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The little hilltop is thick with vegetation. To the east, the dark hills of the Sumatran hinterland rise under banks of pearly clouds. To the west, the expanse of the Indian Ocean rolls away toward the empty horizon.

I scramble through the undergrowth, searching for some trace of the building that once stood on this riverside hillock on the outskirts of Bengkulu city. There are fragments of brick and concrete, and, here and there, chunks of rough-hewn limestone. Mosquitoes needle at my ankles and I beat a retreat to where I can see the bright sunlight through the thicket.

A bulky middle-aged woman ambles up to me from a nearby house to ask what I’m looking for. Her name is Eni, and she tells me that the remnants of something are indeed scattered across this overgrown hill.

“Something from the Japanese era, or maybe from the Dutch,” she says.

The fragments of brick and concrete suggest that she might be right on both counts, but long before those foreign occupiers came, another nation flew its flag here. This spot was the site of Fort York, the first British outpost in Bengkulu.

Occupying a little knuckle of land and presiding over a 400-kilometer sliver of coast, Bengkulu is now Sumatra’s sleepiest provincial capital. But for 140 years, it was an anomalous pocket of British territory.

Two centuries later, I am here to hunt down the traces of this forgotten episode in Indonesian history.

The first servants of Britain’s East India Company reached Bengkulu in 1685. The company hoped the area would prove to be a profitable post — an essential stopover for China-bound ships and a fertile garden for lucrative pepper crops.

Instead, Bengkulu turned out to be an unremitting economic black hole, losing the company 100,000 pounds ($160,000) per year.

The Sumatran climate proved catastrophic to foreign constitutions and Fort York, the outpost that once stood on the little hillock, had a particularly insalubrious location.

“Some unusual malignity infests our air and strikes at all,” wrote Governor Joseph Collet in 1713. In search of a better climate, Collet abandoned Fort York and had a new garrison built a few kilometers south.

Bidding Eni goodbye, that’s where I headed, following a coastal road beneath ranks of tilted casuarina trees.

Much more remains of Fort Marlborough than of its predecessor. Rising in hunks of off-white masonry, it dominates the old part of Bengkulu. Rusting cannons, stamped with English coats of arms, lie like beached whales in the courtyard and the red roofs of the town sprawl inland. The views are fine for modern tourists, but for earlier generations of foreigners with no chance of a quick escape, it was a bleak and lonely place.

Many drowned their sorrows in drink. Governor Collet and his 19 assistants went through a staggering 900 bottles of red wine a month, prompting appalled company directors in Calcutta to declare, “It is a wonder to us that any of you live six months.”

However, not all British residents of Bengkulu succumbed to drink and disease. William Marsden, a writer who rose through the ranks to become the secretary at Fort Marlborough in the 1770s, wrote “The History of Sumatra,” the first major scholarly work in English on Indonesia.

Thomas Stamford Raffles — famed as the founder of Singapore — was governor of Bengkulu for six years.

On his arrival in Bengkulu in 1818, Raffles wrote, “This is without exception the most wretched place I ever beheld.” He said the buildings were collapsing and most of the officials were drunk or already dead. During his term, Raffles did do his best to implement reforms in the city.

I locate one his civic works a hundred meters from Fort Marlborough. It is a chunky neoclassical monument that Raffles erected in honor of Thomas Parr, an earlier governor who was beheaded in his bedroom by disgruntled locals. From here I wander along sleepy streets, half-swamped in tropical vegetation.

At many of the junctions, I see tabot, a Bengkulu icon. Once a year, these tottering wood-and-paper models are paraded through the streets and toppled into the sea. The tabot ceremony falls on the ninth day of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar. It’s a date that is usually commemorated by Shia Muslims. The celebrations in Sunni majority Bengkulu are usually attributed to the British influence — the soldiers of the East India Company were mostly Indians, many of whom were indeed Shia. But the ceremonies also show a link to earlier Hindu traditions.

Passing another British monument — this one to captain Robert Hamilton, who died in 1793 — I come to the great sweep of Pantai Panjang, Bengkulu’s Long Beach. Choppy waves are surging onto the sand and the sun is dropping west across an achingly empty ocean. I cut back through the lanes to the European cemetery where many of Bengkulu’s British residents ended up. Pale headstones stand at crooked angles and barefoot children are using the tombs as goal posts for a football match.

Hundreds of British soldiers and civilians — including Raffles’ four young children — were buried here. Today, it is a strangely tranquil place. Many of the inscriptions have vanished over the years while others were replaced with amateurish replicas during an ill-considered refurbishment in the 1990s.

There are still traces of small tragedies. One vault outside the main cemetery is the resting place of a 10-day-old child and his mother, who died five years later at the age of 25. Another, commemorating Captain Thomas Tapson, who died in 1816, was “erected to his Memory by his much afflicted friend Nonah Jessmina,” hinting at a cross-cultural love affair.

As I wander around, scribbling notes and taking photos, a gang of children drift away from their ball game to follow me. They come here to play football most afternoons, they tell me, but they know nothing about the tombs. No one has ever explained to them the history of their hometown, and they do not even know the nationality of the people buried here.

Once I begin to explain they quickly take an interest and they start dragging me around the marked tombs, demanding to know exactly who is buried where. They take particular delight in the graves of small children, though they assure me that none of them has ever seen a ghost here.

Having done my small bit for historical awareness, I head back to Fort Marlborough to watch the sunset. The British departed Bengkulu in 1824 when they organized a territorial trade-off with their Dutch rivals, swapping the town for the Malay port of Melaka. The fort remained a garrison for Dutch troops but the place was so remote and insignificant that it was chosen as a suitably far-flung exile for Sukarno during the years of anticolonialist agitation.

As I clamber back onto the ramparts and look out toward a fiery western sky, a young woman sitting with her friends on one of the parapets calls me over and we fall into conversation. Her name is Riani and she has recently returned to Bengkulu after several years in Jakarta. She comes from a village 200 kilometers to the south, on the old frontier of the British territory.

To my astonishment, she tells me that in that part of the province, the local Malay dialect still contains a few English words: blanket, school, pocket and try. Almost two centuries after the Union Jack and the red standard of the East India Company flapped down the flagpole here for the last time, it seems that something still remains.