Six Frigates

by Ian W. Toll

  Among the Philadelphia’s crew were a number of British-born men. Some hoped to win release by declaring themselves loyal subjects of the king of England and asking for the intervention of the British consul. Captain Bainbridge endorsed the idea on grounds of “Interest and Humanity.” But several of the Philadelphia’s renegade Britons had nothing but contempt for the idea, saying that “they would not be released by a government which they detested, on account of its tolerating the impressment of seamen, and swearing that they would sooner remain under the Bashaw than George the third.” No prisoner was ever claimed by the British government, and Lord Nelson himself was said to have remarked that he would sooner “have the Rascals all hung” than intercede on behalf of men who had turned their backs on England to enlist in a foreign navy.

  There was another way to escape captivity, and that was to “turn Turk”—to agree to convert to Islam. Muslims could not be enslaved in Tripoli, and any captive who agreed to undergo the conversion was usually emancipated. Owners sometimes tried to block such conversions so that they would not be divested of their slaves.

  On November 8, one of the Philadelphia’s crew expressed an interest in conversion. He was John Wilson, formally the captain’s coxswain (the man who piloted the captain’s barge) aboard the Philadelphia. He had been born in Germany and had learned the Mediterranean lingua franca. He apparently invented stories in the hope of gaining Yusuf’s ear, falsely reporting to the Tripolitans that Captain Bainbridge had thrown nineteen boxes of gold dollars and a large bag of gold overboard before surrendering the Philadelphia, and later warning of a plot among the prisoners to rise up and take over the town. As a reward for his cooperation, Wilson was promoted to overseer of his former crewmates. He was, Ray said, a “perfidious wretch.” On November 20, a second of the Philadelphia’s seamen, a seventeen-year-old Rhode Islander named Thomas Prince, also agreed to convert to Islam. He was allowed to leave the prison and was taken to the palace, where he would be employed by the Bashaw as a private servant.

  Ten weeks after the loss of the Philadelphia, the Tripolitan harbor batteries fired a salute to mark the end of the fast of Ramadan. Mosques and houses were illuminated and people turned out in their best clothes to rejoice in the streets. Captain Bainbridge was invited to a celebratory feast with the Bashaw and the entire diplomatic corps. Along with all the other vessels in the harbor, the Philadelphia was dressed in bright flags and colors, and her guns were fired to join the general salute.

  PREBLE LEARNED OF THE LOSS of the Philadelphia on November 24 from the captain of the Royal Navy frigate Amazon (38 guns), when she spoke the Constitution at sea a few miles southwest of Sardinia. The Commodore wrote in his private diary that he had received “melancholy and distressing Intelligence of the loss of the US ship Philadelphia…the loss of that ship and capture of the Crew with all its consequences are of the most serious and alarming nature to the United States….” Preble feared that Algiers and Tunis would seize the opportunity to declare war. He dreaded the prospect of expanded hostilities at a time when his squadron’s effective strength had been diminished by some 30 to 40 percent. “I most sincerely pity the cruel fate of poor Bainbridge,” Preble wrote his wife, Mary; “I know not what will become of them. I suspect very few will ever see home again.”

  Preble put the Constitution on a course for Malta, where he hoped to gather more intelligence about the appalling event. On November 27, the flagship was just off the Grand Harbor of Valetta, lying to under freshening breezes from the north. Preble chose not to take the Constitution into Valetta, an English port, fearing another spate of desertion. A lieutenant took a boat with a handpicked crew and sailed into the harbor, returning a few hours later with a sheaf of correspondence from Captain Bainbridge. Not only did the letters confirm the capture of the Philadelphia and her crew, but Preble now learned that the Tripolitans had floated the ship and were busy refitting her in Tripoli’s inner harbor. The latter news effectively doubled the pain of the loss. A powerful weapon had been subtracted from Preble’s fighting strength and added to that of the enemy.

