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The Governor-General and the Sultan An Attempt to Restructure a Divided Amboina in 1638

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Gerrit Knaap
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Extract

On 3 May 1638, Anthonie van Diemen, Governor-General of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), the Dutch East India Company, met Hamzah, Sultan of Ternate, in the roadstead of Kambelo. Kambelo was one of the principal settlements on the west coast of Hoamoal, the western peninsula of the island of Seram. As such it was part of the Ternatan dependencies in the Amboina Islands, present-day Maluku Tengah. Van Diemen had arrived in Amboina at the end of February with a capital fleet of seventeen ships, carrying about 1,700 men on board. After he had been apprised that Hamzah had not yet arrived, in March Van Diemen continued his journey to the Banda Islands to inspect and arrange the VOC affairs in that area. In April he returned to Amboina, where, after a short stop at Hila, he sailed to Kambelo because word had reached him that some fifteen ‘junks’ from Java and Sulawesi had arrived there. As these ships were considered to be interlopers, suspected of carrying away cloves, thus violating the VOC monopoly, Van Diemen planned to attack them. However, as soon as Hamzah arrived, accompanied by a fleet, a hongi, of ten kora-kora, indigenous galley-like war vessels, the proposed action was postponed. For the time being diplomacy won the upper hand over violence. There was hope that the meeting of ‘these two great personalities’ could resolve long-standing conflicts in the area.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 2005 , pp. 79 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2005

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