Balbalan (the Balbalan or Babalan river of the Langkat district of the East Coast of Sumatra) was the river in which the harbour of Pangkalan Brandan lay, and whose channel (Balbalangeul) off the coast belonged geographically to the Aru Bay — a conjunction at the heart of the Deli-Atjeh railway connection controversy.
The disputed geography
It was on the Balbalan distinction that Schadee based his correction of Beyerman in the 1912–1913 correspondence quoted by J. Roest in De spoorwegverbinding tusschen Deli, Atjeh en de Aroebaai (1916): the Aru Bay question was, he said, identical with the question of Pangkalan Brandan — or vice versa. It might be true that, from a nautical point of view, the approach to Pangkalan Brandan, that is the Babalan channel outside the coast, could be counted as of the Aru Bay; but this did not at all hold for the Babalan river itself, in which the harbour of Pangkalan Brandan lay. “We treat not a nautical but an economic question,” Schadee’s letter runs in Roest’s citation: the traffic of a river harbour in the river belonged to the river, not to the bay.
The channel — with the Sembilangeul, the southern entrance of the Aru Bay — formed one of the two ways by which sea-going coasters entered the harbour country of north Langkat; it lay a short distance southeast of the point where, in the railway plans, the projected line Besitang–Pangkalan Soesoe (later: the state-built tramway extension) would end at the Aru Bay.
See Also
Source
De spoorwegverbinding tusschen Deli, Atjeh en de Aroebaai, door J. Roest, in Tijdschrift voor het Binnenlandsch Bestuur, Deel XLIX, Afl. 6 (Batavia, December 1916), pp. 466–468.