The Shores of Tripoli

by James L. Haley

  “Well worth the risk.” Bliven bowed slightly back to Mrs. Brace even as they walked. “Apart from your Carolinians, your lawyers really don’t seem like such a terrible lot,” he said. “Mr. Reeve’s school is quite famous for producing the best lawyers in the country, is it not?”

  “Mr. Vice President Burr is a graduate,” she said, as though she disagreed. “Is he an example you would choose for honor and integrity?”

  Bliven chuckled. “Well, no. But, correct me if I am wrong, did not the abolition of slavery in New England come about because of Mr. Reeve?”

  They reached the vined bower with a stone bench beneath it. At his gesture she took the seat and he stood, one foot on the step and his hands clasped behind him—a pose that he had practiced in the mirror and knew that it showed his uniform to best advantage, and also showed his profile to the back door so that Mrs. Brace would know he was not attempting any liberties.

  “It did, yes,” she admitted. She was surprised he was so well informed. “Is the evil of slavery a concern of yours?”

  “Well, ma’am, a sailor at sea has little time for philosophical matters, but when I do think about it, I dislike it and disapprove of it, yes.”

  She had almost forgotten he was a sailor. “Surely it is not a philosophical exercise. It is a matter of daily cruelty and injustice for thousands, for hundreds of thousands, of human beings in a country that claims to be a beacon of freedom.”

  “I would pay money to hear you say that to your friend, Mr. Calhoun.”

  “I would not waste my breath. Do you think me dreadful?” she asked.

  “Hardly. Your candor does you credit, I think, and is surely good for your health. I mean, if there is ever in the land some disease caused by nervous timidity, you shall never suffer from it.”

  She laughed, suddenly and heartily. “And you? Do you know any other Carolinians who could have prepared you for their peculiarities?”

  “Yes, I do know one. He was my friend and fellow midshipman when I first sailed on the Enterprise.”

  “And how did you find him?”

  “Hot-headed. Always knows best. Has trouble taking in the opinions of others.”

  Clarity nodded.

  “And in fairness I should add he says the very same things of me.”

  “Accurately?” she asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Yet you called him your friend.”

  Bliven paused to assess the deeper meanings of the term. “Yes. There was no one more reliable in a fight.” He omitted that they had tried to kill each other and had been compelled to swear their friendship to each other.

  Bliven inclined his head toward the school. “What do they teach you in there?”

  “English, literature, history—the history is fierce. Miss Pierce has compiled her own text of world history, in four volumes. Nothing easy about that, let me tell you. Miss Pierce is of the opinion that mothers are their children’s first teachers, and they should be educated to the equal degree as their husbands.”

  Bliven knew that was a controversial doctrine, advocated by some strong-minded New England women. “She’s right.”

  “You think so?”

  “On board ship, I have to hide my books. Junior officers are supposed to be all fight, fight, fight. But fighting must be for a reason. History teaches the reasons, I think.”

  “My family,” said Clarity, “pays a surcharge above the tuition for me to study art, and French, and needlework. And Reverend Beecher comes over from East Hampton to lecture on religion several times a year. The Beechers and the Pierces are great friends.” She paused, unsure of her ground. “Are sailors religious?”

  “Have you ever been in a storm at sea?”

  “No.”

  “Let me assure you, nothing will lead you quicker to believe in God.”

  She turned suddenly serious. “Are we to become friends, Lieutenant Putnam?”

  “As I stand here breathing, I do hope so.” Even as he said it, he felt the barrier rising that separates sailors from sweethearts. He had not experienced it yet, but he had heard of it often from older men, and here it was. “But Miss Marsh”—he paused for breath—“I must tell you, the war against the pirates is not over. I have received my orders. I leave for Boston in three days’ time. My ship sails in two weeks.”

  “Oh! Are you such a sailor, then? ‘Enchanted to meet you, ma’am,’” she mimicked. “‘How very charming you are, ma’am.’ ‘Perhaps I shall see you again in two years’ time.’ Ha! Ha!”

