which ransacked every nook and corner of barbarism which had a
shore. Vessels slipped their cables and sailed away by night for
some secret destination with whose savage potentate trade
relations had been established. It might be Captain Jonathan
Carnes who, while at the port of Bencoolen in 1793, heard that
pepper grew wild on the northern coast of Sumatra. He whispered
the word to the Salem owner, who sent him back in the schooner
Rajah with only four guns and ten men. Eighteen months later,
Jonathan Carnes returned to Salem with a cargo of pepper in bulk,
the first direct importation, and cleared seven hundred per cent
on the voyage. When he made ready to go again, keeping his
business strictly to himself, other owners tracked him clear to
Bencoolen, but there he vanished in the Rajah, and his secret with
him, until he reappeared with another precious cargo of pepper.
When, at length, he shared this trade with other vessels, it
meant that Salem controlled the pepper market of Sumatra and for
many years supplied a large part of the world's demand.

And so it happened that in the spicy warehouses that overlooked
Salem Harbor there came to be stored hemp from Luzon, gum copal
from Zanzibar, palm oil from Africa, coffee from Arabia, tallow
from Madagascar, whale oil from the Antarctic, hides and wool
from the Rio de la Plata, nutmeg and cloves from Malaysia. Such
merchandise had been bought or bartered for by shipmasters who
were much more than mere navigators. They had to be shrewd
merchants on their own accounts, for the success or failure of a
voyage was mostly in their hands. Carefully trained and highly
intelligent men, they attained command in the early twenties and
were able to retire, after a few years more afloat, to own ships
and exchange the quarterdeck for the counting-room, and the cabin