CHAPTER 5

Tripoli: Decatur’s Raid

I shall hazard much to destroy [the Philadelphia]—it will undoubtedly cost us many lives but it must be done. I am surprized she was not rendered useless, before her Colours were struck.

—COMMODORE EDWARD PREBLE (USS CONSTITUTION, SYRACUSE HARBOR) TO SECRETARY OF THE NAVY ROBERT SMITH, DECEMBER 10, 1803

ON CHRISTMAS MORNING, one hundred and fifty of the American prisoners, slaves on the coast of Barbary, marched through the eastern gate of the city, passed the shriveled severed hands and feet, and headed out along the shore. Rousted just before dawn, they had not yet tasted a morsel of food. Blustery forty-five-degree winds, typical Tripoli winter weather, chilled the men, clad only in long pants and a shirt; most of them walked barefoot. Veering into the low winter sun, these men, not allowed to celebrate their Christian holiday, cast long weary shadows on the sands.

Turbaned overseers, swinging sticks, hurried the men to a decrepit wreck of a boat, half buried, stuck just offshore. This was not the Philadelphia, then in almost perfect repair in the harbor, but some discarded merchant vessel. For marine private William Ray, this Christmas day ranked high on the list of most miserable days of his life. “It was the coldest season of the year,” he wrote. “We were almost naked, and were driven into the water up to our armpits. We had to shovel sand from the bottom of the water and carry it in baskets to the banks.”

Stooping over in the seawater, the Americans lugged the dripping loads up onto the beach. Over and over again.

“The chilling waves almost congealed our blood,” wrote Ray. “The Turks seemed more than ordinarily cruel, exulting in our sufferings. We were kept in the water from sunrise until about two o’clock, before we had a mouthful to eat, or were permitted to sun ourselves.”

The guards then ordered the kitchen-help prisoners to bring out some loaves of coarse black bread, some water, and a jug of aqua-deut to pass around. The men, during their break, ran in place, clapped hands, and did everything to get warm. The guards then forced them again into the water to work until sunset, when they were marched soaking wet into the glare of the setting sun back to the prison barracks. Since none of the prisoners had a change of clothes, they all slept in an inescapable dampness curled on the ground without any blankets. That night, William Ray prayed to die in his sleep “that I might never experience the horrors of another morning.”

This grim routine continued, made grimmer by the handful of turn-Turks in their midst. The men found it easy to hate the five renegades who wore Moslem clothes and ordered them about. But there was another kind of villain in their midst as well, a subtler one.

Carpenter William Godby, the same man who had mishandled the scuttling of the ship, had accepted the Bashaw’s offer to work for wages. (The Bashaw didn’t force any of the officers to do labor; almost all refused, preferring idleness to indignity. Bainbridge and Porter opened an informal school for the midshipmen; they also put on theatrical skits to pass the time.) Godby, whether building gunboats for the Bashaw or repairing wrecks, rode the crew hard, “as cruel to our men . . . as any of the other drivers,” according to Ray.

Godby earned more than $100 for his various services; one night he came back to the officers’ quarters a bit tipsy and started bragging about his pay and privileges. U.S. Marine Sergeant David Irving and two others ragged Godby over helping the enemy. Insults led to blows, and the threesome beat up Godby. The following morning, the carpenter asked for an audience with the Bashaw. Turbaned Swedish turncoat John Wilson translated the man’s complaints. (Aboard ship, Sergeant Irving had once ordered Wilson lashed for interfering with a sentry on duty, so Wilson no doubt magnified Irving’s crimes.) The Bashaw ordered all three Americans immediately bastinadoed. “They were all most unmercifully beaten on the soles of their feet and on their posteriors,” wrote Ray, “and then hampered with a huge chain at each leg and sent to prison with us where they remained for one night.”

Disgusted, Private Ray observed that while the crew was “compelled to work or perish in tortures,” Godby, on the other hand, “was under no compulsion but solicited the undertaking.”

