Aroe

Aroe — also Aru, in Portuguese Aru or Arua, in the Sadjarah Malajoe the realm of the Djao (Portuguese Jaoa), and in the Encyclopaedisch Bureau’s survey of the Outer Possessions the Batakrijk Aroe — was the kingdom on the east coast of Sumatra whose bay, Aroe-baai, opens into the Strait of Malacca opposite the Nine Islands of Perak, and whose fall to the Atjehnese fleet in 1539 — recorded by Mendez Pinto — marks the close of the independent history of the east-coast Hindu-Buddhist commonwealth and the beginning of the Atjehnese maritime age. A kingdom once ranked in the Sadjarah Malajoe on a level with Pasej and Malacca, and one that stretched from Tamijang to Siak — and, in the Encyclopaedisch Bureau’s account, north-westward along the Strait of Malakka into south-eastern Atjeh — Aroe was reduced by the Atjehnese conquest to “poverty and piracy”, so much so that in the colonial period only a “soekoe Aroe” — an Aroe clan — was remembered. The Encyclopaedisch Bureau, drawing on Batak saga, places the destruction of the Batakrijk Aroe “probably in 1589” — a dating tradition that complements (rather than supersedes) Pinto’s 1539 account, and that anchors the Batak memory of a coast-dwelling people driven into the hills by the Atjehnese conquest.

Geography and the bay

Aroe’s strategic heart was the bay — known to Pinto as the port de Surotilau on the cite du royaume d’Auru — into which the river of Tandjoengpoera empties. The bay is sheltered by a half-moon of islands: Kampi (Pinto’s Paneticano), Sembilan, Salahadji and others; the landward side is heavily forested, with apes, pythons, and crocodiles that “dragged men from the prauwen and devoured them”. The approach by sea from Malacca runs by the Nine Islands off Perak, across the Strait, and into the bay; the inland approach runs up the Besitang river, past the Pangkalan Soesoe oil-springs, and up the soengej Si Kondoer and Sérang djaja — old fortifications, the colonial official Van Rijn reported in 1888, that were said to be the old bentengs of the earlier rajas of Aroe.

Geographical extent: the two accounts

The Encyclopaedisch Bureau’s survey of the Outer Possessions records the geographical extent of the Batakrijk Aroe in terms that complement Pinto’s account. “In het N. de Bataks niet alleen het binnenland beheerschten, doch de grenzen van hun groote Batak-rijk Aroe uitbreidden langs de straat van Malaka tot in Z. O. Atjeh” — “in the north [the Bataks] not only controlled the interior, but the borders of their great Batak realm of Aroe extended along the Strait of Malakka into south-eastern Atjeh.” Aroe thus extended, in the Bureau’s account, from the present cultivation district of the East Coast of Sumatra (the future Deli, Serdang, Langkat belt) north-westward along the Strait of Malakka into south-eastern Atjeh. The Bureau’s placement of Aroe “in het tegenwoordig Cultuurgebied” — “in the present Cultivation District” — locates the Batak realm in precisely the territory that would, three centuries after its destruction, become the economic heart of the colonial East Coast.

The two accounts are mutually consistent in their geographical framing: both place Aroe on the east coast of Sumatra, with a reach extending from the Tamijang area southward to Siak (Pinto) and from the cultivation district north-westward into south-eastern Atjeh (Bureau). The difference is one of emphasis: Pinto’s account foregrounds the bay and the maritime trade, while the Bureau’s account foregrounds the Batak ethnic identity and the inland reach.

Pinto and the Atjeh-Aru war (1539)

Aroe enters European record through Pinto’s second Sumatran mission. In October 1539 he was dispatched by Pero de Faria to Aroe, whose king had asked for Portuguese help against the Atjehnese fleet then bearing down on him. Pinto’s anchorage in the bay, his reception by the Radja of Aroe, the arrival of the Atjehnese fleet of 130 vessels, the radja’s death in the breach, the queen’s counter-stroke and flight, and the kingdom’s absorption into the Atjehnese sphere are the substance of the Atjeh-Aroe War (1539) — the foundational military event of the Atjehnese sultanate’s sixteenth-century expansion.

