Tjoet Meuthia — modern Cut Meutia, “the Pearl” (meuthia means pearl) — was a daughter of T. Ben Dawot of Pira, and indeed a pearl among women. She was first married to T. Tjhi Bentara, the weak and unpopular oeléëbalang of Keureutoe appointed by the Dutch, then to his half-brother T. Tjhi Toenong (the balang tjoet baroh), and after Tjhi Toenong’s execution in March 1905 to Pang Nanggroë. She was the mother of T. Radja Sabi, the adelaarsjong of Keureutoe.
Of remarkable beauty
She was a daughter of T. Ben Dawot, of Pira, one of the unyielding chiefs who would hear nothing of submission and who, after the Kompeuni’s victory, withdrew to the mountains and forests just outside the range of the still-not-very-mobile Dutch garrisons. There they sat, a little beyond musket-shot of the territory covered by the outermost Dutch posts, and acknowledged only the authority of the Sultan. Tjoet Meuthia was not only of remarkable beauty, but a proud and stately figure. In the picturesque festive dress of women of her rank — the black silk pantalon (siloeuë Atjeh) and the badjoe, the breast closed by interlocking golden ornaments, the dark hair crowned with the golden oeléë tjeumara, and the foot-rings on her fine ankles — she was a presence of rare allure and enchantment. No wonder the pretendent-sultan, a vrouwenjager by excellence, had an eye on her; but he had to remain an admirer at a distance. This Pearl might perhaps have been the wife of a Sultan and the flower of his house in Keumala, but never his mistress. The soft ringing of her golden ankle-rings was no lure for him.
Such a woman did not fit with the limp T. Tjhi Bentara or with his dependence on the Kompeuni. She was a true daughter of her people, and her heart drew to the party of the unyielding ones in the mountains, the men who walked the way of God and among whom her father and brother were to be found. Therefore Tjhi Bentara repudiated her — a gesture by an unwanted man trying to save his face. Very shortly afterwards she married his half-brother T. Tjhi Toenong, who also disliked the Kompeuni, and they withdrew to the free mountains where he became one of the most feared commanders.
Marriage to Pang Nanggroë, March 1905
In the days before his execution on 5 March 1905, T. Tjhi Toenong was permitted to receive his wife, and in the bitterness of those last days — he had not in a dozen fights been granted the crown of the sjahid — his hatred flared up again. He made the pregnant Tjoet Meuthia swear that she would bring up their son, then about five years old, in hatred of the kaphé, and that after his execution she would marry Pang Nanggroë. This she swore to him, and he knew that a woman of her character would keep that oath. After forty-four days — the puth ploh peuët of Atjehsche custom — Tjoet Meuthia was clean in body and spirit and let Pang Nanggroë know she was ready.
Death at Kroeëng Peutoeë, 25 October 1910
On 25 October 1910 she was killed in the overval by Mosselman’s brigade at the Kroeëng Peutoeë. The overval, in the course of a pursuit of the bende of Seupot Mata and of her son, was made near a small river-bed. She was identified by Mosselman afterwards as the woman with loosened hair who charged the brigade with the klewang. Her son, then about ten years old, was standing unarmed in the beek fishing when the warning cry “Kaphé datang” sounded; one of his kawans seized him in his arms and bore him into the wood. “Saja tida lihat lagi lboe” — “I have not seen my mother again.” Her grave he never found.
Significance
Of Tjoet Meuthia, Zentgraff writes that her second husband was fusilladed, her third (Pang Nanggroë) was shot; the unceasing hunt, year after year, naturally drove her to seek death in the certainty of reunion with those who had gone before her. She and Pang Nanggroë were persons of whom one would later say that they had carried themselves to the last as the great figures of the resistance.
Marriages and the making of a resistance family
Tjoet Meutia was the daughter of an irreconcilable resistance leader. She was married to the half-brother of T. Tjhi’ Toenòng, who had been made oelèëbalang of Keureutòë after administrative errors in 1899 excluded T. Tjhi’ Toenòng from his rightful succession. The marriage was repugnant to her: “the weak half-brother was no man for such a woman,” so that she provoked the formula of repudiation and shortly afterwards married Tjoet Moehamat — the future T. Tjhi’ Toenòng — “a man after her own heart.”
