Jambi (Dutch Djambi) was a Malay sultanate on Sumatra’s East Coast, lying to the south-east of Siak and Kampar along the river of the same name. The Jambi sultanate had a long and complex history of its own, but in Van der Kemp’s article it appears only as one of the East Coast ports with which the British settlement at Singapore carried on an extensive trade in the years after the treaty of 1824. Together with Siak and Kampar, Jambi is enumerated among the states which the Dutch Bellona mission of 1827–1828 was designed to overawe.
In John Prince’s letter of 1827
The sole substantive mention of Jambi in Van der Kemp’s article occurs in Appendix 11, where he prints the letter of 29 November 1827 from Prince, late Resident of Singapore, then at Batavia, to the Penang government. Prince reported that the Commissioner-General Du Bus had resolved to send the Netherlands frigate Bellona to Sumatra’s East Coast in order to revive the trade of Riouw and to substitute Java salt — at thirty rupees the coyan instead of seventy — for the Siam salt then supplied through Singapore. The appearance of such a vessel at “the several ports of Siak Kampar, Jambi & c.”, Prince warned, might overawe the natives into granting, through fear, what their interests and better reason would otherwise condemn.
Place in the wider argument
Jambi’s inclusion in Prince’s letter, though brief, is significant for Van der Kemp’s argument. It shows that the British government at Singapore, by 1827, had come to regard the entire chain of East Coast sultanates — from Deli in the north through Siak, Kampar and Jambi to the south — as a single commercial sphere whose trade was threatened by the Dutch assertion of supremacy over Sumatra. The Dutch claim, which Palmerston would later allow to be argued on the strict letter of the treaty of 1824, was in practice being exerted, at Jambi as at Siak, through precisely the kind of naval mission against which Governor Fullerton had protested in his minute of 21 March 1825. Van der Kemp prints Prince’s letter to show the consistency and continuity of the British commercial policy on the East Coast — a policy which, together with the Achehnese independence reservation of 1824, kept the “Sumatra question” alive until the Sumatra Treaty of 1871.
Sources
De geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Korps Mariniers van 1665‑1945, OCR text, pp. 112 – 113.
See Also
- Sumatra’s East Coast
- Sumatra
- Siak
- Kampar
- Deli
- Batu Bara
- Langkat
- John Prince
- Robert Fullerton
- Bellona mission to Sumatra’s East Coast (1827-1828)
- Fullerton’s minute on Acheh (21 March 1825)
- Anglo-Dutch Treaty of London (1824)
- Sumatra Treaty of 1871
- Retch
- Expedition to Retch 1858
- Batang River
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.