Simaloer (modern Simeulue; also Simalur) is the island off the western coast of Atjeh in the Indian Ocean, mentioned in Kreemer’s *De Karbouw* (1956) as one of the North-Sumatran population-groups among whom the prohibition on slaughtering the albino buffalo (Pantang of the albino buffalo in Atjeh|pantang) is attested — specifically, for the landschap (district) of Tapah — and as one of the regions whose buffalo-horn-stand nomenclature Kreemer documented in vol. I of his *Atjeh* monograph (p. 501) alongside Atjeh proper, the Gayo country, Alas and Tapaq-Toean. The island is paired with the adjacent Atjeh mainland in both connections, which is consistent with the long-standing pattern of close cultural contact between Simaloer and the western coast of Atjeh.
In De Karbouw
Simaloer appears in De Karbouw in two principal connections:
- The prohibition on albino-buffalo slaughter: “5° Het eiland Simaloer, waar het verbod geldt voor het landschap Tapah” (De Karbouw, p. 217) — on the island of Simaloer the prohibition applies to the landschap of Tapah. The Simaloer entry is the fifth of the six North-Sumatran population-groups among whom the albino-buffalo prohibition is attested (the others being Groot-Atjeh for the kawōm Dja Sandang, Gajoland for the Gölö, Beroeksah and Tjéq of Kedjoeroen Boekit and Petiambang, Alasland for the mergō’s Tjebero/Terigan/Pinding/Bintjawan/Sinagō, Atjeh’s Westkust for the Malays generally, and the Padangse Benedenlanden for the soekoe’s Malajoe and Panei). Kreemer notes that he had personally verified, “during an earlier stay in Atjeh,” that the explanatory legend of the prohibition is “nagenoeg dezelfde” (virtually identical) across all six groups.
- The buffalo-horn-stand nomenclature: “Deze afb. namen wij over in het 1e dl. van ons Atjeh-boek (blz. 501), met de namen, die wij in Atjeh, Gajo, Alas, Simaloer en Tapaq-Toean aantroffen” (De Karbouw, p. 32, footnote 1) — sixteen illustrations of common horn-stands, with their names, were reproduced in vol. I of Kreemer’s Atjeh book (p. 501) from the journal Wet en Adat 1896/97, with the names that Kreemer recorded in Atjeh, Gajo, Alas, Simaloer and Tapaq-Toean. The pairing of Simaloer with the Atjeh-Gayo-Alas group in this connection confirms the cultural-linguistic continuity of the Simaloer buffalo-vocabulary with that of the adjacent Atjeh mainland.
Historical-geographical context
Simaloer is the largest of a small archipelago of islands in the Indian Ocean off the western coast of Atjeh, and has been in close commercial and cultural contact with the Atjeh mainland for centuries. The island’s population speaks Simeulue, an Austronesian language with close affinities to the languages of the adjacent Sumatran coast; the island’s conversion to Islam is traditionally attributed to the influence of the Atjeh sultanate. The island was, in the colonial period, administered as part of the Atjeh en Onderhorigheden residency, and the landschap of Tapah mentioned in De Karbouw was one of its constituent districts. The pairing of Simaloer with the Atjeh-Gayo-Alas group in De Karbouw’s horn-stand nomenclature and in the albino-buffalo prohibition reflects this long-standing cultural continuity.
Significance
Simaloer’s significance for the encyclopedia of Acheh history is as a documented island-satellite of the Atjeh cultural sphere, paired with the Atjeh mainland in the comparative ethnographic literature on buffalo-horn nomenclature and on the prohibition of albino-buffalo slaughter. The Tapah landschap on Simaloer is one of the six documented North-Sumatran population-groups among whom the albino-buffalo *pantang* is attested, and the island’s buffalo-vocabulary is documented alongside that of Atjeh-Gayo-Alas in vol. I of Kreemer’s Atjeh monograph.
Account from Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
The pamphlet Een strijd in Atjeh (1934) records the visit of the ophthalmologist Dr. J. Tijssen to Simaloer in 1933, during the tour described at Tijssen’s journey to the West Coast of Atjeh and Simaloer (1933).
Tijssen’s account of the island’s medical provision is brief and severe: “Ik kwam op het eiland Simaloer, waar 20.000 menschen wonen. Geen arts; niets wat lijkt op medische hulp. Eénmaal in de maand een gouvernementsarts, die een paar uur komt kijken… U kunt zich geen voorstelling maken van de toestanden, die op medisch gebied hier en daar in ons Indië heerschen!” — I came to the island of Simaloer, where 20,000 people live. No physician; nothing resembling medical help. Once a month a government doctor who comes to look in for a couple of hours… You can form no conception of the conditions which prevail, in the medical field, here and there in our Indies!
The passage stands immediately after his report of the West Coast results — two hundred and forty-seven people helped with eye diseases and twenty-four cataract operations — and immediately before his account of the departure for Samosir at the beginning of the Poeasa. It is cited in the pamphlet as the sharpest single illustration of the argument Tijssen pressed throughout: that outside the great hospitals of the Indies there remained millions of people, possibly forty million, for whom little or no medical help was available, and that the remedy lay in sending young physicians into the kampongs rather than in multiplying institutional provision alone.
