Britain and the United States signed a peace treaty on Christmas Eve 1814. The following spring, outrage at the continuing detention of the Edwin and her crew led the administration in Washington to decide it had had enough of the corsairs. President James Madison and Secretary of State James Monroe co-signed an uncompromising letter to the dey, Hadji Ali:Your Highness having declared war against the United States of America, and made captives of some of their citizens, and done them other injuries without cause, the Congress of the United States at its last session authorised by a deliberate and solemn act, hostilities against your government and people. A squadron of our ships of war is sent into the Mediterranean sea, to give effect to this declaration. It will carry with it the alternative of peace or war. It rests with your government to choose between them.22
Madison made good his threat, dispatching two squadrons of warships to deliver his letter. One of these squadrons, commanded by Commodore Stephen Decatur in the Guerriere and carrying the American consul general for the Barbary states, William Shaler, encountered Hamidou Raïs and the Mashouda at Cabo de Gata on Saturday, June 17, 1815.
Hamidou had been cruising off the Spanish coast that week, in company with a twenty-two-gun brig, the Estedio, which had been taken from the Portuguese some years before. He had just sent the Estedio to reconnoiter farther along the coast (she was run aground near Valencia by the Americans and captured the next afternoon), leaving the Mashouda alone to watch the merchant shipping passing on its way to and from the Straits.
Hamidou initially thought the American warships were British (and hence friendly), even though they were obviously changing course to close the distance between the Mashouda and them. Only when Captain Gordon of the Constellation raised the Stars and Stripes so rashly did the corsair realize what was happening. Immediately he ordered his men to crowd on sail and take evasive action. If the Mashouda could once get clear of the American guns she could give them a run for their money. There was a westerly wind, and Algiers lay 300 miles due east. He could reach home in two days.
The Americans, though eager, were inexperienced. Even before Gordon’s gaffe with the colors, the captain of the squadron’s flagship, the Guerriere, who had never commanded a ship in battle before, broke out the wrong signal, ordering the other ships to “tack and form into line of battle.” If they had obeyed the signal, the Mashouda would have gotten away while they slowly maneuvered into line. They didn’t. On the deck of the Mashouda, Hamidou told his lieutenant that if he died, “you will have me thrown into the sea. I don’t want infidels to have my corpse.”23
Hamidou managed to leave the Constellation behind him, but the Guerriere gained fast, forcing him to change course and double back on himself. In doing so he brought the Mashouda within range of the Constellation’s guns and Gordon opened fire, hitting the Algerian’s upper deck. One of the flying splinters of wood struck Hamidou, hurting him badly, but he refused requests to go below and instead ordered a chair to be placed for him on the upper deck. There he sat, in pain and in plain view, urging his men on.
The Mashouda changed course again and an American sloop, the U.S.S. Ontario, passed her on the port beam and fired a broadside before sailing straight past her, the captain having misjudged his own ship’s momentum. Minutes later the Guerriere maneuvered alongside and fired a broadside from a distance of barely thirty yards. It tore into the Algerian’s upper deck, and Hamidou, who was still shouting orders and encouragement to his men, was killed outright.
Even in the heat of battle, his men obeyed his wishes before surrendering. The last corsair’s broken body was thrown into the sea to save it from being defiled by the infidels.
The American warships arrived in the Bay of Algiers on June 28, 1815, to find that the dey, the devout and authoritarian Hadji Ali, had been murdered by his own Janissaries. So had his successor, Mohammed Khaznadj. (He’d lasted just sixteen days.) The current dey, Omar, was, understandably, feeling insecure, and the presence of a very hostile American squadron didn’t help. Nor did the news that his finest naval commander had just been killed in battle by a hostile foreign power. Commodore Decatur and Consul General William Shaler managed to make Omar’s life even more difficult. They delivered President Madison’s letter—and then presented a series of unprecedented demands. There were to be no more payments to the dey. On the contrary, the Algerian government was expected to pay $10,000 to America as indemnification for the seizure of the Edwin. All American prisoners were to be released immediately. All American property in Algiers was to be restored to its owners. If America and Algiers ever went to war again, captives were to be treated as prisoners of war rather than slaves. In return, Decatur would hand over the Mashouda and the Estedio and their crews. But there was no time for prevarication or retrenchment or even diplomacy. America demanded an immediate response.