That marriage made T. Tjhi’ Toenòng a resistance leader with Tjoet Meutia at and beside him, and thereby “een gevaarlijk tegenstander voor de Kompeuni (“the Company (the Dutch power)”).”
Widowhood and remarriage
After the surprise of the patrol of sergeant Vollaers at Meurandéh Paja on 26 January 1905, T. Tjhi’ Toenòng was arrested at H. N. A. Swart’s order; Swart was then transferred, Van Daalen became Governor and converted the sentence of banishment into death. Du Croo hinted that Tjoet Meutia may have driven her husband to the act — “who had meanwhile borne him a son and had spurred him on” — but left the question open, as it remained obscure whether T. Tjhi’ Toenòng was guilty at all.
Tjoet Meutia was delivered shortly after the execution; the child died. After forty-four days — “44 is the good number par excellence” — she married, and it was said at the wish of T. Tjhi’ Toenòng himself, the well-known resistance leader Pang Nanggròë, who formed a band around her and around her surviving son T. Radja Sabi. On the upper course of the Djambo Ajé Pang Nanggròë set the whole of Keureutòë in movement and worked with the best-known resistance leaders: Tgk. Sjeh di Paja Bakong, Tgk. di Mata Ië (“the Lord of the Springs”) and Tgk. di Barat (“the Lord of the West”).
Second widowhood, September 1910
Pang Nanggròë was killed on 26 September 1910 in the Paja Tjitjém — the Bird Marsh — by the brigade of sergeant Slooten, after a pursuit begun on 24 September and pressed through night, rain, forest and marsh. Because of the great significance of his death his body was carried away to be identified by the population; it was recognised in the gampong and buried behind the keudé of Lho’ Soekon within a covered wooden enclosure, a kandang, beside the body of Pang Latèh, Pang Nanggròë’s energetic fellow fighter, killed on another occasion. Of Tjoet Meutia and the boy there was no trace: it later emerged that T. Radja Sabi had hidden in a tree during the attack.
“Once again Tjoet Meutia was a widow — once again her husband had been made a martyr by the Kompeuni* (“the Company (the Dutch power)”) ‘sjahid (“martyr in the holy war”)’ gemaakt.”
Death, 25 October 1910
She now resolved to go into the mountains to seek Tgk. di Mata Ië, the Lord of the Springs, who likewise still maintained the resistance. That Teungkoe was in the Gajòland, and so Tjoet Meutia set out with her son in that direction. “It was the road of fate.”
From Lho’ Soekon the brigade commander W. J. Mosselman of the 5th Division — one of the best of the division’s brigade commanders — had marched out on 22 October 1910 to trace a band reported at Lho’ Reuhat. That trail crossed Tjoet Meutia’s, and on the third day Mosselman was on fresh tracks in a side-stream of the Kroeëng Peutòë.
The pursuit was arduous. The djahats had first lured him in a wrong direction and then repeatedly indicated new “spoorzoekers-maatjes”; Mosselman had largely young soldiers and only one genuine tracker, Wokas. Thanks to Wokas the right trail was found: a band that had “gewaaierd” — fanned out — each part hiding its traces as well as possible, choosing different paths, to reunite at some appointed point. From the tracks Mosselman concluded that this was no little band but “groot wild.” (“big game”)
Provisions ran short and the troops were exhausted with foot-wounds from the tough, sucking mud; but Mosselman had discovered that his marechaussée covered in about five hours a distance for which the band needed a day’s march. Reckoning that with a band of certainly sixty persons, including probably women and older people carrying their supplies, this would continue, he pressed on with two tins of oatmeal as his last reserve. On 25 October the rice for three meals had to serve for at least six.
A young marechaussée fell twenty metres at a waterfall and, though nothing was broken, gave out towards noon. Mosselman left six men with his native sergeant and the convicts with the sick man — and, against regulations but for fear of their losing their way, also Wokas, which nearly cost him his success and cost Wokas a well-earned decoration. Towards two o’clock two more men gave out. Ten tired men were left, against a band of certainly sixty.
