[3]In 1683, following the forcible closing of their factory at Bantam in Java and under the likelihood of being turned out at any moment from Dutch-ruled Malacca, the directors of the East India Company found themselves facing the prospect of being entirely excluded from the spice trade of the Malay Archipelago.

When they learned of these developments, the irate directors questioned the alleged superior merits of Bencoolen as a rich center of the pepper trade, stressing that the port was too close to Batavia and notoriously insalubrious.

Deputy-governor Bloome was already lamenting in October 1685 that many of his men were dying from "fever and flux" and permission had to be granted to recruit non-European soldiers to supplement the military establishment of Fort York, a brick building of modest proportions built on the swampy seafront between a palisaded enclosure containing the Company's slaves, and a Malay village of seven or eight hundred houses.

[7] The area over which the East India Company was to dominate politically and economically for 140 years was the southwestern Sumatra pepper growing districts scattered along the narrow coastal plain tucked between the Indian Ocean and the Barisan mountain range covering the whole length of the island from north to south.

Although the Bencoolen-Silebar region had long been the main pepper outlet of southwestern Sumatra, its annual volume was far from meeting EIC requirements and the Company soon began setting up subordinate factories, generally called settlements or residencies, along 500 km of coast both north and south of Bencoolen.

A few years later, fearing that the Dutch were contemplating making themselves master of the vast Bay of Tapanuli 100 km north of Natal, the EIC forestalled them by establishing a settlement there.

During his time as lieutenant-governor of what he declared to be "the most wretched place I ever beheld",[11] he abolished slavery and founded Singapore in order to provide a new trading port in the region.