  The wind came up all through the afternoon. Soon after the lieutenant had returned from Valetta and the boat safely hoisted back onto the davits, the Constitution was laboring in gale-force northerly winds and “tremendous seas in the channel.” Preble put her into the teeth of the gale, under reefed courses and staysails, and she had a rough time of it for the next twenty-four hours, finally fetching the lee of Sicily on the twenty-ninth. Moored in the harbor at Syracuse were two other squadron vessels, Enterprise and Nautilus, and a storeship recently arrived from America, the Traveler.

  Preble landed and waited upon the governor, Marcello de Gregorio, who was obviously delighted to welcome the squadron. The U.S. Navy had money to spend, and its presence would discourage the Barbary cruisers from operating in waters near the Sicilian coast. The squadron was generously allowed the use of the arsenal, which provided covered shelter for boats, spars, “and very excellent Magazines that will contain five thousand Barrels of provisions; and all these free of expence!” Syracusians put out in boats from the quays to tour the Constitution, and the local nobility vied to invite the officers into their homes as guests. Preble felt his decision to move the rendezvous from Malta was vindicated: “The Inhabitants are extremely friendly and civil, and our Sailors cannot desert.”

  The squadron lay moored in the harbor for two weeks, as Preble attended to the tedious details of refitting and provisioning. Ugly weather delayed the transfer of several hundred casks of fresh water aboard the Constitution and her consorts, as well as the landing of the Traveler’s cargo ashore. Constitution prepared a new suit of sails, and the Enterprise was newly rigged from stem to stern.

  Preble was known as a “hard horse”—a harsh disciplinarian—and he lived up to his reputation while the squadron harbored at Syracuse. Floggings were a near-daily event aboard the Constitution. On November 29, several seamen were given two or three dozen lashes each for crimes that included “drunkenness, neglect of duty, and stealing rum from the ship’s stores.” As commodore, Preble had the right to punish seamen serving aboard any vessel under his command, and it was a right he did not hesitate to exercise. On December 1, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, Jr., commander of the Enterprise, received the following curt note: “Your men on shore for the purpose of fitting your Rigging were this Afternoon most of them drunk. This must undoubtedly have happened in consequence of the negligence of the Officers in charge of them. I request you to make the necessary inquiry respecting this Neglect on their part, as I shall most certainly take notice of it. One of your men is in Irons on board this ship for impertinence to me.”

  Preble planned to get the squadron underway for the coast of Tripoli, where he would try a winter blockade. His predecessors had tried and failed to blockade the port continuously, even during the milder summer months, but Preble believed they had bungled the logistical aspects of the operation and that he could succeed where they had failed. On the other hand, he admitted to Secretary Smith that the loss of the Philadelphia “distresses me beyond description, and very much deranges my plans of operation for the present.” He asked to be reinforced with two more frigates. With such a squadron under his command, he promised, he would bring Yusuf to his knees.

  As news of the Philadelphia’s capture spread through the Mediterranean, Bainbridge came in for savage criticism, just as he had known he would. “How glorious it would have been to have perished with the Ship,” wrote James Cathcart from Leghorn on the Italian coast to Secretary of State Madison, with a civilian’s enthusiasm for the romance of dying in battle: “…while humanity recoils at the idea of launching so many souls into eternity, everything great, glorious, and patriotic dictates the measure [blowing up the ship], and our national honor and pride demanded the sacrifice.” The junior officers of the squadron were hardly more sympathetic. Midshipman Wadsworth’s disgusted view was that “one of our Finest Frigates was deserted, without even making a defens
e to be expected from an American cockboat.”

  Preble expressed a variety of opinions on the subject, depending on whom he was addressing. In his letters to Bainbridge (sent to Tripoli in care of the Danish consul, Nissen), he expressed nothing but sympathy and reassurance. “I feel most sensibly for the misfortune of yourself, your Officers, and Crew,” he wrote December 19. “Your situation is truly distressing, and affects your friends too powerfully to be described.” Doubting not for a moment that Bainbridge had done everything within his power to save the Philadelphia, Preble said that what he most regretted was losing the services of such a “valuable commander.”

