Page 291 - THE MELANESIA DIASPORA FILE CETAK ISI 10022017

The situation finally pushed the Dutch government to adopt the free port of the British
policy as a step to attract sailors and native merchants to use its port city and not to visit
Penang and especially Singapore. In 1847, Makasar was declared a free port. A year later
(1848) the port of Manado and Kema received the the same status, and in 1953 the port of
Kaili, Ternate, Ambon and Banda also were also to declare to the same status as that port
city of Manado (Wong, 1960: 82).
The announcement of the status change of the ports to be free ports received a good
response from the European merchants who were interested in the tea trade. Therefore,
they flooded those commercial ports to acquire marine products to be brought to China
in order to get tea to be taken back to their respective countries. Local inhabitants were
happy to trade with European merchants who flooded their commercial port cities, but
gave less attention to Dutch traders. The reluctance to trade with Dutch traders was caused
by the prices of their products, among others: wool and textile which were expensive. This
condition related to the Dutch government’s policy that required all Dutch products to be
imported to the ports located in Java, namely; Batavia, Semarang and Surabaya. The three
ports were declared as “the ports with import and export duties applied” as result of the
government policy to abolish the free ports in 1876 as they benefited only foreign traders
(other Europeans).
The plan to abolish the free port policy received rejection from various parties,
including the Chamber of Commerce and Industry officials who were in the Dutch East
Indies (Makasar, Surabaya and Batavia) as well as those in Amsterdam and Rotterdam,
and the liberals in the Dutch parliament. Finally the cancellation plan was postponed, and
a measure to appropriately solve this problem was sought without causing native traders
to shift their activities to other foreign commercial port cities.
The measures to be taken were: (1) strive to dominate the sailing lanes and trade; in
connection with this effort, they formed a sailing company named the Royal Sailing Company
(Koninklijk Paketvaart Maatschappij, KPM) on September 4, 1888. The management
of this business prepared the facilities and conducted further study on the state of the
infrastructure and commercial sailing to restructure the commercial sailing lanes. The new
sailing company commenced its operations on January 1, 1891. The sailing company was
designed to take over people’s sailing lanes so that commercial sailing activities could be
successfully monopolized by the KPM. To that end, it received a subsidy on each voyage and
privileges in the loading and unloading of goods at every commercial port.

Chapter 7 291

MELANESIA BOOK FA LAYOUT 051216.indd 291 2/10/17 2:11 PM