Pontianak is a sultanate and town on the west coast of Borneo, founded in 1771 by Syarif Abdurrahman Alkadrie at the mouth of the Kapuas River. By the early nineteenth century it had become the most prominent Malay-Muslim polity on Borneo’s west coast and a regular port of call for regional traders. Its strategic position on the South China Sea lane made it a natural waypoint for any European power seeking to establish a foothold on Borneo — and, as Van der Kemp records, it was precisely this quality that brought the sultanate within the orbit of the Anglo-Dutch rivalry that produced the Aceh agreement of 1819.
In the summer of 1818, Major Farquhar, the British Resident of Malacca, undertook an exploratory voyage along the west coast of Borneo and to Lingga. His mission was to sound out possibilities for British commercial and political influence in regions that the Dutch considered their own. Van der Kemp describes the outcome with characteristic dryness: “Mocht hem te Pontianak door onzen commissaris Van Boekholz de deur zijn gewezen, te Lingga had hij met den sultan een contract weten te sluiten” — that is, while Farquhar succeeded in concluding a contract with the sultan of Lingga, at Pontianak he was shown the door by the Dutch commissioner Van Boekholz. The contrast between his rebuff at Pontianak and his success at Lingga sharpened his conviction that the Karimon Islands offered a suitable alternative site for a British establishment — a conviction that fed directly into the founding of Singapore in January 1819.
The Pontianak episode is significant because it illustrates how thoroughly the Dutch had reasserted their presence in the eastern archipelago after the restoration of 1816-1817. Van Boekholz’s firm stance at Pontianak, like Wolterbeek’s Riouw-tractaat of November 1818, was part of a coordinated Dutch effort to draw a clear line around their pre-war sphere of influence — a line that Raffles would shortly cross with his occupation of Singapore. From Pontianak, Farquhar’s mission also confirmed the existence of a Malay-Muslim trading network running from Borneo through Riouw to the Malay Peninsula, which the British were anxious to penetrate.
Pontianak itself remained a Dutch-protected sultanate throughout the nineteenth century. The polity that had turned Farquhar away in 1818 thus became, paradoxically, one of the reasons the British sought and found an alternative station on Singapore. The sultanate survived under Dutch suzerainty until its abolition in the Indonesian revolution.
See Also
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.