Yussef
BY LATE SUMMER, Commodore Preble’s patience had run out. For months he had been expecting Barron and reinforcements to arrive for a final attack. Hard autumn winds would soon whip the southern Mediterranean and make close-to-shore activities too dangerous. Where was Barron?
Now, on September 2, Preble decided to attempt the death blow on his own; he ordered the men to fit out a bomb-ship, an “Infernal” in sailor slang, to be loaded with 100 barrels of gunpowder and 150 bombs. The American sailors would try to slip this volcanic intruder into the harbor at night, nestle it among the Bashaw’s fleet, light a fifteen-minute fuse, then row away, their lives depending on each oar stroke.
Over the course of the previous month Preble, with a handful of navy ships, had tried (but failed) to torment the Bashaw into agreeing to a bargain-price ransom and a tribute-free peace. He had orchestrated a naval bombardment from the long guns of his frigates; he had daringly sent smaller vessels into Tripoli to board the Bashaw’s gunboats. Nothing had worked well enough for victory.
Preble himself, parading on the deck of the Constitution, once spent 54 minutes within musket shot of the shore batteries, venturing that close to unleash broadsides on the town and the corsair fleet. This was Eaton-style attack: reckless and righteous. The shore batteries hit the Constitution with nineteen shots, including drilling a perfectly round hole through the mainmast, which miraculously did not topple.
On August 2, Stephen Decatur’s brother James had led a gunboat into the harbor and furiously attacked a Tripolitan vessel, forcing it to surrender. In the moment of victory, James was treacherously shot. Brother Stephen became so enraged that, with only ten men, he attacked a gunboat with twenty-four scimitar-wielding defenders. While Decatur was fighting hand to hand against the Tripolitan vessel’s gargantuan captain, an enemy sailor sneaked up behind him and raised his sliver-moon blade to slash Decatur. According to lore, sailor Reuben James intercepted the blow with his head, sacrificing his life to save Decatur’s.
Bashaw Yussef Karamanli of Tripoli had a ringside seat for watching these battles: the terrace of his castle, which overlooked the harbor. He could hear the percussive thunder of his cannons, followed by the whoosh of cannonballs hurtling through the air. No daredevil, the Bashaw didn’t take any risks with his own personal safety; he always made sure to have his marabout holy man slip a scrap of paper under his turban, a script from the Koran, which would protect him from harm. “If a Turk gets wounded or killed, it is supposed the blessed paper is too old or not placed in a proper manner,” noted a Christian traveler.
At 4 A.M. on Tuesday, August 28, Preble and the other captains had begun bombarding the town, raining down eight hundred balls and shells in two hours. Constitution purser John Darby thrilled to the courage and rigid discipline of the American Navy. “The Commodore’s ship when standing in and during the engagement was the most elegant sight that I ever saw; she had her tompions [cannon plugs] out, matches lit and batteries lighted up, all hands at quarters standing right in under the fort & recei.g a heavy cannonading from their Battery. . . . As soon as [Preble] got within pistol shot, he commenced firing his bow guns and immediately laid his starboard side parallel to the castle and gave them a broadside.”
The cannonballs fell willy-nilly in the town, inflicting little damage on the stone buildings, but one of them almost killed the most candid diarist.
“The moment . . . the Americans started firing, I leapt from my bed in my nightshirt,” wrote Dutch consul Zuchet, “by what presentiment, I don’t know, and without stopping grabbed my clothes under my arm and left my bedroom. I was halfway down the stairs when a cannon hit the wall in my bedroom and skimmed along my bed to the pillow and then embedded itself in the wall opposite causing more damage . . . I would have been cut in half.”
Although Preble had failed in August to coax the white flag from Tripoli, he had left the enemy a bit perplexed. Prisoner Ray wrote that the surrender of the Philadelphia “to one gunboat without bloodshed” had led the people of Tripoli to believe that Americans were all cowards. They were then surprised by this summer onslaught. “The Turks told us,” Ray wrote, “that the Americans were all drunk, or they would not have ventured as they did, and fought so furiously.”
