Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Philadelphia hove in sight of Tripoli the morning of October 31 (then, as now, the day held special meaning to the superstitious). In the first light of dawn, the lookout sighted a native vessel standing to the east, close inshore with the town, and Bainbridge gave orders to make sail in chase. At eleven, seeing that the fleeing vessel was coming within the extreme range of the frigate’s guns, Bainbridge ordered the bow chasers to open fire. For another hour the chase continued. The leadsmen were kept busy, constantly casting the lead and reporting a depth that varied from seven to ten fathoms. At half past eleven, with the walls and rooftops of Tripoli in plain sight, the Philadelphia entered the shoal waters that guarded the entrance to the harbor, and Bainbridge gave up the chase and ordered the helmsman to put the ship up into the wind.

  The Philadelphia, unknown to her captain and crew, was already in mortal danger. With her head put into the wind and her speed at 7 or 8 knots, she all at once lurched, shuddered, and came to rest. Her bow was canted six feet out of the water and her deck was suddenly as fixed and motionless as a patch of dry ground. When the men on deck leaned over the side, they saw the green and greasy copper undersheathing of the hull resting on a reef just below the surface. The Philadelphia had run hard aground. Worse, she had struck with such force that the lip of the reef was directly beneath her fore chains. A full third of her length had been thrown on top of the shoal. Later charts would identify it as “Kaliusa Reef,” but the Philadelphia’s charts showed no such reef in that position, and Bainbridge later said that the grounding was “as unexpected to me as if it had happened in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.”

  Immediately Bainbridge ordered the sails laid aback and the guns run aft to lift the bow. The sounding lead was heaved from the taffrail and the leadsman reported an ample depth of water astern for the ship to float, if the Philadelphia could be backed off the reef. But the wind was blowing stiffly onto the starboard beam, and the sea was setting with it. When the weight of the guns was transferred to the stern, the bow was lifted from the reef just as Bainbridge had intended—but the wind and waves only drove the hull further onto the shoal. Two hours after grounding, the entire length of the frigate had come to rest and she was heeling severely to larboard, with water beginning to pour through her leeward gunports.

  With the ship “immovably grounded on rocks,” Bainbridge called his officers back to the quarterdeck for a hurried conference. All agreed that the Philadelphia’s situation was desperate enough to justify an extreme measure: they would heave the guns into the sea and start the fresh water out of the hold.

  In the Philadelphia’s distressed position, she was plainly visible from the town. Tripolitans raced down to the harbor to man the gunboats. Nine vessels put out from the harbor and by midafternoon they had approached to within cannon-shot range of the stranded frigate.

  All but a few of the Philadelphia’s guns were thrown over the side, and the few that remained were mounted on her stern. Because of the awkward angle at which the ship was heeling, these guns could be brought to bear only with difficulty. The Tripolitan gunboat crews soon realized they could approach with impunity. Armed with 18- and 24-pounder brass guns, they kept up a steady fire on the Philadelphia, aiming chiefly for the masts in order to prevent her escape. The frigate’s situation, said Bainbridge, was like that of “one man tied to a stake attacked by another with arms.”

  As the afternoon wore on, the crew of the Philadelphia took increasingly desperate steps to lighten the ship. Men with hatchets cut away the foremast and all its supporting rigging. Casks of water and provisions were hoisted up through the hatchways and thrown haphazardly over the side. The anchors, one by one, were cut free and allowed to splash into the sea. “All that seamanship could dictate was acted upon to relieve us from the rocks,” Bainbridge later wrote—“but all proved in Vain!”

  Four hours after the grounding, the captain called his exhausted officers together for a second conference. All agreed that the Philadelphia was doomed. Nothing more could be done to get her off the reef. Nor was there any hope of bringing the frigate’s few remaining guns to bear on the Tripolitan gunboats. Further resistance would end in the slaughter of the crew. For the third time in his short naval career, Bainbridge gave the fateful order to haul down the American colors and surrender his ship “to an enemy whom chance had befriended.”

