Tripoli
Would to God that the officers and crew of the Philadelphia had one and all determined to prefer death to slavery; it is possible such a determination might save them from either.
—COMMODORE EDWARD PREBLE TO SECRETARY OF THE NAVY ROBERT SMITH
THE CARPENTERS WHO BUILT the USS Philadelphia, in addition to their craft skills, demonstrated an extraordinary capacity for alcohol. The project overseer, a Thomas FitzSimons, noted in his expense accounts that he had purchased 110 gallons of rum a month for thirty carpenters. Sober math reveals that each man working six days a week consumed about a pint of rum a day.
The stout frigate showed no ungainly lines. The carpenters, sharpening their adzes hourly, had hewed the live oak floated north from Georgia into a 147-foot keel; they had pocked each side of the ship with fourteen gunports and sheathed the bottom with copper to defeat sea worms and barnacles. As befitting a ship built in the nation’s capital, famed sculptor William Rush had carved an enormous figurehead: a Hercules. No ship of the United States would sport a Virgin Mary (religion) or a King Louis (monarchy), but a muscular classical hero had proven acceptable.
The Philadelphia, launched in 1799, added key firepower to the U.S. Navy, since the entire American fleet in 1803 consisted of six ships. By contrast, England—then fending off Napoleon’s attacks—floated close to six hundred vessels in its Royal Navy. While Admiral Nelson stymied the French with thunderous broadsides, the Americans with a bit of pop-pop from their Lilliputian fleet hoped to overawe the least of the Barbary powers, Tripoli.
Now, in October of 1803, the USS Philadelphia, a 36-gun frigate, was prowling the waters off the coast of Tripoli, trying all by itself to enforce a blockade. Very few nations would have even bothered with something as forlorn as a one-ship blockade, but the United States—only a couple of decades old—wasn’t exactly brimming with military options.
In 1801, just after the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson, Tripoli (modern-day Libya) had become the first country ever to declare war on the United States. The ruler, Yussef Karamanli, had ordered his Janissaries to chop down the flagpole at the U.S. consulate to signal his grave displeasure with the slow trickle of gifts from America. Jefferson, when he learned the news, had responded by sending a small fleet to confront Tripoli and try to overawe it into a peace treaty.
For more than two centuries, the Barbary countries of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli had been harassing Christian ships, seizing cargo and capturing citizens. Algiers once boasted more than 30,000 Christian slaves, including one Miguel Cervantes, before he wrote Don Quixote. European powers in the 1500s and 1600s fought ferocious battles against Moslem pirates like Barbarosa. However, over time, a cynical system of appeasement had developed. The nations of Europe paid tribute—in money, jewels, and naval supplies—to remain at peace. England and France—in endless wars—found it cheaper to bribe the Barbary pirates than to devote a squadron to perpetually trawling the sea off Africa. At its core, expediency outweighed national honor.
When the thirteen American colonies split off from mother England, they lost British protection. The United States found itself lumped in the pile of potential Barbary victims, alongside the likes of Sardinia and Sicily. (From 1785 to 1815, more than six hundred American citizens would be captured and enslaved. This nuisance would prove to be no mere foreign trade issue but rather a near-constant hostage crisis.)
Jefferson wanted to send a message that the United States, with its fresh ideas, refused to pay tribute, but the war with Tripoli was dragging on. Jefferson’s first two U.S. fleets had failed to inflict more than scratches on the enemy, and the president expected results from this latest armed squadron.
The USS Philadelphia cruised off the coast of North Africa on the lookout for enemy vessels. The youngest captain in the U.S. Navy, William Bainbridge, had drawn the plum assignment. While the U.S. Navy was still evolving its style of command, twenty-nine-year-old Bainbridge, from a wealthy New Jersey family, clearly valued discipline. “I believe there never was so depraved a set of mortals as Sailors,” he once wrote. “Under discipline, they are peaceable and serviceable—divest them of that and they constitute a perfect rabble.” During one nine-month stretch on an earlier voyage, he had placed 50 men of a 100-man crew in irons and flogged 40 of them at the gangway. Charming to fellow officers, he didn’t allow common seamen ever to address him, no matter how politely. One sailor, back home later, standing on what he described as the “maindeck of America,” said he expected he would have an easier time speaking to President Jefferson than Captain Bainbridge. This same disgruntled tar said that the captain often addressed crewmen as “You damn’d rascal” and that Bainbridge also cheered on the boatswain’s mates, administering cat-o’-nine-tails to a sailor’s back, with words such as “Give it to him! Clear that cat! Damn your eyes or I’ll give it to him.”
