Instead of bewailing his hard lot, he resolved to send them to the other side of the globe.

At a time when the British and the Dutch East India companies insolently claimed a monopoly of the trade of the Orient, when American merchant seamen had never ventured beyond the two Atlantics, this was a conception which made of commerce a surpassing romance and heralded the golden era of the nation's life upon the sea.
His Grand Turk of three hundred tons was promptly fitted out for a pioneering voyage as far as the Cape of Good Hope.

Salem knew her as "the great ship" and yet her hull was not quite one hundred feet long.
Safely Captain Jonathan Ingersoll took her out over the long road, his navigating equipment consisting of a few erroneous maps and charts, a sextant, and Guthrie's Geographical Grammar.

In Table Bay he sold his cargo of provisions and then visited the coast of Guinea to dispose of his rum for ivory and gold dust but brought not a single slave back, Mr.Derby having declared that "he would rather sink the whole capital employed than directly or indirectly be concerned in so infamous a trade"-- an unusual point of view for a shipping merchant of New England in 1784! Derby ships were first to go to Mauritius, then called the Isle of France, first at Calcutta, and among the earliest to swing at anchor off Canton.

When Elias Hasket Derby decided to invade this rich East India commerce, he sent his eldest son, Elias Hasket, Jr., to England and the Continent after a course at Harvard.