  In his official letters to the Navy Department, Preble took a different tone. “I shall not hazard an opinion on the subject of the loss,” he wrote Secretary Smith, and then offered one: “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 have saved them from either!” He added, caustically, that he was surprised the ship had not been properly scuttled before she was delivered into the hands of the enemy.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS EVE, the Constitution was in the offing near Tripoli, running south toward the African coast in company with the Enterprise. Soon after first light, the lookout at the masthead sighted land to the southwest, and a few minutes later hailed the deck again to report a sail on the horizon in the same direction.

  Preble ordered the British ensign hauled up to the mizzen peak. The hands were turned out to make sail and the Constitution gave chase. The wind soon veered into the southwest, bringing the stranger dead to windward, and she might have escaped into Tripoli Harbor had she been handled with determination. Evidently, however, the crew did not suspect that the English colors were a ruse, and since they had no reason to fear the Royal Navy, they made no effort to escape. At 10:00 a.m., nine miles northeast of Tripoli, the vessel submitted to a shot fired across her bow.

  She was ketch-rigged, about 60 tons burden, and flying Tripolitan colors. Her name was Mastico. A moment after her captain had stepped onto the quarterdeck of the Constitution, Preble ordered down the British ensign and up the Stars and Stripes, at which “the People on board the vessel appeared to be in the greatest confusion.” Directly under the guns of a 1,500-ton frigate, however, the little ketch did not have the slightest hope of escape.

  Questioning the captain and officers through a translator, Preble learned that Mastico had sailed from Tripoli the evening before for Constantinople. Her crew included a Turkish master, seven Greeks, four Turks, two Tripolitan officers, ten Tripolitan soldiers, and forty-two sub-Saharan African slaves—men, women, and children—who were to be given as tribute to the Grand Ottoman Turk. Though she had been flying a Tripolitan ensign when captured, Mastico’s captain insisted that she was an Ottoman vessel. The presence of several Turks in her crew made it difficult for Preble to dismiss the claim out of hand. The last thing Preble needed was a quarrel with the Ottoman Empire. The ketch’s papers were written in Arabic and would require some time to be translated properly. The commodore decided to send her into Syracuse with a prize crew so that her national identity could be definitively ascertained. He would decide what to do with her later.

  The officers and crew were taken aboard the Constitution as prisoners, and the prize set off to the north under convoy with the Enterprise. It was Christmas Eve. Constitution at first stood in toward Tripoli Harbor, but the sky appeared menacing, with “every appearance of strong breezes from the north,” wrote Sailing Master Nathaniel Haraden in the ship’s log. Plans for a winter blockade were for the moment abandoned, and Preble put the frigate into the wind to gain a safe offing against the coming gale.

  The storm came on Christmas morning. Every resource of seamanship was needed to claw the Constitution off a lee shore that was also, as it happened, enemy territory. The prisoners lined the rail and seemed to will the ship to be wrecked: “The Horrors of ship wreck added to irretrievable slavery make this coast very dangerous in the winter,” Haraden observed.

  For several days, Constitution labored through heavy seas and rain under close-reefed topsails and reefed courses, her topgallant masts and yards struck down on deck. She clawed her way north, mile by bitter mile, at last overhauling the Enterprise and Mastico near Malta. The Mastico was so battered that she was no longer capable of sailing, and the Constitution took her in tow. On December 30, the weather-beaten squadron arrived at Syracuse and anchored in five fathoms water, just outside the mole.

  In Syracuse, the case against the Mastico was reinforced by an Italian doctor from Malta who identified two of her officers as high-ranking Tripolitans, swearing “that one of them was a principal officer of the Bashaw and that the other held high rank in his troops.” Even more damning, Preble learned from an English pilot who had been in Tripoli on October 31 that Mastico had taken part in the capture of the Philadelphia. The ketch had been moored in Tripoli’s inner harbor that day under Ottoman colors. When it was obvious that the American frigate was grounded and distressed, the Mastico “took on board upwards of One hundred Tripolines armed with muskets, sabers, etc, slipped his cables, hauled down the Turkish and Hoisted Tripoline Colors, and proceeded to the Attack of the Philadelphia.”