This distinction raises an interesting point, one close to the heart of hard men like William Eaton and Edward Preble. The generally accepted rules of warfare at the time called for enemy combatants taken in war to be held as prisoners, to be exchanged at a later date. Part of the reason the Barbary Coast pirates instilled such fear was that they refused to treat captured enemy soldiers as prisoners of war but instead called them “slaves,” forcing them to work and often threatening to auction them off.

On February 15, a remarkable month-old letter from Commodore Preble arrived in Tripoli, addressed to the entire crew of sailors and marines. (Preble gave Captain Bainbridge discretion as to whether or not to deliver this letter.)

The United States was a young country founded on precedent-breaking ideas, with a strong strain of not wanting to follow the tired lead of Europe. The commodore here displays a staunch New England demand for resistance, in tones reminiscent of Consul William Eaton when he declared he would rather be “impaled” than run an errand for the Dey of Algiers.

Preble wrote:

Altho’ the fortune of War has made you prisoners to the Bashaw of Tripoly, it has not made you his Slaves—Whether you will be Slaves or Not, depends on yourselves. Your determination not to work will be proper, and if the Bashaw should attempt compulsion by punishing you for a refusal, I shall retaliate on his Subjects which I now have and which may hereafter come into my possession.

If you conduct [yourselves] properly, you will in due time be redeemed and restored to your friends, and entitled to receive full pay from the time of your capture to your arrival in the United States. In the mean time every proper means will be taken for clothing and keeping you as comfortable as circumstances will admit of, but should any of you voluntarily engage your services to the Enemy, and afterwards fall into the hands of your justly incensed Country Men you will undoubtedly suffer death agreeable to the laws of the United States.

You ought not to let the threats of those, into whose hands you have unfortunately fallen, intimidate you, but obstinately persist in your rights of being treated as prisoners and not as Slaves. I shall write to the Bashaw immediately and acquaint him that all those Americans who suffer themselves to be compelled to work for him, will be considered as having alienated themselves from the United States, and of course our Governm.t will not consider it under any obligations to ransom them. Behave like Americans, be firm and do not despair. The time of your liberation is not far distant.

I am with Sentiments of regard & Consideration

Your friend,

Edw.d Preble

Captain Bainbridge, on the day after receiving it, decided not to deliver Preble’s inflammatory letter to the men. Preble’s bold gambit would have certainly brought misery and perhaps even martyrdom to some, but it could have also set an extraordinary precedent on the coast of Barbary. Bainbridge promised to explain to Preble his reasons for withholding the letter but never did in writing.

That same night, February 16, the prisoners all went to sleep soon after dark. A few hours later, an overwhelming torrent of noise woke them up. Edward Preble had decided to send another message of defiance, one that Captain Bainbridge could not intercept.

“About 11 o’clock at night, we were alarmed by the screeches of women,” recalled Private Ray, “the clattering of footsteps through the prison yard, and harsh loud voices of men, mingled with a thundering of cannon from the castle which made our prison tremble to its base.” The former schoolteacher added: “Tumult, consternation, confusion and dismay reigned in every section of town and castle. . . . In the confusion of voices we could often hear the word ‘American,’ and therefore hoped that some of our countrymen were landing to liberate us; but the true cause of so much clamour we did not learn until morning.” The 270 prisoners in a cramped barracks, with four square feet each to stand in, spent the night in the dark, enveloped in all that noise. They would soon learn that it was Stephen Decatur on a mission to burn the Philadelphia.

***

Just before Christmas, Lieutenant Decatur, commanding the Enterprize and sailing in tandem with Commodore Preble in the Constitution, had stumbled onto an unknown sail off the coast of Tripoli and given chase. Decatur, over a lifetime in the U.S. Navy, would rise to the rank of commodore and would become arguably the greatest living military hero in the nation for more than a decade; he would repeatedly show himself to be daring but would also reveal a bit of a prickly streak that would lead to his involvement—as principal or second—in numerous duels.

