Pepper (24 page)

When the captain of the
America,
Jeremiah Briggs, heard about this arrangement he “objected strongly” and insisted on completing the loading of his ship. “I now used every argument in my power to induce Captain Briggs to come to some amicable terms, but all my efforts were fruitless,” Nicols wrote. The stakes had to have been very high for these compatriots to be bickering over pepper in a small port in Sumatra. It was understood that American captains were not supposed to undermine one another, but in this case Nicols was determined to get his share even though his boat wasn't the first to arrive in the port.

Understandably, Briggs did everything he could to prevent pepper from being loaded onto the other ship. One day, as one of Briggs's crew was picking up bags of pepper on shore, a Malaysian man drew his creese. The American ran, and when the native man couldn't catch him, he turned on one of Nicols's men and immediately a group of nearby Malaysians drew their weapons. The natives were talked down, but even though both Briggs's and Nicols's men were targets, the violence caused Briggs to quit the port with only about two-thirds of his cargo of pepper. Nicols stayed on. He claimed to have threatened the rajah with firing his ship's guns upon the town to ensure the safe loading of his ship. The rest of his cargo was filled quickly.

By the time the Americans arrived in Sumatra, the reputation of Malaysians as pirates was already firmly established. The Strait of Malacca was, and still is, notoriously dangerous. Innumerable small harbors and beachheads along both sides of the Strait provided hideouts for pirates. In the days of sail, their nimble prahus easily overtook large, heavily loaded ships, and reports of plundered Chinese junks appear at least as early as the thirteenth century. Navigating the Strait unmolested was something of a trick, and it was always best to travel on a ship with many cannons.

Throughout the maritime world, it was widely known that Malaysian prahus should not be allowed to approach a ship at night. Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont, the wealthy New York merchant who sailed to Sumatra and Canton in his youth and observed the opium trade, noted in 1796 that each of the numerous “proas” in the Strait of Malacca carried up to fifty Malaysians armed with cutlasses and long spears, or lances, and firearms. Surprisingly, the pirates were heavily involved in the pepper trade, Pierrepont pointed out in a letter. “They carry on a considerable trade and are generally provided with … pepper … but are always … eager to commit piracy on whomsoever they can find weaker than themselves, or can overpower by surprise or stratagems. When going to an attack … their practice is to board and they never fail to put every sail to death.… The danger from them is greater when at anchor, or in a calm, or at night.”

In the nineteenth century, piracy continued unabated, despite longtime efforts by the European trading companies to defeat it. American ships were also plundered. The American ship
Marquis de Somereulas
, named after a Cuban official, was attacked in 1806 while loading pepper along one of the branches of the River Jamba in eastern Jambi, and its carpenter was killed. The
Marquis
returned to Salem in March 19, 1807. William Story, the ship's master, told the
Salem Register
that the men who attacked his ship were not associated with the sultan, and he had traded in Jambi previously and had seen no reason to suspect treachery among the hundreds of Malaysians who had been on his ship.

Twelve years later
The Asiatic Journal,
the newspaper of the East India Company
,
published a brief news story about pirates that “swarm on our coast.” The item reported that the British ship
Hunter
had recently fought off a fierce attack by a number of Malaysian prahus, while an American schooner called
Duckling
met a worse fate. Malaysian pirates captured the American ship, stole twenty thousand silver dollars, and sank her. Twelve officers and crew escaped by boat.

There were other incidents involving American ships in the Strait of Malacca, but amazingly no U.S. vessel was attacked on the northwest coast of Sumatra for the first thirty years of the pepper trade, when some four hundred voyages were made by U.S. vessels to the pepper coast. The absence of violence doesn't mean that the trade had gone smoothly. The native inhabitants of Sumatra had already learned over some two hundred years that foreigners from the West were not altogether trustworthy. They regarded Americans with apprehension, and for good reason.

