Perilous Fight

by Stephen Budiansky

  There were still a few yards to go when the Tripolitans realized at last that something was wrong. A cry went up from the guard on the frigate’s deck. “Americanos! Americanos!” The captain of the guard hailed Catalano and asked if there were any Americans on board; Catalano replied they were only Italians and Englishmen. Again the guard shouted a warning, and the Tripolitan captain, now convinced, shouted out an order to cut the line. The strain of keeping up the pretense suddenly became too much for the Maltese pilot: Catalano cried out to Decatur, “Board, Captain, board!”

  Decatur’s booming voice responded at once with a peremptory command that froze every man in his spot: “No order to be obeyed but that of the commanding officer!”

  A few more agonizing seconds passed as the last gap closed. Then, leaping onto the frigate’s main chains, Decatur shouted, “Board!”23

  “Not a man had been seen or heard to breathe a moment before,” recalled Heermann, the surgeon’s mate who had begged to be included on the mission; “at the next, the boarders hung on the ship’s side like cluster bees; and, in another instant, every man was on board the frigate.”

  Morris had leapt at the same moment as Decatur, an instant before the actual order to board was given, and happened to reach the deck first, all apparently unbeknownst to Decatur. Morris turned just in time to see Decatur coming over the rail with his sword arm lifted, ready to strike him; Morris shouted the watchword—“Philadelphia”—just in time to avoid becoming the first, self-inflicted casualty of the operation.

  Several of the guards promptly leapt over the opposite rail and swam the short distance to shore; others got aboard a boat and fled. But a few turned to fight, and the minutes that followed were pure butchery. To avoid spreading the alarm, no firearms were used; it was all stabbing and slashing at close quarters, the dead heaved over the side when it was done.

  But the whooping and screaming of the Tripolitans had spread the alarm nonetheless, and a hail of musket fire began from two xebecs lying near. Decatur sent a rocket arcing into the sky to signal the Syren that the Philadelphia had been taken; it was answered by a cannonade from the castle and the other batteries around the harbor.

  The boarding party had been divided into teams, each under a lieutenant and each assigned a part of the ship to set afire; watching from the Intrepid, where he had dutifully remained, Heermann saw the frigate’s gun deck “all of a sudden beautifully illuminated” by the lanterns the men carried as they moved to their stations. Then Decatur was on the deck, making his way forward to aft, shouting the command “Fire!” down each hatchway, and in a minute billows of smoke and flame were pouring from every corner of the ship. Decatur was the last to get off, “literally followed by the flames,” Heermann said.24

  As the fire ran up the rigging and set the tops ablaze, the Intrepid’s men, now giddy with their triumph, stood transfixed at the spectacular “bonfire”—and more than a bit oblivious to the extreme danger they were still in. In approaching the Philadelphia, they had deliberately placed themselves on the lee side to ease their getaway; now the bow was shoved off and the jib set, but the huge draft created by the fire repeatedly drew the ketch back in, and her main boom became entangled with the large ship’s quarter gallery. The men were still noisily laughing and clowning when a furious Decatur leapt atop the companionway, drew his sword, and announced he would cut down the first man who made another sound. That promptly restored order. The boats were got out to tow the bow around, the sweeps were manned, and slowly and laboriously the ketch was brought off and the land breeze began to carry her out to sea. A single cannonball passed through the ketch’s topgallant sail, but the fire from the shore was otherwise mercifully inaccurate. There had been no loss of life and but a single casualty among the Intrepid’s crew.

  At eleven o’clock the men aboard the Syren saw the blazing tops of the frigate’s masts fall over, and at midnight the fire burned through her cables and she drifted slowly ashore in the direction of the pasha’s castle. Then, as the flames and heat reached her guns, they went off one after another, a derisory ghostly cannonade taking the Americans’ final revenge, a few of the shots actually striking the castle walls.