Now, on the evening of September 2, Preble hoped to deal the deathblow and demonstrate that the United States could indeed crush Tripoli. Wrote Consul Zuchet:
At 9 P.M. a blaze could be seen between the reefs that frame this port, as if a barrel had caught fire. An explosion was followed by a noise as though several enormous bombs had blown up simultaneously and at the same instant, the air was filled with grenades. The force of this noise was so horrific that it caused the earth to tremble for two miles around the city. At first, we didn’t know what to make of it all; the next day, we were assured that it was a small boat that Commodore Preble had tried to slip into the port with the idea, possibly, of destroying all the Bashaw’s sloops and gunboats, that were tucked under his castle and also to make the castle itself flip in the air. It’s impossible to know how the fire got started on the boat which is here dubbed an “Infernal”; apparently it was accidentally caused by those who guided her. The Bashaw, who went to the spot where the fire was seen in order to try to figure out what had happened, saw there the hulk of the boat sunk to the bottom. The Tripolitans also retrieved 14 dead bodies, including a mutilated one, discovered willy-nilly along the border of the reefs.
The Bashaw ordered all of the bodies transported to his arsenal. There, from his balcony, he amused himself by watching his people hurl curses and insults at the corpses. He wanted to share this spectacle with Captain Bainbridge under the pretext of letting him see whether he recognized anyone among the dead. Bainbridge identified an officer [Richard Somers] and begged the Bashaw for permission to bury him in a grave. The request was refused. The remains of these human beings were not buried until after three days later, when the greater part of them had been devoured by dogs.
Preble had failed; Yussef Karamanli of Tripoli was still unrepentant. Zuchet, a longtime observer, felt the Bashaw was becoming even more mercurial and violent. “One never knows what to expect from a prince with such a personality as this . . . one hears of nothing but murders and the most atrocious outrages. . . . Who can feel safe after these fine exploits of his? and after he has bragged, even publicly, that there are easy ways for him to avenge himself on anyone, indeed that he can cause accidents to occur without it ever being attributed to him.”
The United States had found a surprisingly resilient enemy in Bashaw Yussef. His knack for brutality and duplicity, while certainly a hallmark of most petty despots, amounted to something of a Karamanli family tradition. Yussef’s great-grandfather, Ahmed I, in fact founded the family dynasty in 1711 through a brutal trick.
For almost two millennia, this region (Tripoli in Jefferson’s day, Libya today) was juggled about by various foreign interlopers: first Greeks, then Romans, Goths, Arabian Moslems, and then, among others, neighboring Tunisians, Sicilian Normans, and Maltese knights, until finally the Turks of the vast Ottoman Empire subdued the territory in the 1550s. The Grand Sultan in Istanbul appointed a pasha (bashaw) and sent Janissaries (the Turkish elite warrior class) to maintain his grip; tribute would be squeezed out and siphoned to Istanbul.
Then came Karamanli. The leader of a small local army, Ahmed Karamanli had won a violent civil war in 1711 and claimed the throne. However, he knew his hold on power remained tenuous so long as the Turkish Janissaries still thrived and swore loyalty to the Sultan. So, pretending to crave their blessing for his rule, he invited them to a peace-making banquet.
The turbaned Janissaries, aboard jeweled mounts, toting silver-hilted scimitars, arrived at Bashaw Ahmed’s summer palace. In typical North African style, high windowless walls surrounded a central courtyard, where Ahmed, with salaams upon his lips, graciously greeted his guests. The loud thump of drums and squeal of stringed instruments, signs of a raucous party, drowned out his words of welcome. The smell of delicately spiced lamb enticed the guests inward. Each Janissary passed from the courtyard into the hallway that led to the banquet rooms. The doors shut behind them. There in the shadows lurked the Bashaw’s black slaves, his loyal palace guards, who quickly strangled each Janissary and dragged away the body. More guests arrived, more corpses slid along the tiled floors. That night, three hundred Janissaries died, and Ahmed gained a lock upon power for his family that would last more than a century. He looted all the officers’ homes and shrewdly shipped half the booty to Istanbul to placate the Sultan.
For the next two generations in Tripoli, succession flowed easily, and the nation thrived. Then came the three current brothers: Hassan, Hamet, and Yussef. All grew up as pampered princelings; when Hamet married a Circassian bride, the jewels laced into her hair weighed so much that they kept tipping her head backward.
