Pieter Johannes Veth (1814–1895) was a Dutch professor of Oriental languages at the University of Leiden, the doyen of Dutch Arabic and Malay studies in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and the author of the 1873 monograph Atchin en zijne betrekkingen tot Nederland (“Acheh and its Relations to the Netherlands”) — cited simply by Snouck Hurgronje as “Prof. Veth’s Atjeh” — which supplied the principal modern European digest of Achehnese historical traditions before the appearance of The Achehnese itself, and which Van der Kemp invokes at three points in his 1900 article on the Raffles–Coombs convention of 1819. A hoogleeraar (professor) of the old polymathic stamp, Veth belonged to that earlier generation of Dutch orientalists — typified also by Niemann and Van Langen — whose compilations laid the groundwork for the more analytical and ethnographic studies of Snouck Hurgronje’s own generation.
Veth’s Two Acheh Writings
Van der Kemp distinguishes between two of Veth’s treatments of the Acheh question. The earlier is an article published in De Gids of 1850 (14th year, part 1, p. 166, note 2), in which Veth reproduced the principal features of Anderson’s account of the two Achehnese pretenders and of the divergence of opinion between Raffles and Bannerman over the Acheh mission of 1819. The later is the self-standing monograph Atchin en zijne betrekkingen tot Nederland, published at Haarlem in 1873, in which Veth treated the same subject “independently” (pp. 86 ff.). Both writings earned Van der Kemp’s respect as the standard Dutch scholarly accounts of the Acheh succession dispute and the British intervention of 1819.
The 1850 Article in De Gids
Veth’s 1850 article, though confined to a long footnote, performed a useful bibliographical function: it made available to Dutch readers the gist of Anderson’s English-language narrative, drawn from Anderson’s Acheen (1840), pp. 137–138. The article gave particular prominence to the conflict between Raffles, who insisted on treating with the “old king” Jauhar Alum at Pedir, and Bannerman, who, supported by Captain Coombs, maintained that the commission’s instructions required it to treat with the ruling party at Acheh itself. Van der Kemp cites Veth’s summary with approval and uses it as an anchor for his own longer narrative of the Penang–Calcutta quarrel of March 1819.
The 1873 Atchin Monograph
Veth’s 1873 monograph, Atchin en zijne betrekkingen tot Nederland, is cited twice by Van der Kemp. The first citation is in the context of Van der Kemp’s account of the antecedents of the Acheh succession dispute. The 1786 letter of the sultan of Acheh to Warren Hastings, printed as Bijlage I of Van der Kemp’s article, is identified by Veth as the work of the sultan whom he names, in Atchin p. 66, “Alaoe’d-din Mahmoed Shah Djohan”; this sultan, Veth had noted, came to the throne in 1781 and died in 1795. The second citation occurs in Van der Kemp’s discussion of the Raja Akil of Siak, whom Veth had given an “attractive biographical sketch” in Borneo’s Westerafdeling, volume II, pp. 150 ff.; the same Raja Akil, Van der Kemp cautions, is not to be confused with the relatively unimportant Said Akil of the Deli correspondence.
The Atjeh in Snouck Hurgronje’s Usage
Snouck Hurgronje invokes Prof. Veth’s Atjeh in the Introduction to Vol. I of The Achehnese as the authority to whom readers are referred for the principal historical traditions of Acheh, “set forth in detail” in his work at pp. 60 et seq. Snouck Hurgronje explains that his own purpose — to describe “how the Achehnese live and how they are governed, what they think and what they believe” — differs from the historical aim of earlier writers. Malayan chronicles and native oral tradition, he warns, furnish “fabulous genealogies, legends and tales dressed up to suit the author’s fancy,” and must be subjected to “a careful process of filtration” before they can be brought into unison with more solid materials. As regards history, therefore, Snouck Hurgronje limits himself to what the discussion of existing institutions “brings to light en passant,” and for further information refers his readers to Veth’s Atjeh.
The same monograph is cited again in Vol. II of The Achehnese for historical data on Sultan Iskandar Muda’s attempt to drive the Portuguese from Malacca and on the 1699 abolition of the line of female sovereigns and the dynastic wars that followed — the central episodes of seventeenth-century Achehnese political history.
The Java and the Kalangs Myth
Veth’s range as an orientalist extended beyond Acheh. Prof. Veth is cited in Vol. I of The Achehnese in connection with the Javanese myth of the Kalangs. The legend of the princess in the wilderness who became the mother of a people through union with a dog and a wild sow is set out in “Veth’s Java, III, p. 580 et seq.” Snouck Hurgronje notes that a version of the story which he himself recorded in Bagelen differs somewhat from that of “Prof. Veth’s authorities,” and that the same story is found elsewhere also in more or less modified form — for instance in the Tijdschrift van het Bataviaasch Genootschap, vol. XXIV, pp. 257–8 and 421 et seq.
Veth’s Place in Dutch Acheh Scholarship
Van der Kemp places Veth alongside Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje and Kniphorst as one of the more reliable Dutch scholars of the Acheh question. Veth’s importance is twofold. As a Leiden orientalist, he possessed the linguistic equipment necessary for the serious study of Malay and Arabic sources, an equipment that the colonial administrators whose compilations Van der Kemp otherwise uses could not always claim. As a contributor to De Gids, moreover, he belonged to the Dutch liberal intelligentsia of the mid-nineteenth century, and his Acheh writings were shaped by the same reformist concerns — the emancipation of the colonial press, the reform of the cultivation system, the assertion of Dutch metropolitan control over colonial policy — that animated his better-known essays on the administration of the Netherlands Indies.
While Snouck Hurgronje’s first-hand acquaintance with Acheh and the Achehnese enabled him to correct and supersede much of what his predecessors had written, the older work of Veth retained its value as a digest of the historical traditions current among the Achehnese themselves.
See Also
- C. Snouck Hurgronje
- G. K. Niemann
- K. F. H. Van Langen
- P. H. van der Kemp
- J. H. P. E. Kniphorst
- John Anderson
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Colonel John Alexander Bannerman
- Captain Coombs
- Sultan Alauddin Muhammad Shah Jauhar
- Sultan Jauhar Alum
- Sultan Iskandar Muda
- Nur ul-Alam Nakiatodin
- Ratu Baka
- Raja Akil
- Said Akil
- Acheh treaty of 1819
- Acheh
- Malacca
- University of Leiden
- 1814
- 1895
- 1850
- 1873
- 1900
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
The Achehnese, Vol. II, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819, by P. H. van der Kemp, in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, 6e Volgr., Deel VII (1900), pp. 159–239. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit, LS.08781.