On 8 April 1951 the third transport carrying Moluccan ex-KNIL soldiers and their families arrived in Rotterdam. The Roma had left Tanjung Priok on 7 March. Among Moluccans the Roma is known as the bachelors’ ship. It is also a ship with a long history and many changes of name.
Between Newport News and Pulau Bintan
It all began in August 1914. The cargo ship SS Medina, built for the Clyde-Mallory Company, was launched in Newport News, Virginia, USA. More than 100 years later, in October 2015, the ship dropped anchor for the last time at Pulau Bintan (Riau, Indonesia) as the Doulos and became a luxury hotel ship. This ship has borne many names. Moluccans in the Netherlands know it as the Roma. One of the 11 transport ships that brought Moluccans to the Netherlands in the spring of 1951. On 8 April 1951 the Roma arrived in the port of Rotterdam. On board were 901 passengers, mainly Moluccan soldiers with their families.
‘Bachelors’ ship’
The 901 passengers consisted of 624 heads of household, 130 wives, 70 sons, 62 daughters, 6 foster sons, 5 stepdaughters, 2 stepsons, 1 mother and 1 mother-in-law. The passenger list was meticulously recorded and all of it can be read on the website “Molukkers naar Nederland” of the National Archives in The Hague. On this website you can also look up exactly who was on board the Roma, by name.
Departure from the tangsi. At the train from Tjimahi to Jakarta for embarkation to the Netherlands on the ‘Roma’.
In 1951 the crossing from Indonesia to the Netherlands took about a month. If you wanted to know roughly where a ship was, the only way to follow it then was through the so-called “shipping reports” in the newspapers. Mobile phones, the internet and social media did not yet exist. The Roma, too, can be followed through the shipping reports in the newspapers of the time. Those newspapers have been put online by the Royal Library in The Hague. The shipping reports record that the Roma was in Surabaya at the end of February 1951, left Jakarta on 8 March, was sailing 500 miles south-east of Colombo on 11 March, passed Aden on 21 March and finally moored in the port of Rotterdam on 8 April. (For more information visit the website www.delpher.nl/)
The arrival of the ships carrying Moluccan soldiers and the subsequent occupation of the camps was reported in detail by the liaison official E.J. van Baarsel. As a lieutenant colonel in the KNIL he had himself been stationed in Cimahi near Bandung in 1949-1950. Van Baarsel begins his report with the arrival of the Roma in Rotterdam on 8 April. On that date the Roma arrived in Rotterdam. The ship sailed until 2009 under various names and owners. In 2009 it was taken out of service. It was sold under the name Doulos. Since 2015 it has been a hotel ship at Pulau Bintan (Riau).