In 1790—when Yussef was twenty, Hamet twenty-five, and Hassan twenty-eight—Yussef, who had already feuded with both his brothers, pulled off a deception worthy of the dynasty founder. In one act, he shamed his religion, his mother, and the sacred laws of the harem. Yussef contacted his mother in late July and told her that he wanted to reconcile with his oldest brother. Could she arrange a meeting in her apartments in the castle? The brother promised to show respect for the sanctity of the harem and arrive unarmed. She led them both to a sofa and sat between them, holding each of their hands, and she later told the sister of the English consul “that she prided herself on having at last brought them together to make peace at her side.”
To seal their reconciliation, Yussef said they should swear an oath on the Koran. The eldest replied, “With all my heart.” Yussef stood up and called loudly for a Koran. That was the signal. A eunuch entered and handed him two loaded pistols. His mother tried to deflect the first shot, and several of her fingers were shattered. The ball entered the eldest’s side, but he grabbed a scimitar by the window, shouting at his mother, “Ah! Is this the last present you have reserved for your eldest son?”
Yussef’s next shot hit Hassan in the chest, and he fell bleeding. At the sound of shots, Hassan’s wife, who was eight and a half months pregnant, rushed in and sprawled herself on his body to protect it. Yussef’s black slaves dragged her off by her hair and finished the assassination, firing nine more pistol balls into Hassan and then hacking and emasculating the body.
Such a wanton crime set Tripoli in an uproar. Would the elderly Bashaw punish Yussef, who had surrounded himself with a small army? Would middle brother Hamet attack Yussef? No one had the nerve to confront Yussef. The Bashaw promptly pardoned Yussef and cravenly demanded that Hamet go unarmed to ask his younger brother’s permission to be appointed as the new rightful heir to the throne. But before leaving the castle, amid all this turmoil, Hamet fainted onto his sofa, and word of his weakness spread.
The sister of the English consul, Miss Tully, left an extraordinarily intimate memoir of her ten years in Tripoli. She describes meeting Hamet a few months after his brother’s murder. The portrait is of a gracious gentleman. “His behaviour was mild, polite, and courteous . . . his manners to his family were not less affectionate and delicate than those of the most polished European.” Miss Tully was at once amazed by one trait, quite unusual in a Moslem man of that era. “He converses with his wife and sister in a manner which shewed he considered them as rational beings.”
Yussef, the most feared man in the nation, remained in the countryside, training an army, building allegiances among the tribes, while Hamet lived a sheltered life in the palace. His father grew so disgusted with Hamet that he cut off his allowance, and when the Jewish moneylenders refused him credit, he went politely begging loans from the foreign consuls.
Yussef readied his forces to attack to claim the throne. By his twenty-third birthday, all was in readiness; then, out of nowhere, a fleet of Turkish ships appeared in the harbor, and one Ali Bourghol, a mercenary, claimed the Sultan had appointed him the new Bashaw of Tripoli. Within days, the aged Bashaw and his son Hamet slunk away to Tunis. Yussef remained, plotting resistance.
Ali Bourghol set about looting and pillaging the country. Soon, not a female or a Jew dared to walk the streets. The mighty fell. The favorite consort of the old Bashaw was an “immensely fat Jewess,” dubbed “Queen Esther,” who would tell the Bashaw stories every night at bedtime. She was described as mischievous, happy, and very rich from wielding influence at the castle. Ali Bourghol locked her up in a cell, demanding a ransom of $15,000. The woman’s son arrived at the British consulate, distraught. He said the tight manacles on his mother’s blubbery wrists and ankles chaining her to the dungeon wall would kill her, and he remembered once seeing oversize manacles and a long chain in the consulate’s prison. Could he borrow them?
Esther was apparently huge; Miss Tully reported it took several strong men to lift her onto a donkey, and slaves always walked alongside to make sure that she didn’t fall. A wry Italian traveler visiting Tripoli around this time commented: “If a camel is necessary to carry her, she is considered a superior beauty . . . any woman who cannot move without leaning on two slaves can have only modest pretensions.”
Consul Tully lent the chain, and Esther’s life was saved. Many of the wealthiest Jews, however, did not survive. Two brokers for the Dutch consulate were burnt to death by “slow fire.”
