Wilson — the British adventurer who, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, established himself at the court of Sultan Tongkoe Ismail of Siak and was nearly successful in driving the entire Siak royal house from Siak — was, in the Encyclopaedisch Bureau’s survey of the Outer Possessions, the immediate occasion of the Dutch intervention against which the Siak tractate of 1 February 1858 was concluded. Wilson’s adventure in Siak is, in the Bureau’s framing, the archetypal instance of the British freelance intervention in the East Coast affairs that the treaty of 1824 had been intended to prevent — and the immediate provocation of the Dutch assertion of formal sovereignty over the Siak sultanate.
The employment by Tongkoe Ismail
The Bureau records that Sultan Tongkoe Ismail of Siak — seeking to restore Siak’s authority over the East Coast statelets and to put an end to the internal unrest that had followed the death of Sultan Said Ali in 1821 — enlisted Wilson’s services. “Om een einde te maken aan de binnenlandsche onlusten en tevens de Onderhoorigheden weder onder zijn gezag terug te brengen, verzekerde Tongkoe Ismail zich van den hulp van een Engelschen avonturier, Wilson” — “To put an end to the internal unrest and at the same time to bring the Dependencies back under his authority, Tongkoe Ismail secured the help of a British adventurer, Wilson.”
The employment of a British adventurer by a Malay sultan was, in the mid-nineteenth-century East Coast, a familiar recourse. The British country-trade networks of Penang, Singapore and Malacca produced a steady supply of freelance military entrepreneurs willing to sell their services to Malay rulers, and the treaty of 1824 — by which the British government had undertook not to make political treaties with the chiefs of Sumatra — did not formally reach the private transactions of British subjects. Wilson’s employment by Tongkoe Ismail was thus a grey-area intervention — neither a British state act nor a private Malay matter, but an uncomfortably hybrid arrangement that the Dutch could not ignore.
The quarrel with the Sultan
Wilson’s employment by Tongkoe Ismail was short-lived. The Bureau records that Wilson “blij weldra oneenigheid met den Sultan kreeg zelfs, dat het niet veel scheelde, of hij was erin geslaagd het geheele vorstenhuis uit Siak te verdrijven” — “however, soon quarrelled with the Sultan — so much so that it nearly succeeded in driving the entire royal house out of Siak.” The Bureau does not record the substance of the quarrel, but its characterisation of Wilson’s project — “het geheele vorstenhuis uit Siak te verdrijven” — signals that the adventurer had moved from the Sultan’s service to a project of dynastic overthrow. Wilson’s adventure had, by this point, ceased to be a Malay matter and had become a threat to the stability of the entire East Coast.
The Dutch intervention and the 1858 tractate
The Dutch intervention against Wilson was, the Bureau records, undertaken at the direct request of Tongkoe Ismail. Having failed to obtain British assistance from the authorities at Singapore — who refused, “met het oog op het bekende tractaat van 1824 met Nederland” — “in view of the well-known treaty of 1824 with the Netherlands” — Tongkoe Ismail turned, “met meer succes” — “with more success” — to the Netherlands-Indies Government. The Dutch intervention rapidly subdued the rebels and drove Wilson out, and the Siak tractate of 1 February 1858 — by which Tongkoe Ismail ceded his realm to the Nederlandsch-Indisch Gouvernement in return for Dutch protection of his rights over the Dependencies — followed immediately.
The Wilson adventure was, in the Bureau’s framing, the immediate occasion of the 1858 tractate. The Dutch state’s interest in asserting formal sovereignty over Siak was, of course, of much longer standing — it reached back to the abortive Baud policy of East Coast posts in 1838–1841 and the outer possessions policy of van den Bosch — but the Wilson adventure provided the political opportunity and the diplomatic justification for the formal assertion of that sovereignty.
Significance
Wilson is, in the Encyclopaedisch Bureau’s survey, the archetypal instance of the British freelance intervention in the East Coast affairs that the treaty of 1824 had been intended to prevent and that the Dutch colonial state, in the mid-nineteenth century, found itself compelled to suppress. His adventure is the immediate occasion of the 1858 Siak tractate — the foundational diplomatic instrument of the Dutch East Coast state — and it is, in the longer perspective, the prototype of the recurrent colonial anxiety about British freelance intervention that would, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attend every Dutch assertion of effective authority over the outer possessions.
See Also
- Siak
- Tongkoe Ismail
- Acheh
- Netherlands-Indies Government
- Singapore
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Siak tractate of 1 February 1858
- Sumatra’s East Coast
- 1854
- 1858
Source
De Buitenbezittingen, Deel II, Afl. 3: Oostkust van Sumatra. Eerste Stuk, bewerkt door het Encyclopaedisch Bureau, Mededeelingen van het Bureau voor de Bestuurszaken der Buitenbezittingen (Weltevreden: Landsdrukkerij, 1918), p. 104. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, shelfmark LS.08781.
Nota omtrent het Rijk van Siak, by H. A. Hijmans van Anrooy, in Tijdschrift van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië, dl. XXX (1885).