1613

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tags17th-century, achehnese, atjeh, banda, djohor, dutch, military, naval, precolonial, timeline, voc, year, hooykaas, batoe-sawar, bendahara-sri-lanang, sadjarah-malajoe, aceh, court-culture
aliases1613, Year 1613

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The Achehnese attack on Djohor (7 May 1613)

The full account of the Atjeh’s attack on Djohor (May [[1613)|attack]] is given in the entry on the attack itself. In summary: the sultan of Atjeh’s successor sent a fleet against Djohor, which appeared at the mouth of the Djohor river on 7 May 1613 while the bulk of the Djohor fleet was away at Pahang. The Dutch ship Hope, which had arrived three days earlier to relieve the factor Jacques Obelaer and replenish the factory’s capital, lay at anchor in the river. The Achehnese demanded that the Dutch stand aside; the Dutch refused, in fidelity to the Matelieff’s Malaka campaign ([[1606)|Matelieff-sultan accord of 23 September 1606]], and landed thirty-one men to assist the Djohor defence. The Achehnese took the city of Batoesawer on 6 June 1613; two Dutchmen were killed, twenty-two — including Obelaer — were taken prisoner and carried off to Atjeh.

The aftermath and the rapprochement

The prisoners’ fate was bound up with the rapid Achehnese-Djohor reconciliation that followed. Within months the two Malay courts had reached an accommodation: the sultan of Atjeh gave his sister in marriage to the deposed sultan of Djohor — now styled Sultan Sabrang — and sent him back to Djohor with an Achehnese escort of two thousand men to rebuild the destroyed city. The Dutch prisoners were released as part of the rapprochement. Van der Woude notes that “bijna een jaar lang lag de handel nu geheel stil” before the opperkoopman Adriaan van der Dussen arrived at Djohor in August 1614 to negotiate the construction of a fort.

Coen’s assumption of the directorship

By 1613 Coen had risen to be the chief Dutch commercial officer in the Indies. He had returned to the East in 1612 as opperkoopman and was appointed, in 1613, to the directorship of the Bantam-Jacatra factories — the post in which all the threads of the Company’s Asian business converged. The Pieter Both’s Banda expedition of March 1613 — in which Both was forced to restore discipline among the troops with drastic sentences and to confront the growing Dutch-English rivalry at Ai and Run — was the immediate strategic context of Coen’s directorship. Coen’s response, articulated in the Discours of 1 January 1614, was the working-out of the bewindhebbers’ instructions of 1608-1609: “Van Banda connen ons meester maken, dezelvige eylanden met macht aantasten; sulcx moeten nootelijcken doen ende de plaetse populeren, ofte het landt verlaten, want ‘t en sal anders met Banda nyet zijn”.

Significance

The year 1613 is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal year of the strategic turn from the western to the eastern archipelago and the year of Coen’s assumption of the directorship of the Bantam-Jacatra factories. The Atjeh’s attack on Djohor (May [[1613)|Achehnese attack on Djohor of 7 May 1613]] — and the destruction of Batoesawer — marked the effective end of the Dutch-Djohor military alliance that Matelieff had constructed in 1606 and the strategic turn southward to Jacatra and the eventual founding of Batavia in 1619. Coen’s assumption of the directorship in 1613 was the institutional prelude to the Discours of 1 January 1614 and the Coen programme of monopoly-by-force that would define VOC policy for the next quarter-century. The year 1613 thus marks both the close of the Atjeh-Djohor-Malaka chapter of Van der Woude’s book and the beginning of the Coen chapter that would follow.

People

Places

Events

Account from Over Maleise Literatuur (1947) — 1613

In Hooykaas’s survey of Malay literature, the year 1613 is the year of the Atjehnese attack on Batoe Sawar — the first of the two great naval expeditions sent by Sultan Iskandar Muda against the capital of Johor — and the principal interruption to the composition of the Sadjarah Malajoe, which had been commissioned at Batoe Sawar in 1612.

The Attack on Batoe Sawar

Hooykaas records the attack: “een Atjehse vloot verscheen in 1613 onverwachts, die zich meester wist te maken van niemand minder dan de vorst ‘Alā’ oed-Din Ri’ājat Sjāh III, Radja ‘Abdoellāh en de meeste rijksgroten, waaronder de Bēndahara. Ze worden naar Atjeh overgebracht, waar de Soeltān gehouden wordt en spoedig sterft. Radja ‘Abdoellāh huwt met een zuster van de Atjehse Soeltān Iskandar Moeda en wordt begenadigd, waarop hij wordt teruggebracht en op de troon van zijn halfbroer gezet” (an Atjehnese fleet appeared unexpectedly in 1613, which managed to seize no less than the Sultan Alā’uddīn Ri’āyat Shāh III, Radja ‘Abdoellah, and most of the great men of the realm, including the Bendahara. They are taken to Atjeh, where the Sultan is held and soon dies. Radja ‘Abdoellah marries a sister of the Atjehnese Sultan Iskandar Muda and is pardoned, whereupon he is brought back and placed on the throne of his half-brother).