*   *   *

Along the coast of northwestern Sumatra, U.S. ships could not dock in port because of the tumultuous surf, and therefore pepper had to be weighed and packed into bags on shore, placed in prahus, and rowed to waiting ships. The weights, based on the picul, were supposed to be the equivalent of 133
1
⁄
3
pounds. But the number was fudged by both sides. The American weight was about 136 pounds and the Malaysian 130. Usually a compromise was reached, and the American and Malaysian weights would alternate days.

Natives would add sand and other material to the pepper, and the Americans would put mercury or other substances into their hollow-beam scales, to add pounds to the scale. It was widely known that the Americans would use a set of false weights to obtain more pepper than they had paid for. Americans carry “
complete sets of false
weights thus often times getting
five Piculs of pepper by paying but for one
…” observed American midshipman Levi Lincoln in the 1830s.

A British writer in the 1840s acknowledged that the practice was initiated by American and English shipmasters. “Who introduced false weights?” he wrote. “Who brought to the coast 56 lb. weights with a screw in the bottom which opened for the insertion of from ten to fifteen pounds of lead, after their correctness had been tried by the native in comparison with his own weights?… I challenge contradiction, when I assert, that English and American shipmasters have for thirty years been addicted to these dishonest practices…”

*   *   *

Perhaps it was just a matter of time before the people of northwestern Sumatra turned against the Americans, but the seemingly amicable relations took a terrible turn in 1831 when the first U.S. ship was attacked by pirates along the northwest pepper coast. Ironically, the pepper ship embroiled in the upheaval was called the
Friendship
, owned by the wealthy firm of Silsbee, Pickman & Stone. She was under the veteran command of Captain Charles Moses Endicott when she set out with a crew of seventeen sailors and officers for Sumatra's pepper coast in 1830. At the time, the supply of pepper along the coast greatly exceeded demand, and prices reached new lows of thirteen cents per pound amid a six-year-long economic slump in the pepper market.

According to Endicott's account of the incident, the ship was anchored three-quarters of a mile off Qualah Battoo on the morning of February 7, 1831, when he and an officer and four crewmen went ashore to assist in weighing and dispatching the pepper. Endicott had been promised that he would be furnished with one hundred to two hundred bags a day, enabling his ship to be completely loaded in forty days. He left strict instructions that in his absence no more than two Malaysians were to be permitted on board at the same time, and no boats should be allowed to approach the ship at night, the usual precautions taken by foreign ships lying along the pepper coast.

However, while Endicott and some of his men were onshore, the
Friendship
was approached by a prahu and a group of armed Malaysians were allowed on board. The chief officer had scoffed at the precautions and boasted that he could “clear the decks with a hundred such fellows with a single handspike.” He lost his life. The Malaysians attacked the crew, killing three Americans and wounding three others, and took over the ship. The remaining unharmed crew jumped overboard. On shore, meanwhile, Endicott and his men saw that the ship was in trouble and quickly got into their own boat. A large group of Malaysians who were nearby brandished their creeses and pursued them from the banks of a river. The Americans narrowly escaped with the help of one Malaysian man, whom the Americans called Po Adams. They rowed to Muckie, a port about twenty-five miles up the coast. In Muckie, an exhausted Endicott met the captains of three other American pepper ships who rallied to his side. Their vessels sailed to Qualah Battoo with Endicott and retook the
Friendship
in early February.

Captain Endicott discovered that his ship had been thoroughly stripped of almost everything, except her pepper. The twelve chests of opium and thousands of dollars' worth of silver specie that she was carrying were gone. (Endicott would later declare that the
Friendship
was seized by drug addicts desperate for opium.) Spare sails and rigging, charts, chronometers, and other nautical instruments, as well as the bedding, cabin furniture, pistols, and other armaments, were gone. Along with the pepper, only the ship's provisions of beef, pork, and bread were spared.

Assisted by the other vessels, the
Friendship
was refitted and Endicott sailed to Tallapow, another pepper port, where he was followed through the streets by great crowds “exulting and hooting … ‘Who great man now, Malay or American?' ‘How many man American dead?' ‘How many man Malay dead.'” With the help of Po Adams, Endicott recovered his sextant and one of his chronometers, which enabled him to navigate his ship.