The Batak saga and the 1589 dating tradition

The Encyclopaedisch Bureau’s survey of the Buitenbezittingen records a second dating tradition for the destruction of the Batakrijk Aroe. “Reeds werd gesproken over het mythische Batakrijk ‘Aroe’ in het tegenwoordig Cultuurgebied, dat, volgens de sage, waarschijnlijk 1589 door de Atjehers vernietigd werd” — “Already was spoken of the mythical Batak realm of ‘Aroe’ in the present Cultivation District, which, according to saga, was probably destroyed by the Atjehers in 1589.” The Bureau’s attribution of the date to “saga” (sage) and its qualifier “probably” (waarschijnlijk) signal that the 1589 date rests on traditional Batak memory rather than on a dated contemporary chronicle.

The 1539 and 1589 dating traditions are best read as complementary rather than contradictory: the 1539 date records the Pinto-attested naval campaign by which the Atjehnese fleet shattered the kingdom’s maritime power, while the 1589 date records the final destruction of the Batak realm’s inland residues, as preserved in Batak oral tradition. The half-century between the two dates would, on this reading, mark the protracted Atjehnese consolidation of the east-coast interior that followed the 1539 naval victory.

Decoding the bedekte taal of Aroe

Pinto’s account of Aroe is dense with names that De Roo de la Faille decodes as bedekte taal — veiled-language forms concealing the older Hindu-Buddhist geography of the bay. Surotilau is read as Soera-sakti-lawoe-kir, the roadstead of Malajoer in Aroe. Ilikandure, the “fish (ikan) on Hindu” (hin-doe ka-ri) riddle, marks where Hindu population still survived. Minhatoley is read as mina-ng-k-a da-toe Olèh-leh, the territory of the dotoe of Olèh-leh, an Atjeh-chief marking the start of the Suratte-passage. Batorrendan is batoe rendang, a joke on the Batu islands. Turban is Batoe-poer-wa-boewana. Paneticano is Kampi. minha cumbaa is minjak sembawa, the white earth-oil of Pangkalan Soesoe.

The bay’s islet, Kampi — Pinto’s Paneticano, also Koempej — is, in this reading, the older Malajoer of the Pararaton, the Noesa-n-ta-ra “standing under the protection of the goddess Tara”, where the pabgjan (the toll-house at which ships paid import duties) stood. The bay and the islet are, in turn, the Taroema of the Adiparwa’s Churning of the Ocean of Milk — the tasik soesoe from which the gods drew the amrta.

Political structure and trade before the fall

Before its fall, Aroe was administered in Malay style: a Xabandar (harbourmaster) commanded five lanchares and twelve balo (war-vessels), while above him stood the banda(ha)ra (bendahara), the “gouverneur du royaume”, who directed the hoeloebalang (war-chiefs). The bendahara’s personal guard were the hamba radja — “the most noble of his Court”, though many of them, Pinto noted, were in fact poor. Ibn Battuta, visiting the region in 1345–1346, likewise recorded a Hindu kingdom (Moel Djawa) with elephants, stone walls, and cloves and nutmeg on its market — evidence of regular trade with the Moluccas conducted through Aroe’s entrepôt.

The Atjehnese and Djohorese invasions after the fall

The destruction of Aroe — whether placed in 1539 (Pinto) or 1589 (Batak saga) — was, the Encyclopaedisch Bureau records, immediately followed by an Atjehnese invasion of Tamiang and Northern Langkat and by a parallel movement of the Maleiers van Djohore further south. “In Tamiang en Noordelijk Langkat waren het de Atjehers, welke onder een vertegenwoordiger van hun Sultan de macht aan zich trokken; meer naar het Zuiden maakten de Maleiers van Djohore, evenals na de vernietiging van het rijk Gasip gebruik van den verwarden toestand om de kuststreken (riviermonden) te bezetten en daardoor een groot economische overwicht op het binnenland te verwerven” — “In Tamiang and Northern Langkat it was the Atjehers who, under a representative of their Sultan, drew the power to themselves; more to the south, the Malays of Djohore, just as after the destruction of the realm of Gasip, made use of the confused situation to occupy the coastal regions (river mouths) and thereby to acquire a great economic preponderance over the interior.” The destruction was followed by a recognition of Atjehnese influence — “voluntary or forced” — “tot in het gebied der Noordelijke hoogvlakte” — “as far as the territory of the Northern high plateau” (i.e. the Karo hoogvlakte).