Decatur succeeded in driving the other ship, which was flying the colors of the Ottoman Empire, toward the massive 44-gun frigate Constitution. Per earlier agreement, both Preble and Decatur were flying the Union Jack of England. The charade continued while a boat carried the other ship’s captain to the Constitution and while a search party examined the other ship’s cargo. Once Preble was convinced the other ship, Mastico, was to some extent sent by the government of Tripoli, he ordered the Stars and Stripes to be raised, which caused “great confusion” on the deck of the other ship.

As so often happens with captures of this sort, especially in the Mediterranean, it was very difficult to determine the exact nationality of the at-mercy ship. She was a ketch-rigged, two-masted vessel of about 70 tons burden, carrying about 70 people: a Turkish captain, seven Greeks, and four Turks as sailors, a Turkish officer, two officers, and ten soldiers of Tripoli as passengers, and thirty young “fine” black female slaves and a dozen black slave boys shipped at Tripoli, most of whom were intended as presents for the Grand Sultan of Constantinople. The ship also carried two cannons and a cache of muskets and pistols, as well as $1,000 in foreign currency.

The captain presented papers in Arabic, which Preble couldn’t read, and one brief sheet that he could decipher. “The Turkish Officer alone had a Passport from the English Vice Consul,” wrote Preble in his diary, “specifying that he was to take passage in a vessel with Turkish colors but neither the name of the Vessel or Master was mentioned in it.” The technicality facilitated capture, as did some eyewitness testimony.

By chance, an Italian doctor on board the Constitution knew several of the prisoners. He said the two Tripoli officers were of the highest rank and that they and their soldiers had participated in the capture of the Philadelphia. The doctor, who had been in Tripoli at the time, said that this ship’s captain, a Turk, had raced out to the beached Philadelphia and grabbed a few souvenirs. (Lieutenant David Porter’s sword and belt would later be found among the captain’s possessions.)

So Preble decided to keep the prisoners and send the Mastico into Syracuse in Sicily, where her papers could be translated, and then eventually an admiralty court could judge whether she was a legitimate prize. (Thomas Jefferson was not at all pleased when he learned months later of Preble’s aggressive action seizing a cargo intended for the Ottoman Empire, a country that had been generally friendly to U.S. interests. “I am not without hope,” wrote Jefferson in that barely concealed tone of oh-god-why-do-you-surround-me-with-fools, “that Preble will have the good sense [to send off] . . . at our expense the presents destined by Tripoli for the Grand Seigneur, and intercepted by us.”) International politics were muddying Preble’s simple resolve.

The commodore, whose main source of information about the Philadelphia loss had been letters from Bainbridge, grew deeply disgusted when the Italian doctor gave him new details. He told him “it was 4 hours after the Philadelphia struck the ground before the gunboats came out to attack her, that for several hours they continued firing without one shot hitting the Philadelphia—that she struck her colors & the enemy were afraid then to come alongside until Captain B. & officers left the ship & landed; when they boarded her finding every man on board drunk & laying about the decks like dead men. The moment the officers landed they were stripped to the buff. Thus (if this information be true & we have no reason to doubt it) one of our finest frigates was deserted, without even making a defense to be expected from an American cockboat.”

Ever since Preble had learned of the Philadelphia fiasco, he had yearned to make certain the Bashaw would never turn the frigate’s three dozen guns on American targets or sell the vessel for an immense profit. It was now on Preble’s storm-battered ship in the southern Mediterranean that the commodore began to refine his plan for revenge, but as a key first step, he needed to legitimize his taking of the prize ship Mastico.

Unable to find a trustworthy Arabic translator in Syracuse, he sailed ninety miles to Malta. After three annoying days waiting for an English rendition, the American commodore on January 20 did not receive the results he craved. He learned that the basic story of the Turkish captain and officers was true. An officer of the Bashaw of Tripoli was commissioned to pick up goods in Bengazi and then deliver those items along with twenty slaves to Constantinople; the other twenty-three slaves were to be auctioned there. The ship was registered in Crete, part of the Ottoman Empire.

This failure to discover lawful grounds for keeping the ship would severely hinder Preble’s secret plans . . . since at that moment he needed a Tripolitan Trojan horse, that is, a Moslem vessel capable of sauntering into Tripoli harbor and not arousing suspicion.

