of the country. Complaints of robbery and murder on board ships trading in Achehnese parts thus grew to be chronic. Of central authority there had never been any for some centuries back; and the country was practically split up into countless miniature states under chiefs whose power depended on personal energy and who were generally in a state of warfare with their neighbours unless in peace and alliance with them for the joint perpetration of their national offences. The foreigner, who had dealings with the Achehnese, as soon as he found himself in difficulties, sought vainly for some authority that might redress his wrongs. Such indeed has been the situation since the seven- teenth Century when the Sultanate of Acheh lost its control over the great chiefs of the State and over their dependents; but even when the power of the Achehnese princes was at its height the foreigner could find no security for life or property in the country.
The arrangements which the British East India Company made with Acheh at the close of the XVIIIth and the beginning of the XIXth Century for the establishment of friendly relations, were overridden in the most insulting way; we can satisfy ourselves upon this point by referring to a recent essay upon the treaty made with Acheh[1] by Raffles in 1819, in which long extracts have been quoted from the archives of the India Office[2].
In 1786 Warren Hastings received from the then Sultan of Acheh a discourteous letter in reply to an expression of goodwill. In that same year, Captain Francis Light pointed out to the Governor-General of Bengal that a settlement at Pulau Pinang possessed greater advantages than one on the Achehnese coast: "Acheen is a good road but no place of security against an enemy there. The country is fertile beyond description and very populous. The inhabitants rigid and superstitious Mohammedans, sullen, fickle and treacherous. To form a settlement there of safety and advantage, a force sufficient to subdue all the chiefs would be necessary". In the same spirit wrote James Price to the chairman
- ↑ Or rather with "Johor Allum as king of Acheen", concerning whom the Chairman of the Company wrote to Bengal on the 4th August 1824: "that chief, so far as we can collect from your correspondence, not having possessed an established authority in the country which he assumed to represent, has never been in a situation to maintain the relations into which he entered".
- ↑ Essay of P. H. van der Kemp in Bijdragen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië, vol. LI, pp. 159–240 (the Hague, 1900). In the English documents quoted there are many writer's or printer's errors.