  “Oh, it would be just one year, more like.”

  “Oh!” She was unmoved.

  “No, really, the enlisted sailors only sign up for a year at a time. Well,” he said more gently, “I can see you are not a young lady to pine away, waiting for her man to come home. But I should be very sorry to think that I have wasted your time today.”

  “You have not.”

  “May I write to you?”

  She lifted her head. “Yes. We should go back inside.” She rose and descended; he walked beside her, hands still clasped behind him. “Will you be in danger?” she asked.

  “As wars go? Oh, I think not. Corsairs have only guns enough to take unarmed merchantmen. They could never stand up to our frigates, or even the sloops; I should be surprised if they dare try.” It was better that she not know, at least not yet, that when the crew of the Tripoli tried twice to board the Enterprise after first striking their colors, Bliven had himself fought desperately with saber and pistol, and had himself accounted for two of the Berbers’ twenty fatalities. He had not even told his parents of that, nor of the surprise in a man’s eyes when he looks at you knowing you have killed him. Bliven reasoned that if he had no conscience, it would not haunt him, but it did haunt him, and would until he could share it with someone.

  “Well,” said Clarity, “will you write me about your adventures? Perhaps I can write a novel about you.”

  “What, you want to be a novelist?” He feigned shock. “Do your parents know this?”

  “Are you going to betray me?”

  “And miss being in it?” he teased. “Never.” They had reached the front steps. “But if you publish a novel,” he said, “being about my adventures, we must share the money.”

  She extended her hand. “Done.”

  He took it. “Well, in my time I have known a Charity or two, but never a Clarity.”

  “Indeed.” She pressed his hand with unexpected earnestness. “What a poor, muddled life you must have lived to have never known Clarity.”

  “Yes, I do confess I begin to think so.”

  After they took hands he stepped back and bowed, and she dropped into a curtsy, but his eyes never left hers.

  5.

  DUNGEONS OF THE WHITE CITY

  November 1801

  The sharp defeat of the Tripoli, and the regular presence in the Mediterranean of American ships ten times the size and firepower of the Berber polaccas, led to a sudden quiet in that sea. American merchantmen began venturing once more out of Spanish and Italian ports without waiting for escort by a warship. Though some captains were more wary than others, trade, by and large, resumed.

  Joseph Barnes sat writing at the small table in the best cabin—although in a three-hundred-ton brig, having the best accommodation did not imply luxury. To say it was adequate met the case.

  The morning began with a favorable wind off the port quarter, but during the day, as the Mary Lovejoy plowed through the blue Mediterranean a hundred miles north of Algiers, it increased and came more from the north, forcing the captain to haul in closer to keep his course. The crewmen looked northward, and smelled and studied. A chill wind on a warm autumn day, all trace of haze blown away, leaving the sky clear as crystal: It was from a mistral, no doubt about it. It must be roaring out to sea off the French coast to be felt this far out, pushing th
e sea into six-foot swells. Now the ship was near broadside to them, rolling obliquely. His daughter Rebecca, fifteen, lay seasick in the next cabin.

  It was not easy to write through the ship’s lurching and heaving, but Barnes dipped his pen again. Newly accredited, the United States consul to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was composing his response to the welcome he expected to receive from the king as they established formal ties. The kingdom had proven herself a steadfast friend in aiding America’s conflict with the Berber pirate states of North Africa. Although they still called it the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, once Napoleon had placed his brother Joseph on the throne in Naples the Italians were down to really only one proper Sicily, the island, with the capital of Palermo lying perhaps seven days east across the open Mediterranean.

  Barnes thought the captain a timid man. Wilfred Hawley had wanted to take a much longer route, calling at Barcelona and Marseilles and Leghorn, but Barnes wielded his authority as the owner’s business partner to insist that they run straight east from Cartagena. Their company had never lost a ship to the Barbary pirates, and with a favoring wind, Barnes calculated that their swift brig could not be caught.