Account from Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh (1923)
Simaloer (Simeulue; in Joh. Langhout’s text also “Simeuloeë”) was the northernmost of the chain of large islands off the West Coast of Sumatra belonging to Atjeh — about 100 kilometres long by 10 to 25 kilometres wide, traversed along its length by a steep, much-branched mountain ridge — which under Dutch rule became the scene of the mechanized timber exploitation of the N.V. Vereenigde Javasche Houthandel Maatschappijen for the island’s endemic rassak tree, and earlier the island where, with Poelò Breuëh, ship-building was the chief native industry.
Geography and population
A strongly ramifying steep mountain ridge cuts the island over its entire length; countless brooks and rivulets find their course in the narrow, almost inaccessible valleys carrying the abundant rainwater seaward. A string of spacious bays accessible to large sea-steamers and sheltered against every wind lies on the island’s east side; the southernmost, the bay of Sinabang, gave its name to the settlement in its immediate neighbourhood. Ship-building was practised principally on Poelò Breuëh and Simaloer, according to the economic survey ordered from 1893. Langhout describes the former Simaloer as a territory “where the native inhabitants died ‘like rats’” through the absolute lack of every measure of hygiene and public health.
The rassak tree and the exploitation
On Simaloer grows the rassak tree, of the family of the Dipterocarpaceae, genus Shorea, forming a separate variety to which botanical science gave the distinguishing name “simaloerensis” — already illustrated in the book by a photograph with a native of normal height standing at its foot. The trunk, with a diameter of 2 to 3 metres and provided at the foot with heavy buttress roots sometimes 10 metres high, stands nearly round and reaches a height of forty metres before the first branch. The timber belongs to the heaviest kinds of wood: freshly sawn light brown, gradually much darker, weighing about 1,000 kilogram per cubic metre; the Technical Laboratory of the Vereenigde Indische Bosch-Exploitatie Maatschappijen at Semarang reported on the Simaloer rassak wood that one had to do with “a very particular kind of wood, which in several qualities, such as resistance against pressure, bending, indentation etc., far surpasses oak-wood” — employed for bridge decks, lock-works, ships’ keels and skittle-alleys (kegelbanen).
The company settlement at Sinabang
The N.V. Vereenigde Javasche Houthandel Maatschappijen — the largest of the c. eighty forest-exploitation concessions issued in the province, in whose hands the whole island came — concentrated its enterprise at Sinabang over the course of about ten years before 1923: after the disappointing first attempt with the local population, it introduced a maximal machine exploitation on the American pattern, developing through steady experiment “an almost wholly own system of forest exploitation”. From a stamlijn (main line) crossing the island in its breadth and then following the coast along the west side, branch lines and secondary spurs approached the stands to within 600–1,000 metres; the gauge was fixed at 1.43 metre for the heavy loads, with “logging trucks” extendable like a harmonica for stems of 5 to 20 metres, worked by four 15-ton and one 40-ton four-axle locomotives. A permanent cableway between two hills of 20–30 metres, carrying a four-ton loopkat, served the stockpile; in the sawmill electrically driven machines did the work, the sawdust fuelling the boilers. More than 1,000 Javanese coolies were imported; the company built the settlement with hospital, hotel, ice-factory, sociëteit-building and bioscoop (cinema), electric light everywhere, an evacateur raising the low ground, cement gutters along the roads, and a prise d’eau: between two offshoots of the mountains a dam was dug out and thrown up, obtaining a water reservoir of 3½ hectares, whose filtered water, after scrupulous examination, was found of excellent quality — whereupon the formerly frequent dysentery wholly disappeared.
See Also
- Alasland
- Atjeh en Onderhorigheden
- Gajoland
- Kreemer’s Atjeh (1922-23)
- Kreemer’s De Karbouw (1956)
- Pantang of the albino buffalo in Atjeh
- Tapah
- Tapaq-Toean
- kawōm Dja Sandang
- N.V. Vereenigde Javasche Houthandel Maatschappijen
- Sinabang
- Foreign capital in Atjeh
- Singkel
Sources
De Karbouw — Zijn betekenis voor de volken van de Indonesische Archipel, by J. Kreemer (‘s-Gravenhage / Bandung: N.V. Uitgeverij W. van Hoeve, 1956), pp. 32, 217.
Atjèh, by J. Kreemer, vol. I (1922), p. 501.
Een strijd in Atjeh (Een oogarts op het oorlogspad), door Mr. C. Graadt van Roggen, met een voorrede van den heer H. Wanting, redacteur Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg, uitgave van de Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934), p. 14.
Acknowledgement of sources. This article combines material from the publications cited above; the material newly added derives from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897) and Een strijd in Atjeh (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg for the Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.
Vijftig jaren economische staatkunde in Atjeh, by Joh. Langhout (The Hague: N.V. Boekhandel v/h W. P. van Stockum & Zoon, 1923), pp. 107–108, 164–171, illustration captions pp. 164–167, 172.