R. W. van Bemmelen was a Dutch geologist, former member of the Netherlands Indies Geological Survey and head of the Netherlands Indies Volcanological Survey, best known as the author of the standard two-volume work Van Bemmelen’s The Geology of Indonesia ([[1949)|The Geology of Indonesia]] (Government Printing Office, The Hague, 1949), whose second volume — Economic Geology — is the most comprehensive colonial-era survey of the mineral wealth of the Netherlands East Indies and remains a principal source for the historical geology of Atjeh and the rest of northern Sumatra. Van Bemmelen’s compilation integrates the reports of the Bureau of Mines in Indonesia with the published work of Zwierzycki, Hövig, Tobler, Jansen, Lindberg, Wolvekamp, De Groot and many others, and his name accordingly appears in the source-line of nearly every mineral locality entry for Atjeh on this wiki.
Career in the Netherlands Indies geological services
Van Bemmelen served as a member of the Dienst van den Mijnbouw in Nederlandsch-Indië (the Netherlands Indies Geological Survey, often abbreviated as the Geological Survey) and was subsequently appointed head of its sister institution, the Vulkanologische Dienst (the Volcanological Survey). Both services were attached to the Bureau of Mines in Indonesia, which in turn fell under the Departement van Verkeer, Energie en Mijnbouw (Department of Transport, Energy and Mining) at Batavia. In the preface to The Geology of Indonesia Van Bemmelen acknowledges that the work was issued as a Special Edition of the Bureau of Mines in Indonesia under the authority of that Department, and that it was printed by the Government Printing Office (Algemeene Landsdrukkerij) at The Hague in 1949 — that is, in the difficult immediate post-war period when the surviving archives of the colonial mining service were being reconstituted after the Japanese occupation of 1942–1945.
The Economic Geology volume, which is the portion of the work that bears most directly on Atjeh, treats the archipelago’s mineral resources under four main parts: organic minerals (petroleum, natural gas, coal, asphalt), ores (tin, gold and silver, copper, lead and zinc, manganese, iron, aluminium, nickel, cobalt, antimony, mercury, molybdenite, bismuth), non-metallic industrial minerals (sulphur, phosphate, iodine, limestone, clay, kaolin, quartz-sand, pumice, trass, diamond), and a final part on minerals not yet produced at the time of writing. Atjeh material is scattered through every section, but is densest in the chapters on petroleum, coal, gold and silver, copper, lead and zinc, iron, and mercury.
The Geology of Indonesia as a source for Atjeh
For the history of Atjeh’s mineral economy, Van Bemmelen’s volume is uniquely valuable because it consolidates, in a single English-language survey, the results of more than half a century of Dutch exploration in the residency. The chapter on petroleum records the North Sumatra oil fields — Aru Bay, Telaga Said, Bulu Telang, the East Atjeh block, the Tamiang block, the Atjeh complex (Peureula, South Perlak, Pulu Pandjang, Pasé), with their 1940 and 1941 production figures in tons of 1000 kg — and notes that the deepest exploratory drilling in the entire East Indies was made at Lho Sukon in Atjeh, reaching 3,450 m. The chapter on coal reproduces the inventory of Atjeh coal localities (numbered 1–20 in the Sumatra list) compiled by Zwierzycki in 1922 from the older surveys by Rinaud (1885) and others. The chapter on gold and silver summarises the Atjeh gold exploration ([[1922, 1946)|Atjeh gold explorations]] of Jansen, Lindberg and Wolvekamp (1922) and of De Groot (1946), with the assay results from the S. Assai and S. Meranging quartz-veins. The chapter on iron gives the canonical list of Atjeh localities — Kr. Geuenteuet, Gle Mon Ampeuet, Kr. Ligan, Kr. Rigaih, Alu Talu, Kwala Boe and Tjot Plaj, A. Pentuwa Gade and Kuto Buloh — together with the 1920 reserve estimate of 2,600,000 tons of 58–64 % Fe ore at Kr. Geuenteuet. The chapter on lead and zinc records the Krueng Heureueng and Krueng Isep assays; that on copper, the Pulu Bras, Gle Broë, Aer Talu and Beutong occurrences; that on mercury, the native mercury and cinnabar reported by De Groot (1946) in the gold-bearing alluvial deposits of the West coast of Atjeh.
Treatment of Atjeh in the survey
Van Bemmelen’s treatment of Atjeh is shaped by two structural facts. First, the residency is treated as part of the wider northern-Sumatran mineral province: the gold-silver belt is described as extending “from the most northern point of Atjeh to the most southern point of Benkulen”, and the Atjeh occurrences are accordingly presented alongside those of Tapanuli, the West Coast of Sumatra residency, Djambi, Palembang and the Lampong Districts. Second, the survey is candid about the disappointing economic results of Atjeh exploration: in the coal chapter Van Bemmelen notes that “Several explorations for coal have been made in the northern part of Sumatra (Atjeh and Dependencies) but the results were disappointing, as large quantities of coal have not been discovered”; in the petroleum chapter he observes that in the “steep folds (Atjeh, Borneo)” repeated drilling “has not been encouraging”. This measured tone — descriptive, factually dense, but sceptical of grand prospects — is the register in which the colonial geological literature on Atjeh was written, and Van Bemmelen’s volume is its most complete monument.
Method and tone
Van Bemmelen writes as a synthesist and editor rather than as a field observer of Atjeh itself. His source-citations for the Atjeh material consistently point to the reports of the Geological Survey and the Bureau of Mines, and to the named engineers and geologists — Zwierzycki, Tobler, Jansen, Lindberg, Wolvekamp, De Groot, Hövig, Philippi, Fennema, Rinaud, Hengeveld, Fryling, Van Loheezen — who actually walked the ground. The value of his compilation lies precisely in this editorial labour: by gathering into one English-language text the scattered Dutch reports on Atjeh’s mineralogy, Van Bemmelen made the colonial mining record accessible to a post-colonial readership and provided the baseline against which later Indonesian geological work has been measured.
Significance
Van Bemmelen is significant for the encyclopedia of Acheh history because his Geology of Indonesia (Vol. II, Economic Geology) is, for the colonial period, the single most comprehensive printed source on the mineral geography of Atjeh. Almost every entry on this wiki that concerns an Atjeh mineral locality, oil field, coal seam, or mining concession draws, directly or indirectly, on the data Van Bemmelen compiled. The work also preserves — in the form of citations, page-references, and footnotes — the names and dates of a generation of Dutch mining engineers and geologists whose own reports often survive only in the archives of the Bureau of Mines at Bandung.
See Also
- Acheh
- Atjeh en Onderhorigheden
- Atjeh’s Westkust
- Bureau of Mines in Indonesia
- C. de Groot
- J. Zwierzycki
- Netherlands Indies Geological Survey
- Netherlands Indies Volcanological Survey
- P. J. J. Jansen
- P. Hövig
- A. Tobler
- Van Bemmelen’s The Geology of Indonesia (1949)
- 1949
Source
The Geology of Indonesia, by R. W. van Bemmelen, Vol. II: Economic Gelogy (The Hague: Government Printing Office; sole agents Martinus Nijhoff, 1949). Special Edition of the Bureau of Mines in Indonesia, Department of Transport, Energy and Mining, Batavia. Pp. 1–267 (with literature references pp. 245–250, list of figures pp. 251–253, and index pp. 255–257).