When the French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville arrived at Triton Bay in 1839, he found coconut palms growing in neat rows, a grove of lemon trees, and the crumbling remains of buildings that had been abandoned four years earlier. The jungle was already reclaiming what the Dutch had tried to build. Fort Du Bus - the first European settlement in New Guinea, the flag that was supposed to secure an entire half-island for the Netherlands - had lasted just seven years. In that time, malaria killed dozens of settlers, raids kept the garrison on constant alert, and the colonial ambition that had dispatched two ships from Ambon dissolved into a retreat that the Dutch would not reverse for more than sixty years.
In the early 19th century, New Guinea was the largest blank spot left on European maps. The Dutch administered the region loosely from the Moluccas, content to leave the vast island to its indigenous inhabitants and to the Sultanate of Tidore, which claimed authority over its western coastline. But the British were probing. Reports reached Pieter Merkus, the Governor of the Moluccas, that British interests were preparing to establish settlements along the coast. The prospect of losing a territory that the Dutch considered theirs by proximity - if not by presence - was intolerable. Merkus pressed his government to act. On December 31, 1827, a royal authorization was issued. The race to plant a flag in New Guinea had begun.
The expedition that sailed from Ambon on April 21, 1828 was as much scientific as military. Lieutenant Jan Jacob Steenboom commanded two ships - the corvette Triton and the schooner Iris - carrying soldiers, settlers, and five naturalists whose names suggest the breadth of European curiosity about a land no Westerner had yet inhabited. Dr. H.C. Macklot came as a zoologist, Salomon Muller as a zoologist and botanist, Alexander Zippelius as a botanist, Gerrit van Raalten as a taxidermist, and Pieter van Oort as an artist. They stopped at the Banda Islands, then pushed on to New Guinea, surveying Dourga Strait and the Oetanata River for suitable sites. Swamps and reefs defeated each candidate. At one point, local inhabitants attacked, injuring several officers and crew. It was early July before Steenboom found what he was looking for: a small enclosed bay on the southwest coast, just east of the settlement of Kaimana. He named it Triton Bay, after his ship.
For two months, the crews of the Triton and Iris hacked buildings out of the coastal forest and erected a double palisade around the compound. On August 24, 1828 - the birthday of King William I of the Netherlands - the Dutch flag was raised and the Netherlands formally claimed all of western Papua, christening it Nieuw Guinea. Local chieftains were brought into the arrangement: Sendawan, the King of Namatota; Kassa, the King of Lahakia; and Lutu, an "Orang Kaya" from the communities of Lobo and Mawara, each pledging loyalty to a distant crown they had never seen. The post was named Fort Du Bus, honoring Leonard du Bus de Gisignies, the Governor General of the Dutch East Indies. Trade began immediately. Ceramese merchants arrived in long, roofed-over prahus, and the Dutch bartered for massoia bark, aromatic woods, nutmeg, trepang, birds of paradise skins, and edible bird's nests - the same goods that had drawn traders to these waters for centuries.
The trade was brisk, but the dying was faster. Malaria took hold almost immediately, fed by the swampy lowlands surrounding the fort. Within 18 months, 24 men were dead. Of the 110 who remained, 83 were sick - a garrison where the healthy were outnumbered by the ill nearly four to one. Raids by people from the islands of Ceram and Goram kept the settlement in a state of siege. The naturalists who had arrived to catalog the wonders of an unknown land instead cataloged the ways it could kill them: fever, infection, violence, isolation. The colonial administration back in the Moluccas weighed the cost of reinforcement against the value of a fort that controlled nothing and decided the arithmetic did not work. In 1835, the surviving settlers were evacuated. The flag came down. The jungle began its patient work of erasure.
Fort Du Bus had failed as a settlement, but it succeeded as a legal precedent. The flag-raising of August 24, 1828 established the Dutch claim to western New Guinea - a claim that would persist through the colonial era and shape the borders of modern Indonesia. The Dutch would not return in force until 1898, when administrative posts were established at Fakfak and Manokwari, beginning the slow process of incorporating western New Guinea into the Dutch East Indies. Today, a monument stands on the original site of the fort, overlooking Triton Bay in what is now Kaimana Regency, West Papua province. The coconut palms that d'Urville noted in 1839 - planted by settlers who never imagined their colony would outlast its usefulness in less than a decade - are long gone. But the bay remains as enclosed and beautiful as it was the day Steenboom chose it, the jungle as dense, the waters as warm. Fort Du Bus endures not as ruins but as a footnote that redrew a map.
Fort Du Bus was located at approximately 3.76°S, 134.10°E on the shores of Triton Bay, on the southwestern coast of New Guinea in what is now Kaimana Regency, West Papua. The nearest airport is Utarom Airport (KNG) at Kaimana, roughly 15 km to the west. From altitude, Triton Bay is a distinctive enclosed bay cutting inland from the coast, surrounded by dense tropical forest. The Fakfak Mountains are visible to the northwest, and the Kumawa Mountains rise to the southeast. The coastline here is deeply indented with numerous small bays and offshore islands. Look for the contrast between the dark green forest canopy and the turquoise shallow waters of the bay - the fort site is near the head of the bay where a small clearing marks the monument location.