  In the last minutes before the Tripolitans came aboard to take possession, the crew took measures to scuttle the ship. The carpenter took his mates below to bore holes through the ship’s bottom. The gunner drowned the magazine by “turning the cock and securing the key,” allowing a rush of cold seawater to pour into the hold. Cannon shot was thrown into the pumps to render them useless. Bainbridge himself tore the signal book into pieces and handed them to a midshipmen to be burned or thrown overboard. At six, with darkness falling, the victorious corsairs clambered over the side to seize the prize that had fallen so unexpectedly into their hands.

  There seems to have been little discipline among the Tripolitans. According to ship’s surgeon Jonathan Cowdery, a quarrel between some of the Tripolitan officers and their own men escalated into a melee. The officers drew their swords and “cut off the hands of some, and it is believed several were killed.”

  Communicating with the prisoners using gestures and a few phrases from the amorphous lingua franca of the Mediterranean—an amalgamation of French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic—the Tripolitans instructed the prisoners to climb down into the gunboats, where they would be transported to the town. In the confusion that followed, many of the Americans were beaten and robbed. Tripolitans rifled the prisoners’ pockets, tore off their clothes, and stripped them of their watches, money, books, pocket handkerchiefs, and gloves. Dr. Cowdery was robbed of his surgical instruments and a silver pencil. “The treatment we received from these Savages was such as raised our utmost indignation,” said Bainbridge. “Nothing was sacred or escaped their prying search…. Our swords were snatched from us, our pockets searched and emptied; some of us had our boots pulled off, to examine if something was not concealed there, and some had their very coats pulled off their backs, which the barbarians exultingly put upon themselves, and as if the rewards of some signal Exploit; they seemed to triumph in acquiring what fortune alone had obtained them.”

  As the overcrowded boats reached the inner harbor, some of the prisoners were thrown into the sea and forced to swim or wade ashore. The boat carrying Bainbridge and several of his officers landed at a pier at the foot of the Bashaw’s Castle. They were driven through the streets—“amidst the shouts and acclamations of the rabble Multitude”—to a passageway “lined with terrific janissaries, armed with glittering sabers, muskets, pistols and tomahawks.” Hurried along through “various turnings and flights of stairs,” they were escorted into an opulent hall, where the walls were made of enameled porcelain and the marble floors covered with luxuriant Turkish carpets. The prisoners were compelled to sit in a half circle before an elevated throne.

  After a short delay, Yusuf Karamanli himself entered, trailing an entourage of councilors and guards. At thirty-five years old, the Bashaw was in the prime of his health. He was tall and athletic, with a long, dark beard and a “manly, majestic deportment.” He wore a long robe made of cerulean silk and embroidered with gold lace. A gold sword hung from his diamond-encrusted belt, and his head was crowned with a magnificent white turban. As he gazed down on the prisoners from his throne, Bainbridge later wrote, “a gracious smile appeared upon his countenance, expressive of his inward satisfaction.”

  Yusuf seemed willing to treat his prisoners as honored guests, and after a short audience the officers were served a sumptuous dinner at a table “set in the European style.” The servants appeared to be Maltese and Neapolitan slaves. The incongruity of the lavish setting must have heightened the officers’ sense of shock and dislocation. They must have known that few prisoners taken by the Barbary States were ever restored to freedom. None kept a record of any conversati
on that passed between them during the meal, but it is not difficult to picture them eating in stunned silence.

  After dinner, the officers were escorted out of the castle by a retinue of armed guards. Walking for a short distance through the city, they arrived at the former residence of James Cathcart, the last American consul who had lived in Tripoli before the war. This house, they were told, would serve as their quarters for the duration of their captivity. It was large and pleasant, with a spacious interior court and an imposing portico lined with ancient marble pillars, but it had stood empty for years and its many rooms contained no furniture. On the first night, Bainbridge and the others made themselves as comfortable as they could, sleeping on “mats and blankets spread upon the floor, which was composed of tiles.”

