Lingga (also spelled Lingen or Linga in older Dutch and English sources) is an island and sultanate in the Lingga Archipelago, lying south of Singapore and south of the Riouw (Riau) islands, in what is now the Indonesian province of Kepulauan Riau. The largest island, Lingga, together with neighbouring Singkep and the surrounding smaller islands, formed the maritime heart of the Sultanate of Lingga-Riau, the descendant polity of the great Johor Empire, and was therefore of considerable strategic interest to both the British and the Dutch in the early nineteenth century.
In the political-diplomatic manoeuvring described by P. H. van der Kemp (1900), Lingga enters the narrative through the figure of Major Farquhar of Malacca. Returning in 1818 from a voyage to Borneo’s west coast, where he had been turned away from Pontianak by the Dutch commissioner Van Boekholz, Farquhar had nonetheless succeeded in concluding a contract with the sultan of Lingga. That success drew his attention to the Karimon Islands and ultimately to the site on which Singapore would be founded in January 1819. Lingga was thus indirectly part of the same chain of British probings of the southern approach to the Malay Peninsula that produced the Aceh agreement of 1819.
When the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 came to divide the archipelago into Dutch and British spheres, Lingga fell explicitly within the Dutch side. Article 12 of that treaty — which Van der Kemp quotes verbatim — barred the British from establishing any office on the Carimons, or on the islands of Batam (Battam), Bintan (Bintang), Lingen, or any of the other islands lying south of Singapore, and forbade British authorities from concluding treaties with their chiefs. The clause was the price Britain paid for Dutch recognition of Singapore, and it confirmed Lingga as a Dutch dependency.
Lingga’s importance remained military as well as political. In a private letter of 16 March 1819 from Governor Thyssen to Admiral Wolterbeek, quoted in Van der Kemp’s appendix, Thyssen feared that Raffles — after combining with his friends at the Carrimons — might “venture an attack on Lingen”; he urged the Governor-General to send a strong force and even suggested that, given such a force, the Dutch might seize Pahang, Lingen and other convenient places to deny the British the benefit of their stolen positions. The letter is revealing: Lingga was seen as both vulnerable to British intrigue and a tempting object of Dutch counter-action.
The sultanate of Lingga-Riau endured as a Dutch protectorate until its formal abolition in 1911, by which time the political geography Van der Kemp described had long since been settled into the colonial pattern fixed by the treaty of 1824.
See Also
- Riouw
- Bintan
- Batam
- Karimon Islands
- Singapore
- Treaty of London (1824)
- Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819
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.