  If any doubt remained in Preble’s mind, it was dispelled when articles belonging to the officers of the Philadelphia, including a sword and belt Preble recognized as belonging to Lieutenant David Porter, turned up in the possession of the Mastico’s crew. Whether she was Tripoline or Ottoman was beside the point, said Preble: “If a Tripoline, she is a prize; if a Turk, a pirate.”

  The Mastico was not a valuable prize. A panel of American officers estimated her worth at no more than $1,800. But her economic value was not important. As the officers and men of the squadron celebrated the new year, 1804, Preble had an important mission in mind for the little ketch—a mission that promised, if successful, to bring him one long step closer to winning the war.

  SHOULD THE OFFICERS AND CREW of the Philadelphia be ransomed? The suggestion could not be dismissed out of hand. There was a precedent for it in the recent past: the U.S. government had paid a huge ransom to recover American seamen taken by Algiers. Even before the loss of the Philadelphia was known in Washington, the president’s cabinet had voted to authorize a new payment to the Bashaw of Tripoli. Jefferson and Madison were not adamantly opposed to paying for peace in the Mediterranean; they just wanted to be sure of getting value for the American people’s money.

  Months would pass before the dispatches could be carried back to America, digested by Jefferson and his advisers, and new orders carried back to Syracuse. Preble could not afford to keep the squadron idle as he awaited new instructions. To do so would risk bringing on himself the same censure that had ended his predecessor’s naval career. He had no choice but to proceed as best he could.

  American diplomatic consuls were stationed in most of the major ports of the Mediterranean. They were an unruly and fractious group, often operating with little or no supervision from their putative boss, Secretary of State Madison. They blended public duties with private business affairs in ethically troubling ways, and they seemed to devote much of their time to feuding among themselves. For all their flaws, however, the members of this embryonic diplomatic corps knew better than anyone else how to get things done in the Barbary States.

  Working independently and through backchannels, several of the consuls sounded out the Bashaw’s ministers on the cost of ransoming the officers and crew of the Philadelphia. In mid-December, James Cathcart, the former consul to Tripoli, told Madison that “if government concludes to redeem our fellow citizens immediately and sue for peace on the Bashaw’s own terms, it will cost us $300,000 at least, exclusive of consular presents and annuity (tribute) of $10,000 or $15,000….” Richard O’Brien, the former consul to Algiers, came up with the similar figure of $282,800, based upon a price of $600 for each sailor and $4,000 for each officer. Peace, he said, would require a
n additional onetime payment of $100,000. Tobias Lear, the current consul at Algiers, weighed in on Christmas Eve, estimating the ransom at $1,000 per head ($307,000) and peace at about $150,000.

  Naturally, such a settlement would only be reached at the end of long negotiations. The Bashaw’s initial demand would be something like $3 million. “A pretty good asking price,” Preble commented dryly.

  If half a million dollars would wash away America’s troubles in the Mediterranean, the Bashaw’s terms might have been deemed a bargain. But there were other variables to consider. As a new country, placed on the opposite side of the great western ocean, America was a bit of an enigma; the Barbary powers had not yet decided, as James Cathcart put it, “how to rank us among the nations of the earth.” Was the United States a formidable military power to be treated with deference, like England and France? Or was it a nation to be preyed upon and blackmailed, like Naples, Portugal, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden? Or was it something in between? The outcome of the Tripolitan War would provide the answer. A large peace settlement would be interpreted by Tunis and Algiers as a fatal sign of weakness, and tempt them to escalate their own demands. Worse, they might take the view that long-term war against a nation so obviously rich and defenseless was preferable to peace at any price.