In spring of 1803 when the Philadelphia had needed a crew, most potential recruits knew nothing about Bainbridge’s reputation as a rough commander. They also didn’t know Bainbridge’s service record included two of the blackest incidents in the history of the young navy.
William Ray, native of Salisbury, Connecticut, certainly didn’t. It’s unusual in this era for an articulate “grunt,” a private, to record his impressions in a memoir, but Ray did just that. (His Horrors of Slavery, an extremely rare book, provides a counterpoint to the usual self-aggrandizing officers’ letters and memoirs.)
William Ray, 5' 4 ½", thirty-four years old, had failed at many professions. His general store . . . long shuttered; his schoolroom . . . now vacant, and in the latest mishap, he had fallen sick en route from New England and had lost a newspaper editing job in Philadelphia. So Ray, penniless, exasperated, discouraged, and inebriated, headed down to the Delaware River to call it a day and a life and to drown himself.
There, through the haze, he saw flying from a ship in the river the massive flag of the United States, fifteen stars and fifteen stripes. A drummer was beating the skin trying to encourage enlistment. Ray weighed his options: death or the marines. He weighed them again. At the birth of the Republic, the marines ranked as the lowliest military service, paying $6 a month, one-third of the wages of an experienced sailor. The entire marine corps totaled fewer than 500 men, and though it’s true marines wore fancy uniforms and carried arms, they basically came onboard ship to police the sailors and prevent mutiny or desertion. The major glory the U.S. Marines could then claim was its Washington City marching band, which the local citizens of that swampy outpost loved and President Thomas Jefferson despised.
Ray enlisted. Rarely was a man less suited for the marines than diminutive William Ray. As a former colonist who had lived through the War of Independence, he detested tyranny, whether it be that of King George III or his new captain, William Bainbridge. Onshore he saw “liberty, equality, peace and plenty” and on board ship, he said he found “oppression, arrogance, clamour and indigence.”
Ray, still smarting that he couldn’t find a job onshore in “prosperous” America, was appalled to discover his new maritime career required addressing thirteen-year-olds as “Sir” and treating them like “gentlemen.” The Philadelphia’s officer list included eleven midshipmen, all in their teens. “How preposterous does it appear, to have brats of boys, twelve or fifteen years old, who six months before, had not even seen salt water, strutting in livery, about a ship’s decks, damning and flashing old experienced sailors,” complained one veteran sailor, who called the job of midshipmen a “happy asylum” for the offspring of the wealthy too vicious, lazy, or ignorant to support themselves.
Ray once saw a midshipman toss a bucket of water on a sleeping sailor who, as he woke, spluttered some curses. When the sailor recognized it was a midshipman, he tried to apologize, saying he didn’t expect “one of the gentlemen” to be tossing water. Captain Bainbridge had the sailor thrown in irons and flogged. “You tell an officer he is no gentleman?” shouted Bainbridge at the man’s punishment. “I’ll cut you in ounce pieces, you scoundrel.”
In that era of sail, navy ships were so crowded that sailors slept in shifts: Half the crew rocked in the foul-smelling dark while the other half performed the watch. Some captains allowed the men six consecutive hours of sleep; Bainbridge allowed four.
A marine comrade of Ray’s, David Burling, fell asleep on watch . . . twice. The second time, he was chained in the coal hold until three captains could be gathered for a court-martial. “It will give me infinite pleasure to see him hanging at the yardarm,” Bainbridge was overheard saying.
Despite Ray’s shock at seaboard life under Bainbridge, the Philadelphia for its few months at sea had performed well enough. Then Commodore Edward Preble in mid-September had sent the vessel, along with the schooner Vixen, on the important mission to blockade Tripoli. Preble represented the third commodore (i.e., ranking squadron captain) in three years to command the small U.S. fleet in the region; the last two men—Commodore Richard Dale and Commodore Richard Morris—were both accused of spending more time showing their epaulets at dances and balls at various European ports than in the choppy waters off Tripoli. Preble, a no-nonsense New Englander, was eager to blockade and to capture hostile ships even in the stormy fall weather. He hoped to choke the enemy’s economy.
Now, on October 31, 1803, in the half light of dawn around 6 A.M., the lookout on the Philadelphia, hovering high above the deck, spotted a sail far off on the port bow. Standing orders required alerting the captain. A distant ship, a mere swatch of white at first, usually remains a complete unknown for quite a while. Thanks to elaborate rules of warfare in the early nineteenth century, deception was viewed as an acceptable strategy in the early stages of encountering another ship. (For instance, the Philadelphia carried half a dozen foreign flags, including the Union Jack, a Portuguese pennant, a Danish ensign; Bainbridge a month earlier had used the British colors to trick a Moroccan ship into furling canvas and laying by.)
