'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!"