These shipments were assembled in the warehouses on Derby Wharf and paid for the teas, coffees, pepper, muslin, silks, and ivory which the ships from the Far East were fetching home.

In fourteen years the Derby ships made one hundred and twenty-five voyages to Europe and far eastern ports and out of the thirty-five vessels engaged only one was lost at sea.
It was in 1785 when the Grand Turk, on a second voyage, brought back a cargo of silks, teas, and nankeens from Batavia and China, that "The Independent Chronicle" of London, unconsciously humorous, was moved to affirm that "the Americans have given up all thought of a China trade which can never be carried on to advantage without some settlement in the East Indies." As soon as these new sea-trails had been furrowed by the keels of Elias Hasket Derby, other Salem merchants were quick to follow in a rivalry which left no sea unexplored for virgin markets and 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.