Malacca

The great Portuguese stronghold and Malay capital on the Malay Peninsula. ‘Sultan Iskandar Muda… made several attempts to drive out these rivals of his power from Malacca. For instance, he attacked that port in 1628 with a fleet of gigantic proportions.’ In the Hikayat Malem Dagang, Si Ujut is described as a son of the raja of Malacca; the fleet sails to Malacca, ‘the king of which place (the father of Si Ujut and Raja Raden) has fled with all the inhabitants of the coast to the hills in the interior.’ The Portuguese disappearing from the field of vision of the Achehnese while the Dutch came to represent European danger.

Expanded account from The Achehnese, Vol. I — Malacca

Malacca (modern Melaka) is the Malay state on the Malay Peninsula whose Hukum Kanun of Malacca is cited in The Achehnese Vol. I as a parallel to the Adat Meukuta Alam of Acheh. Both are codes of sovereigns’ decrees, expressive not of decay but of a temporary desire for order and reform. In both, the real living adats are silently taken for granted and not committed to writing, while the new matter which the books contain must have had a very brief existence in view of the constant changes of government. They principally deal with the details of court ceremonial, the exaction of fines and the regulation of the slaves of the court.

The parallel between the two codes is part of Snouck Hurgronje’s larger argument that what are sometimes described as the ancient “laws” of a Mohammedan people of the Archipelago are in reality only the occasional and short-lived decrees of a sovereign, superimposed upon an indigenous customary law that was never reduced to writing. The case is of course somewhat different with regard to certain codes dealing with the decrees of sovereigns in regard to a limited number of subjects, such as the Hukum Kanun of Malacca and others; these are expressive not of decay, but of a temporary desire for order and reform. Of these the same holds true as of the Adat Meukuta Alam in Acheh.

The name of Malacca also occurs in the comparative vocabulary of the Peninsula. Sawah, the Malay word for irrigated rice-fields used in the southern parts of the Peninsula (Johor, Malacca etc.) and also in Java, gives way in Penang, Province Wellesley, Kedah etc. — and in Acheh — to blang. Titi, a dialectic variation of titian (“a bridge”), is the word for “bridge” in the Malay of the northern part of the Peninsula; in Malacca and Singapore it is jambatan. Such regional variations within the Malay world are used by Snouck Hurgronje to mark the linguistic frontier that separates Acheh, with its pronounced northern and western peculiarities, from the more southerly Malay of the Peninsula.

In the historical memory of the Achehnese, Malacca also figures as the object of the great expeditions of the 17th century. With the short-lived period of Achehnese prosperity ended all such glorious expeditions as those undertaken in the 17th century against Malacca and Pahang, but the bold seafarers and pirates of Acheh continued to make themselves dreaded along the coasts of Sumatra and among the surrounding islands. The monopoly of trade claimed by the great sultans could in the end no longer be enforced, and the central authority dwindled to a mere shadow.

Account from Raffles’ Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819 — Malacca

Malacca (Dutch Malakka; modern Melaka) was a town and colonial possession on the Malay Peninsula whose governance, transfer and strategic position recur throughout P. H. van der Kemp’s account of the Atjeh-overeenkomst van 1819. Restored to the Dutch under the Anglo-Dutch convention of 1814 and resumed by Britain in 1818, the town formed, with Penang and (after 1819) Singapore, one of the three vertices of British power in the Straits of Malacca during the years in which the Acheh commission was dispatched, the Wilhelmina mutiny was pursued, and the treaty of London of 1824 was negotiated.

The handover of 1818 and the Karimons scare

The resumption of Malacca by Britain formed the immediate backdrop to the Anglo-Dutch friction that produced the Acheh treaty. Major Farquhar of Malacca, having returned from a sweep along West Borneo and the Lingga archipelago, had been rebuffed at Pontianak by the Dutch commissioner Van Boekholz but had concluded a contract with the Sultan of Lingga. On those voyages he became convinced that the Karimon Islands would offer an excellent site for a British establishment. Governor Thyssen wrote to Wolterbeek on 11 November 1818, immediately after Farquhar’s surrender of Malacca, that “the Major still hopes to take possession of the Karimon Islands; on Pulo Pinang it appears to be a settled plan to take possession of them, and of the kingdom of Acheen situated on Sumatra.” The Dutch believed Wolterbeek’s Riouw contract guaranteed them against any further British settlement in those waters — a confidence Raffles was soon to shatter with the founding of Singapore.