The fortifications at Algiers were in a state of disrepair, and the dey’s navy wasn’t strong enough to take on the heavily armed American warships. So Omar had no choice but to cave in. The official Algerian report on the encounter was painfully brief. “Eight American warships met and seized an Algerian frigate and a brig. They then came to Algiers, and when the news of the event spread, peace was concluded.”24
On the surface this was a tremendous victory for the United States. Decatur and Shaler had succeeded where the greatest powers in Europe had failed; and Decatur seized the moment. Acting on his own responsibility, he sailed straight to Tunis, where he demanded and received similar terms and an indemnity of $46,000 from the bey; and then to Tripoli, where Yusuf Pasha agreed to release Christian slaves and to hand over $25,000, which was, he claimed, all the ready money he had. In England, the radical polemicist William Cobbett applauded the United States for its strong action and sneered at Europe’s moral cowardice. “The extirpation of the royal nest of African pirates,” he declared, “is an act which will be recorded in the pages of history to the eternal honor of the American people, while the long endurance of this haughty and barbarous race will for ever reflect disgrace on the nations of Europe.”25
But America underestimated its adversaries. The deys of Algiers had always known how to pick their battles, how to yield when it suited them, and how to fight when they could win. While the American warships sailed for home and a hero’s welcome, Omar began to have second thoughts. When another American squadron arrived off Algiers in March 1816 carrying the treaty, which had now been ratified by the Senate and proclaimed by President Madison, the crew found the Algerians extremely restive and looking for excuses to reopen negotiations on more favorable terms. They considered it “disgraceful to the faithful to humble themselves before Christian dogs,” wrote Oliver Perry, the captain of the U.S.S. Java, the frigate that actually brought the ratified treaty across the Atlantic.26
Omar found his excuse to suspend the new treaty in what he described as America’s breach of faith in failing to return the Estedio as Decatur had promised. The battered Mashouda had been allowed home almost immediately, but the Spanish, who were holding the Algerian brig, showed a marked reluctance to give it up, arguing that it had been captured in Spanish waters. When a Spanish squadron eventually turned up at Algiers with the Estedio in the spring of 1816, Omar promptly announced that it was too late; the United States had broken faith and there was nothing for it but to return to the treaty that the gout-ridden Joseph Donaldson had negotiated back in 1795, complete with its system of annual gifts and payments.
While the United States pondered this awkward turn of events, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli were caught in a greater struggle. In 1807 the British government had abolished the trade in slaves (although not the institution of slavery) throughout the British Empire, and in the years that followed, it brought pressure to bear on other slave-trading nations to follow suit. Abolitionists and antiabolitionists alike were quick to point out the hypocrisy of Britain’s position—how could it be so eager to put a stop to the traffic in black slaves, while it turned a blind eye to the enslavement
of white Christians on the Barbary Coast? Even slave-owning nations like the United States voiced their criticism, oblivious to the inconsistencies of their own position; as far as slave owners like U.S. president Madison were concerned, there was simply no equivalence between the situation of their own black Africans and that of white Christians who were being held by heathens. In May 1816, John Quincy Adams, then the U.S. minister in London, assured the First Lord of the Admiralty, Viscount Melville, that if America had but one-third of Britain’s naval power, “the Christian world should never more hear of tribute, ransom, or slavery to the African barbarians.”27
As it happened, only a few moments after Adams made this remark he was called in to see Viscount Castlereagh, the British foreign secretary, who informed him that a naval force commanded by Admiral Lord Exmouth was at that very moment anchored off Algiers. Exmouth’s instructions were to negotiate a peace on behalf of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Sardinia (which now also controlled Genoa); to point out that the Ionian Islands now belonged to Britain, which put them off-limits to corsairs; and to advise Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli “of the rising indignation of Europe against their mode of warfare, and to advise them to abandon it and to resort to more creditable resources for the support of their Government.”28
Exmouth’s expedition was a partial success. Tunis and Tripoli were both persuaded to abolish Christian slavery completely and, in the event of a future war with Christian states, to treat captives as prisoners of war. Between them, both cities agreed to free around a thousand Neapolitans and Sicilians, although the admiral had to pay for them. He was given a further 400 Sardinians and Genoese at no extra charge.
His experience at Algiers was less happy. Omar agreed to hand over forty Sardinian subjects at a price of 500 Spanish dollars a head, and a thousand Neapolitans at 1,000 dollars a head. He also agreed to pay a ransom of 500 Spanish dollars a head for eight Algerian slaves being held at Genoa. (Let’s not forget that the Barbary states were the victims of slaving raids as well as the perpetrators.) But slavery was still vital to the Algerian economy, and Omar refused point-blank to end the enslavement of Christians. Exmouth and his aides were jostled by an angry mob on his way back to the harbor; the British consul general was arrested with his wife, daughter, and sister-in-law; and the consulate was overrun and occupied by armed men.
After a standoff in which both sides prepared to fight, Exmouth decided he couldn’t commence hostilities against Algiers without authority from his government. Finally Omar agreed to send ambassadors to London and to Istanbul to discuss the British demands, and Exmouth and his fleet went home.
They found the British public up in arms. While Exmouth was still in Algiers and the tension between him and the dey was at its height, Omar had sent orders to arrest two communities of Italian coral fishermen who lived on the coast at Bona, near the Tunisian border, and at Oran, 200 miles west of Algiers. Both groups were technically under British protection. Omar had second thoughts and countermanded the orders, but his new orders arrived too late for the group at Bona, who were celebrating an Ascension Day Mass on the shore when the Janissaries arrived. They tried to resist arrest and in the ensuing fight a hundred were hacked to death and as many more were wounded.
