Bliven lay down in his tiny berth and closed his eyes, but he did not sleep. Instead he pondered how close he might have come to wrecking his naval career, less than a week old. In his mind’s eye he saw the man fall from the yardarm again and again. Bliven did not know his name, but surmised he was one of the new recruits who went to sea, as many did, one jump ahead of the law. Bliven had seen him clinging uncertainly to the rigging; ought he to have drawn Merrick’s attention to him? Surely it was not for a midshipman to tell a bosun of fifteen years’ experience who to send aloft. Again he saw Merrick running toward him, waving his arms and shouting at him not to come about until the sails were down. Might he have capsized the vessel? Likely not, really, for she was well ballasted, and it was part of the bosun’s job to help train midshipmen. His first three watches at the wheel, either the second or third lieutenant was nearby. He could not have been expected to respond as a seasoned officer would have.
Bliven rubbed his eyes and shook his head, hoping to place it behind him. He thought again of the majesty of a ship of the line, and wished that he had seen one, but he had not, he had seen only pictures. At a time when England and France deployed scores of them, the United States possessed not one. He knew they had built one, once, but straightaway awarded her to France as thanks for their help in the Revolution, and to replace a French vessel lost in that conflict. This seemed like a grandly generous gesture, to public perception, but over time the real reason became clear, that our infant country had no money to maintain such a powerful ship in peacetime, and in this gift to France they divested themselves of that ruinous expense. The largest ship Bliven had seen was a frigate; he had boarded the President once, briefly, to receive his commission, and was breathtaken at even her size and complexity. He had heard it widely stated as fact, and it was universally accepted, that America’s frigates were incomparably better than any of their class in the European navies; even the great Admiral Lord Nelson had remarked his consternation at ever having to fight one.
• • •
ONLY THREE DAYS AT SEA, but home seemed a world away. Bliven’s brawn and self-reliance had slowly accrued with dawn-to-dusk labor on his family’s farm near Litchfield, Connecticut, and his late start as an officer in training resulted from the bargain he had made with his father. Unlike many of their neighbors who could apportion chores among four or six or many more children—a circumstance common even elsewhere in his extended Putnam family—Bliven, despite his parents’ prayers and assiduous effort, was an only child. He had agreed with his hardworking father, laconically in their spare-spoken New England way but not altogether tacitly, that Bliven would work long and without complaint to bring their farm to self-sufficiency, and when the time came he would be free to seek a larger destiny, to travel, to learn things of the world that did not come from cultivating corn and root vegetables, or pressing cider from the apples in their orchard. The world held wonder for him, and he read books ahead of his years on history and geography. He had proven only a moderately successful student at mathematics and the sciences, but he applied himself to learning of the rest of the world, the places, the people and how they lived.
In that two years since Bliven voiced his interest in the navy they had increased their orchard to an acreage ample for commercial production, enlarged the garden, and brought two new fields into production. In this condition they needed only to hire a single helper, paid for with the sale of cider, and his father proved as good as his word.
Bliven’s choice of the sea was new within his family. New England had always had sailors, but far fewer as so many turned to farming and commerce. The perils of the North Atlantic were all too well known, as townspeople observed lonely matrons strolling the widow’s walks atop their harborside houses, forever gazing out to sea for the rise of approaching masts. Most of their men eventually returned, but all too often they did not. Yet the Revolution and the Quasi-War clarified to all the need for a fleet, whose paucity of seamen was well publicized, and for Bliven it was his best chance to enlarge his own horizons. There was little to prepare him for the sea in Litchfield, but this placed him at no disadvantage from other midshipmen, for many entered the service having read less than he had. Bliven had seen several of the memoirs written by officers who had accompanied Captain Cook in his explorations. Only recently had he acquired a recent edition, though not the latest, of The Practical Navigator, but he did not consult it as often. He was no great hand at mathematics, and he could only trust that the trigonometry required for the subject would come to him with age.