Rumors about the
Friendship
had already begun circulating even before she arrived back in Salem on June 16, 1831, thanks to another ship that had arrived earlier in Boston. When the
Friendship
finally came into port, she caused a sensation. Crowds overwhelmed the ship. “The curiosity of some visitors was so great that they would not be satisfied until they knew the exact spot where every man stood who was either killed or wounded,” Endicott wrote. “Even the casing of the cabin, so much cut up in the search for money or other valuables, was an object of the greatest interest.”

Concerned that the pepper trade in Sumatra was threatened with immediate extinction, the merchants of Salem and Nathaniel Silsbee, a United States senator who was one of the owners of the
Friendship
, sought government action. Such pressure, however, was hardly necessary. The story of the ship's capture was widely reported in the press, and the administration of President Andrew Jackson was itching for action. Even before receiving Silsbee's appeal, Navy Secretary Levi Woodbury had ordered “every necessary preparation be made … to demand immediate redress for the outrage committed.”

Thus began the first armed, officially sanctioned, U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.

*   *   *

The recently commissioned U.S. frigate
Potomac
, one of the finest warships of its day, was about to embark on another assignment when President Jackson decided to send the ship to Sumatra instead. John Downes, the commander of the
Potomac,
was an experienced hand who had served in the War of 1812, and he was given orders to gather information about the murder of Americans at Qualah Battoo. If he found that Endicott's account was true, then he was to demand restitution of the plundered property or an indemnity from the rajah or other authorities. If he didn't get a response, he was authorized to seize the murderers and send them back to the United States for trial or take harsher measures. In other words, Downes was supposed to gather information first and then act.

The
Potomac
set sail from New York in August 1831, with five hundred officers and sailors, and a contingent of marines. She carried some fifty mounted guns and other artillery on her gun and spar decks. After stopping in Rio de Janeiro for three weeks, the ship proceeded to Cape Town, where Commander Downes and his officers dined with British army and navy officials who claimed to know about the East Indies.

The Americans also made pleasant excursions to the countryside to drink wine. Sometime during this layover, Commodore Downes decided that the rajahs of Qualah Battoo were guilty as charged, and there would be no need to spend time gathering information in Sumatra itself. Perhaps the British had finally convinced him that he could not possibly seek restitution. What we know about this decision comes from J. N. Reynolds, who visited Batavia in the 1830s and was horrified by the decline of the port city. He was Downes's personal secretary during the voyage to Sumatra and published a book about the
Potomac
. According to Reynolds, the information “already obtained” in Cape Town, “seemed to leave no doubt, that neither the character of the people on the coast of Sumatra, particularly at Quallah-Battoo, nor the government under which they nominally lived, and under whose sanction piracies had frequently been committed on commerce, promised the least hopes of success from a mere formal demand of restitution, unless that demand was accompanied, at the same time, by a force sufficient to carry it into effect.”

The
Potomac
arrived off the coast of Sumatra on February 5, 1832, disguised as a large merchant ship. Downes already had a fairly good idea of the layout of the five forts in the village of Qualah Battoo from a chart that Endicott had drawn, but he wanted more accurate information and that day sent ashore two officers in civilian clothes who were to act as captain and supercargo anxious to procure a supply of pepper. They were accompanied by several lieutenants dressed as sailors who would scout the village. This bit of playacting was foiled when a large number of creese-bearing Malaysian men gathered as the Americans neared the shore and scared them away. Reynolds noted that the “physical force of the Malays” further convinced Downes of the “correctness of the plans he had previously matured…”

Plans were immediately made for a nighttime surprise landing, and the “spirit of enterprise pervaded the whole ships's company,” according to Reynolds. Navy regulations prohibited Downes from leaving the
Potomac
and he entrusted the attack to Lieutenant Irving Shubrick. Before his men left, Downes told them that their first objective was to surround the forts and “intercept the flights of the rajahs,” and on no account were they to fire upon the Malaysians unless they were attacked first. Did Downes actually think that the inhabitants of Qualah Battoo would not try to defend themselves when their forts were surrounded?