Ralph Ord commanded the expedition; he died soon after landing. Benjamin Bloome, the new deputy governor, watched his garrison wither. By October 1685, just months after arrival, he was writing to Madras that his men were dying of "fever and flux." The directors in London were furious -- Bencoolen was too close to Batavia, center of Dutch power, and notoriously unhealthy. But what had been done could not be undone. Fort York rose on the swampy seafront, a brick structure of modest proportions squeezed between a palisaded compound housing the Company's enslaved workers and a Malay village of seven or eight hundred houses. The Company had to recruit non-European soldiers just to keep the garrison staffed, so fast did European troops sicken and die. Bencoolen earned its grim reputation early and never lost it.

In 1714, the Company replaced Fort York with Fort Marlborough, a larger stone fortress built on higher ground two miles to the south, hoping better elevation would mean better health. Deputy-Governor Joseph Collett, who oversaw construction from 1712 to 1716, boasted that "this military structure of my own" was the strongest fortification in India. His confidence was misplaced. In 1719, Malay insurgents -- angered by a proposed head tax among other grievances -- captured and briefly occupied the fortress. The higher ground did nothing for the death rate, either. Bencoolen's reputation as an unhealthy station remained unaltered for the rest of its existence. The fort was strong; the climate was stronger.

The entire purpose of British Bencoolen was pepper. The East India Company had been shut out of its factory at Bantam in Java in 1683 and faced exclusion from the Dutch-controlled spice trade. Southwestern Sumatra grew pepper along a narrow coastal plain between the Indian Ocean and the Barisan mountain range, and the Company planted its flag to harvest that trade. But the Bencoolen region never produced enough. The Company set up subordinate factories along nearly 500 kilometers of coast, from Indrapura in the north to Krui in the south, creating a chain of settlements where local cultivators could sell their harvest. Company sloops then shipped the pepper back to Bencoolen. The system was expensive to maintain, and British Bencoolen generally ran at an annual deficit. In 1752, the Company expanded into Natal in northwestern Sumatra, and then into the Bay of Tapanuli, chasing volume that the southern pepper districts could not deliver.

By 1785, the colony had been downgraded from a Presidency to a mere Residency under the Bengal Presidency -- an administrative demotion reflecting London's frustration with an outpost that cost more than it earned. Then, in March 1818, Stamford Raffles arrived as lieutenant-governor. He declared Bencoolen "the most wretched place I ever beheld," which was saying something for a man who had governed Java. Raffles abolished slavery in the colony and turned his attention to a more consequential project: finding a viable British trading port in the region. In 1819, he founded Singapore. That new settlement quickly overshadowed its administrative parent, and in 1823 Singapore was removed from Bencoolen's control entirely.

The end came cleanly. In 1824, the Anglo-Dutch Treaty redrew the colonial map of Southeast Asia, assigning spheres of influence between the two European powers. Britain ceded Bencoolen to the Netherlands; in exchange, the Dutch gave up Malacca and abandoned their claims on Singapore. After 140 years of disease, deficit, and disappointed expectations, the Company walked away from the southwest coast of Sumatra. The colony's most lasting contribution to the British Empire was not pepper but a city on the tip of the Malay Peninsula that Raffles had founded precisely because Bencoolen was such a failure. What is now Bengkulu City remembers its British past mainly through the walls of Fort Marlborough, which still stands on its hill above the Indian Ocean.