A midshipman’s appointment was impossible without a recommendation from a senator of the candidate’s home state, and the senior Mr. Putnam had approached Uriah Tracy, who had long maintained a law office in Litchfield. It was in Bliven’s favor that the celebrated Revolutionary War general Israel Putnam had been his grandfather’s brother, and moreover that the navy wanted men, desperately. Mr. Putnam recounted his family’s hardship during the Revolution—and it surely also helped that Tracy was an enthusiastic consumer of Putnam cider. When Bliven’s appointment to the navy issued, he left the farm without guilt and with his father’s spoken blessing, but in Bliven’s quiet moments he worried about them.
Bliven knew that with the afternoon watch they would beat to quarters for gun drill. Lieutenant Sterett was mad for discipline and efficiency from the gun crews, but then, as one of the few on board who had seen action, he had reason. With twelve guns and three messes that the crew had formulated their first day out, the labor was evenly divided: first mess to service the first four guns port; second mess the first four guns starboard; third mess the last two guns each side. Each gun had a crew of four, which, as each six-pounder weighed three quarters of a ton, was barely sufficient to run them out and in, and a boy for each three guns to shuttle powder and shot up from the magazine. The lieutenants had command of the guns in action; Bliven was assigned to help Porter with port guns one through four.
Sterett drove the crews hard, but after three days, from the initial tattoo of beating to quarters the crew were at their stations, tompions pulled, guns rolled out, powder horns at the touch holes ready for priming powder, second cartridge and ball waiting to reload, wet sponges and ramrod ready—all in three minutes. Mistakes the first day were met with a tongue-lashing; mistakes the second day were lashed with a cat; the third day there were no mistakes, and when Sterett praised them, it meant something. Almost never did a ship fight both sides at once; thus, when the starboard guns were engaged, the crews of the port guns were available to manage the rigging and replace casualties. Every man knew his action station and his duty, and Sterett pressed on them that confusion in battle was fatal.
On their fourth day out they suddenly encountered a north wind, stiff and chill, that blew stronger during the course of the day. The frigates held their course but lost speed, hauling repeatedly closer to the wind until it seemed they must lie on their beam ends, while the Enterprise skimmed ahead on her fore-and-aft main rigging.
Sterett was visibly vexed at the prospect of having to shorten sail even more to keep from outrunning them, when a cry came from the lookout that the President was running up signal flags. He put the glass briefly to his eye and hissed, “Damn.” He sent a boy to run and fetch his speaking trumpet.
He could see the bosun was aware something was afoot, and was awaiting instruction. “Mr. Merrick!” called Sterett.
“Sir?”
“The flagship desires to speak us. Take in your mains’l and mizzen, we will run on tops’ls and jibs until they catch up.”
“Aye, sir.”
Lieutenant Porter was in the small wardroom when he heard the new orders, and clattered up the ladder to the quarterdeck.
“The commodore desires to speak us,” Sterett told him.
It took the President an hour to maneuver up, fifty yards off Enterprise’s starboard beam—alee, which would be harder to speak into but a safety precaution;
should an errant gust push the great frigate off her heading, she would not run the schooner over.
“Steady as you go, Mr. Bandy,” said Sterett quietly.
“Aye, sir.” Sam Bandy wished he could run below and tell Bliven to come have a close look at a forty-four in all her majesty, but he knew he must stay rooted at the wheel.
Sterett and Porter beheld a clot of officers on the President’s quarterdeck, carrying their hats, which would have blown off had they tried to wear them. In their center was one noticeably older, close to fifty, with iron-gray hair and soft, intelligent eyes above a finely turned mouth. That one strode to the rail and put a speaking trumpet to his mouth, and called into the wind with distinct syllables, “Good morning, Mr. Sterett.”
Sterett put the trumpet to his lips, a brass cone nearly two feet long that did not just direct his voice but amplified it with its brassy vibration. “Good morning, Commodore.” In fact, Dale’s rank was captain, no higher than the other frigate captains, but by universal consent a captain in overall command of a squadron was addressed by the honorary rank of commodore.
