Calcutta (modern Kolkata; the seat of Fort William) was the capital of British India and the residence of the Governor-General of Bengalen whose government directed British relations with Acheh throughout the events narrated in P. H. van der Kemp’s Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819. From Calcutta, Lord Moira dispatched the Acheh commission of 1819; to Calcutta, Raffles came to lobby the Supreme Government against the Dutch; and at Calcutta the pretender Syf ul-Alum was given a pension of 500 dollars a month after his piratical cruise.
Raffles’s appeal to the Supreme Government
Raffles, lieutenant-governor of Benkoelen, wrote from Bencoolen to Sultan Djohor that he was ready to go to Calcutta and there promised “to invoke the help of the Bengal government for Djohor.” He carried out the threat: “the lieutenant-governor appeared in the British-Indian capital, where he opened the government’s eyes to the imaginary danger that the Dutchers were coming to monopolise the China road.” At that moment Captain Coombs was also in Calcutta, urging — in opposition to Raffles’s view — the recognition of Syf as sultan. The Calcutta government under Moira dispatched the commission to Acheh; Lord Moira’s letter to London of 14 January 1819 hoped “that we may be in time to establish our political influence at Acheh, to the exclusion of that of the Dutch or other foreign nations.”
Source of instructions and complaints
The Calcutta government’s instructions to the commissioners were “incomplete,” Van der Kemp notes, and lay at the root of the subsequent quarrels between Raffles, Coombs, and Bannerman. The Penang government alleged that Raffles had received verbal orders from the Governor-General contradicting the written instructions; Raffles, in a letter dated Calcutta, 31 December 1819, formally denied the allegation. The report of the Calcutta government of 7 October 1820 to London, repeatedly cited by Van der Kemp, supplies much of the English documentation reproduced in his appendices.
A refuge for Syf and a way-station for troops
When Syf ul-Alum was driven from Telok Semawé in early 1820 by the man-of-war Dauffiless, he seized a junk, plundered twelve praus, and sailed to Calcutta. There the complaints of those he had robbed caught up with him; but “the judges found no grounds to condemn him: Syf had acted as a sovereign!” He departed undisturbed on 21 July 1820, the Bengal government granting him a monthly pension of 500 dollars, charged — vainly, as the Penang officials remarked — to Sultan Djohor’s account. Earlier, in 1814, Captain Canning had proceeded from Calcutta to Acheh to regulate trade; and in mid-1820 the troopship which carried Colonel O’Hallaran to Pedir had gone from Calcutta via Penang.
After the 1824 treaty: a “dead letter”
Once the treaty of 17 March 1824 was signed, the London Court of Directors sent it to Calcutta with an explanatory dispatch of 4 August 1824 (Van der Kemp’s Bijlage 9). The Bengal government, by missive of 28 January 1825, asked Penang for advice, itself recognising the Acheh treaty as a dead letter. Governor Fullerton composed his minute of 21 March 1825 for the Bengal government; and the Ibbetson dispatch of 25 February 1824 from Penang to the governmental secretary George Swinton at Calcutta supplied the Supreme Government with the first formal proposal of armed British intervention at Acheh. Falck wrote to Elout on 17 September 1824 that Sumatra’s impulse could now “better come from nearby Batavia than from the gentlemen at Calcutta, who were always thinking of other things” — a barb Van der Kemp preserves verbatim.
See Also
- Bengal
- Lord Moira
- Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
- Captain Coombs
- Captain Canning’s mission to Acheh (1814)
- Raffles-Coombs Acheh Commission (1819)
- Syf’s flight to Calcutta
- Syf’s pension at Penang
- Colonel O’Hallaran
- Bengal inquiry to Penang (28 January 1825)
- Ibbetson’s intervention proposal (February 1824)
- George Swinton
- Robert Fullerton
Account from Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu
Centre of the pinang (betel nut) market in British India; direct shipping trial considered but not pursued.
Source: J. Jongejans, Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. —.
Source
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.
Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu, by J. Jongejans, Oud-Resident van het Gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden, with a foreword by Dr. H. Colijn (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. —.