Fort Zeeland at Atjeh (the factory baptised “Zeeland”) was the first Dutch office on Sumatra, established at Atjeh in 1602 by the returning Zeeland ships that had carried Prince Maurits’s letter to the Sultan Aloeddin. The naming of the factory after the province of Zeeland was a memorial to the Zeelanders who had opened the formal Dutch-Atjeh relationship. Two merchants and several assistants remained behind to staff the new station.
Foundation, 1602
In 1602, after the four Zeeland ships that had come to Atjeh in August 1601 had obtained the release of the Dutch prisoners and the Sultan’s agreement to compensate Frederik de Houtman “en zijn vrouw” for his material losses, the returning ships left at Atjeh the first Dutch office on Sumatra. Godee Molsbergen’s text: “In Atjeh kregen de Zeeuwen het eerste Nederlandsche kantoor op Sumatra, ‘Zeeland’ gedoopt, waar twee kooplieden en enkele Assistenten achterbleven.”
The staff — two kooplieden (merchants) and several Assistenten (assistants) — was small, but the foundation was a deliberate act of Zeeland commercial colonisation: the factory bore the province’s name as a mark of its origin. The factory’s foundation in 1602 is contemporaneous with the founding of the VOC itself (the charter is dated 20 March 1602) and slightly predates the Atjeh embassy’s arrival at the siege of Grave later that year.
The opening of the Gujarat trade
Two of the new factory’s staff sailed on Atjeh vessels to the Gulf of Cambay, on the west coast of Voor-Indië, where — thanks to the letters of the Atjeh Sultan — they were excellently received in Goezeratte and could begin their trade. The Sultan’s letters thus opened the Gujarat trade to Dutch merchants — a small but concrete instance of the sultanate’s diplomatic reach, and of the practical value to the VOC of the Atjeh alliance that the 1602 embassy had cemented.
Continuity with the later lodge
The “Zeeland” factory of 1602 was the seed of what would become the VOC lodge at Atjeh of later decades — the Opperhoofd with eight helpers that Soury’s 1641 embassy found already in place. By 1641 the lodge had become the Company’s principal station on the northern coast of Sumatra, with the Sultan’s exclusive right to trade on Sumatra’s Westkust attached to it. The line of institutional continuity runs from the two merchants of 1602 through the Opperhoofden of the 1620s and 1630s (among them Justus Schouten in 1640) to Compostel and Willemz in 1641.
Significance
For Atjeh’s history, Fort Zeeland is the foundation-point of the continuous Dutch presence in the sultanate — the first formal Dutch office on Sumatra, named for the province whose ships had opened the relationship, and the institutional ancestor of the lodge that would host Soury’s embassy of 1641. Its small staff (two merchants and a few assistants) is itself a measure of how modest the Dutch residential presence in Atjeh actually was at its foundation — a thin European thread that the larger ceremonial of later embassies would repeatedly overshadow.
See Also
- Sultan Aloeddin of Atjeh
- Atjeh embassy to Prince Maurits at Grave (1602)
- Frederik de Houtman
- Cornelis de Houtman
- Dutch lodge at Atjeh
- Justus Schouten
- Jacob Compostel
- Pieter Willemz
- Pieter Soury’s mission to Atjeh (1641)
- Goezeratte
- 1602
- Acheh
Source
Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie, by Dr. E. C. Godee Molsbergen, Oud-Hoogleeraar, Landsarchivaris te Batavia (Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger Boekhandel en Uitgevers Mij., 1932), chapter XXXIII (“Atjehers in het kamp van Maurits. De zeeslag bij Bantam”), pp. 118–121 of the numbered-letter sequence.