Authors: Marjorie Shaffer
By the end of Carnes's third voyage, American vessels were flooding the northwestern coast of Sumatra. In the boom years of 1802 and 1803, fifty-two U.S. ships sailed to the coast, carrying away some 78,000 piculs, or more than eleven million pounds, of pepper, an extraordinary haul. Many of these ships belonged to merchants such as George Crowninshield, Joseph Peabody, and Stephen Phillips, who were among the first to follow the Peeles into the pepper trade. The
Belisarius
, an especially fast ship owned by George Crowninshield & Sons, made two successful voyages to Sumatra in 1800 and 1803, bringing home more than 630,000 pounds of pepper. The firm paid duty of more than $37,000, which would be worth roughly $19 million today. The firm's
America
imported more than 800,000 pounds of pepper in 1802. The duty paid was more than $56,000, or about $28 million in today's dollars.
Many of the relatively small ships that sailed to Sumatra made the 13,000-mile trip to the coast in about four months. They left late in the year in order to arrive in time for the pepper harvest in March. The ships headed southeast across the Atlantic and rounded the Cape of Good Hope, sometimes stopping for provisions in St. Helena, an isolated island in the southern Atlantic Ocean (where Napoleon had died in exile), or in Mauritius before striking out for Sumatra. Detailed logs of the voyages helped captains navigate with surprising ease to Sumatra.
The merchants of Salem knew that these logs would be crucial to the success of the pepper trade. At a meeting in Salem of the East India Marine Society held in November 1801, a committee was chosen to procure “Blank Journals” for the “great object of their institution ⦠was the acquiring of nautical knowledge⦔ Each captain would be furnished with a log, which was to be “a regular diary of the winds, weather, remarkable occurrences, during his voyage⦔ The atlas-sized diaries were usually kept by the master of the ship, although a “keeper” was occasionally hired to maintain a chronicle of the voyage. Their pages are filled with nautical notations and weather reports, written in flowing ornate script. A typical journal entry notes that the day “commences with a fine breeze and pleasant weather.”
Occasionally the logs of these voyages provide glimpses of daily life aboard the ships, and even about matters that had nothing to do with the business of buying pepper in Sumatra or goods elsewhere in Asia. Benjamin Hodges, a successful Salem merchant who was an early figure in the trade to the East, was the master of the brigantine
William and Henry
, which left Salem in December 1788 on a voyage to China. The log he kept reveals a thoughtful, compassionate man driven at times to melancholy by the tediousness of a long voyage. Along with the usual comments about the weather, Hodges noted in April 1789 that his mood had turned as gloomy as the overcast sky. He complained that the “⦠long passage in which there is such a sameness & the same tedious recurrence to nautical observations that I am, obliged to rally all my little philosophy to drive off the hypochondriac, which hovers about me, for want of more exercise, I often turn to my Lord Boiling broke on Exile though that is more Philosophy in Theory than in Practice.”
On the
William and Henry
's return to Salem in April 1790 from Mauritius, the brigantine encountered a British slave ship,
Philips Stephens
, of Liverpool. Hodges detested slavery and wrote with evident disgust about “⦠a cargo of those (unhappy fellow animals) whose happiness is sacrificed to satisfy the ambition of avarice, men who are proud of living under the light of Christianity and more especially of philosophy.⦠The Captain came on board appeared to be one of those stupid beings of men who never thought or knew whether he was in a right or wrong line ⦠in short he appeared a stupid decrepid [sic] devil.”
Two years later, Hodges embarked on a journey to Bengal, India, aboard the
Grand Turk
, owned by Elias Hasket Derby, which left Salem in 1792. During this long voyage he noted in the ship's log that the “blue devils” hovered around during a prolonged spell of bad weather.
The darken sky how thick it lowers
Troubled with storms & big with showers
No cheerful gleam of light appears
But nature pours forth all her tears
Long passage dark Gloomy
Weather. Very unpropitious
The Blue Devils hover round.