  Most of their personal belongings—“everything but what we had on our Backs & even part of that”—had been stolen. It was unclear whether their captors would provide them with food or other essentials. The Tripolitans offered to sell the officers their own trunks of clothing (which had been recovered from the still-grounded Philadelphia) for the exorbitant price of $1,200, but the Americans did not have that kind of money and would not pay it even if they did.

  Relief came on the second day, when the Danish consul, Nicholas Nissen, brought mattresses, blankets, and baskets of pomegranates, dates, and oranges. Nissen, prompted by nothing more than simple charity, offered to assist the American officers in making their captivity as comfortable as possible. He introduced Bainbridge to local bankers and assisted him in negotiating an order for 300 Spanish dollars “which will serve his wants as well as those of his officers.” Bainbridge also borrowed 500 dollars from the Tripolitan foreign minister, Sidi Mohammed Dghies, at 15 percent interest.

  The Tripolitans were familiar with the European military custom of the parole of honor, and agreed to a generous degree of personal freedom in exchange for a pledge that no American officer would try to escape. On November 5, Dghies sent his personal secretary to the officers’ house with a parole written in French. Each man signed it. The guards relaxed and the prisoners were permitted to climb a stairway that led to a terrace at the top of the house, which “commanded a handsome prospect of the harbor, the sea, the town, the Palace, and the adjoining country.” They were irked to see many Tripolitans “running about town with our uniform coats and other clothing on.”

  Bainbridge lost no time in laying the foundation of his defense. Having consulted with his officers before surrendering the Philadelphia, he now asked them to put in writing their approval of his conduct. They complied, each signing a statement that expressed “our full approbation of your conduct concerning the unfortunate event of yesterday…believe us, sir, that our misfortunes and sorrows are entirely absorbed in our sympathy for you.”

  In his official letters, Bainbridge’s anguish was palpable. “Sir,” he wrote Secretary Smith the day after the capture; “Misfortune necessitates me to make a communication, the most distressing of my life, and it is with the deepest regret that I inform you of the loss of the United States frigate Philadelphia under my command by being wrecked on Rocks between four and five miles to the Eastward of the Town of Tripoli.” Anticipating the criticism that he should have fought rather than surrender, he told Captain Preble: “Some Fanatics may say that blowing the ship up would have been the proper result. I thought such conduct would not stand acquitted before God or Man, and I never presumed to think I had the liberty of putting to death the lives of 306 Souls because they were placed under my command.”

  As if the loss of the Philadelphia was not bad enough, on either November 1 or 2, a westerly gale raised a heavy sea, and with the help of the Philadelphia’s own carpenter and his mates, the damaged frigate was lifted off the shoal and brought triumphantly into Tripoli’s inner harbor. Over the next several days, divers free-dove the reef and successfully retrieved many of the guns and much of the other equipment that had been thrown overboard. Having first assured his superiors that the Philadelphia was a complete loss, Bainbridge was now forced to admit that he had been wrong. “We were not Gods to foresee the Wind, and to know that the Sea would so rise; and had we been apprised of it all, it could have availed us nothing.”

  Although he maintained a cool outward demeanor, Bainbridge’s private letters written during this period suggest he was borderline suicidal. He assumed that when the news of the loss of the Philadelphia reached America, he would be condemned as an incompetent, perhaps even a coward. Isolated by his rank, Bainbridge was mostly left alone by his subordinate officers, and he passed the long, uneventful hours imagining what his countrymen were thinking of him and saying about him. Unless liberated, he would never even have the opportunity to defend himself and his decision to surrender his ship. He told his wife, Susan, “These are the mere reveries which daily pass through my heated brain…. These impressions, which are seldom absent from my mind, act as a corroding canker at my heart.”

  Writing on November 1 to Susan, Bainbridge exclaimed that “it would have been a merciful dispensation of Providence if my head had been shot off by the enemy, while our vessel lay rolling on the rocks.” Only his certainty that she would always love him, in spite of his disgrace, gave him a will to go on living: “If the world desert me, I am sure to find a welcome in her arms—in her affection, to receive the support and condolence which none others can give.”