Though a captain might trick another vessel to sidle close, the etiquette of battle demanded that he fly his true colors before opening fire.
The USS Philadelphia, at that moment about thirty miles east of Tripoli, was already flying the American flag to announce the blockade. As Captain Bainbridge peered through the spyglass, he watched the other ship suddenly raise the yellow-and-red-striped flag of Tripoli. This amounted to a dare, a taunt. Any other colors, especially British or French, would have made the U.S. ship less eager to pursue.
Bainbridge ordered all possible sail to speed the chase of this 12-gun enemy corsair. Pigtailed men scurried to set the sails. A strong breeze coming from the east and southeast allowed both ships to ignore the danger of drifting too close to the shore to the south. The Tripoli vessel sprinted due west while the Philadelphia, farther off the coast, had to zigzag landward to try to catch up.
Officers barked, and the men smartly obeyed. Beyond patriotic zeal, another incentive spurred the crew: prize money. In the early navy, officers and men received shares of legally captured vessels. The roping of a gold-laden ship could change an officer’s life and dole out more than rum money to a common sailor.
The chase was on. The men eagerly scampered up the ratlines to unfurl yet more sail, the topgallants. Standing 190 feet above the deck on a rope strung along a topgallant yardarm, as the frigate rolled in the waves, the men were tilted over the sea from starboard, then over the sea to port, over and over again.
The Philadelphia proved slightly faster than its quarry, and within three hours of traveling at about eight knots (nine-plus miles per hour), it reached within cannon shot for its bow chasers. The Tripoli ship, much smaller, smartly hugged the shore to tempt the Philadelphia to follow landward and accidentally beach itself. Bainbridge kept the Philadelphia at least one mile offshore. The port of Tripoli began to loom in the distance . . . at first a minaret then a castle.
“Every sail was set, and every exertion made to overhaul the ship and cut her off from the town,” Ray wrote. “The wind was not very favourable to our purpose, and we had frequently to wear ship. A constant fire was kept up from our ship, but to no effect. We were now within about three miles of the town, and Captain Bainbridge not being acquainted with the harbour, having no pilot nor any correct chart, trusted implicitly to the directions of Lieutenant Porter, who had been here several times and who professed himself well acquainted with the situation of the harbour. We however went so close in that the captain began to be fearful of venturing any farther, and was heard by a number of our men, to express to Lt. Porter the danger he apprehended in pursuing any farther in that direction and advising him to put about ship.”
David Porter, then a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant, and a six-foot bull of a man, would go on to achieve a remarkable and controversial career. He would almost singlehandedly wipe out the British whaling fleet in the Pacific during the War of 1812. He would help root out the pirate Jean Lafitte from New Orleans, but his reluctance to follow orders would ultimately lead to court-martial. He was, indeed, a bit of a wild man.
A year earlier, he had killed a fellow in a Baltimore saloon during a brawl while trying to land new recruits. Six months after that, his aggressiveness had surfaced again, this time against the enemy. The U.S. squadron—under Commodore Morris—had trapped in a cove eleven small Tripoli merchant ships carrying wheat; Porter took four men in an open boat at night to sneak in and scout the enemy ships. He discovered that the Moslem merchants had tucked all the vessels by the shore, unloaded their bales of wheat into breastworks, and were now backed on land by a thousand militiamen. Porter begged permission, and received it, for the foolhardy mission to attack in open boats to try to set fire to the wheat. Within a stone’s throw of the shore, he was shot through his left thigh, and another ball grazed his right thigh. His men managed to set fire to the wheat, but the Moslems eventually succeeded in extinguishing the blaze. Porter—though bleeding profusely—begged permission to attack again, but Morris refused.
Now as the Philadelphia skirted the shore, Porter encouraged Bainbridge to go deeper into the harbor; he also gave orders that three lead-lines be cast and recast to look for any perilous change in the depth of the water. Two lieutenants and one midshipman oversaw sailors who slung forward a lead weight, itself weighing as much as twenty-eight pounds. If the toss was timed right, the lead weight would strike bottom as the ship passed, giving a true vertical depth by a reading of colored markings tied to the rope. The men sang out lead-line readings of at least eight fathoms (or forty-eight feet of water), plenty for a ship that needed a little over twenty feet in depth.
The city of Tripoli stood about three miles away. The enemy ship looked too far ahead to catch. Captain Bainbridge granted Lieutenant Porter permission to fire a few more rounds before heading out to sea. Porter, not shy, unleashed quite a few. A diplomat in town hearing the last burst of cannon fire called it a “fanfaronade,” that is, a braggadocio, or a mad fanfare of farewell.