Yussef allied himself with the ruler of Tunis and with his brother Hamet to mount a resistance against Ali Bourghol. The Jews of Tripoli helped finance the mission. The well-trained troops of Yussef and an army from Tunis attacked Tripoli. The end was swift.
“The pacha usurper [Ali Bourghol] departed as he had arrived, a pirate,” stated the French consul. “He wanted to squeeze the last drop out of the sponge but the enemy was already firing bombs into the city.” Bourghol began to massacre hostages, decapitated eleven Christian slaves, and even killed his own officers to take their loot; he departed around 3 A.M. on January 16, 1795, taking a French merchant ship with him. “One could compare the flight of the pacha to the end of a plague, as the aftermath was so sweet.”
On January 19, Hamet and his brother Yussef entered the city triumphant; the people of Tripoli welcomed them enthusiastically “with expressions of joy as lively as sincere.” The ruler of Tunis had convinced the old Bashaw to step down, and Hamet, twenty-nine years old, found himself proclaimed Bashaw of Tripoli.
He discovered the treasury empty. Ali Bourghol had stripped the palace down to the last stick of furniture. With no money to pay the army and with the Bedouin camped outside the city threatening to attack, Hamet was forced to borrow 60,000 Venetian sequins to bribe the Bedouin to leave. Hamet also begged the foreign consulates to lend him furniture, and he received, for instance, from the British: silver candlesticks and snuffers, an English sofa, some chairs, a mahogany dining table.
The English consul, Simon Lucas, was not the least bit impressed with the new ruler, Hamet. “The Bashaw Sidy Hamed, having at best a weak understanding, gave himself entirely up to his pleasures, was almost in a constant state of inebriation and consequently neglected the government. Sidy Joseph (Yussef) who is quite the opposite character of his brother neither drinks nor smokes and, having studied for some years in the school of adversity, acquired a thorough knowledge of the constitution of the government and of the disposition of his subjects, who love him almost to adoration, and had been frequently applied to in private by the principal people to salvage his country from total ruin by wresting the reins of government out of his brother’s hands.”
(An earlier French consul disagreed; he described Hamet as “very affable” and said most diplomats dreaded that Yussef, “sanguinary and ferocious,” might one day rule.)
On June 11, Hamet invited his brother to go gazelle hunting with him in the dunes by the city. (Hamet never left the city without his brother, for fear of treachery.) Yussef accepted the invitation but after leaving with his brother, secretly doubled back, killed the gatehouse guards, and ordered the city gates shut. Cannon fire announced the betrayal.
Hamet fled. Bedouin sheiks honored the laws of hospitality but would not rally to his cause. Hamet put up no fight. Yussef offered Hamet a choice: return to Tripoli and live a retired life with his family under house arrest or take the governorship of Derne and Bengazi, rich provinces to the east. Hamet accepted the governorship, but for the time being, Yussef kept Hamet’s family—his wife, Lilly Howviva, and his three sons and two daughters—as hostages. A storm forced Hamet’s ship to Malta, and fearing treachery, he decided to flee to Tunis. So began the captivity of Hamet’s family inside the castle of Tripoli, and Hamet’s exile.
For the past nine years, Yussef had ruled Tripoli with an iron fist, establishing law and order, restoring the Jews to revive commerce, and revamping the corsair fleet to extort tribute money from European governments. He gradually repaired the castle and replenished the treasury. The French government, post-Revolution, sent him a shipload of trinkets looted from the homes of aristocrats: carpets, mirrors, chandeliers. Yussef was using a bidet as a fountain until the English consul informed him of its proper function.
Over the years, Yussef married a second wife, an African, to go along with his first wife, a cousin who at age twelve had given birth to his first child. By age twenty-one she had given birth to three sons and three daughters. His black wife had given birth to one son and two daughters.
Now, on this day in early September of 1804, Yussef was fulfilling the family tradition of ruthlessness. He encouraged his people to hurl insults at the corpses of the American sailors; he let stray dogs gnaw on their bodies. His brother Hamet’s family remained hostages in the castle, scorned, disgraced. And weak wandering Hamet—on whom American hopes were pinned—was nowhere to be found. Rumor had him somewhere in Egypt.