  Directly over Barnes’s head on the quarterdeck, Hawley stalked back and forth, worrying. The captain of the Mary Lovejoy was a short man with a powerful chest and a round face, his smooth-shaved cheeks framed by beard on his chin and jowls. He squinted into the wind, studying. If it shifted even a point more to the east, he would risk being blown too far south to make the straight, safe north coast of Sicily. If he was forced south into the Sicilian Strait, he would have to work around the whole island, exposing himself to the pirates from Tunis and Tripoli. Hawley did not like it; the summer mistral never blew for more than a day, but this was not of the summer variety. This one might become stronger yet.

  Barnes worked through the afternoon, entering his daughter’s cabin at intervals to check on her. Rebecca was miserable but stoic. He hoped she would develop some poise and polish in Italy, and find diversion from her unhappiness back in Virginia. It was apparent that she would not be pretty, and occasionally she hurled thunderbolts of her mother’s foul disposition. Perhaps Palermo, and Naples if it was recaptured, would give her a chance to cultivate a happier direction.

  Writing at his table, Barnes jumped at the concussion of a cannon shot, not from their own deck and not close, followed by running and shouting and cursing from the deck above him. He rested his pen in the inkwell, tied up his cravat, put on his coat, and made a quick check in the mirror. He was forty-eight, tall, with curly, iron-gray hair. Not a sailor, he ascended the ladder carefully. By the time Barnes reached the quarterdeck, the captain had ordered sails trimmed back to only the topsails and they had slowed to where they just had steerage. “Here, Hawley!” he demanded. “What is all this?”

  “Well, I hope you’re happy now,” growled the captain. Handing his glass to Barnes, he pointed off the starboard quarter. Barnes raised the glass to his eye and saw, a thousand yards out, an exotic-looking ship approaching, low-cut and lateen-rigged. “That, my greedy master, is an Algerine xebec. A pirate ship.”

  Barnes looked fitfully up at the sails. “Are you mad? You can outrun them!”

  “Not a chance. In this wind the only way to open a distance would be to run straight south, and that would take us on a line to Algiers, which they would think rather funny, wouldn’t they?”

  “You’re not going to surrender!” roared Barnes.

  “I am.”

  “I forbid it!” Barnes gesticulated at four small, shrouded cannons on the Mary Lovejoy’s deck. “Is there not a reason this ship is called an armed merchantman?”

  “Oh, yes,” Hawley said grandly. “I have four guns; they have twelve or fourteen. I have twenty-two lazy merchant sailors who might give an account of themselves in a tavern brawl; they have eighty to a hundred trained fighters. Lateen sails—they can make double our speed hauling this close to the wind. We are done, Mr. Barnes! I am going to surrender and do whatever I have to do to keep my head attached to my shoulders. Now, you had best get below and break the news to your daughter that she is going to be spending a few months in Algiers before she gets to Italy.”

  “Good God!”

  “When they board us,” said Hawley, “I will tell them that you are an important American diplomat and that you will be well ransomed. You won’t be harmed, but hear me now, and make no mistake: If you resist they will kill you.”

  Barnes thrust the glass back in the captain’s hand and stormed back to the ladder; the captain just heard him mutter “Coward” as he disappeared. And Barnes just heard the words “Pompous ass” follow him below.

  He forbids it, thought Hawley. Silly man, who is he to forbid anything? There is no rank where we are going. Hawley had been in Algiers before, and had seen the bagnios, the crumbling, fortified baths on the quays where captive sailors were held like goats in a pen when they were not chained together and used as slave labor by the dey or those he favored. Immediately out of the same hatch came a crewman, who approached the captain bearing a white bedsheet taken from Hawley’s cabin. “Bring down our colors,” ordered Hawley with resignation. “Run them back up with this above them. Jump to it, now.”

  “Aye, sir.” Then the sailor hesitated and turned. “Sir, what’s to happen to us?”

