Schadee was a Dutch former (oud) member of the Local Council of the Cultuurgebied (plantation region) of the East Coast of Sumatra and former administrator of the Deli Spoorweg Maatschappij (Deli Railway Company). He became, in the years 1911–1915, the principal spokesman of the company’s and the plantation region’s objections to the Government’s harbour and railway plans on the Aru Bay, and the figure around whom the Deli-Atjeh railway connection controversy turned.
The case against Telok Taboehan
Roest’s 1916 article records Schadee’s arguments at length. When the Government planned to continue the Atjeh-tram to Besitang and to end it at a new first-class harbour at Telok Taboehan, Schadee asked the Cultuurraad whether it would acquiesce in so important a plan being fixed without the Council being heard. The kernel of his position, laid down in an open letter answering Beyerman, was economic: the existing import and export trade of Tamiang was not seated in the Aru Bay but at Pangkalan Brandan; the greater depth of the Sembilangeul had never yet drawn the trade of the existing harbour places away; and a new harbour at Telok Taboehan would be built at the cost of millions on a very uncertain chance — that the dredging at Belawan should fail — while a few hundred thousand guilders could give the plantation region the connection it actually needed, with certainty. The connection with Pangkalan Brandan existed immediately and must therefore be built first; a branch line to Telok Taboehan as a “fair chance” for the Aru Bay he would have regarded as money thrown away, but he had no objection of principle to it, provided the harbour emplacement were fit for a possible ocean harbour of later times.
He further showed that the Deli Company’s claimed preference for a concession from Pangkalan Brandan to the Aru Bay, applied for early in 1911, had only been made as proof of goodwill towards the Government’s plans; and he demonstrated, in the Council debate of 20 February 1913, that the time difference between the connections Besitang–Tandjong Slamat and Besitang–Pangkalan Brandan–Tandjong Slamat was but twenty minutes — thirteen if speeds were raised — and that the Chinese shop-houses of Kwala Simpang, about eighty in number and nearly all branches of those of Pangkalan Brandan, took one third of Brandan’s import trade, worth at least a million guilders of trade and a hundred thousand of profit per year, well justifying the f 300,000 of the connecting line. His candidate for the eastern trace, via Pematang Pandjang (8 kilometres, f 300,000), was estimated vastly cheaper than the army engineers’ Besitang–Tandjong Slamat (30 kilometres, f 1,450,000).
The motions
At the Cultuurraad meeting of 26 September 1912, the motion Schadee asked the Council to regret that the plan had been fixed without the Council’s hearing, to have it tested against the interests of the plantation region, and to petition the Government to give the Council the opportunity. Amended by Beyerman, it was carried by 19 votes to 3; unamended as phrased by Schadee — naming Telok Taboehan and the ground east of the Besitang river — it was rejected by 18 votes to 4. At the meeting of 20 February 1913 his proposal to prefer the Pangkalan Brandan connection was carried by 28 votes to 1; Governor Van der Plas of the East Coast of Sumatra answered that Schadee could not separate the interest of the Deli railway from that of the plantation region — a charge Roest partially defends his way of pursuing as the strongest defence the company’s case ever received.
Significance
Roest’s account shows Schadee victorious in the Cultuurraad but defeated by the Government: railways and harbour remained as the Government had designed them (Besitang to Telok Taboehan via Pangkalan Soesoe), although Schadee’s expected neutralisation — the Deli Company’s own construction of the Besitang–Pangkalan Brandan line — came exactly as he had proposed.
See Also
- Deli-Atjeh railway connection controversy (1912-1916)
- Beyerman
- Van der Plas
- Deli Spoorweg Maatschappij
- Cultuurraad
- Pangkalan Brandan
Source
De spoorwegverbinding tusschen Deli, Atjeh en de Aroebaai, door J. Roest, in Tijdschrift voor het Binnenlandsch Bestuur, Deel XLIX, Afl. 6 (Batavia, December 1916), pp. 464–478.