And stopped our grog forever.
By caring for the sanitary conditions of the ship he saved his crew, and it was to this rather than to the efficiency of his work against slavers, that he owed the favor with which his cruise was regarded by the officials of the Navy Department.
Another kind of naval work that is never pleasant, that always involves danger, and yet never gives the men a chance to earn fame, is that of chastising the more or less wild coast tribes in out-of-the-way parts of the world for carrying, to an extreme, the greed and aggression they have observed in white traders. Although there are always two sides to every affray, the story of the white trader is the one that gets printed; what the aborigines might have said is never learned. No matter—a Yankee ship is assaulted and some of her crew killed, so it is necessary to teach the natives that they must not do such things. No inquiry is made into the provocation offered by the Yankee crew, but on the ex parte statement of the probable aggressor a man-of-war is ordered to visit the scene of bloodshed and take such vengeance as is possible on the tribe. And the man-of-war must go and do as bid, whether the naval officers like the task or not. So it comes to pass that all maritime governments when avenging injuries done to their merchantmen are not so very different from those tribes of American red men who, on failing to find the individual who had killed one of their number, took revenge by killing the first member of the aggressor’s race they happened to find.
The story of the trouble with the people of Sumatra, growing out of an assault on the ship Friendship, Captain Endicott, of Salem, in 1831; and again for an assault on the American ship Eclipse, Captain Wilkins, in 1838, will show what kind of work the navy had to do in such cases.
The Friendship was at anchor off Quallah Battoo, on the northwest coast of Sumatra, buying pepper of the natives, on February 7, 1831. The pepper was brought off through the surf in small boats that were moored, when loading, in a stream that enters the ocean there. Captain Endicott, Second Mate John Barry, and four seamen were on shore superintending the packing of the pepper. When the first boat was loaded and manned it headed down the stream, but instead of putting out to sea it stopped at the beach, and Mr. Endicott noticed that more men got into her. However, he was only a little suspicious of trouble, for he supposed the surf was worse than usual and more men were needed, so he merely detailed two seamen to watch the boat, and went on packing pepper as before.
After a little the seamen on watch saw a commotion on the ship, men were running to and fro, and in a moment four sailors were seen to jump over the rail into the sea. Captain Endicott was warned, and, jumping into a second boat he had brought ashore, he and his men pulled down stream for life.
In their haste they left their arms behind, and that was unfortunate, for the natives swarmed to catch them. Worse yet, they were not accustomed to taking a boat through the surf, and several native canoes, full of armed men, gathered outside ready to kill the whites when their boat should be overturned by the surf.
At this critical moment a neighboring chief, known to the whites as Po Adam, came to their rescue. He not only guided the boat through the surf, but by brandishing his sabre overawed the waiting natives in the canoes, and Captain Endicott got safely out to sea. There he picked up the four sailors who were swimming from the Friendship, and then all went to a settlement some distance away, called Muckie.
The sailors said that no less than twenty natives had come off to the ship in the first boat. At first they had scattered over the deck with no arms in sight and acting as if full of curiosity. The mate, who had at first been alarmed by the numbers, was deceived by their apparent innocence, and began taking the pepper on board. At that two or three natives sauntered carelessly to his side and, as he leaned over the rail to get hold of a package of pepper, they drove their daggers into his back. Five of the ship’s crew ran to aid the mate, but the natives killed two of these and made prisoners of the other three, whom they reserved, as alleged, for torture. The remainder of the crew, four in number, jumped overboard.
