- Atché (Sumatra)
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A few months ago, I was on the west coast of Atché1 on board the Siak, a gunboat in the Dutch Colonial Navy on which I was enjoying a cordial reception. I was waiting for the tide to allow our boat to go ashore on that very difficult madreporic coast of the Indian Ocean. While waiting, I tried to spend the time usefully, and asked the numerous local chiefs on board about their colony. Most of these Atché chiefs were going to Kota Radjah for the first time to make their submission. They lay stretched out on the deck, barefoot, and draped in rich cloths of silk or in rough clothes enhanced with enormous gold jewels. With their often lively faces, their piercing [End Page 205] eyes and their long black hair enveloped in a light turban, they gave our ship, amidst the comings and goings of its Malay crew, a truly colourful appearance! I wanted to know what the name the local people themselves gave to this island which we call Sumatra.
The person I questioned on this subject was a lively little old man, with an intelligence broadened by long journeys. His name was Si-Labò. He had visited the regions of the Gaïoux [Gayo] and of the Battaks and, following the obligation that those people impose on foreigners staying in their land, he had married in both of these. He thus simply gave back their freedom to his wives upon his departure, by abandoning his children to them – which they and their parents must have considered to be a great largesse! In these regions, in fact, abandoning wives is an emancipation, and the children are always a blessing.
But Si-Labò had gone even further in his peregrinations. He had embarked upon an Italian ship that was engaged in the pepper trade along the Atché coast and had visited Europe. That was perhaps more than forty years ago, but two things remained firm in his memory about this land of the white people. They were the terribly cold weather in Italy and the nastiness of the women. I think his habit of getting married in each country he visited had proved to be fatal. When he disembarked at Genoa, a beautiful girl (who would probably not have been happy with the liberty he gave her when he left) had taken from him, as an engagement deposit, all his money and all his jewels and had left him at the harbour in such a state of destitution that he had had to re-embark straight away.
Despite his misadventure, he had kept good memories of the European men, and now willingly offered his services to European ships which berthed on those ports of the coast where he happened to be.
I asked Si-Labò what name the local people gave to the island.
“Poulo-Klouang Touan”, he replied.
This was indeed the name of a small island we could see.
“But the main island?”
“The main island? That is the country of Klouang”.
“And further on?”
Further on he named successively Tenom-Weïla, Malabou, Soussou, Tampat-Touan, Klouat: just like we would say England, Germany, Russia …. All these places, however, were just the names of small states in the land of Atché. Upon my insistence, Si-Labò told me about Baros, Sibolga and the Mangdelings which are even further afield, in the region of Padang. But he could not give me a complete enumeration of the regions of Sumatra, and I asked him the general name of the main island which contained all the others. Despite all his travels, did he really know what an island was?
So Sumatra, which for us is just a point of geography, is an entire world for the indigenous people. They do not have a clear idea of its isolation, nor of the entity made up by the innumerable regions which compose it.
In reality, Sumatra is a vast country with a surface area about two-thirds that of France, and it is certainly one the most interesting and curious to study.
It is astride the...