Bengkulu, October 1685 : The fortress stood on a small hill on the banks of coffee-colored river. To the west, the Indian Ocean stretched empty and white and empty. In the east the dark wall of the Bukit Barisan mountain range like a stalled tsunami a gray lock of cloud monsoon rose from his lip spill
A European moored ship Offshore -. The first of its kind, this to happen the way for many months. Inside the fortress - little more than a few modern cabins of a rickety wooden palisades ringed - two men were busy writing. Benjamin Bloome and Joshua Charlton, overseers of this sad little station had, since June 24 at their posts, but the passing ship was only now them the opportunity with a first message to their British East India Company overlords in Fort St Send in Madras George in India .. they filled 18 densely packed pages reserved accounts of their frustrated attempts to establish an effective pepper trade, before they finally come to the crux of the matter:
We will now give your honor an account of our miserable state and condition, the God grant better. We have become incapacitated by the disease all help each other and the large number of people who came over not more than thirty men [are] well ... the black workers [there are] not more than 15, which is capable of working; of them are dead and about 40 [more] die every day because it is difficult to be charged for it. All our servants are sick and dead, and this minute [there is] not a cook to get provisions ready for those who sit in the Company table, and so have been our plight that we often fasted. The ill lies neglected some cry remedies, but no [are] had to be: those who eat do not they could to cook victuals, so that we do not the dead live to bury, and if you get sick of the other is not observed, because he that better than two forms says, so that the people die and no notice [is] taken away ...
for Bloome and Charlton, heads of what was planned as lucrative imperial outposts Bengkulu was already proving hell on earth to be
, the British station at Bengkulu -. or Bencoolen, as it was known at the time - was one of the saddest of all imperial follies. had for much of the 17th century, British and Dutch traders for control of the lucrative spice trade from Indonesia to the bet. It was the Dutch who finally got the upper hand, expel their rivals from Java and Maluku. The ousted British then went looking for an alternative base in the region. They had to choose the pitch Bengkulu, on the bony west coast of Sumatra.
The place had long been under the loose sovereignty of Minangkabau Sultanate Inderapura, but it was a place of unique insignificance, even for the locals. It had no natural harbor, was far from any major population center and lay on a completely wrong side of Sumatra - miles away from the busy Straits of Malacca along almost all shipping had passed since the beginning of human history. It also had the most horrifically morbid of climates, teeming with malaria and dengue carrying mosquitoes and swept periodically by floodtides of cholera and smallpox. But for some reason believed the British would be a successful pepper growing plantation and a burgeoning way station of international trade. It never made a penny profit, and for more than a century she sucked endlessly solitary life up
The first challenge for the British was always to go in each to Bengkulu -., The was formally established on the basis of some little shaky contractual arrangements with the two Inderapura and local chiefs Rejang. From the beginning, they had to leave for the manual labor to slavery. A number of African slaves had come with Charlton and Bloome, but they were so vulnerable to the harmful air like the Europeans, so the company instead took to buy a large number of Southeast Asian slaves, especially those who are abducted from Nias by local pirates ,
When it came to European employees, now all was over with the disaster in great danger, press ganged. That's what happened, in 0, William Dampier, a gloriously disreputable globetrotting vagabond who performed three complete circumnavigations Earth during his career seafaring. During what was meant to be a short stopover in Bengkulu, he found himself bullied into ever chief gunner at Fort. He promised that it would only be for a short stint, but he quickly discovered that the new governor, James Sowdon had absolutely no intention of ever releasing him from his post. Dampier was not impressed by his boss. "I soon grew tired of him, not feel very safe indeed under a man whose whims were to think so brutal and barbaric:" If, gone early 1691 one of the rare passing ships at anchor offshore, Dampier squirmed through made moonlight in the fort wall and a window made his escape.
Others sought escape not through the physical act of fleeing, but by alcohol. In 1712 Joseph Collett took charge as governor, the development of a somewhat more extensive British headquarters oversee Fort Marlborough called. Like so many others, had Collett come only to Bengkulu under duress - he was bankrupt and unemployable elsewhere as
During a month he and his 19 employees by 00 bottles of wine to get, manages 300th bottles of beer and 0 liters of other alcoholic beverages
- Invitation horrified East India Company Directors "to ask each of you to live 6 months, and that it no longer quarrels and duellings are you" back in Britain !
There however were by choice some who went to Bengkulu.
