Sultan Ziemul Abudeen was an Achehnese ruler identified in Van der Kemp’s documentation as the father of the Sultan of Acheh who corresponded with Warren Hastings in 1786. He is named in the opening of a letter preserved as Bijlage I to Van der Kemp’s article, in which the Achehnese sultan addresses the Governor-General of Bengal: “This letter is sent from your friend sultan Munson, son of sultan Ziemul Abudeen … to you, who are a valuable and noble friend, and who are known to Hindostan and Arabia.” The letter, dated 7 November 1786, thus places Ziemul Abudeen as the predecessor (or at least the royal father) of the ruling sultan of Acheh in the mid-1780s.
Identification with Alauddin Mahmud Shah Djohan
In a footnote to this letter, Van der Kemp draws on P. Veth’s Atchin (1873, p. 66) to suggest that “Sultan Ziemul Abudeen” must be the same ruler whom Veth lists as Alauddin Mahmud Shah Djohan (in Veth’s spelling: Alaoe’d-din Mahmoed Shah Djohan). Veth gives the dates 1781 for that sultan’s accession and 1795 for his death. If this identification is accepted, Ziemul Abudeen would have been the reigning sultan of Acheh at the time the letter was written in 1786, and his son “Sultan Munson” — identified elsewhere in the Aceh Wiki corpus with Sultan Alauddin Muhammad Shah Jauhar — would have been acting as a co-ruler or heir apparent with the courtesy title “Sultan.” The complicated nomenclature of the late-eighteenth-century Achehnese court, with its successive Alauddins, Mahmuds, Jauhars and Shahs, makes such overlapping identifications unusually hazardous, and Van der Kemp himself admits the equation only tentatively (“deze zal dan dezelfde moeten zijn”).
Context of the 1786 letter
The letter in which Ziemul Abudeen is named was delivered to Warren Hastings by Captain Steven, and it acknowledges the receipt of an earlier despatch and of gifts of muskets. The Achehnese sultan complains that the muskets sent were “not worth anything” and asks for better-quality arms in future. The letter also recounts the death of Captain Hobbs, who had been entrusted with the sultan’s earlier reply but was wounded off Tringano by a “classy from Java” — apparently a Javanese sailor, since Van der Kemp’s footnote explains classy as a matelot — and died five or six days after returning to Tringano. The episode underlines how thin was the thread of communication between Calcutta and the Achehnese court in this period, and how dependent the sultanate was on the goodwill of passing British country-trade captains.
The sultan also mentions that “Captain Canning and Mr. Phillips” had subsequently come to him to consult about Hobbs’s effects. Whether this Captain Canning is the same officer who later conducted Captain Canning’s mission to Acheh in 1814 cannot be established from Van der Kemp’s text alone; the long interval (twenty-eight years) and the typicality of the surname make an identification plausible but unproven.
Significance
Ziemul Abudeen’s chief significance in Van der Kemp’s argument is chronological and diplomatic. His inclusion in the 1786 letter shows that Achehnese-British relations were active, court-to-court, well before the better-known Acheh commission of 1819, and that the sultanate was already looking to Calcutta for arms and friendship against its regional rivals. This precedent undercuts later Dutch claims — discussed at length by Van der Kemp in connection with the suzerainty question — that Acheh had lain outside the British sphere before the Treaty of London of 1824. The article’s use of the 1786 letter as Bijlage I, immediately before Raffles’s own Acheh agreement documents, signals Van der Kemp’s view that British relations with Acheh had a continuous history stretching back to the Hastings era.
Sources
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.
Sultan Alauddin Muhammad Shah Jauhar (in Veth’s spelling Alaoe’d-din Mahmoed Shah Djohan; in Van der Kemp’s text Alaëddin Mohammed Shah; in the 1786 letter to Bengal styled, probably by corruption, sultan Munson) was Sultan of Acheh from 1781 until his death in 1795. He is chiefly known to history through a celebrated insolent letter of 7 November 1786 to Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal, which opens Van der Kemp’s narrative as a token of the “loose or strained” relations between Europeans and Acheh down to the eighteenth century.
