Poelo Kampi — also Kampi, Koempej, Kampe, in Pinto’s transcription Paneticano — is the small hilly islet close under the shore in the bay of Aroe on the east coast of Sumatra that De Roo de la Faille identifies as the older Malajoer of the Pararaton and the Noesa-n-ta-ra “standing under the protection of the goddess Tara”. The islet was the first named point of Pinto’s October 1539 embassy to Aroe — the pilot’s strange answer Paneticano to Pinto’s question “what is this place called?” — and is, in De Roo de la Faille’s reading, the principal bedekte taal marker of the Hindu-Buddhist sacred geography of the bay.
Pinto’s Paneticano
When Pinto, on 5 October 1539, entered the bay of Aroe and asked his pilot the name of the place, the answer was Paneticano — a name so strange that Pinto wrote it down as best he could. The veiled-language reading, as De Roo de la Faille decodes it, is Roe-pang moes-tika-noe-sa: the “white-magic islet of Aroe”, the place “of old in the reputation of tooverij [witchcraft] — witte magie [white magic]”. Pinto further records it as a place “compared with a white-holy bezoar amulet-stone” — the moes-tika, a magical bezoar whose protection covered the islet. In De Roo de la Faille’s day the islet was known as Poelo Koempej or Kampi.
The Pararaton’s Noesa-n-ta-ra
In the Pararaton’s account of the thirteenth-century struggles, De Roo de la Faille identifies Kampi with the Noesa-n-ta-ra — the island under the protection of the goddess Tara, at which the pabgjan (the toll-house at which ships paid import duties) stood. He further identifies it with the Kampe — P.Kompaj — that, in the thirteenth century, “armed with weapons must have broken loose from the famous Sri Widjaja” (Krom, Hindoe-Jav. Gesch., pp. 306-307, 416). The same islet, De Roo de la Faille argues, is the Tarawangan — the “Noorder-eiland” — of the pralambang tradition: the island at the wangan that leads into the bay of Aroe, named for the goddess Tara whose patronage covered the great island of Sumatra itself.
Van Rijn’s visit (1888)
In 1888 the Controleur S.B. Van Rijn entered the bay between Sembilan and Koempej, and recorded the islet as “a half-moon-shaped islet close under the shore, set with 50-to-150-metre hills. The clear white strand slowly gives way to higher ground with light-green grass, behind which the fortified houses of the Datoe Bintara and the Inlandsch Opziener come into view: the whole makes the impression as if one has a fortress with breastwork before one”. This impression, De Roo de la Faille argues, was the djoeragan of Van Rijn’s barkas pointing out the same image that the Tanjore inscription of 1030 had recorded as “the ancient Malayur situated on a high hill” — the hill that, in 1862, still bore the benteng of an Atjehschen avonturier who flew the Atjehsche flag.
The two islands
Van Rijn also recorded the local tradition of Sembilan — the island opposite Pangkalan Soesoe: it “consists of a chain of larger and smaller hills. According to the tradition this island came here from the Overwal and would have belonged to the Nine Islands of Koeala Pérak, of which only eight are now said to lie there”. The same tradition held that this island “would marry with Poelau Salahadji, but could not proceed further than the present place, where it anchored before a tree which is still found and which, at high as well as low water, is visible in the bay of Aroe and always protrudes equally far above the water”. De Roo de la Faille decodes this as a riddle on djangkar (anchor) and Hangker, and on boom (tree) and taroe nama — i.e. Taroema, “always visible in the bay and always equally far (djaoeh) protruding above the water”.
Puteri Idjo’s original seat
Local east-coast tradition also places here the original dwelling of Puteri Idjo (“Poetri Idjo”), the green princess of Deli and Asahan legend, before her negorij moved to the mouth of the Tandjoengpoera river at Koewala Boeboen.
Significance
For AcehWiki, Poelo Kampi is the principal sacred-island locus of the east-coast Hindu-Buddhist place-world that the Atjehnese conquest of Aroe in 1539 overwrote but did not erase. Its identification with the Noesa-n-ta-ra of the Pararaton and with the Malajoer of the chronicle tradition makes it the single most important topographical anchor of De Roo de la Faille’s bedekte taal reading of Sumatran-Javanese historical geography. Its later history — as the hill from which an Atjehscher avonturier flew the Atjehsche flag in 1862 — also marks the survival of an Atjehnese memory of the place long after the fall of Aroe.
See Also
- Aroe
- Aroe-baai
- Pulo Sembilan
- Tandjoengpoera
- Pangkalan Soesoe
- Atjeh-Aroe War (1539)
- Mendez Pinto
- Van Rijn van Alkemade
- Atjehsche avonturier at Aroe-baai (1862)
- Cyama-Tara
- Bedekte taal
- Wangsallan
- Pararaton
- Puteri Idjo
- Deli
- Asahan
- Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java
Source
Historische Curiositeiten uit Malajoe en Java, by P. de Roo de la Faille (Den Haag: Maart 1954), chapter “Mendez Pinto op Sumatra”, pp. 9-12, and chapter “Over Soenan Kalidjaga”, pp. 45-49.