Porter then relayed the captain’s order to haul the ship about and head out to sea. The topgallant sails used in the chase were furled, ropes were tied to change the angle of the sails. Bainbridge sent Porter up the mizzen topmast, the sternmost of the three masts, so he could use the spyglass to assess the vessels in Tripoli harbor as the Philadelphia headed back out to sea.
Lieutenant Porter, in his blue uniform with a single gold epaulet, was halfway up the mizzen rigging, about seventy-five feet above the deck, when he felt himself flung forward hard. Porter gripped the ropes as they flung him backward now.
The Philadelphia had beached itself on an uncharted reef; the bow rode up on this shelf of sand and rested several feet above its normal water level. Bainbridge later said he couldn’t have been more surprised than if this had occurred in the middle of the ocean.
In the first moment of shock, Captain Bainbridge coolly gave the next order: full sail ahead to try to surmount and pass the reef.
Bainbridge hadn’t ordered any soundings to determine the height of the reef fore or aft, or to ascertain where the deep water lay. The ship, with wind in its sails, rose up and beached itself higher on the reef. Lieutenant Porter would later confirm Bainbridge’s command at a Court of Inquiry. “All sails were instantly set to force her over the bank,” testified Lieutenant Porter, who added a touch cattily: “After this did not succeed, Captain Bainbridge asked the witness’s opinion.”
At that moment, the Tripoli blockade runner, which had been darting away, now hove to and rolled out its guns for the first time. A couple miles beyond that vessel, more than a dozen ships bobbed inside Tripoli harbor. (The U.S. schooner Vixen would have come in handy now, but Bainbridge had sent it away toward Tunis two weeks earlier to scout for other ships.)
Philadelphia was stuck in Tripoli. Anyone on duty in the Mediterranean knew the consequences of being captured: Barbary slavery. For many of the 307 men aboard, it evoked a greater fear than shipwreck, which brought quick death, because Barbary slavery was portrayed as long, humiliating death-in-life.
In colonial days, preacher Cotton Mather had described Barbary slaves as living for years in dug-out pits with a crosshatch of bars above, and their taskmasters were “barbarous negroes.” Galley slaves also lived to tell of being chained naked to an oar, forced to row ten hours at a stretch. Slaves, facing forward, pushed the forty-foot-long oars by rocking back to near horizontal, as though in a grotesque limbo contest, and then lurching with full strength, again and again. During hard chases, they were sustained by a wine-soaked rag shoved in their mouths.
Accounts of North African slave auctions showed white Americans treated like black slaves. Rituals varied, but in one account an American stated that after being purchased: “[I] was forced to lie down in the street and take the foot of my new master and place it upon my neck.” Another described being forced to lick the dust along a thirty-foot path to the throne of the Dey of Algiers.
John Foss survived captivity in Algiers, and his popular account ran in several American newspapers in the late 1790s, fleshing out the nightmare. He wrote of prisoners routinely shackled with forty-pound chains, forced to perform sunrise-to-sunset labor ranging from digging out sewers to hauling enormous rocks for a harbor jetty. He matter-of-factly described the most common Barbary punishment for light infractions: bastinado of 150 strokes. “The person is laid upon his face, with his hands in irons behind him and his legs lashed together with a rope. One taskmaster holds down his head and another his legs, while two others inflict the punishment upon his breech [his buttocks] with sticks, some what larger than an ox goad. After he has received one half in this manner, they lash his ankles to a pole, and two Turks [Moslems] lift the pole up, and hold it in such a manner, as brings the soles of his feet upward, and the remainder of his punishment, he receives upon the soles of his feet.”
American and European accounts depicted a slave’s life in Barbary as an unending hell of tortures, including the bastinado (left) and forced circumcision (right).
With cheery thoughts such as these running through their heads, the crew and officers of Philadelphia worked desperately to free the 150-foot-long vessel off Kaliusa Reef.
Porter advised Bainbridge to consult all the officers. They quickly suggested lowering a boat to sound the depth all around the ship. The bow lead drew only twelve feet as far back along the ship as the foremast—at least six feet less depth than required—but the stern still floated free with plenty of deep water there. Clearly, the ship needed to back up. The Philadelphia was pointing to the northeast; the winds flowed briskly to the northwest directly across the beam of the ship, a decidedly unhelpful direction. The officers recommended putting the sails aback, that is, facing them into the wind by tying off the yardarms to move the ship backward. That amounted to the exact opposite tack from Bainbridge’s original command.
