Tringano (modern Terengganu; British spelling Trengganu) was a Malay state on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula. It is mentioned in Van der Kemp’s article only as the place to which Captain Hobbs returned after being wounded, and where he died five or six days later, in the events narrated in the Sultan of Acheh’s letter to Warren Hastings of 7 November 1786.
Captain Hobbs and the Sultan’s letter
The letter of Sultan Munson (Alauddin Muhammad Shah, son of Sultan Ziemul Abudeen) to Governor-General Warren Hastings of Bengal, printed by Van der Kemp as Appendix I, opens the long preamble to the Acheh treaty of 1819. The sultan declared himself desirous of lasting friendship with the English and recalled that he had “wrote an answer by captain Hobbs and desirous of lasting friendship”. The narrative continued: “But fate ordered it that when he had sailed two days from Tringano a classy from Java wounded him while he was asleep”. The wounded Hobbs “then returned to Tringano and died after 5 or 6 days”, delaying the despatch of the sultan’s letters. The “classy” — explained in Van der Kemp’s note as a sailor, matroos, with reference to Hobson-Jobson — was presumably a Javanese member of the vessel’s crew.
The same collection contains, Van der Kemp notes in a footnote, a letter from the Raja of Trengganu to Governor-General John Macpherson of Calcutta, dated 24 February 1787, in which he invoked Macpherson’s friendship against the Dutch.
Place in the narrative
Tringano itself is not the subject of any sustained discussion in Van der Kemp’s article; it appears only as the scene of Hobbs’s death. The mention serves chiefly to date and locate the early, frustrated British approaches to Acheh under Warren Hastings — approaches which, as the sultan’s brusque dismissal of the gifts sent him showed, were received by the Achehnese court with characteristic independence. The wider setting is the struggle of European powers, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, to secure a footing on the northern approach to the Straits of Malacca — a struggle which culminated, after Captain Francis Light’s settlement of Penang in 1786, in the Acheh succession dispute (1802-1819) and the Raffles–Coombs commission of 1819.
See Also
- Acheh
- Sultan Ziemul Abudeen
- Sultan of Acheh’s letter to Warren Hastings
- Warren Hastings
- Captain Hobbs
- Captain Francis Light
- Penang
- Malay Peninsula
- Straits of Malacca
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.