Americans died during the voyages to Sumatra. Disease claimed some, while others drowned in the surf off the coast, but little is known about their lives. Occasionally a ship's log offers brief accounts of the deceased. The barque
Eliza
left New York for Sumatra in December 1838, and among her crew were Samuel Smith and his son, who was master of the ship and kept its log. After the vessel put in at Analaboo in March 1839, the two men went ashore in a small boat and a Malaysian guide accompanied them into the town. Many ships had already been to the port, they were informed, and no more pepper was available. They would have to sail to other ports to find available pepper. On April 28, 1839, the log reports that Samuel Smith suddenly got sick and died. “He did not talk but very little for about half of an hour before he died. I was obliged to bury him at sea,” his son wrote. “That afternoon while he was on shore he drinked 4 or 5 cocoas ⦠and the last one that he drinked he complained of his being very old and said that he had a stomach ache⦔ The ship returned from Sumatra on September 18, 1839, with a full cargo of pepper.
Sometimes U.S. pepper ships could not complete the voyage. The
Sooloo
, owned by Silsbee, Pickman & Stone, left Salem in November 1854 and arrived in Analaboo after 118 days of sailing. The ship was on the coast of Sumatra until mid-May, when she set sail with a full load of pepper. According to the ship's log, the vessel was “rolling heavily and thumping very hard endangering the masts ⦠rendering it almost impossible to stand on the deck to do anything. Before heaving taut the ship's bow swung off to the westward but still hung fast ⦠Sounded the pumps and found 3 feet water in the well.⦠Furled all sail and sounded the pumps again, water increased to 5 feet in the well⦔
Although the crew tried to save the ship, the effort proved futile. Boats came from the shore to take pepper off the
Sooloo
as fast as possible. The last entry of the log stated: “Finished taking pepper out of the between decks the water about 1 foot above the between decks. During the night the ship sunk at her anchors carrying one Malay with her.”
Other ships had to be scuttled because they were infested with centipedes, scorpions, cockroaches, and innumerable white ants. Amasa Delano, an American sailor who joined the East India Company, describes putting in at Benkoolen in 1792 and having to sink his ship, the
Endeavour
, because it was overrun with vermin and insects. White ants, in particular, could eat through the timbers of a ship and ruin it in only a few months.
The Beauty of the Tropics
Life aboard ships waiting to be loaded with pepper wasn't entirely dreary. Along with such chores as caulking, refitting the sails, and painting the decks, American seamen did get out and take in the breathtaking, rugged beauty of the tropics, just as Raffles had done during his stay in Sumatra. “Then we went out on the mountain top to gaze at the view and it was one of the most beautiful scenes that I have ever beheld,” wrote Gorham P. Low, a seaman from Gloucester, Massachusetts, who sailed to the pepper coast for the first time in 1834. He had climbed to a dwelling on the top of a mountain to attend to a sick boy. “From that high peak the land and sea looked very different from anything I had ever seen before,” Low wrote. “The shore line from the sea seemed to be nearly straight but from here we could see it in all its sinuosities in both directions for many miles. It was like looking down from another world.” Low's first impressions of Sumatra were overwhelmingly positive, and he was especially struck by the dignity of the people and by some of their customs, such as filing the ends of their teeth square and dying them black. He sailed to several ports on that first voyage because there were so many American ships along that coast that it was difficult to find pepper, and the competition made the spice expensive. In fact, his ship had to leave the coast because the price of pepper, $6.50 per picul, was too high. Low spent twenty years at sea, and became a wealthy businessman who served on the Massachusetts State Legislature.
Another American described the beauty of Soo-soo as something almost otherworldly. “Could an American of the north have been conveyed suddenly from his home and placed where we stood as we stepped from the boat, he would have been in ecstasy, if he had any susceptibility to the beauty of nature,” wrote a chaplain in 1838. “The stream was almost embowered by the leaves of the palm, graceful and fan-like, curving over their half circle of gorgeous foliage in their place, and blending with the tall trunks of the cocoa-nut tree, spreading its top like an umbrella upon a pole, but Asiatic and picturesque beyond description in its effect; while the bay-tree, and the banana, and the forest giant, and their lesser and more graceful associates, with the tall and luxurious bamboo everywhere softening the scene, surrounded us.”