  FOR THE OFFICERS, captivity in Tripoli was shaping up to be something like an extended vacation in a tropical seaside resort. The midshipmen amused themselves by catching scorpions in the courtyard, while the lieutenants accepted an invitation to lunch with Nissen at the Danish consulate. The enlisted men of the Philadelphia were not nearly so fortunate. Their plight was recorded by an ordinary seaman named William Ray, a thirty-four-year-old native of Salisbury, Connecticut, whose career had included failed stints as a shopkeeper, a schoolmaster, and a newspaper editor. Published in 1808, his account was entitled Horrors of Slavery, or the American Tars in Tripoli.

  Hours after the surrender of the Philadelphia, the sailors were taken under heavy guard to a damp cell within the walls of the castle. The chamber, which would house more than two hundred prisoners, was 50 feet long and 20 feet wide. Light entered through a narrow aperture in the ceiling and two grated windows. “Not a morsel of food had we tasted,” Ray wrote, “and hunger, like the vulture of Prometheus, began to corrode our vitals.” Eventually, each man was given a small, unsatisfying loaf of coarse white bread. They slept that night on the floor, which was cold, damp, and “planted with hard pebbles.” A few were lucky enough to have salvaged some flimsy, tattered fragments of sailcloth; the others rolled up their shirts as pillows. As the room was not nearly large enough for all the men to stretch out, some slept while sitting and others spent the night on their feet.

  In the morning, the prisoners were awoken before sunrise by “the horrid clanking of huge bolts.” They were divided into smaller groups and taken off to different parts of the city to be put to work. Those who were slow to comply were beaten by the guards. Some were forced to carry stone, dirt, lime, and mortar to a construction site; others carried buckets of water from a well to the castle. A few were rowed out to the Philadelphia, where they remained all night, working to bring her off the reef.

  On returning that night, a scuffle broke out as men tried to force their way into the cell in front of their mates, hoping to stake out enough space on the floor to get a night of sleep. They were fed a meal of couscous, which they had never seen before—Ray described it as “barley ground very coarse, and neither sifted nor bolted”—and small loaves of coarse black barley bread, which the ravenous prisoners “seized with avidity.” Accustomed to the harsh conditions of naval service, the seamen showed a remarkable ability to adapt to the grim routine. Ray observed with admiration that his fellow prisoners, “in the most despondent aspect of times,…would caper, sing, jest, and look as cheerful, many of them, as if they had been at a feast or wedding.”

  On the thi
rd day, while at a work site, some of the Americans managed to sneak away from their overseers and wander into town in search of liquor, which was purveyed by some of the city’s Jews and Christians. Most of Tripoli’s streets were alleyways abutted by the walls of the houses, so narrow that pedestrians had to walk in a single file. Homes were built of materials apparently scavenged from ancient ruins, including fragments of marble with “engravings and inscriptions, mostly defaced,” in Greek and Latin. Beginning just inside the city’s main gate, which was festooned with the severed hands of accused thieves, a long line of low brick huts served as a market. At the door of each shop, a proprietor sat cross-legged on the ground, wrapped in a blanket. One could buy or barter for “pumpkins, carrots, turnips, scallions, oranges, lemons, limes, figs, etc. etc. with a thousand trinkets, and haber-dashers’ wares.”

  When caught, the sailors who had deserted their work site were sentenced to suffer a “bastinado.” Ray described the punishment:

  The instrument with which they prepare a man for torture is called a bastone; it is generally about four or five feet long, and as thick in the middle as a man’s leg, tapering to the ends. At equal distances from the center, it is perforated in two places, and a rope incurvated, the ends passed through the holes, and knotted. This forms a loop. The person is then thrown on his back, his feet put through the loop, and a man at each end of the stick, both at once, twist it round, screw his feet and ankles tight together, and raise the soles of his feet nearly horizontal. A Turk sits on his back, and two men, with each a bamboo, or branch of the date tree, as large as a walking staff and about three feet in length, hard and very heavy, strip or roll up their sleeves, and with all their strength and fury, apply the bruising cudgel to the bottoms of the feet. In this manner they punished several of our men, [who were] writhing with extreme anguish, and cursing their tormentors.