The American sailors noticed a flurry of activity taking place on the ships in harbor; the men of Tripoli were racing to ready their vessels; speed was vital for both sides. “I could not but notice the striking alteration in our officers,” wrote Private Ray. “It was no time to act the haughty tyrant—no time to punish men for snoring—no time to tell men they had ‘no right to think’ . . . It was not ‘go you dam’d rascal’ but ‘come, my good fellow, my brave lads.’ ”
The men tied the sails, prepared the canvas. The blustery winds pushed against backed sails, but instead of inching the Philadelphia backward, the strong breezes tipped the ship far over onto its left side till the gunports hovered just above the waterline. A few more inches of tip and water would rush in. This unexpected result caused the deck not only to slope downhill (from the elevated reef) but also to lean left. Carved Hercules looked drunk and falling sideways at the masthead. Worse, this careening caused one bank of eighteen cannons to point into the water, and the cannons on the other side to aim high into the sky.
The one enemy gunboat—downwind—kept up a fitful fire from a respectful distance, but so far almost all balls splashed harmlessly in the water.
The American officers, to lighten the bow quickly, ordered the men to cut the ship’s three heavy bow anchors; no one wanted to part with valuable equipment, but this was an emergency; the sailors chopped with axes at the fat cables. The ship still stuck firm. Then the officers ordered the crew to shift the heavy cannons to the stern. The gun carriages must be unchained and the men must lash ropes to the cannon barrels and wooden gun carriages to ease them down the tilted gun deck. The men, who could barely outstretch their arms in the cramped areas belowdeck, now tried to haul 2,000-pound cast-iron long-barreled cannons in a hurry.
The gun crews—trained to load, fire, swab, reload in battle rush—strained to pile the humongous weapons in the stern. That hard maneuver failed to free the bow, so the officers told the men to hoist and toss many of the 2,000-pound cannons overboard. They jettisoned most of the twenty-eight beautiful long guns capable of shooting eighteen-pound balls and the sixteen stubby carronades that plunked thirty-two-pound balls . . . except for a handful on the quarterdeck and in the stern cabin. Sailors shot-put cannonballs into the harbor water. The men sought out heavy articles everywhere—from barrels to ballast—and cast them overboard. Even David Burling, the marine imprisoned for sleeping, was freed from the coal hold to lend a hand.
With massive effort, the crew lightened the vessel by sixty tons, but the Philadelphia still stuck fast. Meanwhile, the blockade runner continued to line up a broadside of its guns and to fire. The balls, surprisingly, either whizzed through the rigging or fell harmlessly in the water. Not a single shot caused a direct hit. No splinters flew. The Philadelphia, with most of its remaining guns underwater or aimed askew, couldn’t fire back. Bainbridge later compared himself to a chained helpless animal.
While the crew worked hard over the ensuing hours, several more gunboats, finally readied, stirred out of Tripoli harbor. (A gunboat might carry 50 to 75 men and sport a half dozen or so cannons.) The number of enemy gunboats sailing to attack the Philadelphia is up for debate. According to Private Ray, only one gunboat risked passing by the Philadelphia’s stern to get upwind while two others remained almost out of gunshot downwind. Captain Bainbridge, however, pegged the ultimate number at nine.
As an occasional cannonball whizzed overhead, the men labored and the officers remained calm. The Americans were sitting ducks in an arcade where the customers couldn’t hit the side of a barn. The carpenter and his men tried to chop away enough of a cabin wall to allow at least one cannon to bear on the Tripoli gunboat upwind. The gun crew fired several shots, but the cannon failed to roll out far enough, and the blast caused a small fire. The men doused the flames quickly and abandoned using the cannon.
George Hodge, the boatswain, a non-commissioned officer, suggested using the ship’s boats to try to float out the huge stern anchor a distance behind the ship, drop it, and then try to haul or warp the ship backwards. Ideally, the anchor’s giant triangular flukes would bury themselves in the sandy bottom; the men would turn the capstan to pull on the anchor cable. Bainbridge rejected his idea and later stated enemy gunboats “commanded the ground” where the anchor would have had to have been dropped. Hodge and many sailors privately grumbled that the effort was well worth the risk.
Now deeper into the afternoon, the officers regarded the situation as desperate. They suggested a radical move, and Bainbridge concurred: chop down the foremast. With topmast and topgallant perched above, this stout pole towered 176 feet. Bainbridge hoped it would fall to the right, and this would cure the ship’s tilt left or, even better, without the weight, the ship would float free. The carpenters wielded axe blows on the right side of the base; oak chips flew. They chopped it down, but the men hadn’t planned their tree-cutting well enough. The foremast fell to the left and, even worse, yanked the main topgallant mast with it. The decks tilted more. The bow was a mess of tangled ropes and shattered masts.