Then Preble caught a break.

In Syracuse a week later, he made the acquaintance of an Italian captain, a veteran pilot, one Salvatore Catalano of Palermo, who said that he had been in Tripoli when the Philadelphia was captured. Catalano, under oath in the Royal Vice Admiralty, swore that this captured ship, Mastico, had been in Tripoli harbor and had dropped its Ottoman colors, hoisted the Tripoli flag, then loaded aboard dozens of armed men and sailed out to subdue and plunder the Philadelphia. This version of events amounted to far more than a few curious officers sightseeing at a capture.

Preble decided that this testimony made her an enemy vessel and a legitimate prize. “The Captain and Crew having acted hostile towards our Flag, under enemies colours, I cannot release either the vessel or them,” he wrote.

Then, in an inspired moment, Commodore Preble chose the new name Intrepid for the Mastico prize, and he ordered her fitted out for a cruise. In a transaction typical of seamen’s lives in the 1800s, the seven Greeks in the crew, technically slaves of the Bashaw of Tripoli, were allowed to join the crew of the USS Constitution. Also typical of the era, the forty-three blacks were landed at Saragosa and locked up as slaves.

On January 31, 1804, Preble gave the most memorable orders of his career to Lieutenant Decatur, who would command the Intrepid, and to Lieutenant Charles Stewart, who would command the 16-gun brig Siren. Lord Admiral Nelson, no mean judge of nautical talent, would call their mission “the most bold and daring act of the age.”

Preble ordered Decatur to take the Mastico/Intrepid and sail directly to Tripoli, enter the harbor at night, board the Philadelphia, burn her, and then retreat. “On boarding the Frigate, it is probable you will meet with Resistance, it will be well in order to prevent alarm to carry all by the Sword.” Obviously, silent throat-slitting would delay detection. Not wanting to take any chances that Philadelphia might survive again, he ordered that once the ship was on fire, the men should lug two eighteen-pounder cannons over to the main hatch, point them straight down, “and blow her bottom out.” Hoping to inflict even more harm, Preble added that, if feasible, Decatur, instead of retreating aboard Mastico/Intrepid, should ignite that vessel as well and send her in among the Bashaw’s fleet as a “fire ship” to burn as many Tripoli vessels as possible. They should then make their retreat by oar in small boats to the Siren.

This was an insanely daring plan, since the Philadelphia sat nestled deep in the Bashaw’s tricky harbor, next to a dozen other armed ships under the castle’s heavy batteries. Preble gave Decatur five midshipmen from the Constitution and told him to see whether any of the 70 crew and officers from the Enterprize would volunteer. This mission was strictly optional, and Preble offered to make up any shortfall in the complement of men. Instead, Decatur was engulfed by men willing to risk their lives. Too many volunteered. Lieutenant Charles Gordon, for one, sent a note to Preble begging the favor “to let no opportunity escape wherein I can render my country any service.”

After months of little action, certainly the chance for danger appealed, but in addition, something about twenty-five-year-old Stephen Decatur inspired confidence and swept other men along. Tall, athletic, handsome with wavy hair, he was a strong, warm commander who maintained discipline not through fear of punishment but through loyalty and fairness. Decatur, as a young man, was credited with several daring rescues, including swan-diving from the yardarm to save a drowning sailor. He grew up in a seafaring household and was always more mechanically than academically bent. His father, Stephen Decatur Sr., veteran sea captain, was actually the first commander of the frigate Philadelphia after it came off the blocks.

Despite the choppy seas, the navy men were eager to depart for Tripoli. Ralph Izard Jr., a midshipman from the Constitution allowed to go on the mission, wrote home to his mother on February 2, 1804, from Syracuse harbor. “Before this day [next] week, I am in hopes we shall have the happiness of seeing the Philadelphia in flames—We shall astonish the Bashaw’s weak mind with the noise of shot falling about his ears. Perhaps some ‘more lucky than the rest may reach his heart’ & free our countrymen from Slavery.”

