Wrecked among cannibals in the Fijis

A hundred years ago the young men and boys living in New England seacoast towns could easily find in the forecastles of locally built ships, an opportunity to gratify a desire for adventure and a sight of foreign lands. Many of their shipmates would be neighbors or come from nearby towns and all who intended to follow the sea looked forward with anticipation and pride to the day when they might be able to ship as an officer or be given the command of a vessel. It was no unusual thing at that time for officers and captains to be under twenty years of age and the ship and the sea then possessed a romance and a lure not to be found in the present-day age of steam. The following narrative describes in matter-of-fact language, the experiences of one of these twenty-year old lads who shipped out of Salem, Massachusetts, as third officer in a fine ship bound for the South Seas.

The ship Glide, of 306 tons burden, was built in Salem in 1811 for Joseph Peabody and Samuel Tucker and made thirteen voyages to the Mediterranean, Archangel, South America, India and the East Indies. In 1829 she was sent on a trading voyage to the South Seas under the command of Capt. Henry Archer. Most of her crew were young men and some were green hands. After doubling the Cape of Good Hope a course was set for New Zealand where fresh provisions, wood and water were taken aboard. At that time it was possible to obtain for a small piece of tobacco or some trading article of trifling cost, finely carved and ornamented war-spears and canoe paddles and curiously figured shawls made from the native flax,—articles now highly valued by museums and collectors. While there the ship was visited by Pomare, the principal chief in that part of the island, who brought with him his favorite wife. He was a fine-looking man wearing a blanket fastened over his right shoulder and his face and thighs were tattooed in graceful scrolls. She was handsome for a New Zealander, wore a blanket fastened over her left shoulder and her lips and chin were tattooed.

After a voyage of 142 days from Salem, the Glide reached Narai, one of the Fijis, where fresh provisions were taken aboard. A common musket worth only two or three dollars could be traded for a dozen large hogs and a pair of scissors or a jackknife was valued at a bunch of plantains or forty cocoanuts. When it came to exchanging trading goods for the native labor necessary to obtain the beche-le-mer—the principal article of trade in the islands—a common chisel made by the blacksmith on board from old hoop iron could be bartered for a day’s labor. To earn a chisel the islander must leave his hut early in the morning, sail fifteen or twenty miles to the reef and then work knee-deep in the water for six or eight hours gathering the beche-le-mer, a species of sea snail; after which he must carry his spoil to the ship—and all for a barrel-hoop chisel! The trading goods most esteemed in the Fijis at that time were iron tools, knives, scissors, whale’s teeth, beads and trinkets, but especially muskets, pistols and ammunition.

The place selected for trade was reached about the middle of October, 1829, and after negotiating with the local chief, his people were employed in building three houses,—a “batter house,” a hundred feet long, thirty wide and twenty high, where the beche-le-mer were dried and cured after boiling; a “pot house,” open on all sides, in which the forty-gallon pots were placed to boil the sea snails; and a “trade house,” a building about fifteen feet long, ten wide and eight high, in which trading goods brought in the ship were stored and so made easily available for barter.

The beche-le-mer when found on the reefs are about eight inches long and three inches thick. They are of a dark brown color, have a rough skin which is thickly covered with slime, and are easily taken. Exposure to the air has little effect upon them. After having been purchased by the trading master they are placed in a shallow pool made near the shore where the sea-water flows in at high tide and here the snails are cleaned of slime and then taken to the pot house and boiled about forty minutes. After drying they become hard and are then sent aboard the ship, packed in matting bags and stowed away. When properly cured beche-le-mer will remain in good condition for several years. It requires the Chinese palate to wholly appreciate the peculiar delicacy of its flavor when cooked and served as a table dainty and it was to the Chinese market in Manilla that the Glide’s cargo was taken and sold.

As the natives were a warlike race and the different tribes were constantly engaged in fighting, the dozen men who remained on shore in charge of the trading house and the curing of the beche-le-mer, went fully armed. The Glide, also, presented a warlike appearance. Heavy cannon loaded with cannister and grape-shot appeared at every port-hole and on deck and below weapons were placed so that they were available at an instant’s notice. In each top there was a chest of arms and ammunition and “boarding nettings, eight or ten feet wide, were triced up around the ship by tackles and shipping lines suspended from the extremities of the lower yardarms.”⁠[1] This seemed very necessary as nearly two thousand natives were employed in gathering and curing the beche-le-mer to complete the cargoes of the Glide and the Quill, a brig hailing from Salem, that came in not long after the Glide reached Miambooa Bay.

Severe storms at times prevail in the Fijis and twice the Glide narrowly escaped shipwreck. On the evening of March 21, 1831, a hard gale came up unexpectedly and all night the shrill voice of the leadsman called at intervals, “She drags! She drags!” The next morning at about eleven o’clock, after having dragged her anchors for a distance of nearly eight miles, the ship drove on a shore-reef projecting from the island of Vanua Levu and soon became a total wreck. In the following pages, William Endicott, the third officer of the Glide, describes the events of the voyage and gives an interesting account of the natives among whom he lived for several months; supplying also a short vocabulary of their language.

William Endicott, who wrote this narrative, was the son of Israel and Betsey (Rea) Endicott of Danvers, Mass., and was born there July 7, 1809. He came of a family of sailors and shipmasters and at the age of fifteen went to sea for a voyage to the west coast of South America, in the ship China, Capt. Hiram Putnam. There the ship was loaded with copper and the voyage home made by way of Manilla, China and Calcutta. It was during the homeward passage through the South Seas that Endicott learned of the trade in beche-le-mer. The first officer of the ship was Henry Archer, Jr., a Salem man, and on reaching home he proposed to Joseph Peabody, the great Salem shipowner and merchant, that a voyage be made to the South Seas to obtain beche-le-mer to be traded for Chinese goods. The venture promised large profits and Archer was given command of the ship Glide and he shipped young Endicott as his third mate. This was Endicott’s last voyage to sea and on reaching home he engaged in the morocco leather business and in 1861 was commissioned an inspector in the Salem Custom House. He died Sept. 25, 1881, in Danvers.

The journal of the voyage to the Fijis, kept by him, was given to the Peabody Museum of Salem by his children and is now printed for the first time by the kind permission of the Museum authorities who have also supplied valuable material to illustrate the volume. Accompanying the journal was a log book, kept during the voyage, from which additional information has been abstracted and is included among the footnotes. Mr. Israel O. Endicott, a son of William Endicott, has obligingly furnished biographical information. Thanks are also due to Mr. Charles C. Willoughby, Director of the Peabody Museum of Archæology and Ethnology, Cambridge, Mr. Perry Walton, Boston, The Essex Institute and Mr. Henry W. Wright, Salem, for assistance in illustrating the book.