The extensive reefs lying off the pepper coast of northwestern Sumatra were charted by numerous captains who plied these tropical waters. The most important landmark as the ships neared Sumatra was what the Americans called Hog Island, about ninety miles southwest of Soo-soo. The most-frequented pepper portsâAnalaboo, Qualah Batoo, Soo-soo, Tally-Pow, and Muckieâlay south of Banda Aceh, but the ports were not controlled by the sultan. Each was ruled by a chief, or “rajah” (and sometimes by more than one chief), and the Americans had to strike up individual relationships in each port in order to procure their pepper. Usually, they had to make arrangements with someone called the
Dattoo,
who set up contracts on behalf of the chiefs in each port.
Nathaniel Bowditch was a brilliant navigator and mathematician and one of the most important figures in the Salem pepper trade. In November 1802, when he was twenty-nine, Bowditch sailed on the
Putnam
to Sumatra. He was the master and part owner of the ship, and kept a log of its voyage (now in the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem). In its last pages, Bowditch wrote an influential essay on the pepper trade along the northwest coast of Sumatra, offering an intelligent guide to how Americans should conduct their business with the Dattoo and with each other. He explicitly states that the Dattoo is a free agent who makes arrangements according to his own best interests. If only American captains had paid more attention to Bowditch's words.
“On arrival at any of these ports you contact with the Dattoo for the pepper and fix the price,” Bowditch explained. “If more than one vessel is at the port, the pepper which comes daily to the scales is shared between them, as they agree, else they take it day and day alternatively. Sometimes the Dattoo contracts to load one vessel before any other is allowed to take any, and he holds to this agreement as long as he finds it for his interest to do so and no longer, for a handsome present or an increase in price will prevent the pepper from being brought in for several days, and the person who made the agreement must either quit the port or else add an additional price.”
Bowditch noted that the price of pepper in 1803 ranged from ten to eleven dollars per picul
,
and in previous years had been as low as eight dollars, “but the demand for it had risen the price considerably, there being near thirty sail of American vessels on the coast.” He carefully described how pepper was weighed using American scales and weights, and was sold by the picul, equal to 133
1
â
3
pounds. Dollars were the accepted coin, and the Malaysians did not take halves or quarters. American captains, he added, shouldn't have any trouble making contacts since some natives spoke English fairly well.
The ports supplying pepper to the Americans were clustered along a seventy-five-mile stretch of coastline. Soo-soo and Muckie were the most important, and each exported 18,000 piculs [about 2.4 million pounds] of pepper in 1803, according to Bowditch's calculations. These ports did not produce pepper prior to the turn of the nineteenth century. Depending on the harvest and on how many American ships were in Sumatra, U.S. vessels would wander from port to port seeking a deal. Several American ships would inevitably end up in the same port, especially during boom years. Courtesy demanded that the captains wait their turn for the pepper, as Bowditch had recommended, but these men weren't always willing to wait.
When a certain American captain was outbid for pepper by a rival in 1839, the losing captain sent a threatening letter to the local chief in the village of Bakungan threatening to sink his
prahus
(Indonesian boats) if he gave any pepper to his rival. A similar situation occurred two years later when a captain fired a gun at a prahu bringing pepper to a rival American ship.
Disputes between American captains had been occurring since the beginning of the U.S. pepper trade. George Nicols, a Salem seaman and merchant who sailed to the Far East, Sumatra, and Europe, was the master and supercargo of the
Active
, which set out from Salem to Sumatra in December 1801. (The supercargo managed all of the commercial transactions of a merchant ship's voyage.) When the ship arrived in the port of Muckie, the
America
was already there. Nicols went ashore and discovered “great numbers of Malays, all well armed.” He soon negotiated to buy a cargo of pepper, but after fixing the price he learned that the pepper could not be delivered until the
America
was fully loaded. The
America
was three times as large as the
Active
and she wasn't even half full, Nicols claimed, so he declined to wait unless the “governor” could give him a time when the
Active
would begin receiving pepper. “It was finally agreed that I should begin to receive in a week, whether the
America
was loaded or not.”