The Wilhelmina mutineers and the Thyssen correspondence

When the colonial schooner Wilhelmina was carried off by its Malay and Javanese crew in 1819 and Lieutenant Bouwens murdered, the surviving mutineers made their way to Telok Semawé, where the pretender Syf ul-Alum detained part of the stolen specie. A Dutch brig was despatched from Malacca to demand their surrender, and the British agent Captain Sartorius later arrived to claim eleven of them, who were sent on to Batavia “via Malakka”. On Batavia’s instructions Thyssen, as Dutch governor of Malacca, addressed a missive of 20 January 1821 to the government of Prince of Wales Island, carried by the man-of-war Irene under Colonel Lucas. That letter demanded the restitution of the stolen money and the surrender of nineteen named criminals. The Penang government — Bannerman having died on 8 August 1819, Phillips now presiding — was unwilling to permit Lucas to proceed to Telok Semawé, replying that it would itself seek to apprehend any mutineers who might be “domiciled in the territories of our ally” and deliver them to “the government of Malacca.” Van der Kemp prints the English text in full.

A pawn in the 1824 settlement

In the Fagel-Elout negotiations and the treaty of 17 March 1824, Malacca’s position was again prominent. The Dutch plenipotentiaries noted that the price of Britain’s withdrawal from Sumatra — to be exclusively Dutch — had been the cession of “Nederlandsch Hindostan, of Malakka, of Singapore,” together with one million guilders: a heavy price, in Van der Kemp’s words, for the abandonment of “kostbaar Malakka” itself. The Pinang Nota of 1825 and Fullerton’s later minutes continued to treat Malacca as the British counterpart to the Dutch sphere in Sumatra, the two governments being bound, in the words of Clubley’s letter to Lucas, “to preserve the good intelligence which exists between the Government of Prince of Wales Island and that of Malacca.”

Account from Over Maleise Literatuur (1947) — Malacca

In Hooykaas’s survey of Malay literature, Malacca is the principal Malay place of the pre-Atjehnese period — the place whose 1511 Portuguese conquest gave rise to the sultanate of Johor and to the rise of Atjeh as the chief Muslim commercial rival of the Portuguese in the Strait of Malacca.

Malacca and Pasai

Before the rise of Atjeh, Malacca’s principal Sumatran relationship was with Pasai — the older, pre-Atjeh centre of Islamic learning on the north Sumatran coast. Hooykaas records: Pasai “had de glorie gehad van het eerst en best geïslamiseerde staatje te zijn in die wateren, zodat Malakka in zijn glanstijd herhaaldelijk er gezantschappen heenzendt om antwoord te krijgen in theologische vraagpunten” (had the glory of having been the first and best Islamised state in those waters, so that Malacca in its golden age repeatedly sent embassies there to get answers in theological questions). This Malacca-Pasai theological relationship — recorded in the Sadjarah Malajoe’s account of Malacca’s repeated consultations with the ulema of Pasai — is the older Sumatran-Malay relationship that Atjeh would inherit in the early seventeenth century.

The Portuguese Conquest of 1511

The 1511 Portuguese conquest of Malacca — by Albuquerque, who “voer eerst naar Pedir (Pidie) op Noord-Sumatra” (first sailed to Pedir (Pidie) on North Sumatra) on the way to Malacca — is the foundational event of the Portuguese empire in the Malay-Indonesian archipelago and the proximate cause of the rise of Atjeh. After the conquest, “de sultans van Atjéh — pressing from the west along the north Sumatran coast — became the most dangerous Muslim rivals of the Portuguese” (the sultans of Atjeh — pressing from the west along the north Sumatran coast — became the most dangerous Muslim rivals of the Portuguese). The Atjehnese siege of Malacca of 1-17 February 1575 — recorded in the Sadjarah Malajoe and in the Portuguese sources — nearly succeeded; the 1587 treaty between Atjeh and the Portuguese, by which Aru was assigned to Johor, opened a generation of relative peace.

