Pepper (22 page)

Peter Mundy, the Cornish diarist and merchant traveler, encountered an Englishman in Aceh who had a small vessel and was “trading to and Fro in these parts For himselffe.” The man from the “Westcountry” was “Friendly and courteously enterteyned by us all in generall,” Mundy wrote in 1638. However, the man “privately and ungratefully” sailed away in his boat “carrying with him the Monies off some, and otherwise indebted unto others. Butt itt pleased God that within a Day or two hee was by Foule weather Driven on shoare within a little off this place, his vessel suncke and loste, his goods wett and spoiled, halffe of his company run away and himselffe left to repent of such bad Courses.”

During the course of the seventeenth century, English seamen increasingly owned or co-owned boats or were employed by Asian ship owners, and in the eighteenth century they became a potent commercial force. William Dampier was a country trader. They roamed widely over the Indian Ocean, and engaged in a good deal of smuggling. Englishman Roger Wheatley admitted in 1725 that he had been employed by a lady whose husband had been a member of the Council of Batavia to smuggle 150 chests, or about 21,000 pounds, of opium. Independent English traders formed communities in Asian ports and dabbled in Company business and private trade, occasionally serving as pilots on indigenous rulers' ships. By contrast, the VOC would not allow Dutchmen to become country traders.

VOC Captain J. S. Stavorinus was shocked when he saw English ships unloading cargoes of textile piece goods and opium in Batavia in 1769. The VOC prohibited Dutchmen unaffiliated with the company from trading in these items, yet the English could dispose of them, he observed. “These indulgences were … extended to all sorts of commodities, both Indian and European, to the great detriment of our own ships' officers and crews, who were not allowed to import their wares; and they who did bring some privileged goods, were forced to sell them at a loss, on account of the glut occasioned by the quantities imported by the English,” Stavorinus wrote.

*   *   *

Rampant corruption was one of the reasons the VOC finally collapsed in 1799, ending a two-hundred-year-long rivalry with the English East India Company. The VOC also had been struggling for many years with the ever-increasing costs of running an overseas trading empire and poor management, and had refused to adapt to changes in the market for Asian goods in Europe. Meanwhile, the English East India Company sputtered along until 1833, when it withdrew finally from trade. No longer could a group of Englishmen be given nearly sovereign rights to exclusively buy and sell Asian commodities. However, the Company continued to administer India until it was finally disbanded in 1874.

 

Seven

U.S. Pepper Fortunes

THE NORTHWESTERN COAST OF SUMATRA BECAME THE CENTER OF A VIBRANT PEPPER TRADE WITH THE UNITED STATES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. SEEMINGLY AMICABLE RELATIONS WITH THE PEOPLE OF SUMATRA CHANGED IN 1831 WHEN PIRATES ATTACKED A U.S. PEPPER SHIP, LEADING TO THE FIRST ARMED U.S. INTERVENTION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA.

For the coast of Sumatra now I'm bound,

Pepper for to get if there's any to be found.

From thence for Europe if the Lord spares my life,

And back again to Beverly to get a pretty w[ife].

—
P
ENNED BY A SAILOR ABOARD THE
U
.
S
. PEPPER BRIG
Tuskar
,
1841.

If our Government does not send a frigate next season and destroy Soo-soo, Tangan Tangan, Muckie and South Tallapow, we must bid adieu to the pepper trade.

—
E
XCERPT FROM A LETTER WRITTEN IN 1838 BY AN
A
MERICAN CAPTAIN OFF THE COAST OF
S
UMATRA, AND PUBLISHED IN THE
S
ALEM
R
EGISTER
NEWSPAPER.

“Another class of commercial interloper, who will require our vigilant attention, is the Americans.”