  By six the next morning the Syren and the Intrepid were forty miles to sea. They could still see the glow of the burning ship on the horizon.25

  THE DESTRUCTION of the Philadelphia brought a rare moment of relief to the agonizing apprehensions that had weighed on Captain William Bainbridge since surrendering his ship in October. In the house in Tripoli where the officers of the Philadelphia were being held, they were awakened the night of Decatur’s raid by “a most hideous yelling and screaming from one end of the town to the other,” mingled with a “thundering of cannon from the castle.” Opening a window, they were able to look out to the harbor and see the frigate ablaze. “A most sublime sight,” Bainbridge wrote, “and very gratifying to us.”

  The next morning a strong guard appeared at the door. The pasha, who had watched the entire spectacle from a front-row seat in his own quarters overlooking the harbor, was said to be in a rage. The Philadelphia’s surgeon’s mate, Jonathan Cowdery, was curtly informed he would no longer be permitted to tend to the sick members of the crew or any of the other patients in the city that he had been treating, including the pasha’s own daughter. There were rumors the officers would be moved to the castle; or, as Bainbridge put it, “what they call a Castle, which in fact was a most loathsome prison.”26

  But most of these shows of displeasure abated almost as soon as they had arisen. Despite Preble’s pangs back in December as he contemplated Bainbridge’s captivity—a “slave, treated in the most cruel manner”—the Philadelphia’s officers had, in fact, enjoyed considerable freedom and privileges since they had landed in the pasha’s hands, and that was not about to change for the very simple reason that, as the pasha very well knew, they were literally worth their weight in gold. The officers had been allowed to take up residence in the spacious house previously occupied by the last American consul in Tripoli before the war began. The Danish consul was allowed to visit them every day and supplied them with bedding and arranged for credit with local moneylenders. After signing a pledge that they would not attempt to escape, the prisoners were eventually allowed to stroll around the town and even the countryside; Cowdery was regularly invited to visit the pasha’s gardens and often left loaded down with baskets of oranges, figs, dates, pomegranates, and olives, gifts from the pasha and his ministers.

  The initial indignities of the first hours after their capture—they were stripped of their money, uniforms, and swords; their pockets were searched; even their boots were pulled off to see if anything of value had been concealed there—still rankled, all the more when they saw the local citizens parading around in their clothes, and even more when the local clothes dealers showed up to offer them back at an exorbitant price. But all in all it was not a terribly arduous captivity for the officers.27

  What really made life a burden to Captain Bainbridge was the dread of what would become of his honor and reputation. “My situation in prison is entirely supportable,” he wrote his wife the day after the disaster, “… but if my professional character be blotched—if an attempt be made to taint my honour—if I am censured, if it does not kill me, it would at least deprive me of the power of looking any of my race in the face.” So maddened was he at moments by contemplating the loss of “the beautiful frigate which was placed under my command,” he said, “that I cannot refrain from exclaiming that it would have been a merciful dispensation of Providence if my head had been shot off by the enemy, while our vessel lay rolling on the rocks.”28

  Bainbridge once referred to himself as “the Child of Adversity,” and this was not the first humiliation he had suffered in his naval career.29 In 1798, during the Quasi War, he had surrendered without a shot his very first command, the eighteen-gun schooner Retaliation, to two French frigates that he had embarrassingly mistaken for British vessels he had spoken the day before
and carelessly approached. Two years later he had suffered the torment of having to carry tribute to the dey of Algiers under the terms of the treaty the United States had accepted as cheaper than building a navy that could resist the Barbary corsairs’ depredations on American merchantmen. After unloading a shipment of guns, lumber, nails, and other supplies in Algiers, Bainbridge was summoned by the dey and told he must now run an additional errand with his warship. The dey needed to send his ambassador to Constantinople, along with a retinue of a hundred followers, a hundred black slaves, four horses, a hundred and fifty sheep, twenty-five horned cattle, four lions, four tigers, four antelopes, and twelve parrots, a lavish tribute that the dey hoped would restore his good graces with the sultan, with whom he was just at the moment out of favor. The humiliation was completed by the dey’s insistence that Bainbridge’s ship, the George Washington, a thirty-two-gun converted merchantman, fly the Algerian flag on this mission. When Bainbridge balked, the dey hinted that the only alternative was war. “You can, my friends, see how unpleasantly I am situated,” Bainbridge wrote William Jones and Samuel Clarke, old friends from Philadelphia, owners of a merchant shipping partnership he had sailed for in his days as a very young merchant captain. “If I go it will take a period of six months and for that space of time I shall be in the worst of purgatories, having two hundred infidels on board, being in a country where the United States is not known, no person to call on in case of emergency and not able to speak the language in a land where the plague ravishes and at the mercy of Devils.” The day of his departure, the George Washington’s log recorded, “The pendant of the United States was struck and the Algerian Flag hoisted on the Main top Gallant royal head mast … some tears fell at this Instance of national Humility.”30

