Teunes, better known by his alias Santa Maria, was a pirate and dispatch-carrier active in the Straits of Malacca in March 1819, at the moment when Dutch anxieties over Raffles’s movements in the region were at their height. He is mentioned only once in Van der Kemp’s article, in a single sentence of a private letter from Governor Timmerman Thyssen of Malacca to Schout-bij-nacht Wolterbeek at Batavia, dated 16 March 1819. The relevant passage, preserved as Bijlage IV, reads: “these waters swarm with pirates, as also that the Tommegong of Sincapour has at sea nine well-armed pengojabja; these vessels I believe are not so much on the look-out for plunder as for the dispatches which are expected with Santa Maria (alias Teunes).”
Identity
Van der Kemp provides no further identification of Teunes beyond the alias “Santa Maria.” The Portuguese form of the alias strongly suggests that Teunes was an Indo-Portuguese sailor — one of the Luso-Asian maritime population that, in the early nineteenth century, still staffed much of the country-trade shipping of the Indian Ocean and the Straits. Such figures were often employed as pilots, linguists, or couriers by European trading companies, and their ambiguous status — sometimes in European service, sometimes operating on their own account as pirates or smugglers — made them natural conduits of intelligence and rumour in the region. The fact that Thyssen knows both his Malay or Dutch name “Teunes” and his Portuguese alias “Santa Maria” suggests that the man was already a familiar figure in Dutch intelligence reports.
Function as a dispatch-carrier
The most interesting feature of the passage is Thyssen’s belief that the Tommegong of Singapore’s war-boats were not seeking plunder but were watching for “the dispatches which … are expected with Santa Maria (alias Teunes).” This implies that Teunes was at that moment carrying, or was expected to carry, official correspondence between Dutch posts — most likely between Malacca and either Batavia or Riau. The interception of dispatches was a common stratagem in the intelligence war that accompanied the Anglo-Dutch rivalry in the archipelago, and the Tommegong’s mobilisation suggests that he, in concert with the newly arrived British under Raffles (who had just founded Singapore in February 1819), was seeking to gain advance knowledge of Dutch intentions.
Context of the Thyssen letter
Thyssen’s letter to Wolterbeek was written at a moment of acute Dutch alarm. Carnegy, the harbour-master at Malacca, had reported that two ships with three hundred troops had sailed from Penang for the Carrimons with the intention of taking possession of those islands, and that Raffles was preparing to follow with three more ships and four hundred men, ostensibly for Acheh — a report Thyssen disbelieved, suspecting instead an attack on Lingga. In this atmosphere, every movement of armed craft — whether British warships, Malay pengojabja, or the lone dispatch-carrier Santa Maria — took on an exaggerated significance. Teunes’s small part in this larger drama was to be the unwitting object of the Tommegong’s naval watch.
Significance
Teunes is a marginal figure in Van der Kemp’s narrative, but his brief appearance is revealing. He illustrates the dense network of semi-official couriers, pilots and pirates through which information moved in the early-nineteenth-century Straits, and he highlights the role that Malay chiefs such as the Tommegong of Singapore were already playing in the Anglo-Dutch intelligence contest within weeks of Raffles’s landing. The fact that Van der Kemp, writing in 1900, thought the passage worth reproducing verbatim as Bijlage IV reflects his broader concern to show how seriously the Dutch authorities took Raffles’s movements in 1819 — a seriousness that, in his view, later Dutch historiography had too readily dismissed.
See Also
- Tommegong of Singapore
- Timmerman Thyssen
- Schout-bij-nacht Wolterbeek
- Singapore
- Malacca
- Founding of Singapore
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Karimon Islands
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.
Teunes, better known by his alias Santa Maria, was a pirate and dispatch-carrier active in the Straits of Malacca in March 1819, at the moment when Dutch anxieties over Raffles’s movements in the region were at their height. He is mentioned only once in Van der Kemp’s article, in a single sentence of a private letter from Governor Timmerman Thyssen of Malacca to Schout-bij-nacht Wolterbeek at Batavia, dated 16 March 1819. The relevant passage, preserved as Bijlage IV, reads: “these waters swarm with pirates, as also that the Tommegong of Sincapour has at sea nine well-armed pengojabja; these vessels I believe are not so much on the look-out for plunder as for the dispatches which are expected with Santa Maria (alias Teunes).”
Identity
Van der Kemp provides no further identification of Teunes beyond the alias “Santa Maria.” The Portuguese form of the alias strongly suggests that Teunes was an Indo-Portuguese sailor — one of the Luso-Asian maritime population that, in the early nineteenth century, still staffed much of the country-trade shipping of the Indian Ocean and the Straits. Such figures were often employed as pilots, linguists, or couriers by European trading companies, and their ambiguous status — sometimes in European service, sometimes operating on their own account as pirates or smugglers — made them natural conduits of intelligence and rumour in the region. The fact that Thyssen knows both his Malay or Dutch name “Teunes” and his Portuguese alias “Santa Maria” suggests that the man was already a familiar figure in Dutch intelligence reports.
Function as a dispatch-carrier
The most interesting feature of the passage is Thyssen’s belief that the Tommegong of Singapore’s war-boats were not seeking plunder but were watching for “the dispatches which … are expected with Santa Maria (alias Teunes).” This implies that Teunes was at that moment carrying, or was expected to carry, official correspondence between Dutch posts — most likely between Malacca and either Batavia or Riau. The interception of dispatches was a common stratagem in the intelligence war that accompanied the Anglo-Dutch rivalry in the archipelago, and the Tommegong’s mobilisation suggests that he, in concert with the newly arrived British under Raffles (who had just founded Singapore in February 1819), was seeking to gain advance knowledge of Dutch intentions.
Context of the Thyssen letter
Thyssen’s letter to Wolterbeek was written at a moment of acute Dutch alarm. Carnegy, the harbour-master at Malacca, had reported that two ships with three hundred troops had sailed from Penang for the Carrimons with the intention of taking possession of those islands, and that Raffles was preparing to follow with three more ships and four hundred men, ostensibly for Acheh — a report Thyssen disbelieved, suspecting instead an attack on Lingga. In this atmosphere, every movement of armed craft — whether British warships, Malay pengojabja, or the lone dispatch-carrier Santa Maria — took on an exaggerated significance. Teunes’s small part in this larger drama was to be the unwitting object of the Tommegong’s naval watch.
Significance
Teunes is a marginal figure in Van der Kemp’s narrative, but his brief appearance is revealing. He illustrates the dense network of semi-official couriers, pilots and pirates through which information moved in the early-nineteenth-century Straits, and he highlights the role that Malay chiefs such as the Tommegong of Singapore were already playing in the Anglo-Dutch intelligence contest within weeks of Raffles’s landing. The fact that Van der Kemp, writing in 1900, thought the passage worth reproducing verbatim as Bijlage IV reflects his broader concern to show how seriously the Dutch authorities took Raffles’s movements in 1819 — a seriousness that, in his view, later Dutch historiography had too readily dismissed.
See Also
- Tommegong of Singapore
- Timmerman Thyssen
- Schout-bij-nacht Wolterbeek
- Singapore
- Malacca
- Founding of Singapore
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Karimon Islands
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.