The Etiquette of the Salam and the Sembah

The Sadjarah Malajoe, in Hooykaas’s Toelichting, also records the protocol relationship between Malacca, Pasai, Aroe, and Haroe — the four Malay sultanates that, in the fifteenth century, treated each other as equals. Hooykaas notes: “In de grote regeling van Malakkaanse kraton-etikette in SM 11/11 wordt uitdrukkelijk vastgesteld, dat bij brieven uit de rijken Aroe en Pasai, die even groot geacht worden als Malakka, slechts de salam-groet zal gebezigd worden, ongeacht de leeftijdsverhoudingen der regerende vorsten” (In the great regulation of Malacca court etiquette in SM 11/11 it is explicitly established, that for letters from the realms of Aroe and Pasai, which are considered as great as Malacca, only the salam-greeting will be used, regardless of the age-relationships of the reigning sultans). The salam — the collegial Muslim greeting — was the protocol of equals; the sēmbah — the obeisant gesture of inferior to superior — was reserved for subordinates. The protocol of the salam and the sēmbah is, in Hooykaas’s reading, the diplomatic expression of the Malacca-Pasai-Aroe-Haroe system that Atjeh would dismantle in the early seventeenth century.

The Sadjarah Malajoe’s Composition at Batoe Sawar

The Sadjarah Malajoe — the principal Malay chronicle of the Malacca-Johor sultanate — was commissioned at Batoe Sawar in 1612, in the context of the rising Atjehnese threat to the Johor successor of Malacca. The chronicle’s composition-history — interrupted by the 1613 Atjehnese attack, completed after the Bendahara’s return from Atjeh, and diplomatically silent on the 1615 catastrophe — is the principal literary record of the Malacca-Johor-Atjeh triangle in the early seventeenth century.

Source: Over Maleise Literatuur, by Dr. C. Hooykaas, Hoogleraarte Batavia; Tweede Druk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1947), chapter 11 (“Geschiedschrijving in het Maleis”), pp. 94-96; Toelichting tot de Sadjarah Malajoe, aantekening bij 11/11 and 24/1, pp. 219, 237.

Account from DLP-84-Atjeh — Malacca as Overwal and the Pepper-for-European-Goods Exchange

In the framing of DLP-84-Atjeh, Malacca — historic trading port on the western coast of the Malay Peninsula — is treated as the principal Overwal (Dutch: overwal, “overseas” or “across-the-water” trade hub) linking the Indian Ocean to the Strait of Malacca and, consequently, to Acheh (Atjeh). From the early centuries of the Common Era, ships from India, China, and later Europe passed through Malacca en route to the archipelago, making it a conduit for goods such as pepper, gold, gunpowder, weapons, and opium. The Acehnese sultans exchanged pepper and gold for the coveted European commodities at Malacca, and the port also functioned as a point of contact for Portuguese, Dutch, English, and American traders who sought to tap the lucrative spice market of the northern Sumatran coast. Control of the sea lanes through the Strait of Malacca was, in this account, a central justification for the Dutch colonial government’s obligation — under the Treaty of 1824 — to protect the safety of navigation in Acehnese waters. The strategic significance of Malacca persisted into the nineteenth century, influencing diplomatic and military actions in the region and contributing to the eventual outbreak of the Aceh War in 1873.

Sources

The Achehnese, Vol. II, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906. 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. Over Maleise Literatuur, by Dr. C. Hooykaas, Hoogleraarte Batavia; Tweede Druk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1947). DLP-84-Atjeh.pdf, pp. 2-3. Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk V “Voorgangers, Hollanders en mededingers tot 1614. Atjeh. Djohor. Malaka.” (pp. 134-140). De geschiedenis van het Nederlandsche Korps Mariniers van 1665-1945, OCR text, pp. 80‑82.

tags	place, sacred-site, foreign-land, region, foreign, malay-state, city, colony, british-india, coast, hooykaas, pasai, salam-sembah, 1511-conquest, port, fortress, malay-peninsula, portuguese, dutch, atjeh, djohor, precolonial, colonial, 16th-century, 17th-century, strait, east-indies
aliases	Melaka, Malay Malacca, Malakka, Malacka, Mallaca, Malacca Hooykaas account, Malaka, Malaka (Portuguese fortress), Portuguese Malaka, Fortress of Malaka, Stad van Malacca

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