Decadence and the soekoe Aroe

After the fall of Aroe, the queen’s flight, and the brief Johorese reconquest, Aroe was finally lost for good, and “with the realm of the Djao — as the Portuguese wrote Jaoa — it was done forever”. Once a negeri ranked in the Sadjarah Malajoe on a line with Pasej and Malacca, a realm that stretched from Tamijang to Siak, it sank into poverty and piracy, so much so that in the colonial period “one could only remember a soekoe Aroe” — an Aroe clan — in its place. Aroe had once been a ravitailleeringsplaats (revictualling station) for merchant shipping through the Strait, a place that traded on its own account and trans-shipped to other places, renowned as the source of the minjak tanah — the white medicinal petroleum that was exported as a balsam. In the seventeenth century that reputation had already much declined.

The Batak dispossession and the Karo Doesoens

The institutional memory of Aroe survived in the Karo-Batak tradition of the radja berempat and in the broader cultural memory of the Bataks as a people driven from the coast into the hills. The Encyclopaedisch Bureau records that the Bataks were “steeds meer teruggedrongen naar het binnenland, vanwaar zij vroeger uitgezwermi waren naar de kust” — “driven ever further back into the interior, from which they had earlier swarmed out to the coast” — and that the Karo doesoen population of Langkat, Deli and Serdang — the Batak communities of the hill country immediately behind the coastal plain — were the descendants of the Batak population that had once inhabited the Aroe kingdom’s coastal core.

Van Rijn’s visit (1888)

In 1888 the Controleur S.B. Van Rijn brought a visit to the Aroe-bay from Bengkalis, in connection, De Roo de la Faille notes, with Tiele’s essay on the history of those days. He found the bay heavily forested, hilly, a timber-concession of beautiful damar-trees; on the islet of Kampi he saw the half-moon of hills whose whitish strand — “making the impression that one has a fortress with breastwork before one” — recalled the Tanjore inscription of 1030’s “ancient Malayur situated on a high hill”. On the mainland, at Pangkalan Soesoe, he found ten dwellings of Malays who had fled from Besitang; inland, he found the two old bentengs of soengej Si Kondoer and Sérang djaja, said to have been the fortifications of the earlier rajas of Aroe.

Significance

For AcehWiki, Aroe is the principal east-coast polity whose fall marks the formal opening of the Atjehnese sultanate’s maritime age. Its loss to Atjeh in 1539 is the single event by which the Atjehnese sultanate closed the Strait of Malacca to Portuguese shipping and began to draw the commerce of the Strait into its own sphere; its bedekte taal geography, as decoded by De Roo de la Faille, is the principal instance of the survival of the older Hindu-Buddhist place-world beneath the chronicle record. The Encyclopaedisch Bureau’s account, in turn, anchors Aroe in the Batak memory as the Batakrijk whose destruction in 1589 (per Batak saga) opened the east coast to the Atjehnese overlordship of the northern coastal statelets and the Atjehnese invasion of Tamiang and Northern Langkat.

Sources

Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra”, pp. 7-17, and chapter “Over Sjahroe’n Noewi”, pp. 24-31.

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), pp. 102, 116. Universiteitsbibliotheek Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, shelfmark LS.08781.

De Oostkust van Sumatra, III, by Gramberg, in Indische Gids (1881). Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk V “Voorgangers, Hollanders en mededingers tot 1614. Atjeh. Djohor. Malaka.” (pp. 109, 136-137).

tags	place, kingdom, sumatra, east-coast, 16th-century, achehnese, batak, precolonial, buitenbezittingen, atjeh, djohor
aliases	Aru, Aru kingdom, Kingdom of Aru, Aroe kingdom, Aroe negri, Negri Aroe, Djao, Jaoa, Rijk Aroe, Batakrijk Aroe, Batak realm of Aroe, Aroe rijk, Het rijk Aroe, Great Batak realm of Aroe, Batak-Aroe, Haru, Aru (Atjeh wingewest), Aru Sumatra, Deli region

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