Poelò We (Pulau Weh; in Joh. Langhout’s text “P. We”, “Poelò We” or “eiland We”) was the island north of Atjeh closing the Sabang bay “as with wide-opened arms” — first surveyed by the government commission of 1877, depot for coal from 1884, home of the Maatschappij Zeehaven en Kolenstation Sabang from 1896–1897, and since the 1890s also cultivated with pepper gardens.
Government interest and settlement
In the war years after 1873 the Netherlands Indian government felt the necessity of a good harbour near Sumatra’s North Coast as operation-base, coal station and evacuation-place; a government commission sent out in 1877 reported the island then unsuitable as an evacuation place. None the less the Government in 1884 established a small coal depot on the Balohan (South) bay and appointed an oelèèbalang (native headman) as head of the island. Only after the hydrographic and topographic survey of 1887 was the northern bay — the Sabang bay — developed (see Sabang, Maatschappij Zeehaven en Kolenstation Sabang). The “first harbour-place of Netherlands India” impressed every visitor by the island’s thick-wooded flanks rising steeply above the sea (photo captions: “Sabangbaai met de rubber- en theekistenfabriek ‘Ret-Ret-Sabang’”; “Sabanghaven”; “Papier-a of Poelo Weh” [sic; a kampong seen from the sea near the Atjeh Museum plate]).
Pepper and bird’s-nests
The island proved increasingly suited to the cultivation of pepper: under Governors Van Teijn and successors the plantations regularly expanded, the pepper harvest on Poeloe We turning out “zeer goed” (“very good”) in the early 1890s alongside that of the East Coast. Together with several moekims of Groot-Atjeh, the island also practised the collecting of edible bird’s-nests, which were bought up by Chinese traders. A coal establishment (koolen-établissement) on the island came to completion in the mid-1890s, and at Lë Meulè a wireless-telegraphy station was erected in 1912 for the service of the shipping.
Account from Verstege’s Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk (1886)
Verstege (as “Poeloe Waai”) develops the strategic value Verstege won in 1884: when the “joint action” with England against the Tenom pirate was being held out as so profitable to Dutch prestige in the East, he warned that England would have settled the war-costs “with double chalk” and accepted as equivalent the cession of this “voor handel en scheepvaart zoo gunstig gelegen” (“for trade and shipping so favourably situated”) island, “waarop in dienzelfden tijd door Frankrijk en door Rusland de aandacht onzer Regeering was gevestigd tot het aanleggen van kolendepôts, ten einde in dat opzicht onafhankelijk te zijn van Engeland” (“to which in the same time France and Russia had directed the attention of our government for the laying down of coal depots, so as to be in that respect independent of England”); thereby the fear of the Straits English, that Poeloe Waai could once be injurious to Penang and Singapore, “dan voor goed weggenomen zijn” (“would then be taken away for good”), and England would have come one step nearer to the possibility of exercising tutelage over our colonial conduct. “Sedert, ik meen in Augustus 1884, is Poeloe Waai daarom feitelijk door ons bezet” (“Since, I believe in August 1884, Poeloe Waai was therefore actually occupied by us”), Verstege records (see Nisero affair (1883–1885)).
See Also
- Sabang
- Poelò Breuëh
- Maatschappij Zeehaven en Kolenstation Sabang
- Pepper cultivation and trade in Atjeh
Source
Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh, by Joh. Langhout (The Hague: N.V. Boekhandel v/h W. P. van Stockum & Zoon, 1923), pp. 64, 67–68, 71, 109, 142–143, illustration captions pp. 4, 139, 142, 192.
Een beroep op het Nederlandsche volk in zake het Atjeh-vraagstuk, door J. J. W. E. Verstege (Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy, 1886), pp. 33-34. OCR: DLP-158.