Around 3 P.M. Bainbridge yet again called all his officers together to consult on the situation. (At this time, Ray observed three more gunboats just leaving the harbor, which would have brought his total to six potential attacking vessels.) Bainbridge saw the decision in stark terms: surrender or fight against overwhelming odds, with scant means of self-defense. (While the Tripoli ships might eventually prove overwhelming, up to that moment, not one cannonball had hit the deck of the Philadelphia, nor were any sailors killed or wounded.)
What many men aboard didn’t realize was that William Bainbridge had already surrendered a U.S. Navy ship; he had already gained the unwelcomed distinction of becoming the first officer in the history of the United States Navy (after the end of the War of Independence) to surrender.
A half decade earlier, back in 1798, the United States was fighting an undeclared war against France over commerce, mainly against Caribbean privateers. Bainbridge, then a twenty-four-year-old lieutenant, was given command of the Retaliation, eighteen guns, and 140 men, joining a small squadron of three American ships off Guadeloupe. Commodore Alexander Murray was chasing a French privateer when on the morning of November 20, 1798, he reconnoitered with Bainbridge. They spotted two large sails in the distance. Murray consulted Bainbridge, who informed him that he had spoken earlier with a British warship, and he was convinced these two arriving ships were also British, then our ally.
Murray in the Montezuma sailed off after a French privateer, leaving Bainbridge in the Retaliation, who headed in the direction of the arriving sails. He gave the flag signal agreed upon for encountering British ships. No answer. He drifted closer. He gave the signal for American ships and received a muddled answer.
By now, the large frigates were bearing down upon him. The first ship, 36 guns, fired across his bow and hoisted the tricolor of Revolutionary France. The second ship, a 44-gun leviathan, arrived, and Commodore St. Laurent of the Voluntaire demanded that Bainbridge surrender. Without firing a shot, after having carelessly sidled up to unknown ships, William Bainbridge ordered the Stars and Stripes to be lowered, and he surrendered.
The men aboard the Philadelphia also might not have been aware of another stain on Bainbridge’s navy record. After being released from prison in Guadeloupe, Bainbridge had somehow avoided censure and was made a captain and sent on a mission commanding the George Washington to deliver naval supplies and other tributary gifts to Algiers in 1800. Bainbridge navigated across the Atlantic without incident, but once in Algiers he allowed the harbor pilot to guide him to a berth directly under the massive guns of the fortress. The Dey of Algiers then arrogantly demanded that Bainbridge run an errand for him, carrying presents to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul. Bainbridge objected, as did the American consul, Richard O’Brien, who pointed out the Algiers–United States treaty called for American merchant vessels to run emergency errands but certainly not U.S. Navy ships. The Dey threatened war.
With George Washington tucked under the massive guns of Dey Bobba Mustapha, Bainbridge felt himself constrained to agree to run the Dey’s errand. To add insult to injury, the Dey demanded George Washington sail under the Algerian flag. Bainbridge agreed to this as well, and the 100-foot-long American pennant was struck. As a midshipman noted in the ship’s log: “The Algerian Flag hoisted on the Main top Gallant royal mast head [the ship’s highest point] . . . some tears fell at this Instance of national Humility.”
Bainbridge delivered to Istanbul: 4 horses, 150 sheep, 25 horned cattle, 4 lions, 4 tigers, 4 antelopes, 12 parrots, as well as 100 African slaves, many of them females bound for the harems.
When William Eaton, then consul in Tunis, heard of Bainbridge’s mission, he was appalled. “History shall tell that the United States first volunteered a ship of war, equipt, a carrier for a pirate. It is written. Nothing but blood can blot the impression out. I frankly own, I would have lost the peace, and been myself impaled rather than yielded this concession. Will nothing rouse my country?”
Aboard the Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor, at 3 P.M., Captain Bainbridge consulted with his officers, asking their opinion on surrender. “We all answer’d that all was done,” wrote William Knight, sailing master. “Nothing remain’d but to give the ship up.”
Although not a single cannonball had hit the ship, causing any leaks, Bainbridge apparently perceived a danger of being sunk; he regarded further defense as fruitless and further delay as a possible death sentence for everyone aboard.
Bainbridge now faced a rather unusual problem . . . one that most captains rarely face in the course of a long career. Obviously he didn’t want to hand the Bashaw of Tripoli an immaculate 1,200-ton frigate. He needed to scuttle and sink his own ship but do so at a stage-managed pace that would allow all his crew to exit safely. Timing would be crucial. (Many sailors couldn’t swim, including Bainbridge.)
