Bencoolen

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tagsplace, region, coast, west-coast, foreign, british-india, city, colony, sumatra, colonial, british, dutch, achehnese, organization, ship, navy, aceh-war, 19th-century, 1884, toekoe-oemar, lambeusong, koninklijke-marine, indonesia
aliasesBenculen, Bancoolen, Benkulu, Bengkulu, Fort Marlborough, Benkoelen, Hr. Ms. Benkoelen, Warship Benkoelen, Dutch warship Benkoelen, Benkoelen (Bengkulu)

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Bencoolen — Dutch Benkoelen; modern Bengkulu — on the south-west coast of Sumatra, was the British East India Company’s settlement on the West Coast of Sumatra, centred on the fortress of Fort Marlborough, established in 1685 after the English expulsion from Bantam by the 17 April 1684 treaty between sultan Hadji of Bantam and the Compagnie. In Dr. F. W. Stapel’s Geschiedkundige Atlas van Nederland Bencoolen is the long English counterweight to the Dutch Westkust system, and the place whose presence on the Westkust — formally on territory the Compagnie considered its own — would last until 1824.

The 1684 Bantam treaty and the English relocation

The English expulsion from Bantam and the consequent establishment at Bencoolen is, in Stapel’s narrative, the closing Westkust event of the Painansch Contract era. “According to the treaty, 17 April 1684 concluded by sultan Hadji of Bantam with the Compagnie, the latter received the monopoly of the pepper, which was won on Sillebar, situated under Bantam’s suzerainty, just south of Benkoelen. By the same treaty the English had to leave Bantam; they settled themselves in 1685 on the West Coast, namely on Benkoelen, Batang Kapas and Sillabar, although these were considered to stand under the Dutch Compagnie. This region became the centre of the English establishments on the West Coast, where they remained until 1824” (Krachtens ditzelfde verdrag moesten de Engelschen Bantam verlaten; zij vestigden zich in 1685 op de Westkust, en wel op Benkoelen, Batang Kapas en Sibebar, hoewel die werden beschouwd als onder de Nederlandsche Compagnie te staan. Deze streek werd het centrum van de Engelsche vestigingen op de Westkust, waar zij tot 1824 zijn gebleven).

The Hasan-Husain festival and British-Indian influence

Bencoolen is named in Vol. I of The Achehnese as one of the places on the West Coast of Sumatra where the Hasan-Husain festival was celebrated in a form which bears the marks of British-Indian influence. It is paired by C. Snouck Hurgronje with Padang and “etc.” as the principal localities of the West Coast at which the festival was observed.

The festival commemorates the martyrdom of Husain — and, in its Indonesian form, of Hasan as well — at Kerbela. “In different parts of Netherlands-India and especially on the West Coast of Sumatra (Padang, Bencoolen etc.) the Hasan-Husain festival is celebrated on a smaller scale, but in much the same manner as we find it described in the Qanoon-e-islam.” The reference is to Jaffur Shurreef’s account of the Mohammedan customs of the Deccan, which Snouck treats as the standard description of the South-Indian form of the observance.

It has been suggested, Snouck continues, that the festival was introduced along the sea-board by the sipahis (sepoys) who immigrated thither during the period of English domination. Bencoolen, as the seat of the English East India Company’s establishment at Fort Marlborough from 1685 to 1825, was for nearly a century and a half the chief English station on Sumatra; the sepoys stationed there were natives of Hindustan, and their presence would naturally explain the diffusion of Deccan-form Mohammedan customs along the adjacent coast. Snouck allows that “it is indeed quite possible that these natives of Hindustan may have had an influence on the manner of its observance.”

He is, however, careful to add a caveat: “it is however probable, to say the least, that even previously to this a Hasan-Husain feast enjoyed much popularity both in Sumatra and elsewhere.” The survival of the festival at Trumon in the manner customary in the Deccan, the Achehnese name Asan-Usen for the month, and the Javanese name Sura for the month of Muharram — all point, in his view, to a deeper and older root than the sepoys of Bencoolen and Padang alone could supply.

Bencoolen’s appearance in Vol. I is thus that of a comparative locality — a place whose English-Indian history throws light on the diffusion of South-Indian Mohammedan forms in Sumatra, but which cannot by itself account for the prevalence of those forms throughout the Archipelago.