The “five-hour theory” proved correct: at ten o’clock they found a place where the band had bivouacked. Losing and refinding the trail along the kr. Peutòë, over waterfalls, boulders and slippery stones, Mosselman saw smoke above the trees towards four o’clock after a stiff climb. Some 150 metres up a side-creek they found a marching bivouac under construction, hurriedly abandoned with all supplies left behind. They stormed on and came upon the band about to cross the stream some thirty metres ahead. Mamahit, then in front, pointed out an old man being helped along by three others, trying to escape into the forest, and fired; the old man fell wounded.
Immediately the fire broke out on all sides from the wooded banks. Mosselman, with only Tarmin and Mamahit beside him, jumped into a pool of the bend with the steep washed-out rock wall behind them, standing to the waist in water, “literally with our backs to the wall.” When at last they heard heavy rapid fire and shouting from obliquely opposite — “Madjoe, hantam marsausee!” (“Forward, strike them, marechaussée (“military constabulary”)!”) — the enemy supposed himself surrounded. His fire wavered; the inciting La illaha illalah faded; and when the four remaining men with Wakary and Sinkey in front sprang from the riverine forest into the bed, Mosselman used the hesitation to charge into the forest.
Before them lay the old man, just carried by the others and hit by their fire. From behind two boulders two young men sprang up, covering the fallen man with their bodies, klewang and rentjong in their fists; they had to be cut down. Leaping over him, Mosselman saw that the old man was already dead, lying still and not reacting to the hand-to-hand fight above him; he glimpsed the golden weapon, the famous “bawar”, and it flashed through him that this was “een Hooge.” “The self-sacrificing manner too in which he was defended by those two young men, who truly died a hero’s death, told me as much.”
In this action fell “the great blind resistance leader, revered as a saint, Teungkoe Sjeh di Paja Bakong (Seupot Mata), his son Tgk. Mat Saleh, and Tjoet Meutia as well.”
Once more T. Radja Sabi escaped.
Significance (du Croo, 1943)
Tjoet Meutia stands in du Croo’s narrative as the embodiment of the judgement of H. C. Zentgraaff with which the chapter on patrol life opens: “the Acehnese, men and women, [have] in general fought splendidly … for what they saw as their national or religious ideal. Among those fighters there is a very great number of men and women who would be the pride of any people.” Through three marriages and two widowhoods she remained at the centre of the Keureutòë resistance, and her death together with the blind and saint-venerated Tgk. Sjeh di Paja Bakong marked, with the death of Pang Nanggròë a month earlier, the practical end of organised resistance in Keureutòë.
See Also
- T. Tjhi Bentara
- T. Tjhi Toenong
- T. Radja Sabi
- Pang Nanggroë
- T. Ben Dawot of Pira
- Keureutoe
- Keumala
- Pira
- Mosselman
- Tengkoe Sjech di Paja Bakong
- Death of Tjoet Meuthia (1910)
- Sjahid
- Prang sabil
- Kaphé
- 1905
- 1910
- Aceh War
- Tgk. Sjeh di Paja Bakong
- Tgk. di Mata Ië
- Tgk. di Barat
- W. J. Mosselman
- Kroeëng Peutòë
- H. C. Zentgraaff
Account from Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu
Her presence and the reverence paid to her as mother of the child oelèëbalang strengthened Pang Nanggròë’s influence. Travelled with Pang Nanggròë and the boy; repeatedly escaped with them.
Source: J. Jongejans, Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 369, 370.
Source
Atjeh, door H.C. Zentgraff. Gedrukt bij Drukkerij “De Unie”, 1938, Batavia. OCR-filename: 20260709_002148_DLP-81-Atjeh_OCR.txt.
Generaal Swart, Pacificator van Atjeh (“General Swart, Pacifier of Atjeh”), by M. H. du Croo, Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with the collaboration of H. J. Schmidt, Titular Colonel K.N.I.L. (retired), with a foreword by His Excellency Lieutenant-General K.N.I.L. (retired) G. K. Dijkstra (Maastricht: N.V. Leiter-Nypels, 1943), Chapter X, pp. 94–101; Chapter XI, p. 104.
Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu, by J. Jongejans, Oud-Resident van het Gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden, with a foreword by Dr. H. Colijn (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 369, 370.