S. da Costa was the author of the 1939 article De Padrie-oorlog; haar oorsprong, strijd en verloop ter Sumatra’s Westkust (“The Padri War; its origin, struggle, and course on Sumatra’s West Coast”), published in the Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging, No. 24, p. 149 e.v., and reprinted in Ons Aller Belang, No. 33, p. 318 e.v. The article is recorded as No. 558 in Van Meurs’s Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (The Hague, 1940), in the Sumatra chapter.
The 1939 article
Da Costa’s article surveyed the Padrie-oorlog — the Padri War — in three aspects: its oorsprong (origin), strijd (struggle), and verloop (course, development) on Sumatra’s Westkust. The double publication — in the Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging (the principal professional journal of the Netherlands Indies officer corps) and in Ons Aller Belang (a periodical of broader colonial interest) — marks the article as one judged to be of interest to both military and civilian colonial readerships. The restriction of the survey to “Sumatra’s Westkust” — the west coast — is the article’s distinctive contribution, connecting the Padri War to the longer history of the Westkust of Sumatra and of the Atjehnese presence on that coast.
Significance
For AcehWiki, S. da Costa is significant as the author of the 1939 retrospective on the Padri War as fought on Sumatra’s Westkust — an independent source for the west-coast dimension of the Padri War, complementing the corpus’s existing entry on the Padri War, which treats the war from the perspective of the east-coast theatre.
See Also
- De Padrie-oorlog (Costa, 1939)
- Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 (Van Meurs, 1940)
- H. van Meurs
- Padri War on Sumatra’s East Coast
- westkust-van-sumatra
- atjeh’s-westkust
- Acheh
- 1939
- 1940
Source
Literatuur-Overzicht over het jaar 1939 van de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde en Geschiedenis van Nederlandsch-Indië, door H. van Meurs (‘s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1940), Hoofdstuk III (Sumatra en naburig gebied), No. 558. Citing: S. da Costa, “De Padrie-oorlog; haar oorsprong, strijd en verloop ter Sumatra’s Westkust,” Orgaan van de Nederlandsch-Indische Officiersvereeniging, No. 24 (1939), p. 149 e.v.; ook in Ons Aller Belang, No. 33 (1939), p. 318 e.v.