Bainbridge ordered the gunner to drown the gunpowder magazine. In case of fire, a supply of water stood at the ready to soak the explosives. The gunner, Richard Stephenson, used a key to gain access to a stopcock, which he turned to send water into the magazine. Bainbridge also ordered the carpenter to bore holes in the ship’s oak-and-copper-sheathed bottom. Carpenter William Godby and his two assistants, turning T-shaped augers and pounding sharpened chisels, pierced an unspecified number of holes in the bow below the waterline. Seawater sprayed in. First it spritzed onto puddles in the hold, then it began to rise. More water. Within an hour, one eyewitness said it reached four feet in the hold. Bainbridge decided it was time for him to surrender once again.
The USS Philadelphia carried four American flags: The largest was twenty-two feet by thirty-eight feet; the Stars and Stripes announced the ship’s nationality at a great distance; they proclaimed that nationality to the men serving on board.
“About four o’clock, the Eagle of America, fell a prey to the vultures of Barbary—the flag was struck!!” wrote Ray.
“Many of our seamen were much surprised at seeing the colours down, before we had received any injury from the fire of our enemy, and begged of the captain and officers to raise it again, preferring even death to slavery. The man who was at the ensign halyards positively refused to obey the captain’s orders . . . to lower the flag. He was threatened to be run through and a midshipman seized the halyards and executed the command, amidst the general murmuring of the crew.”
The captain tore up the signal books; a midshipman tossed them overboard; the men rushed to destroy and fling seaward: battle-axes, pikes, cutlasses, pistols, muskets, anything that might be useful to the enemy. They took axes to the captain’s furniture and generally rampaged throughout the ship.
The rules of war are complicated; many are observed more in the breach than the observance. The Congress of the United States had clearly stated in the Navy Act of 1800 (Article IX) that when capturing another ship as a prize, the American sailors should not “strip of their clothes, or pillage or in any manner maltreat” the enemy on board the prize vessel.
Somehow, word spread among the hundreds of crewmen of the Philadelphia that the enemy sailors of Tripoli might honor more humane rules of surrender, and that they would not be stripped or harassed. William Ray observed that the crewmen, from the marines to foretopmen, started to put on layer upon layer of clothing. The most common outfit was for each man to put on four pairs of blue trousers, and four white shirts and four black neckerchiefs. In their pockets they stuffed their prized possessions: money, knives, jewelry, food, keepsakes. Former schoolteacher William Ray said the overstuffed men resembled Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV.
The captain ordered the entire crew to assemble on the sloping deck. And they did, in their ballooning outfits. As they stood there, Captain Bainbridge solemnly read the articles of war and informed them that their wages would continue in captivity, that they should hope and pray for ransom, and told them “to behave with circumspection and propriety among our barbarous captors.”
The puffed men swayed on the deck as Bainbridge talked. Ray said that a dying saint would have had trouble not laughing.
In the ensuing minutes, men rummaged for more food and valuables to stuff into their pockets; officers filled satchels; marines guarded the liquor. But mostly, the crew and officers awaited the boarding by the enemy, and waited, as the water rose in the hold. And they waited. The enemy did nothing but lob the occasional cannonball over the rigging.
Captain Bainbridge eventually realized that the enemy—even though it had seen Ol’ Glory drop—didn’t believe the Philadelphia was surrendering.
In hard-fought battles, ships of certain nations had been known to raise the flag of surrender in order to lure a boarding party and then blow them up.
If the enemy did not board the Philadelphia soon, the crippled ship, with waters rising in the hold, might sink, and then many of the officers and crew would drown. Embittered William Ray might have his death by drowning after all.
Lieutenant Porter volunteered to take a boat under a white flag over to the enemy. As Ray caustically put it: “We sent a boat and persuaded them that it was no farce, no illusion, assuring them that our frigate had in reality struck to one gunboat, and entreated them to come and take possession of their lawful booty!!”
Finally, around sunset, the first boarding boats of the enemy arrived. The prospect of Barbary slavery grew all too real. As the orange disc descended into the western Mediterranean, a parade of Moslem officers and men climbed aboard, a fierce costume pageant of baggy pants, turbans, bright-colored vests, made all too real by the glint of scimitars and drawn daggers.
The officers intermixed Arabic commands to their men with Lingua Franca attempts to communicate with the Americans. The valuables aboard this prize frigate and on the persons of the captives incited a frenzy among the attackers. As boatloads of boarders arrived, fights broke out among the attackers over whom to rob. While Americans had drawn no blood, the men of Tripoli drew blood among themselves over plunder. The American Falstaffs slimmed down quickly. The frenzy wasn’t surprising, to veteran observers. While perhaps a Barbary captain might share in the profits from ransoming slaves or selling cargo, “most Barbary crewmen have no other means of drawing profit than stripping prisoners completely,” wrote an Italian, a Barnabas monk, who had been captured in nearby Tunis, around this time.