  But Bainbridge had a streak of bullying self-pity that had served him well in the past, and it did not take long for him to put it to use again in this latest humiliation. He had all of Decatur’s pride and vanity and touchy sense of honor with none of his dash; he was not a handsome man, with a rectangular head, heavy jowls, a florid complexion, thick lips, a deeply cleft chin, and a pugnacious air. Even Bainbridge’s admirers noted his “vehemence” and how when one of his “fierce” storms came over him he could barely speak, caught in a stammer that sounded like he was saying “unto unto unto” before he could get his words out.31

  In only one of his letters following the loss of the Philadelphia did Bainbridge even come close to admitting responsibility for the disaster. He acknowledged to Preble that if he had not sent the schooner Vixen away a week before (on what he surely should have known was an ill-advised wild goose chase: two Tripolitan men-of-war were rumored to be somewhere on a cruise, but the report Bainbridge received from a passing merchant brig did not even say where they might be), it might have been possible to prevent the calamity.32 The Vixen could easily have come to his aid and helped tow the frigate off the rocks.

  After that he became ever more stridently self-justifying, demanding to friends that they write back and reassure him he was not to blame. “Striking on the Rocks was an accident not possible for me to guard against,” he wrote Preble. The shoal was not marked on any charts. He had done “every thing” in his power to get the ship off: backing the sails, lightening the bows by throwing most of the guns overboard, finally cutting the foremast clear away; it was, however, “impossible.” Attempting to fight off the Tripolitan gunboats “would be only a sacrificing [of] lives without effecting our enemy or rendering the least service to Our Country … a want of courage can never be imputed when there is no chance of resistance.” The embarrassing fact that the Tripolitans had floated the frigate off the shoal forty hours later “adds to our calamity, but … we feel some consolation in knowing that it is not the first instance where ships have been from necessity (of running aground) oblidged to surrender, and afterwards got off by the enemy … witness the Hannibal at Algesiras, the Jason off St. Maloes, and several others.”33

  No doubt at Bainbridge’s behest, the officers of the Philadelphia quickly closed ranks too, drawing up and sending to their captain a memorial on the first day of their captivity assuring him of their “highest and most sincere respect,” their “full approbation of your conduct,” and vouching that “every exertion was made … which either courage or abilities could have dictated.” But some of their consciences were far from clear over their own responsibility for the loss of the ship, which likely explained the eagerness to embrace Bainbridge’s assurances that it had been an unavoidable “accident.” Lieutenant David Porter had apparently urged Bainbridge repeatedly to continue the chase and insisted they were in no danger, even though they had no pilot aboard who knew the local waters; the moment the ship struck the reef, reported one of the ship’s men, Porter had turned as white as a sheet.34

  Bainbridge importuned friends to send copies of American newspapers, and soon after the first reports of the Philadelphia’s loss reached the United States in March 1804, the American press had indeed rallied to Bainbridge’s support. The Republican newspapers hastened to absolve blame anywhere by labeling it “one of those inevitable misfortunes which no human foresight could have seen,” the Federalist prints equally acquitting the ship’s officers as they rushed to use the event to pillory the Jefferson administration for its “miserable, starveling, niggardly species of economy which by saving a dollar ruins a nation.”35

  AS ALWAYS, the common sailors had a different story to tell; from the start they had loathed their captain and were far from convinced that he had done all he might have to resist capture.

  They had also suffered a brutality in captivity that the officers escaped. The 283 crewmen were confined in a stone warehouse outside the castle that measured eighty by twenty-five feet—seven square feet to a man—with a rough dirt floor and a small grated skylight the only source of light or air. Accounts published afterward by one of the captives, William Ray, a marine private, recounted vicious beatings by the guards. A favorite was the bastinado on the bare soles of the feet: the prisoner would be thrown on his back, his ankles bound together and raised so the soles were nearly horizontal, and then two men, each armed with a three-foot bamboo staff as thick as a walking stick, would roll up their sleeves and swing down on the bottoms of the victim’s feet with all their might.

