“The immense concourse of citizens which covered the wharves, stores and house tops to view the boats, the profound silence which pervaded the atmosphere, broken only by the reverberations of the minute-guns, rendered this part of the solemnities peculiarly grand and impressive.
“Conspicuous in the procession and in the church were a large number of naval and military officers, also the Salem Marine and East India Marine Societies, wearing badges, with the Masonic and other organizations.
“On arriving at the Meeting house, the coffins were placed in the center of the church by the seamen who rowed them ashore, and who stood during the ceremony leaning upon them in an attitude of mourning. The church was decorated with cypress and evergreen, and the names of Lawrence and Ludlow appeared in gilded letters in front of the pulpit.
The remains of Lawrence rested in the Salem burying ground until 1849 when they were removed to New York, where in the churchyard of Old Trinity, his monument bears the line that can never die:
“Don’t Give up the Ship.”
FOOTNOTES:
CHAPTER XIX
THE TRAGEDY OF THE “FRIENDSHIP”
(1831)
The first American vessel to load pepper on the coast of Sumatra was the Salem schooner Rajah in 1795, and the last ship under the stars and stripes to seek a cargo on that coast was the Australia of Salem in 1860. Between these years the trade with that far off island was chiefly in the hands of the merchants and shipmasters of Salem. When the United States frigate Potomac was ordered to the East Indies seventy-five years ago with instructions to prepare charts and sailing directions of the Sumatra coast to aid American mariners, her commander reported that “this duty has been much more ably performed than it could have been with our limited materials. For this important service our country is indebted to Captain Charles M. Endicott and Captain James D. Gillis of Salem, Massachusetts. The former, who was master of the Friendship when she was seized by the Malays at Qualah Battoo has been trading on this coast for more than fifteen years, during which period he has, profitably for his country, filled up the delay incident to a pepper voyage, by a careful and reliable survey of the coast, of which no chart was previously extant that could be relied on.”
Captain Endicott of the Friendship not only risked his vessel amid perils of stranding along these remote and uncharted shores, but also encountered the graver menaces involved in trading with savage and treacherous people who were continually on the alert to murder the crews and capture the ships of these dauntless American traders. Notwithstanding all of Captain Endicott’s precautions and shrewdness born of long experience, he was at length overtaken by the fate which befell others of these pioneers in Malaysian waters. The story of the tragedy of the Friendship is typical of the adventures of the Salem shipmasters of the long ago, and Captain Endicott, like many of his fellow mariners, possessed the gift of writing such a narrative in a clean-cut, and vigorous fashion which makes it well worth while presenting in his own words. Perhaps because they told of things simply as they had known and seen and done them, without straining after literary effect, these old-fashioned sea captains of Salem were singularly capable writers, self-taught and educated as they were, jumping from school to the forecastle at twelve or fourteen years of age.