  “I expect we will be locked up with the other American hostages in Algiers. But no fear, the owner is rich, we will be ransomed.” The sailor turned to his task, and Hawley thought, Damn the owner, and damn this ship.

  The Mary Lovejoy was Boston-built to the specifications of her owner, Franklin Lovejoy, the wealthy merchant. He had been particular in his preference for brigs to carry his cargoes. Brigs were square-rigged and fast running before the wind, never mind that she was slow and cumbersome in tacking or hauling. Mary Lovejoy was also fat and deep, her large hold too ambitious for her size. It was a fault committed at Lovejoy’s insistence, for he meant her to carry every possible ton of cargo short of sinking her—lumber, sugar, rum—whatever needed transport from one wharf to another. Her too-great beam had caused the keel to hog by several inches over the years, as the weight of the bow and stern pulled down against the buoyant midships. Warned that one day she would mount a swell and her back would break, Lovejoy settled on a simple remedy: Keep the hold well ballasted with profitable cargo and the problem would correct itself. He had a knack for making money, Hawley allowed, but he cared little for the stresses on a ship’s timbers. Or the dangers run by his crews, damn him.

  • • •

  BELOWDECKS, Barnes rapped twice softly before entering Rebecca’s cabin. She was awake as he sat on the edge of her berth and laid his hand on her forehead. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not as awful as before, thank you, Papa. What is all the commotion?”

  He held her hand in both his own. “Becky, I want you to prepare yourself. You have to be very brave. We are going to be, well, diverted. We are not going to Palermo just yet. We are going to Algiers.”

  She took this in for a few seconds, that Algiers could mean only one thing. “Is it pirates?”

  “Yes, I am afraid it is.”

  Her breath quickened. “Have we been boarded?”

  “No. Not for twenty or thirty minutes yet.”

  She assimilated the news for nearly a minute and then nodded. “Go back to your cabin, Papa. I will get dressed and come to you.” As soon as he was gone, she peeled back the covers and got to her feet, but then immediately sat back on the mattress as the ship’s roll toppled her backward. She looked about the cabin, assessing what, if they were taken off the ship, she would need to take with her. She saw two novels lying on the table, and as she stared at them she realized that her father could not have been more wrong about her in his exhortation to be brave. She felt no fear at all. To hell with silly novels, she thought. She was about to live an adventure of her own. She felt app
rehension, to be sure, but that only sharpened her determination to breathe in each moment of it.

  Her only jewels were two rings and a small brooch, better not to wear and show them. There was no time to sew them into her clothing, as she had read a wise hostage would do, so she poked them down her stockings. And she had a small locket on a gold chain, which held a curl of her mother’s hair. That she would wear. She thought if they took it, they might be satisfied and not search her further. She tied back her long brown hair and pulled on a green muslin dress, packed a small bandbox with her toiletries and as many clothes as would fit, and went to her father’s cabin.

  The remarkable thing about taking the Mary Lovejoy was the lack of violence; it was, if anything, businesslike. The corsair captain, whose name was Achmed Faisal, inquired into what cargo they were carrying, and upon learning that it was rice and sugar, burst out laughing and remarked how polite it was of them to bring their own rations into captivity.

  From their cabin, Barnes and his daughter heard activity overhead, but nothing in any detail, and both leapt to their feet when the cabin door was kicked in. In rushed a large Berber, with no turban and almost Western in dress but for the looseness of his blouse, and wielding a scimitar. Seeing there were only two in the cabin, he advanced, the sword ready.

  Rebecca’s nerve deserted her and she buried her face in the breast of Barnes’s coat. “My God, they’re going to kill us! Papa!”

  Barnes looked over his daughter’s brown curls and saw the Berber raise his sword, but upon finding them unarmed, he stood up straight and swung the blade away from them. “No, no, dear. I think we shall be quite safe.” She pulled away an inch and looked up at him searchingly. “They are corsairs,” he said. “Pirates. They live on the ransom they take.” He raised his gaze from her to look directly at their assailant. “The more of us they kill, the less profit all around.”