W. C. Nieuwenhuyzen — gep. kolonel (late colonel) Nieuwenhuyzen — was a Dutch colonial officer and man of letters, the author of Poeloe Weh (1898) and a contributor to De Nederlandsche Spectator, who is cited three times by Van der Kemp in his 1900 monograph on the Raffles–Coombs convention and its long aftermath. Nieuwenhuyzen’s chief importance for Van der Kemp lies in his editorial and historical interventions on the early history of British and American activity in the East Indian archipelago.
W. C. Nieuwenhuizen was a Dutch writer in the Indische Gids whose dictum on the relation between the Atjeh-oorlog and Dutch shipping was quoted by H. van Kol in the Tweede Kamer on 17 November 1897.
Poeloe Weh (1898)
Nieuwenhuyzen’s Poeloe Weh — a study of the small island off the northern tip of Sumatra, on which the Dutch port of Sabang would later be developed — appeared in De Indische Gids of April 1898. Van der Kemp cites it on his fourth page, in connection with his discussion of the founding of Penang in 1786. The Treaty of Quedah, by which Captain Francis Light obtained Penang from the sultan of Kedah for an annual payment of ten thousand dollars, had been the subject of a separate study by Nieuwenhuyzen, who had drawn attention to the original Malay text of the cession and to the supplementary documents preserved in the Bisschop collection. Van der Kemp, though declining to reprint those documents himself, refers his readers to Nieuwenhuyzen’s article for further particulars.
The Warning of American Designs on the Philippines
Nieuwenhuyzen’s second appearance in Van der Kemp’s article is in connection with the celebrated letter of J. C. Baud to Minister Falck of 28 November 1822, in which Baud had predicted that the North Americans would one day seize the Philippines. The prophecy, fulfilled in 1898 with the American occupation of the Philippines during the Spanish–American War, was more than seventy-five years ahead of its time. Nieuwenhuyzen had earned, in Van der Kemp’s words, “the merit of pointing this out” in De Nederlandsche Spectator of 10 December 1898. The reference to Nieuwenhuyzen comes at the close of Van der Kemp’s discussion of the British plenipotentiaries’ invocation, at the London conference of 23 February 1824, of an American threat to Acheh — an invocation that Van der Kemp insists was no idle speculation but a real concern of Dutch colonial strategists since at least 1822.
The Ironical Citation on “Our Mighty Neighbour”
Nieuwenhuyzen’s third appearance is more oblique. In the course of Van der Kemp’s discussion of the Dutch plenipotentiaries’ performance at the London conference of 1824, he cites Nieuwenhuyzen’s ironical characterisation of the Dutch negotiators’ trust in the honesty of “our mighty neighbour and natural ally” — that is, Great Britain. The phrase is not Nieuwenhuyzen’s own but is quoted by him with conscious irony, and Van der Kemp reproduces the irony as a way of underlining his own critical assessment of the Dutch plenipotentiaries Fagel and Falck. The citation places Nieuwenhuyzen in the small camp of late nineteenth-century Dutch colonial commentators who looked back on the treaty of 1824 with something less than reverence.
Nieuwenhuyzen as Colonial Commentator
Taken together, the three citations present Nieuwenhuyzen as a distinctive voice in the Dutch colonial literature of the 1890s — a former colonial officer who combined technical familiarity with the geography of the East Indian archipelago (Poeloe Weh, Penang, the Philippines) with a sharp, ironical judgment of the Dutch diplomatic record. His standing as gep. kolonel — a retired colonel — lends his writings the additional authority of long colonial service, and Van der Kemp’s repeated recourse to them suggests that he regarded Nieuwenhuyzen as an ally in the project of revising the complacent Dutch historiography of the Acheh question.
The dictum
The words, as Van Kol gave them, were: “De geschiedenis van den Atjeh-oorlog is in zekeren zin de geschiedenis van de Nederlandsch-Indische Stoomvaartmaatschappij.” — The history of the Atjeh war is in a certain sense the history of the Netherlands-Indies Steamship Company.
Van Kol placed the quotation in the passage printed under the heading De belanghebbenden, in which he set out the private interests served by the prolongation of the war. It stood beside his statement that the prauwenveren had made colossal profits by their expensive freights and could pay yearly dividends of twenty to twenty-five per cent, and that the shares of the paketvaartmaatschappij rose in times of aggression and fell in days of gentler tactics.
Significance
The dictum was among the most damaging quotations available to the socialist case, since it came not from a party source but from a recognised colonial periodical. It was in substance conceded by the Minister of Colonies Cremer for the earlier period: as former chairman of the Koninklijke he acknowledged that the provision of ships for expeditions had strengthened that company’s treasury far more under its predecessor the Nederlandsch-Indische Stoomvaart-Maatschappij, “die geen contract had gemaakt omtrent de huurprijzen van schepen en dikwijls dan ook toen groote dividenden uitkeerde.” — which had made no contract about the hire prices of ships and often therefore paid great dividends at that time.
Account from Verstege’s Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk (1886)
Verstege’s Appendix D draws heavily on kapitein Nieuwenhuyzen’s essay “Het stelsel der militaire instellingen voor het Indische leger” (Indische Gids, November and December 1883), which he offers to his readers next to the other warnings about the Indies army. From it he borrows the sentence that “voor de aldus in zes maanden tijds georganiseerde tweede expeditie, de rest van het Indische leger gedesorganiseerd moest worden” (“for the second expedition, in this way organised in six months’ time, the rest of the Indies army had to be disorganised”), and the costly arithmetic of the war: that the direct and indirect expenditure during the years 1873, 1874 and 1875 for transport by water alone had come to approximately fourteen million guilders, and that in direct and indirect costs the first five years of the war had cost about one hundred million guilders — a figure Verstege supports with his own observation that even the Regeering could not give the exact amount of the war costs with accuracy (see Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger).
See Also
- J. C. Baud
- Anton Reinhard Falck
- Captain Francis Light
- Penang
- Philippines
- United States of America
- Treaty of Quedah (Penang cession, 1786)
- Raising of the Acheh treaty in London negotiations
- P. H. van der Kemp
- H. van Kol
- Indische Gids
- Nederlandsch-Indische Stoomvaart-Maatschappij
- Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij
- Economic interests alleged behind the Atjeh-oorlog (1897)
- 1897
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.
Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer: Debatten bij de behandeling der begrooting van Nederlandsch-Indië voor 1898, uitgave van de Sociaaldemokratische Arbeiderspartij in Nederland (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897). Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, Br P95-178, p. 69.
Acknowledgement of sources. This article combines material from the publications cited above; the material newly added derives from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897) and Een strijd in Atjeh (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg for the Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 118, 125, 130. OCR: DLP-158.