Friendship and the Sumatran Pirates
EARLY FEBRUARY 1831
FRIENDSHIP AND THE SUMATRAN PIRATES
Salem, Massachusetts, was one of our busiest seaports in the early days of our young nation. In fact, it was the major port through which the American spice trade was conducted. About the turn of the 19th century Salem shipping firms learned of the handsome profits to be made trading for pepper, then grown only in the Far East. Salem’s merchant fleet was soon calling regularly on several Javanese and Sumatran villages where local rajahs would collect pepper from the interior for sale to the white men. Thus, it was that the American merchantman Friendship anchored off on the village of Quallah Battoo in what is now Indonesia in January of 1831.
Piracy was a clear risk that pepper traders assumed, for along this western coast of Sumatra the practice had thrived for centuries. So was Captain Charles Endicott suspicious when a native prahu pulled near the ship on a dark January night. Its occupants confessed to be smuggling pepper and were cautiously permitted to board. In truth they were reconnoitering Friendship.
Days later the local rajah lured Endicott and his officers ashore with promises of more pepper recently transhipped from the interior. While the officers were thus engaged, a party of natives outnumbering Friendship’s remaining crew boarded. Within minutes the 1st Mate, Mr. Knight, the steward, and several crewmen fell to the native’s krises. Four crewmen jumped overboard and managed to swim away as the natives became distracted by the booty for which they had attacked. Ashore, Endicott observed his crewmen jumping from Friendship and discerned the ruse. He quietly mustered his officers and pushed-off in the ship’s pinnacle.
Correctly judging his remaining strength to be less than necessary to challenge the natives, Endicott’s men began rowing for the port of Muckie, 25 miles distant. Through the day they labored, reaching the mouth of the Soo Soo River after nightfall. Here they were able to obtain fresh water but dared not make a landfall. Braving a sudden squall, they struggled onward, passing several hostile villages along the way. With a makeshift sail of gunny sacks, Endicott’s men safely reached Muckie at 0100 that night. They were sheltered by three American traders lying at anchor. They were eventually reunited with the haggard four who had swum for their lives only to endure mosquitos, crocodiles, starvation, and exposure before reaching friendly natives.
The sympathetic captain of James Monroe, one of the traders, mounted a successful effort to re-take Friendship in the days that followed, but she was found to have been stripped of her specie, cargo, and $12,000 worth of spars and rigging the pirates could re-sell to future traders. Endicott further observed many natives bedecked in red, white, and blue striped finery, clearly cut from Western cloth. Even the wardroom’s gingham tablecloth was noted to be gracing the shoulders of a native warrior.
Continued tomorrow…
Corn, Charles. The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade. New York, NY: Kodansha International, 1998, pp. 280-92.
Miller, Nathan. The U.S. Navy: An Illustrated History. Annapolis, MD: American Heritage and USNI Press, 1977, p. 114.