The words Romo kelb (“Christian dog”) and Senza Fede (“Infidel”) echoed along the chaotic decks. The Moslem officers separated out the thirty-plus American officers to go in the first three boats ashore; it was more than a three-mile pull ashore, with twenty men or more to a longboat. As the American officers climbed over the rail, the pillaging began anew. Someone tore Captain Bainbridge’s gold epaulets off his shoulders; that same man claimed Lieutenant Porter’s sword. The surgeon’s mate, Dr. Jon Cowdery, had his pocket picked of a $10 gold coin, then lost his surtout, a winter cloak. Dr. Harwood, an ill man, and Carpenter William Godby were wrestled to the bottom of one boat, then robbed. The captors forced the Americans to row. Near shore, someone smacked Cowdery hard on the side of his head. He then lost his surgeon’s instruments, his silver pencil, and a silk handkerchief from around his neck.
By the time the boat reached shore, swarthy hands had lightened the American officers of all watches, cravats, and money and had left them with only their trousers, shirts, and jackets. As they debarked at the stone steps of the castle in the harbor, the Americans expected the worst, having long been filled with Barbary pirate horror stories. Instead they were ushered into a room in the palace, where a long table had been set European style. Italian slaves served the surprised American officers a decent supper. “We are treated much better than I expected,” later wrote sailing master William Knight.
The 270 crewmen, however, ferried ashore in relays over several hours, found a harsher fate. In the boats, the enemy raised sabers over their heads while enemy crewmen stripped them down, in a tug-of-war where no American sailor dare put up any resistance. About fifty feet from shore, most of the Americans were yanked overboard to scramble through the October surf.
“At the beach stood a row of armed men on each side of us, who passed us along to the castle gate,” wrote William Ray. “It opened and we ascended a winding, narrow, dismal passage, which led to a paved avenue, lined with terrific janizaries, armed with glittering sabres, muskets, pistols, and tomahawks. Several of them spit on us as we passed. We were hurried forward through various turnings and flights of stairs, until we found ourselves in the dreadful presence of his exalted majesty, the puissant Bashaw of Tripoli.”
The Bashaw—Yussef Karamanli—enjoyed the notoriety of being the first foreign ruler ever to declare war on the United States. (Arabic lacks a “P” so the Turkish word pasha was pronounced bashaw on the north coast of Africa.)
Ray, who had wanted to be a newspaperman, captured the scene.
His throne on which he was seated, was raised about four feet from the surface, inlaid with mosaic, covered with a cushion of the richest velvet, fringed with cloth of gold, bespangled with brilliants [jewels]. The floor of the hall was variegated marble, spread with carpets of the most beautiful kind. The walls were of porcelain, fantastically enameled but too finical to be called elegant. The bashaw made a very splendid and tawdry appearance. His vesture was a long robe of cerulean silk, embroidered with gold and glittering tinsel. His broad belt was ornamented with diamonds, and held two gold-mounted pistols, and a sabre with a golden hilt, chain and scabbard. On his head, he wore a large white turban decorated with ribbons. His dark beard swept his breast. He is about five feet ten inches in height, rather corpulent, and of a manly majestic deportment. When he had satiated his pride and curiosity by gazing on us with complacent triumph, we were ordered to follow a guard.
Bashaw Yussef was ecstatic at the victory granted him by Allah. He told diplomats that he felt deeply indebted to his local marabout, or Moslem holyman, for he believed that the man’s prayers had delivered, like a present, almost gift-wrapped, an armed American frigate.
Guards crammed the soaking wet American crewmen into a chamber that barely had room enough for them to stand. Slaves, most from Naples or Malta, came with bundles of tattered but dry clothes to exchange for the Americans’ wet garments. The prisoners naïvely expected their own clothes to be returned; instead, they were sold to Jewish merchants, who would later offer to sell them back to the American prisoners at a steep premium.
Near midnight, soldiers herded the American sailors to a covered piazza, walled on three sides but open on the fourth to the sea winds. Their just-received “new” clothes did little to keep them warm. The prisoners, such as seventeen-year-old Thomas Prince from Rhode Island, curled up shivering and tried to sleep on the frigid tile floors.
The loss of the Philadelphia and its 307 crewmen and officers on Kaliusa Reef in Tripoli harbor marked a national disaster for the young United States. The Bashaw, a wily and worthy adversary, would set his first ransom demand for the American slaves at $1,690,000, more than the entire military budget of the United States.
Navy officers like the fierce Captain John Rodgers would beg for the chance to attack Tripoli to avenge and free his comrades; diplomats such as Tobias Lear, a Harvard graduate, yearned for the glory of negotiating their release. But the man who would one day speed their freedom more than all others was a stubby disgraced former army officer on his way to the nation’s new capital, Washington City.