The Interruption of the Sadjarah Malajoe

The composition of the Sadjarah Malajoe — commissioned at Batoe Sawar in 1612 — was interrupted by the 1613 attack. “Het schrijven heeft niet ongestoord zijn gang kunnen gaan” (The writing was not able to proceed undisturbed). The Bendahara was among the captives taken to Atjeh, where he would — in Hooykaas’s reading — have become acquainted with the Tādj us-Salāṭīn of 1607, the Atjehnese “mirror for princes” that served as the model for the Bendahara’s own “Geslachtslijst der Soeltanen” (Genealogy of the Sultans).

The Completion of the Sadjarah Malajoe

After the Bendahara’s return from Atjeh in 1614, the new sultan — Radja ‘Abdoellāh, now a vassal of Atjeh — “doet de Bēndahara weten dat hij prijs stelt op de voltooiing van zijn opdracht; deze krijgt het omvangrijk werk van 34 verhalen af” (lets the Bendahara know that he values the completion of his commission; the latter completes the extensive work of 34 stories). The completed Sadjarah Malajoe — 34 stories — thus reflects, in its very composition-history, the 1613 Atjehnese attack and the Bendahara’s captivity in Atjeh.

Source: Over Maleise Literatuur, by Dr. C. Hooykaas, Hoogleraarte Batavia; Tweede Druk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1947), chapter 11 (“Geschiedschrijving in het Maleis”), pp. 96-98; Toelichting tot de Sadjarah Malajoe, Inleiding van de schrijver, pp. 203-205.

Account from Schets eener parlementaire geschiedenis (1955)

The following account is drawn from the parliamentary history of the Dutch Second Chamber as narrated by Vermeulen in the colonial section of the 1955 fourth revised edition of Rengers’s *Schets*.

1613 is the year attached in Nederlanders over de Zeeën to an English drawing — “Engelse tekening uit het begin der 17e eeuw” — depicting an elephant-fight at the court of Atjeh. The image is reproduced as a gravure illustration facing the chapter on the Dutch East India Company in the western part of the archipelago, and is one of the principal visual testimonies of the early seventeenth-century Atjehnese court cited in the source.

The elephant-fight at the court of Atjeh

The illustration caption in Nederlanders over de Zeeën reads: “Olifantengevecht aan het hof te Atjeh. Engelse tekening uit het begin der 17e eeuw” (Elephant-fight at the court of Atjeh. English drawing from the beginning of the seventeenth century). The drawing depicts a staged combat of elephants before the court of the Sultan of Atjeh in the early seventeenth century. The court context — the seat of the sultan, the assembled retinue, the elephants — places the image squarely within the reign of Sultan Iskandar Muda (r. 1607-1636), the “Roi soleil” of the Atjehnese sultans.

The English source

The drawing is identified as English, indicating that the image was made by or for one of the early English factors who visited Atjeh in the reign of Iskandar Muda. The English East India Company had opened relations with Atjeh in the early seventeenth century; the 1613 visit of Thomas Best to the Atjehnese court is the principal first-hand English account of the period.

Significance

1613 is significant for the encyclopedia of Acheh history because the English drawing of the elephant-fight at the Atjehnese court — reproduced in Nederlanders over de Zeeën — is one of the principal visual testimonies of the early seventeenth-century Atjehnese court. It records the spectacle of the Iskandar Muda court at the height of the sultanate’s power, when Atjeh dominated both shores of the Strait of Malacca and brought the Portuguese fortress there repeatedly into dire straits.

See Also

Sources

The Voyage of Thomas Best to the East Indies, 1612-14, edited by William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1934), p. 168. De Karbouw — Zijn betekenis voor de volken van de Indonesische Archipel, by J. Kreemer (‘s-Gravenhage / Bandung: N.V. Uitgeverij W. van Hoeve, 1956), p. 84. Atjèh, by J. Kreemer, vol. I (1922), p. 192. Over Maleise Literatuur, by Dr. C. Hooykaas, Hoogleraarte Batavia; Tweede Druk (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1947).

Nederlanders over de Zeeën: 350 Jaar geschiedenis van Nederland buitengaats, onder redactie van Dr. H. J. de Graaf, met medewerking van Prof. G. Gonggrijp, W. R. Menkman en Prof. Jhr Dr P. J. van Winter, 2e geheel herziene druk (Utrecht: W. de Haan N.V., MCMLV), gravure facing p. 154.

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