'Clever Toan' and 'Lord Blessing': Tale of two heroes

'Clever Toan' and 'Lord Blessing': Tale of two heroes

This year, in 1995, Nuku, Sultan of Tidore, has been
officially recognized as Pahlawan Nasional, a National Hero.
Today, President Soeharto will also award him posthumously with
the Bintang Mahaputra Adiprana during the commemoration of the
National Heroes Day. Nuku was recognized as Sultan of Tidore,
Papua and Ceram, and acclaimed as Kaicil Paparangan or a Supreme
Commander. For a quarter of a century he led the resistance
against the Dutch colonial presence.

By Marianne Katoppo

JAKARTA (JP): This is a tale of two heroes: one in education,
and one in maritime history. Had it not been for the one, we
would have never known of the other.

When my father was a small boy in Tikala, Manado, he was
generally known as Toan Pinter, "Clever Toan". Although his
baptismal name was Elvianus, his indigenous name was Pinontoan,
or Toan for short. The adjective was added because he was
considered the most brilliant boy of all Tikala.

His father and grandfather had been teachers, and that became
his main ambition, to be a teacher. He read everything the Dutch
idiom mission school had to offer. Perhaps not much by our
standards, because it was the beginning of the twentieth century.
However, all through Tikala, and then Manado, his fame spread as
the little boy who knew just about everything.

Nobody was surprised when in 1916 he went off to Amboina to
study at the prestigious Kweekschool. He and his cousin August
Roring were the first Manadonese to enroll there. August stayed
for the full four year course, but Elvianus returned to Manado
after two years, having finished the whole curriculum in record
time.

He then went on to Batavia, and became the first Indonesian to
receive the Hoofdacte (Certificate of Education). His
enthusiastic teachers wanted to send him on to the Netherlands,
but by that time he had already met my mother, Agnes Rumokoy.
They married in 1926 and had ten children. For the greater part
of his life he was a teacher and headmaster of the
Louwerierschool in Tomohon. Established in 1881, this school was
one of the first to educate girls, although it later became a
coeducational boarding school, attended by the children of local
dignitaries, including far off Gorontalo.

He was an educator par excellence, in the true sense of
"educate: to lead out". Leading his students out of ignorance to
knowledge, out of prejudice to understanding. Years after his
death I would still meet former students of my father's whose
faces would shine when they spoke of him. And even those who were
not his students, but had made his acquaintance through his
subsequent office at the Department of Education, would remember
him with the highest regard. For example, the late Ida Bagus
Mantra, when ambassador to India, told me on a visit to New Delhi
that when he first took public office, he went to see my father
for guidance.

"Clever Toan" became minister of education in Makassar,
capital of the Negara Indonesia Timur (East Indonesia State) of
which the Balinese prince Sukawati was president. After the
Republik Indonesia Serikat (United Indonesian Republic)
dissolved, he was posted at the Ministry of Education in Jakarta.
He retired in 1955, but continued to be active in the University
of Indonesia as a curator, in other institutes of learning, and
was also chairperson of the Spelling Commission (which prepared
our present spelling) after Priyono died. The last years before
retirement he was at the Arsip Nasional, the National Archives,
where he could indulge in his childhood passion of reading
whatever he could read. He was determined to write a book
(published in 1955) to prove beyond doubt that Indonesia's claim
on West Irian was legitimate. It was as he was perusing the old
dusty archives written in archaic Dutch that he came across his
find: Nuku, sultan of Tidore, an eighteenth century prince whom
the Dutch had tried to obliterate from the annals of history.

"Of course they would," my father used to chuckle when he told
us about this legendary prince who was called Tuan Barakat (Lord
Blessing) by his devoted subjects.

"Here was a native leader who put them all to shame, defeating
them countless times through his brilliant maritime strategies.
Giving them a taste of their own medicine by taking some of them
prisoner and forcing them to hard labor. Macchiavelli would have
been proud of him; certainly he would have approved of the way
Nuku played out the British against the Dutch and the French!"

Popular name

His full name was sultan Saidul Jehad Muhamad el Mabus
Amirudin Syah Kaicil Paparangan. Before he ascended to the throne
of Tidore he was called Kaicil (prince) Syaifudin; but his
popular name was Nuku. He was born around 1840, second son of
sultan Jamaludin, and died on Nov. 14 1805.

In the middle of the 18th century, the Spice Islands and the
Northern Moluccas enjoyed the benefit of Dutch economic policy
(VOC) for over a hundred years, more especially their
"extirpation" policy. The extirpation policy meant the deliberate
destruction of spice trees in order to control production and
keep the monopoly. According to a commission report, "from Dec.
10, 1728 to Dec. 17 1729 more than 96,000 trees were destroyed,
and from July 14 1731 to July 27 1732, 117,000 trees were
destroyed in Makian, Moti, Weda, Maba and Ternate". These are
just statistics for two years. The environmental havoc, to say
nothing of human misery, which the VOC wrought during these times
defies description. Greenpeace and Amnesty International would
have had a field day.

Nuku first appeared on the scene in 1768, during negotiations
in Ternate, when the VOC tried to trick the sultan of Tidore into
giving them the territory of East Ceram in lieu of an alleged
debt of 50,000 rijksdaalder. The sultan was led to believe it
would only be for a period of 20 years, but he wanted to have
this confirmed in writing. Governor Hermanus Munnik did so,
stating that the transfer was to be "in perpetuity".

