The unhealthiness of the old situation was thought
to render this an expedient step; and accordingly
about 1714 it was in great measure relinquished, and
the foundations of Fort Marlborough were laid on a
spot two or three miles distant. Being a high
plain it was judged to possess considerable advantages;
many of which however are counterbalanced by its want
of the vicinity of a river, so necessary for the ready
and plentiful supply of provisions. Some progress
had been made in the erection of this fort when an
accident happened that had nearly destroyed the Company’s
views. The natives incensed at ill treatment received
from the Europeans, who were then but little versed
in the knowledge of their dispositions or the art
of managing them by conciliating methods, rose in a
body in the year 1719, and forced the garrison, whose
ignorant fears rendered them precipitate, to seek
refuge on board their ships. These people began
now to feel alarms lest the Dutch, taking advantage
of the absence of the English, should attempt an establishment,
and soon permitted some persons from the northern
factories to resettle the place; and, supplies arriving
from Madras, things returned to their former course,
and the fort was completed. The Company’s
affairs on this coast remained in tranquillity for
a number of years. The important settlement of
Natal was established in 1752, and that of Tappanuli
a short time afterwards; which involved the English
in fresh disputes with the Dutch, who set up a claim
to the country in which they are situated. In
the year 1760 the French under Comte d’Estaing
destroyed all the English settlements on the coast
of Sumatra; but they were soon reestablished and our
possession secured by the treaty of Paris in 1763.
Fort Marlborough, which had been hitherto a peculiar
subordinate of Fort St. George, was now formed into
an independent presidency, and was furnished with
a charter for erecting a mayor’s court, but
which has never been enforced. In 1781 a detachment
of military from thence embarked upon five East India
ships and took possession of Padang and all other
Dutch factories in consequence of the war with that
nation. In 1782 the magazine of Fort Marlborough,
in which were four hundred barrels of powder, was
fired by lightning and blew up; but providentially
few lives were lost. In 1802 an act of parliament
was passed “to authorize the East India Company
to make their settlement at Fort Marlborough in the
East Indies, a factory subordinate to the presidency
of Fort William in Bengal, and to transfer the servants
who on the reduction of that establishment shall be
supernumerary, to the presidency of Fort St. George.”
In 1798 plants of the nutmeg and clove had for the
first time been procured from the Moluccas; and in
1803 a large importation of these valuable articles
of cultivation took place. As the plantations
were, by the last accounts from thence, in the most
flourishing state, very important commercial advantages
were expected to be derived from the culture.)