See Also
- Sultan Alauddin Muhammad Shah Jauhar
- Warren Hastings
- Sultan of Acheh’s letter to Warren Hastings
- Tringano
- Pieter Johannes Veth
- Captain Canning’s mission to Acheh
- Captain Francis Light
- Captain Hobbs
- Captain Glass
- Captain Thomas
- John Bird
- Sultan Ziemul Abudeen
- Sultan Jauhar Alum
Source
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.
Sultan Ziemul Abudeen was an Achehnese ruler identified in Van der Kemp’s documentation as the father of the Sultan of Acheh who corresponded with Warren Hastings in 1786. He is named in the opening of a letter preserved as Bijlage I to Van der Kemp’s article, in which the Achehnese sultan addresses the Governor-General of Bengal: “This letter is sent from your friend sultan Munson, son of sultan Ziemul Abudeen … to you, who are a valuable and noble friend, and who are known to Hindostan and Arabia.” The letter, dated 7 November 1786, thus places Ziemul Abudeen as the predecessor (or at least the royal father) of the ruling sultan of Acheh in the mid-1780s.
Identification with Alauddin Mahmud Shah Djohan
In a footnote to this letter, Van der Kemp draws on P. Veth’s Atchin (1873, p. 66) to suggest that “Sultan Ziemul Abudeen” must be the same ruler whom Veth lists as Alauddin Mahmud Shah Djohan (in Veth’s spelling: Alaoe’d-din Mahmoed Shah Djohan). Veth gives the dates 1781 for that sultan’s accession and 1795 for his death. If this identification is accepted, Ziemul Abudeen would have been the reigning sultan of Acheh at the time the letter was written in 1786, and his son “Sultan Munson” — identified elsewhere in the Aceh Wiki corpus with Sultan Alauddin Muhammad Shah Jauhar — would have been acting as a co-ruler or heir apparent with the courtesy title “Sultan.” The complicated nomenclature of the late-eighteenth-century Achehnese court, with its successive Alauddins, Mahmuds, Jauhars and Shahs, makes such overlapping identifications unusually hazardous, and Van der Kemp himself admits the equation only tentatively (“deze zal dan dezelfde moeten zijn”).
Context of the 1786 letter
The letter in which Ziemul Abudeen is named was delivered to Warren Hastings by Captain Steven, and it acknowledges the receipt of an earlier despatch and of gifts of muskets. The Achehnese sultan complains that the muskets sent were “not worth anything” and asks for better-quality arms in future. The letter also recounts the death of Captain Hobbs, who had been entrusted with the sultan’s earlier reply but was wounded off Tringano by a “classy from Java” — apparently a Javanese sailor, since Van der Kemp’s footnote explains classy as a matelot — and died five or six days after returning to Tringano. The episode underlines how thin was the thread of communication between Calcutta and the Achehnese court in this period, and how dependent the sultanate was on the goodwill of passing British country-trade captains.
The sultan also mentions that “Captain Canning and Mr. Phillips” had subsequently come to him to consult about Hobbs’s effects. Whether this Captain Canning is the same officer who later conducted Captain Canning’s mission to Acheh in 1814 cannot be established from Van der Kemp’s text alone; the long interval (twenty-eight years) and the typicality of the surname make an identification plausible but unproven.
Significance
Ziemul Abudeen’s chief significance in Van der Kemp’s argument is chronological and diplomatic. His inclusion in the 1786 letter shows that Achehnese-British relations were active, court-to-court, well before the better-known Acheh commission of 1819, and that the sultanate was already looking to Calcutta for arms and friendship against its regional rivals. This precedent undercuts later Dutch claims — discussed at length by Van der Kemp in connection with the suzerainty question — that Acheh had lain outside the British sphere before the Treaty of London of 1824. The article’s use of the 1786 letter as Bijlage I, immediately before Raffles’s own Acheh agreement documents, signals Van der Kemp’s view that British relations with Acheh had a continuous history stretching back to the Hastings era.
See Also
- Sultan Alauddin Muhammad Shah Jauhar
- Warren Hastings
- Sultan of Acheh’s letter to Warren Hastings
- Tringano
- Pieter Johannes Veth
- Captain Canning’s mission to Acheh
Source
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.