—
S
IR
S
TAMFORD
R
AFFLES

At the turn of the nineteenth century, nearly two hundred years had passed since James Lancaster sailed to Aceh to procure pepper on behalf of the nascent English East India Company. Hundreds of millions of pounds of pepper had been produced in Sumatra and transported to Europe and China. From the central highlands of Minangkabau, where streams and rivers carried rafts filled with pepper to the marshy eastern shores of Jambi and Palembang, to the southern Lampongs, northern Aceh, and western Padang, pepper had been cultivated all over the island. By 1800, it appeared that pepper could not be grown anywhere else in Sumatra. Then stories began circulating about a new source of pepper along a small stretch of the perilous reef-filled northwestern coast.

This corner of Sumatra would attract a host of seamen and traders from a recently founded country eager to expand its treasury, opening a new chapter in the history of black pepper. The United States would become a major purveyor of pepper in the nineteenth century, and the source of this pepper was the northwest coast, dubbed the “pepper coast,” of Sumatra, some 13,000 miles away. Over the course of the century, 967 U.S. ships sailed to the island.

Many of the two- and three-masted vessels began their journey in the New England port of Salem, Massachusetts, where pepper built the fortunes of America's first millionaires, merchants with names like Crowninshield, Thorndike, Gardner, and Peabody, who in turn invested in the industrialization of New England. (The Gardner Museum in Boston was founded by the daughter-in-law of John Lowell Gardner, a wealthy pepper merchant.) Salem, best remembered today for its witch trials, prospered on the money made from the pepper trade. Ships from Salem and its major rival, Boston, were such frequent visitors to Sumatra that the island's inhabitants thought these New England towns were nations. New York; Beverly, Massachusetts; and Philadelphia played a smaller role in the trade, although many pepper ships discharged their cargo in New York. The Americans brought specie, or silver coin, in the holds of their ships to pay for the peppercorns, as well as opium. The coin proved to be pretty good ballast, and it has been estimated that more than seventeen million silver dollars flowed into Sumatra from the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

At the height of its wealth in October of 1825, Salem held a great banquet to celebrate the opening of a new building for the museum of the East India Marine Society. President John Quincy Adams and Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy attended along with many other dignitaries. Some forty-four toasts were made during that long giddy night, and the president particularly praised “the trade to India—no commercial nation has been great without it, may the experience of ages induce us to cherish this rich source of national wealth.” In those days “India” was synonymous with the East, and President Adams was surely invoking the pepper coast of northwestern Sumatra when he made that toast. The duties paid on pepper had expanded the U.S. treasury at a critical time in the nation's early history, and Salem was essential to the success of the trade. Surprisingly, most of the Sumatran pepper carried on Salem ships went to European markets, because there wasn't much of a demand for the spice in the United States. Pepper was a thriving import-export business.

The first American seaman to bring back loads of pepper from northwestern Sumatra was Captain Jonathan Carnes, the son of a distinguished privateersman who had fought during the Revolutionary War. Although Carnes wasn't an immediate member of Salem's elite merchant families, he was allied with them through his maternal uncle, Jonathan Peele, a wealthy ship owner. An able navigator, Carnes had been to Benkoolen aboard the
Cadet
in 1788 and the
Grand Sachem
in 1791, a boat owned by one of Salem's most prominent merchants, Elias Hasket Derby.

The fate of the
Cadet
isn't known, and the
Grand Sachem
was wrecked on a reef in the West Indies, but during these voyages to Sumatra Carnes probably heard about newly available pepper in a region north of Benkoolen and Padang, where he had found little of the spice. Carnes somehow made his way back to Salem after these unsuccessful voyages and became master of a newly built schooner called
Rajah
, owned by Ebenezer Beckford and his uncle, Jonathan Peele, and cousin, Willard Peele. Rigged as an agile schooner, the boat had a better chance in unfamiliar shallow waters filled with dangerous reefs where quick maneuvering would be required. It was a secretive voyage; even her small crew of ten men didn't know the ship's destination. The owners and Carnes recognized that they alone were sitting on a veritable pot of gold.