The Mastico/Intrepid and the Siren set sail for Tripoli, but within days, gale winds forced them off the plan. The first crack at a rendezvous on February 8 outside Tripoli harbor fell through when violent seas made it impossible for the Siren even to weigh anchor, and instead was forced to cut the anchor cable. “The men [were] several times knocked down by the capstan bars and several much injured,” wrote an officer.

The captains of the two vessels had to tie up their sails and ride out the storm. Aboard both ships, the whistle of the winds mixed with the ominous sound of men sharpening steel.

On the night of February 16, they tried again. The Siren waited just outside Tripoli harbor. The Mastico/Intrepid slowly proceeded in the dark into the harbor and approached the Philadelphia. When the Tripolitan guards aboard the Philadelphia noticed the other ship, they took the tompions out of the cannons, making ready to fire. The American sailors crouched belowdeck, with hatchets, daggers, cutlasses at the ready. Salvatore Catalano of Palermo stood on the deck with a handful of Americans disguised as typical Mediterranean sailors. He hailed the Philadelphia and spoke to the guards in Lingua Franca, mixed with some Arabic from a lifetime at sea: “We come from Malta and have lost our anchors in the storm. Can we make fast to you for the night?”

The unsuspecting guards on the Philadelphia tossed over a thick hawser rope. The disguised crewmen pulled the two ships close to each other. The instant before the two vessels touched, Decatur gave the signal, and 60 concealed Americans sprang up, edged weapons in hand, and boarded the Philadelphia. “The Tripolitans on board of her were dreadfully alarmed when they found out who we were,” wrote middie Ralph Izard Jr. “Poor fellows! About 20 of them were cut to pieces and the rest jumped overboard.”

The ambush ended quickly, but not quickly enough. “The whooping and screaming of the enemy being boarded and defeated drew an almost instantaneous and continued fire of small arms from two xebecs lying near,” wrote surgeon’s mate Lewis Heerman. Now the 60 boarders raced about the long deck of the Philadelphia, following Decatur’s detailed plan, and they climbed belowdeck to scatter combustibles. “I immediately fired her in her Store Rooms, Gun Room Cockpit and Birth [Berth] Decks,” wrote Decatur in his official report. “And remained on board until the flames had issued from the Spar Deck Hatchways and Ports.”

If the Philadelphia’s gunpowder caught fire, Decatur and others would be launched skyward. The stragglers literally outraced the flames to reboard the ketch Mastico/Intrepid. The mission was completed within fifteen minutes, but in the confusion, the Philadelphia’s shore boat, which the Americans had hoisted down, drifted away, carrying a flag of Tripoli, a trophy.

The Philadelphia, strategically drenched in combustibles, roared up in flames, garishly illuminating the harbor. The Mastico/Intrepid lay two feet downwind of this inferno. Now, a not so strange thing happened. It was as though currents of air “were rushing from every side toward the flames,” pulling everything into the blaze, according to Heerman, surgeon’s mate. Fire needs oxygen, and the Mastico/Intrepid was being sucked closer to the Philadelphia.

Decatur had no hope whatsoever of sailing away. The castle cannons began shooting; a ball pierced his topgallant sail.

Decatur ordered two oared boats in the water, with tow ropes tied to the Mastico/Intrepid. The men literally pulled for their lives, hauling the ship inches, feet, yards away from the burning Philadelphia and toward the mouth of the harbor. Meanwhile, as the men rowed, they heard an enormous broadside. Many of the forty-four cannons of the Philadelphia were mounted and loaded with powder and shot; the flames ignited the charges and sent cannonballs hurtling toward the town. The fat anchor cable soon burned through, and the vessel flambé began to drift deeper into the harbor and toward the Bashaw’s castle.

The Americans pulled harder to escape. In freshening winds and choppy surf, they pulled for almost two hours before reaching the edge of the harbor. There, in the dark, they stumbled onto another boat. They were stunned and ready to attack until they realized it was the Siren’s boat come to help.

Sometime after midnight, the two ships rendezvoused, along with the small boats, and sailed back toward Syracuse. Not a single man was killed, only one slightly wounded. They could see Philadelphia burning for miles.