On July 15, 1756 a young man named Stokeham Donston wrote a letter to his cousin George. He was 23 years old and he was planning a post in the service of the British East India Company to take over. " allows the content ... is about £ 80 or £ 0 p year, but that is nothing compared to the through care benefit and care ." He wrote - and in the motivation for so many similar young men is revealed of modest wealth throughout the 18th century. Slack management practices, irregular arrangements, and a whole series of blind eyes turned meant that the company in Asia employees often can cause enormous fortune, -. Either through unofficial on the page private enterprises or by utter corruption
Young Donston was quite untroubled by horror stories of the Southeast Asian climate: " Some say that the climate is unhealthful, and the constitutions of Europeans does not agree, but I think to some extent of the irregularity of their life is due ... and I think it could be avoided by resolution ... "
in the following year he was in Bengkulu arrived, several worlds away from the Midlands and in no time at all clear that he. the full horror of his mistake Over the next few years Stokeham Donston sent letters home of every passing ship, every friend and acquaintance to bring begging, whatever influence they could have to endure, get transferred him to India or elsewhere less terrible than Bengkulu. But without success. Sometimes he collected and revealed his dreams somehow still make a fortune and play returning home a gent in his country. In 1765 he wrote again to his cousin in Nottinghamshire:
I want to make devilishly about 500 p £. annum. The Lord knows when that will be, it will satisfy my ambition and then, and I will come and a pack of beagles hold for the diversion of us and the Worksop Gentry, you think we can do it?
He never has his beagles, and he never came to go home. A full decade has been sent to this letter, the tired little British community still made one of his depressingly regular trips from the fortress on the way to weed clogged cemetery to inter another of their number. The grave stone is set in place still there: " Esq To commemorate Stokeham Donston on Marlbro 'departed this life April 2, 1775. At the age of 41 .".
Stokeham Donston grave stone
Until the early 19th century Bengkulu was £ 100,000 a guaranteed annual loss of the East India Company costs - a large sum in today's conditions. The pepper trade was pathetic, and relations with the locals were always irritable. On several occasions over the decades, the British had to mercenaries from the Bugis community in the area had to leave them to settle the put on locals from annihilation save who got regular with their practice of debt slavery and forced pepper fed and coffee production , At one point, in 1719, the British en masse had to flee in the boats after angry locals Fort Marlborough stormed, while in 1805, particularly clumsy official, Thomas Parr, was beheaded in his own bedroom by some thoroughly damaged Rejang chiefs ,
the last, but a British chief in Bengkulu was none other than Thomas Stamford Raffles, former Lieutenant Governor of British ruled Java and future co-founder of the British settlement in Singapore (which he founded in fact while formally established in Bengkulu). Upon arrival, he explained, it "without exception the most miserable place I ever seen". During his time there, 1818-1824, he made some effort to knock the place in shape. He stated that the remaining 0 African slaves (most of them Bengkulu born of many generations in this stage) officially "liberated" and gave each a printed certificate to that effect. However, it was the classic educational ultimately empty gesture: she could hardly go "home" to and they stayed as the lowest workers in the civil service, their means essentially unchanged - although Raffles' wife Sophia, a girl of eight of their number who pluck to serve as "to set an example for the rest of the European Community." her personal household servants
Raffles lost three of his four young children to the Air Bengkulu, and by the time he left his own health was irrevocably broken. The following year an agreement between the UK and the Netherlands was signed. The former agreed to pull out of their territories in Sumatra, while the latter all claims on the eastern side of the Strait of Melaka leave. Colonial Bengkulu was abandoned in all respects purpose. Some were quietly wondering why it had taken 139 years since the input of the pitiful letter from Benjamin Bloome and Joshua Charlton for the British East India Company to come so eminently sensible decision.
the beach of Bengkulu
Today Bengkulu is one of the most remote of the Indonesian provincial capitals today; up from the gardens and a hot wind blows from the south, a small town where bougainvillea fountain. Here and there a mildewed monument to a forgotten British resident breaks the modest flow motorcycles. There is a beach, wide and bright and empty, supported by casuarinas and crooked palm trees whisper. Fort Marlborough still stands, slices of heavy masonry ringing a sultry inner compound in the rust like beached seals lying in the grass gun. But the older outposts, Fort York, survived nothing but a few faint traces of masonry in a maze of mosquitoes plagued vegetation north of the city. The cemetery has become a popular meeting place for local young people who use the cracked grave stones for goalposts. In the evening, when the sun sinks, Bukit Barisan still shows in the East like a black wave, and the pale sky above the head is filled with thousands of flickering swiftlets. To the west of the Indian Ocean melts into a pool of molten copper. You can scan the salty distance until the last light is gone, greenish behind the horizon, but there are no ships.
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