The
Rajah
set sail on a cold New England day in mid-November 1795. The
Salem Gazette
published a list of seagoing ships under the title “District of Salem and Beverly” on November 17, 1795. (Beverly is the port next to Salem.) One entry listed a brig named
Cicero
and nine other vessels. Another noted that thirteen ships were cleared for sailing, including ten schooners, one of which bore the name
Rajah
. The destinations of these vessels varied—Copenhagen, West Indies, Nova Scotia. The
Rajah
was the only one bound for “India.” The 120-ton schooner carried a cargo of brandy, gin, iron, and salmon. She arrived in Cape Town in March 1796, and then seemingly vanished. She sailed away and there was no further word about her whereabouts.

Many in Salem believed that the ship had sunk along with its master. But in July 1797, nineteen months after the
Rajah
set sail, the schooner made a seemingly miraculous return to Salem laden with some 150,000 pounds of bulk pepper, the first time such cargo had entered the United States. No one knew where the schooner had been, and Carnes and the Peeles weren't talking. The pepper would earn an incredible profit of
700
percent.

There isn't much that is known about Carnes's activities in northwestern Sumatra—no log book survives of the voyage—although he probably visited Soo-soo, a port that was to become a rich source of pepper for the Americans. Somewhere along the coast, the
Rajah
was mistaken for an English vessel by a French privateer from Mauritius. Ten or twelve Frenchmen boarded the schooner and a fierce fight broke out. Carnes's cook lost his arm and a French officer was killed before Carnes showed his American papers, ending the mêlée. Violence certainly did not deter the Americans from the shores of Sumatra; they wanted to make money. After Carnes returned, the
Rajah
was quickly refitted as a brig and slipped out of Salem in 1798, returning fifteen months later with a load of more than 150,000 pounds of bulk pepper. In 1801 Carnes brought back another 150,000 pounds, and it wasn't until the end of that year that Soo-soo's location finally became more precisely known among the merchants of Salem. The Peeles would no longer enjoy a monopoly on Sumatra's pepper. During their brief control of the market, their boats had imported more than 400,000 pounds of pepper.

Carnes returned from his second trip to northwestern Sumatra and gave mementoes of his journey—an elephant's tooth, golden boxes, various shells, pipes, and other items—to the newly established Salem East India Marine Society. These objects inspired the society to begin a “cabinet of curiosities,” which was the foundation for the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem.

The British had been to northwestern Sumatra before the Americans arrived, and could have dominated the pepper trade there. However, they bungled opportunities to contain the Americans and thus helped set the stage for them to become extremely successful pepper traders. A group of men from the East India Company first exploited northwestern Sumatra's pepper gardens in the mid-eighteenth century, establishing a firm in Natal, a village several hundred miles north of Benkoolen, for their own private trade. Continually seeking to boost pepper production in Sumatra, the Company supplied loans to the Natal Concern and bought pepper from the firm. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the head of the firm fortuitously met an enterprising local chief named Libbe Duppoh who ruled in Soo-soo, and struck a deal to buy all the pepper that could be grown in his domain. Duppoh became phenomenally successful, and the area soon was one of the world's major suppliers of pepper. Indeed, when Raffles arrived in Sumatra in 1818, he thought that the Natal Concern would help cure some of the chronic problems of obtaining pepper in the Benkoolen residencies.

Twenty-two years before Raffles appeared in Sumatra, East India Company officials in cash-strapped Benkoolen needed to pay down some of their debts and allowed three American ships to buy some 284 tons of pepper at high prices. When Company officials in London found out, they were furious because the Americans had unloaded more than 500,000 pounds of pepper on the European market, which interfered with the sale of the Company's pepper. “… we must express entire disapprobation of the Sale of pepper to neutral vessels as it must of course materially interfere with our Sales of that article for foreign Markets,” the London officials wrote to Benkoolen. Eventually, the sale of Benkoolen pepper was prohibited to Americans, a decision that only drove more U.S. ships to Soo-soo.