From the letters of the Dutch consul Antoine Zuchet, there emerges a view from inside Tripoli looking out to the harbor, and, more particularly, an intimate glimpse of how the Bashaw reacted to the raid.

“The Americans have just partially erased the shame of Captain Bainbridge’s easy surrender of the frigate Philadelphia,” wrote Zuchet to the foreign ministry in Amsterdam.

It was the evening on the Feb. 16 around 10 P.M. that by a very determined bravery they burned the frigate that was anchored in the middle of the harbor. Despite all efforts, the Bashaw could not slow the voracity of the flames which continued for 36 hours, leaving almost no remnant of the incineration.

Into what fits of rage did this gallant enterprise throw the Bashaw; it was necessary that this prince unleash his fury on someone. So it was the poor artillerymen [of the castle cannons] who felt the sad effects of his rage. He beat them upside down and sideways; except those lucky ones who dared to seek refuge in the mosques.

The Bashaw . . . who had preened over the capture and had expected to use the frigate to lay down the law to the entire universe, was deeply hit by this misfortune; but his political side required him to try to hide his chagrin and he forced himself, as much as he could, to try to show indifference over the loss, saying that it was only a punishment of Heaven and had nothing to do with the valor of his enemies.

The American officers who a few days prior to the burning of the frigate had been allowed to walk in the countryside . . . were once again confined in their prison, and their guard was doubled and soldiers were posted on the roof of their building. Yussef, still not satisfied with these precautions, commissioned a new prison house built inside his castle; he ordered an iron grill placed at roof level over the [tall] interior courtyard. He apparently fears that, in imitation of Daedalus, they might escape by flying away upon the air.

While the officers lost promenade privileges, the crew suffered much more in the wake of the raid. “Early in the morning and much earlier than usual,” wrote Private Ray, “our prison doors were unbolted, and the keepers like so many fiends from the infernal regions, rushed in amongst us, and began to beat everyone they could see, spitting in our faces and hissing like serpents of hell. Word was soon brought that the wreck of the frigate Philadelphia lay on the rocks near the round fort, almost consumed by fire. We could not suppress our emotions, nor disguise our joy at the intelligence, 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 exercized cruelties tenfold more rigid and intolerable than before.”

Bashaw Yussef, receiving spy reports from Malta that the U.S. Navy was planning to bombard or even invade his city, stepped up his efforts to fortify Tripoli’s defenses. The crew of the Philadelphia, under the orders of Carpenter Godby, “who to court favour from the Turks struck several of our men,” worked at salvaging the metal work, bolts, spikes, copper sheathing, from the charred remains of the frigate. The Bashaw was growing desperate. Unable to locate enough lumber for shipbuilding, he ordered the town’s olive presses dismantled for planks for gunboats.

About two weeks after Decatur’s daring raid, the thirty American officers were marched through the prison yard of the crew on their way to their new unpleasant accommodations inside the castle. The guards ordered silence. “Captain Bainbridge, however, bid us be of good heart,” recalled Private Ray, “although he looked very much dejected himself.” (Bainbridge was indeed gaunt and emaciated despite access to a steady diet with meat.)

On March 4, the bodies of two of the Tripolitan soldiers who had been guarding the Philadelphia washed ashore. Bashaw Yussef personally examined the corpses and declared that they were so hacked up, it looked as though they had been “massacred.” He ordered harsher guards assigned to the prison of the American officers. One of them took an especial dislike to Lieutenant David Porter, who set about trying to plan an escape. Captain Bainbridge for the first time tried to write a letter to Commodore Preble with portions concealed in invisible ink. “By writing with lemon juice or milk it cannot be discovered until it has been heated over the fire,” he informed Preble. Bainbridge hoped to be able to give the commodore secret tips on negotiating the best deal with the Bashaw.

On March 26, a frigate with an American flag sailed into the harbor, a white flag flying. A negotiator, Richard O’Brien, former U.S. consul to Algiers, was ready to make an offer.