The Bona massacre outraged public opinion in Britain, galvanized the British government into action, and sealed Algiers’s fate. On August 26, 1816, Lord Exmouth was back in the Bay of Algiers at the head of a formidable fleet of battleships, frigates, and bomb-ketches, reinforced by a Dutch squadron that had asked to take part in a joint operation. “The whole western horizon,” wrote William Shaler, who was watching from the U.S. consulate, “is covered with vessels of war.”29 The Algerians were ready for them: Omar had 40,000 soldiers manning the shore batteries and waiting to board any ship that came close enough, and there was a fleet of thirty-seven gunboats just inside the mole, waiting to attack.
The next morning at eleven o’clock one of Exmouth’s officers handed an ultimatum to the Algerian captain of the port, demanding the release of all Christian slaves, the abolition of Christian slavery, and the repayment of the ransom money that had been paid over in May. The captain was told that Omar had three hours to respond and no more. At two o’clock the officer returned. No answer had been received.
This was the signal for Exmouth’s flagship, the 108-gun Queen Charlotte , to move slowly toward the shore, closer and closer, until she was barely a hundred yards from the mole, which was crowded with Algerian troops. The other battleships followed her in. Exmouth’s pilot steered the Charlotte into position with her starboard broadside facing the shore batteries. She anchored by the stern and the crew gave three loud cheers. It was three o’clock.
For a moment there was nothing but silence and the sound of timbers creaking and water lapping. Then a flash from one of the shore batteries, followed by a loud crack and the whiz of a shot sailing past the Charlotte. “Stand by!” called Exmouth. A second shot rang out. He gave the order to fire, and the walls of Algiers shook at the sound of hell breaking loose. The Algerians fought back, and they fought hard. The British 104-gun Impregnable, which was slightly out of position and exposed to fire from the heaviest batteries, was hit 233 times, and fifty of its crew were killed. And soon after the bombardment began, the Algerian gunboats sped out from the smoke that lay over the mole and made straight for the Queen Charlotte and the frigate Leander, which was nearby. “With a daring which deserved a better fate,”30 the boat crews intended to board them both. Before they could come close enough, the Leander directed its guns downward and fired on them to terrible effect. Thirty of the thirty-seven gunboats were sunk.
By nightfall the Anglo-Dutch fleet had poured 50,000 shots into Algiers, more than 500 tons of iron. The bomb-ketches, stationed right out to sea, lobbed 960 shells over the ramparts and into the city. William Shaler, whose consulate was blown to pieces around him, described the scene:The spectacle at this moment [it was now midnight] is peculiarly grand and sublime. A black thunderstorm is rising, probably an effect of the long cannonade; its vivid lightning discovers the hostile fleets retiring with the land breeze, and paints them in strong relief on the deep obscurity of the horizon.31
Shells and rockets streamed across the horizon, and there was still the desultory thud of cannon fire from those ships within range, answered by shots from what remained of the Algerian shore batteries.
Taking stock that night, the fleet’s surgeons counted 141 men killed and 742 wounded. Lord Exmouth had the skirt of his coat torn off by a passing cannonball and received cuts to his face, hand, and thigh. The Algerians initially reckoned their losses at about 600 dead and wounded, a figure later revised to 2,000.
As the bomb-ketches moved into position at dawn the next day to resume their bombardment, it became obvious that Algiers couldn’t take much more. Her navy was destroyed: in addition to the thirty gunboats that the Leander had sunk, Exmouth noted that his ships had sunk or burned four large frigates, five large corvettes, and several merchant brigs and schooners. On the quays and around the city, walls had been breached or completely destroyed, houses were smashed to pieces, batteries were out of commission. “Every part of the town appears to have suffered from shot and shells,” wrote Shaler. “Lord Exmouth holds the fate of Algiers in his hands.”32
Before resuming operations Exmouth sent another letter to Omar under a flag of truce. It was uncompromising:Sir,
For your atrocities at Bona, on defenseless Christians, and your unbecoming disregard of the demands I made yesterday, in the name of the Prince Regent of England, the fleet under my orders has given you a signal chastisement, by the total destruction of your navy, storehouses, and arsenal, with half your batteries.
As England does not war for the destruction of cities, I am unwilling to visit your personal cruelties upon the inoffensive inhabitants of the country, and therefore offer you the same terms of peace which I conveyed to you yesterday in my sovereign’s name. Without the acceptance of these terms, you
can have no peace with England.33
Omar surrendered later that day.
Exmouth’s bombardment marked the beginning of the end for piracy on the Barbary Coast. Unable to defend itself, Algeria ratified the disputed treaty with the United States in December 1816, although Omar insisted that the Americans should provide him with a certificate stating he had signed under compulsion. He struggled to maintain his authority in Algiers for another eight months, but an outbreak of plague added to a general feeling that he was somehow cursed, and in the summer of 1817 his Janissaries confirmed it by strangling him.
At the 1818 Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle, the European powers debated ways of stamping out the corsairs completely; although they couldn’t agree on a resolution, Prince Metternich of Austria and the other heads of state did agree that Britain and France should send a joint squadron to warn the Barbary states “that the unavoidable consequence of their perseverance in a system hostile to peaceful commerce, would be a general league among the powers of Europe . . . which might eventually affect their very existence.”34
As it turned out, their very existence was more profoundly affected by the greed and ambition of Europe.
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