Their father was bound by a contract signed in 1733, but Nuku
and his eldest brother Garomahongi, the crown prince, vowed to
fight the Dutch and sabotage their policies of monopoly and
extirpation. They rallied their seafaring nobles and captains,
and created a secret network in the seas east of Kalimantan.

The English had been driven out of Banten and Rundi Banda in
1685 by the Dutch and only retained their fortress, Marlborough,
in Bengkulu. For almost a hundred years, they had been looking
for a way to access the Spice Islands without sailing through
waters heavily controlled by the Dutch. They managed to build a
trading post on the little known island of Blambangan, off the
northern shore of Kalimantan. First, they deceived the Dutch into
believing they were heading for Blambangan in East Java, so the
Dutch were kept busy conquering Blambangan and building a
fortress there. By the time they realized they had been tricked,
the English had already made an alliance with Tidore. In 1775,
Captain Forrest managed to take 100 healthy nutmeg seedlings
aboard his ship, La Tartare, to Blambangan.

Furious, the Dutch arrested sultan Jamaludin and crown prince
Garomahongi, charging them with conspiracy to smuggle spice tree
seedlings out of the islands. Reports of spices being grown in
Mauritius had already shaken them; now even the English had
gotten hold of the precious nutmeg!

Jamaludin and Garomahongi, together with their wives and
children, were first taken to Batavia. There the old sultan died,
and the crown prince and the rest of the family were exiled to
Sri Lanka, never to return. Governor Cornabe put a distant cousin
of Nuku, Patra Alam, on the throne of Tidore, thinking he had
himself a puppet prince. But Nuku rallied all loyal princes and
nobles and utterly defeated the Dutch in 1781. On that occasion
he captured 30 Dutchmen at Salawati and made them do a couple of
months of forced labor before releasing them and sending them
back to Ternate to tell their superiors precisely who ruled the
waves and that even Dutchmen could be slaves.

Nuku was recognized as sultan of Tidore, Papua and Ceram, and
acclaimed as Kaicil Paparangan, a term we would now translate as
Supreme Commander. For a quarter of a century he led the
resistance against the Dutch invader.

Armada

His greatest victory was probably in 1799. The Dutch, having
learned that Nuku had set sail, sent an armada of 100 ships under
the command of a German noble, Baron von Luetzow. The 200 Dutch
soldiers included 38 artillery men to operate the heavy cannons.
There were also 2,000 Alifuru warriors in 100 kora-kora (local
warships) led by their chieftain, Imam Jiko. With such an armada,
and the enemy leader away, how could they possibly fail?

They should have tried to find out first where Nuku had gone.
When the fighting was at its fiercest and Imam Jiko and most of
his warriors were trying to storm the Kotabaru palace-fortress,
Baron von Luetzow ordered his ships to approach even closer,
although they were being heavily battered by cannon fire.
Suddenly he called for a hasty retreat, because he had espied the
sail of a large ship approaching: it was the English frigate
Orpheus which was armed with 36 heavy cannons. Nuku was on the
bridge in command. That was the reason for his having left
Tidore: he had gone to Makian to enlist the help of the English
and returned at the right moment. A great shout of joy went up
from the Tidorese, "Tuan Barakat!"

Two Dutch ships, Aandacht and Waker immediately surrendered to
the English. Perhaps for fear of being taken prisoner by the
Tidorese and sentenced to forced labor. A shattered Baron von
Luetzow, who managed to escape safely, reported to governor
Budach, "Not one company ship returned to Ternate, of the 100
kora-kora only 46 have returned. Of the 200 company soldiers,
only 17 escaped, the great Imam Jiko and nearly 1000 of his men
have perished".

Two weeks later, two French ships arrived in Ternate to help
the Dutch. Budach told them they were a little late, but they
should still make an effort. The ships, a frigate and a corvette,
under the command of Captain Le Meme, duly sailed to Tidore.
Having exchanged fire with the Tidorese, Le Meme decided that
discretion was the better part of valor, and left. Governor
Budach was so angry that he fell ill and had to resign. He was
given a gold chain and a position at the Council of the Indies.
Von Luetzow got a silver medal for "courageously having defended
(the Dutch) against Britons and Moors". Le Meme was promoted to
major in the artillery.

The next governor, Cranssen, in spite of his hatred of Nuku
whom he called een onverzoenlijke vijand (an enemy with whom no
reconciliation is possible) and in the end cut off all diplomatic
relations with him, had to admit in a letter (Aparte Brieven) to
the government in Batavia in 1800, "With regard to the Kingdom of
Tidore, to the best of my knowledge there is no other remark to
be made than that Nuku and his subjects, through his wise
government and his courage, aided by the sustenance of the
English, have been able to maintain themselves splendidly - and
prince Nuku is known by most Moluccan people as Tuan Barakat or
Lord Blessing!"

Other names which the Dutch called him were "Rebel, Prince
Rebel, Archrebel, Pirate, Archpirate and Destroyer of the Peace".
They hated him so much that they tried to obliterate him from
human memory. Some documents, however, were saved. Having
discovered them, my father wrote a book about Nuku, which was
first published in 1957, and led to Nuku being officially
mentioned in Indonesian history books. A Navy cruiser has been
called after him.

This year, in 1995, Nuku has been officially recognized as
Pahlawan Nasional, a National Hero. My father would have been
happy, for he writes in the last paragraph of his book, "... the
aim of this book is to make known the hero Nuku, who to date is
not yet known by the Indonesian people, who are still fighting to
complete their independence. May our people truly appreciate the
meaning of Nuku's struggle for the independence of our country
and our people. Nuku, hero of the country! Tuan Barakat!"