Raffles’s chair of authority

The opening pages of Van der Kemp’s narrative set Bencoolen squarely against Pulo Pinang. The two chief British authorities in those waters were Sir Stamford Raffles, lieutenant-governor of Benkoelen, and Colonel Bannerman, governor of Penang. Bannerman’s name has been eclipsed, Van der Kemp observes, “because he had no taste for the conscienceless driving of Benkoelen’s governor.” It was from Bencoolen that Raffles wrote to Sultan Djohor warning him to refuse the Dutch aid allegedly offered at Pedir, and promising that he was “ready to go to Calcutta” and there invoke “the help of the Bengal government for Djohor.”

The Acheh Commission of 1819

When Lord Moira, Governor-General of Bengalen, decided to send a commission to Acheh to secure British influence and exclude that of the Dutch, Raffles was named senior commissioner with a casting vote. The choice was natural given his rank at Bencoolen, but it placed him in uneasy partnership with Captain Coombs of the Bengal establishment. Raffles diverted artillery and military stores intended for the Acheh expedition to his detour to the Karimon Islands in January 1819, provoking formal complaint from Bannerman and Coombs that “Benkoelen’s governor” had arbitrarily interrupted the Acheh commission and sent off the Minto on his own authority. After the treaty with Sultan Jauhar Alum was nonetheless concluded in April 1819, Raffles was credited in the Asiatic Journal and the Oriental Star as the sole architect: “the man who had accomplished that great work was none other than the Governor of Bencoolen.”

A pawn in the Anglo-Dutch revision

After the treaty of 1814 restored the Dutch possessions in the East, Bencoolen’s situation became untenable. British-Indian officials in Bengalen urged the Dutch to surrender the now-worthless factories in Hindostan in exchange for Bencoolen. Falck and Fagel had agreed already in 1814 on the worthlessness of the Hindostan factories, and Commissioner-General Elout in February 1817 formally recommended that Bencoolen be taken over in exchange for them. This became the foundation of the revision of the treaty of 1814 culminating in the treaty of London of 17 March 1824.

Van der Kemp characterises the surrender as a deliberate sacrifice: “we bade farewell to our possessions on the Ganges, more glorious in memory; for that we finally acquiesced in the humiliation of Singapore; for that we threw in costly Malacca to boot.” Under article 10 of the 1824 treaty the transfer of Bencoolen to the Dutch took effect, and with it the abandonment of British political influence on Sumatra as a whole. The British plenipotentiaries nevertheless stipulated that “the new possessor of Fort Marlborough” should take no hostile measures against the King of Acheh — a stipulation whose very formulation Van der Kemp treats as a piece of effrontery.

Significance

Bencoolen is the long English counterweight to the Dutch Westkust system. The Compagnie’s Painansch Contract system extended along the Westkust from Singkel in the north to Sillebar in the south, and the 1684 treaty had just secured the Compagnie’s monopoly in Bantam itself; the English relocation to Bencoolen in 1685 — on territory the Compagnie considered its own — opened a long English presence on the Westkust that would last until the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London. The Bencoolen period is the connecting thread between the seventeenth-century Dutch-Acehnese Westkust contest and the nineteenth-century Anglo-Dutch Sumatran contest.

The Bencoolen establishment is also the operational proof that the Compagnie’s Westkust authority, however complete on the treaty paper, could not exclude a determined European rival. The Painansch Contract system gave the Compagnie exclusive rights against all other European and native nations — except Atjehers — but the English presence at Bencoolen from 1685 onward is the standing contradiction of that exclusivity.

See Also

Sources

The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.

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.

De Koloniën, by Dr. F. W. Stapel, in Geschiedkundige Atlas van Nederland (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931), kaart 19, blz. 23 (tekst bij blad 4: Atjeh en de Westkust van Sumatra in 1684). Drie Atjeh-mannen: Snouck Hurgronje — Van Heutsz — Van Daalen, door H. T. Damsté (September 1936). OCR-filename: 20260718_105749_DLP-111-Drie_Atjeh_mannen_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt, p. 25. 20260707_232246_DLP-55-De_geschiedenis_van_het_Nederlandsche_Korps_Mariniers_van_1665_1945_OCR.txt, pp. 109‑110. DLP-84-Atjeh.pdf, pp. 3‑4.

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