Kampar was a district and river of Sumatra’s East Coast, lying to the south of Siak and discharging into the Strait of Malacca. Like the other petty states of the coast — Deli, Langkat, Batu Bara, Siak, Jambi, Tanah Putih, Balah and Panei — Kampar was in the early nineteenth century practically independent and carried on a direct trade with the British settlements at Penang and, after 1819, Singapore. Kampar is mentioned in Van der Kemp’s article only in passing, but its inclusion among the East Coast ports gives it a place in the wider argument of the study.
In John Prince’s letter of 1827
The sole substantive mention of Kampar in Van der Kemp’s article occurs in Appendix 11, where he prints the letter of 29 November 1827 in which Prince, late Resident of Singapore, then at Batavia, warned the Penang government of the contemplated dispatch of the Dutch frigate Bellona to Sumatra’s East Coast. Prince reported that the Dutch aimed to substitute Java salt, at thirty rupees the coyan, for the Siam salt then supplied through Singapore, and observed that the appearance of such a vessel at “the several ports of Siak Kampar, Jambi & c.” might intimidate the natives into compliance with the Dutch demands, “grant through fear, what their interests and better reason would otherwise condemn”. Kampar is thus enumerated by Prince among the principal East Coast ports which the Bellona mission was designed to overawe.
Place in the wider argument
Although Kampar is mentioned only in this single passage, its inclusion is significant. Van der Kemp adduces Prince’s letter as evidence that, after the treaty of 1824, the Netherlands Indian government at Batavia was prepared to use naval pressure to draw the East Coast states into its commercial system, even at the cost of conflict with British trade at Singapore. The Dutch claim of “suprematie over Sumatra”, which Palmerston would later allow to be argued on the strict letter of the treaty of 1824, thus came in practice to be exerted — at Kampar as at Siak and Jambi — through precisely the kind of “political influence and military power” against which Governor Fullerton had protested in his minute of 21 March 1825.
See Also
- Sumatra’s East Coast
- Sumatra
- Siak
- Jambi
- Deli
- Langkat
- Batu Bara
- 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)
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.