  The officers whiled away their days at the consul’s house with books and other diversions. A few days after their arrival Bainbridge ordered Porter to organize what he called “the College of Students,” instructing the midshipmen each day after breakfast in navigation and naval tactics. The Danish consul supplied the American officers with a volume of collected plays, which they proceeded to stage complete with scenery and costumes they set to work building and sewing. The crew meanwhile was set to hard labor, hauling three-ton stones in hand-pulled carts, boring cannons, unloading casks of gunpowder and supplies from the frigate, shoveling out an old wreck buried in the sand of the beach as they worked up to their armpits in the cold surf. Their diet was little more than bread, olive oil, and couscous.36

  Like the officers, the men had openly rejoiced in the success of Decatur’s raid; unlike the officers, they suffered the full force of the pasha’s humiliated rage. Ray recounted what happened next:

  Early in the morning, and much earlier than usual, our prison doors were unbolted, and the keepers … rushed in amongst us and began to beat every one they could see, spitting in our faces and hissing like the serpents of hell. We could not suppress our emotions, nor disguise our joy … which exasperated them more and more, so that every boy we met in the streets would spit on us and pelt us with stones; our tasks were doubled, our bread withheld, and every driver exercised cruelties tenfold more rigid and intolerable than before.37

  But Ray’s bitterest recollections were of the indifference Bainbridge and the other officers showed for the men’s plight. “At numerous times, when we were on the very brink of starvation, and petitioned Captain Bainbridge for some part of our pay or rations, he invariably gave
us to understand that it was entirely out of his power to do anything for us,” Ray wrote. The men resorted to petitioning Preble, and even the pasha, directly, and with more success (the pasha agreed to provide barrels of pork unloaded from the frigate to supplement the men’s meager rations).38

  Soon after their arrival the men had been questioned closely by the pasha’s admiral about the circumstances of the ship’s surrender. Murad Reis was a character who would have been scarcely credible on the pages of a novel. Born in Scotland, he was originally known as Peter Lisle. In his younger years he had traveled to New England, where he developed a strong aversion to America and Americans; then in 1796 he took passage on a schooner out of Boston that was captured by Tripolitan marauders when it reached the Mediterranean. Seizing opportunity with remarkable panache, Lisle proceeded in quick succession to convert to Islam, marry the pasha’s sister, talk the pasha into declaring war against America, and assume personal command of the captured schooner, now fitted out as a twenty-six-gun man-of-war in the Tripolitan navy.

  The “renegade Scotchman,” as the Americans called him, asked the men bluntly whether their captain was “a coward, or a traitor”: Reis said he had to be one or the other. Reis went on to express incredulity that the Americans had given up so easily. They might have known the frigate would float off the rocks as soon as the wind shifted, Reis pointed out; they might have realized that he had no intention of trying to board a frigate manned by three hundred well-armed men, or risk destroying such a valuable potential prize by firing his guns at the hull.

  It was a telling point. While Bainbridge did order the ship scuttled and the magazine drowned, the flag was struck before the work was finished, and the Tripolitans, when they rushed aboard, were quickly able to plug the leaks. At a very minimum he could have played for time. And Ray noted that the crew was more than willing to fight; the only damage the Tripolitan gunboats had done up to the moment of the frigate’s surrender was to the rigging and sails: they were deliberately aiming high. “The man who was at the ensign halyards positively refused to obey the captain’s orders, when he was ordered to lower the flag,” Ray recalled. “He was threatened to be run through and a midshipman seized the halyards, and executed the command, to the general murmuring of the crew.” Ray also noted that Bainbridge had impatiently spurned the suggestion of the ship’s boatswain to try kedging the ship off by hauling in a line from an anchor cast astern, which might well have worked. But, as Ray bitterly observed, Bainbridge had once told a seaman, “You have no right to think”; that attitude seemed to be his guiding rule in this case as well.39