A senior official, lacking eyewitness reports, dismissed the attack as politically insignificant.

Evidence

In the meantime, Resident Locker de Bruijne, without Valck’s report in hand, sent the following communiqué to the Governor-General: From private information, but from a very reliable source, I was informed that on one of the Langkat plantations, disturbances took place during which a European administrator was wounded and some damage was done to personal property. According to my informant, the offenders were some of the Gayos working on the estates, who because of injudicious action by the administrator took bitter revenge on him and who afterwards disappeared to their own region without creating further disturbances. It seems to me, therefore, that this fact has no political significance whatsoever … I have not yet received a report from the Assistent Resident of Deli [Valck]. (my emphasis) Locker de Bruijne pretends to a knowledge that barely masks his unfamiliarity with the circumstances of the assault. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1182

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete archival instance of knowledge production in the absence of direct evidence — officials writing authoritative findings from ‘private information’ and veiled rebukes. Directly useful for the reader’s colonial archival research on how official knowledge was assembled.