Lampanas was a small Achehnese village and roadstead on the north coast of Groot-Atjeh, east of Oleh-leh and Kroëng Raja, lying at the foot of one of the outrunners of the Goudberg (Selawa Djanten), famous in the history of the Atjeh-oorlog as the landing place and supply base of the Lamtoba column of 26 July–4 September 1879, narrated in W. Cool and G. B. Hooijer’s Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis (1889).
Description and situation
The village stood on a yellow strand behind which the glittering, chalk-coloured hill country rose, the dark row of coconut palms below and the massive body and sharp peak of the heavily wooded Goudberg towering above all. The roadstead — ordinarily a dead-quiet anchorage — gave shelter to the four steamships that anchored there at half past eight in the evening of 26 July 1879, in bright moonlight: the Merapi, Soerabaya, Borneo and Graaf van Bijland, attended by the little government steamboat Zeemeeuw. The surf on this coast, the authors note, is least in the early morning — a phenomenon that governed the hours of every landing.
The landing of 27 July 1879
Before the expedition, the population of Lampanas had not proved hostile: it was here that 1e Luitenant G. B. Hooijer and the chief Panglima Tibang came with the Zeemeeuw to take intelligence, and the headman Toekoe Mas came aboard to fix the landing point. On 27 July the guides were sent ashore at first light to reassure the people; the 3rd Company of the 9e Bataljon Infanterie with a mortar section under Majoor Ducroo was the first troop landed, about six o’clock, and at eleven all the troops had reached the bivouac chosen a quarter of an hour from the village, on a grass-covered hill washed on two sides by a rivulet of pure drinking-water, secure as might be against surprise, heat and damp. The disembarkation of the horses — lowered by tackle upon the iron pontoon raft and swum ashore when the raft fell between the breakers — lasted until one in the afternoon, and that of the engineers’ materials and provisions until eight in the evening. Before the kampong stretched the unplanted plain of the Blang Tring, on which the column first drew up in marching order.
Base and quarantine camp
Lampanas remained the column’s base to the end: here Kapitein Bedet with two companies built the provisions storehouse and barracks; hence the Zeemeeuw ran the supply line to Oleh-leh, bringing up slaughter cattle when the runderpest-thinned valley yielded none; and hither returned, on 22–23 August 1879, the whole column for the ten days’ quarantine imposed on account of the smallpox of the Lamtoba valley. Between 24 and 25 August a complete camp of bamboo barracks — company sheds 40 and 50 metres long, officers’ bathrooms, a circular ambulance for fifty sick set about shady trees — rose behind the strand. From this camp the column re-embarked in three divisions between 2 and 4 September 1879, whereupon, in the book’s closing landscape, the bustle vanished for good: “Evenals te voren, als ware er niets geschied, beukte de witte schuimende branding het eenzame strand … het groen-grijze silhouet van den voor altijd verlaten Selawa Djanten!”
See Also
- Lamtoba
- Embarkation at Oleh-leh and landing at Lampanas (26–27 July 1879)
- Quarantine at Lampanas (August–September 1879)
- Toekoe Mas
- Zeemeeuw (gouvernements-stoomboot)
- Goudberg
- Oleh-leh
- 1879
Source
Eene schoone bladzijde uit Atjeh’s geschiedenis, door W. Cool en G. B. Hooijer (‘s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1889), pp. 3-4, 8-13, 15, 66-69, 72-76. OCR-filename: 20260720_115822_DLP-135-Eene_schoone_bladzijde_uit_Atjeh_s_geschiedenis_Nemotron_OCR_v2_OCR.txt.