Tenom (with its river, the Tenomrivier) was a little state on the North Coast of Sumatra which Verstege calls “a pure Atjehnese settlement”, ruled by a Tenomsche roovervorst (piratical prince). It was one of the coastal areas whose chiefs, as van Swieten reported in February 1874, had submitted to the Dutch government (so van Swieten noted in De Waarheid over onze vestiging in Atjeh, pp. 388-392). The district then became the centre of the long chain of complications summed up as the Tenom affair: on 9 March 1880 the two French travellers Vallon and Guillaume were murdered by the Tenom prince’s people — before the Netherlands had ever made war upon him, as Verstege stresses — and in 1884 the Nisero question showed the true state of Atjeh to the world and occasioned, in London negotiations of July 1884, the conditions under which England permitted the Dutch blockade of the Atjeh coasts: that the harbours of the Tenom pirate should remain open and that the Atjeh harbours would again be opened to world trade as soon as the blockade’s object had been obtained. The Tenom affair was also, in Verstege’s reading of the facts, the pressing occasion which brought the Dutch government to the secret concentration decision — the “retreat” that the proclamation of 19 August 1884 had just called impossible. (Dutch troops at Malaboeh were provisionally retained for fear of attacks by the Radja of Tenom.)
See Also
- Nisero affair (1883–1885)
- Murder of Vallon and Guillaume (9 March 1880)
- Blockade of the Atjeh coast (1884-1885)
- Concentratie-stelsel (1884-1896)
- 1884
Source
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, 86-88. OCR-filename: 20260801_235605_DLP-158-Een_beroep_op_het_Nederlandsche_volk_in_zake_het_Atjeh_vraagstuk_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.