They noticed that the President did not alter her canvas after catching up; the visit would be brief. Dale put the trumpet to his lips again. “My compliments, I instruct you to go ahead of us to Gibraltar. Make contact with our supply ship, if possible, and the American consul. Inform them of our imminent arrival, gather what information you can, and wait for us there.”
Sterett’s heart leapt. “Aye-aye, sir.”
“Very well,” said Dale. “Godspeed.”
“Thank you, sir,” he concluded as he lowered the trumpet. “Mr. Merrick!”
“Sir?”
“Make all sail! Mr. Bandy!”
“Sir?”
“Think you can handle her with all the canvas set?”
Sam Bandy grinned broadly. “Yes, sir.”
“Mr. Porter, if you will come below with me.” As they reached the head of the ladder, Sterett said where only Porter could hear, “Keep a good eye on Bandy this watch. I would feel better if he showed just a little doubt in himself.”
2.
GIBRALTAR
July 1801
The first hint that they were entering troubled waters came on June 28, as the coasts of Spain and Morocco began to narrow in the approach to the Straits of Gibraltar. Cádiz lay behind a British blockade, unseen over the northern horizon. Ahead of them they spied a French squadron of three sail, inbound, and ninety minutes later they heard the rolling booms of a furious battle as the French ships attempted to break through to their garrison. Spain, her own imperial glory a fading memory, lay prostrate between them.
The United States was neutral in this newest manifestation of Anglo-French bloodletting. Their hatred for each other had simmered for centuries, often boiling over into war. America had found little to choose between them in the Quasi-War; indeed, there had been as much sentiment to fight the British as the French. That they chose the French produced a happy result now, for English friendship vouchsafed them resupply in the British colonies at Gibraltar and Malta, which could prove indispensable if it did come to war with the Barbary states. The officers on the Enterprise studied the northern horizon the rest of the day for any sign of who had won the unseen battle, but sea met sky undisturbed until night fell and they contented themselves with the mystery.
Enterprise began to thread the Straits of Gibraltar early on June 29. Bliven waited until Lieutenant Curtis had the watch, and he furtively pulled his Rollins Geography from beneath his blankets. The ancients called the mountains on either side the Pillars of Hercules, and he wondered whether indeed the flanking peaks should look as if they were holding up the sky. In the morning he saw Africa sliding by, three and a half miles to starboard, and Spain three and a half miles to port.
When he spied the Jeb el Musa of Morocco he nodded. The ancients had let their imaginations carry them away; it was a high, rearing massif of a hill, but did not live up to such an expectation. They had passed Cádiz on their north, and then five miles ahead off their port bow he saw, shimmering in the salt air, the white south face of Gibraltar, a sharp peak like a lion’s tooth. There, he thought with satisfaction as though the earth had resumed its order, that one is holding up the sky—ah, no, the ancient writers had caused him to mix his metaphors, and he decided to prefer the lion’s mouth. But sailing between Gibraltar and Jeb el Musa, he was aware they might be sailing into a lion’s mouth in an entirely different way.
In books Bliven had seen engravings of the famed Rock of Gibraltar rearing thirteen hundred feet out of the water, but he had read nothing to tell him, and he was surprised to discover, that the harbor and the town lay on the west side of the rock, which sloped gently, not dramatically, up to the heights, so his first close view of that celebrated profile would have to wait until they left the harbor and penetrated farther east into the Mediterranean.
They tacked north into the Bay of Gibraltar, shortening sail as they took on a pilot who guided them through a gap in the mole into Gibraltar’s basin that was ample but by no means huge. Sterett inquired into the confused etiquette of a salute, but the pilot assured him, upon learning that Enterprise was merely in advance of a squadron, a salute would be rendered by his flagship and not him. All officers were on deck, surprised at how empty the harbor was. There was not a single British man-of-war to be seen, and only a couple of merchantmen, one of which they learned was the American Grand Turk. She was laden with a cargo of the infamous tribute for the dey of Algiers, and was sheltering in Gibraltar, awaiting an American warship to escort her safely across lest the riches intended to purchase the peace of one pirate be spirited away by another more brazen. Also anchored in the harbor were two of the oddest curiosities that Bliven had ever seen. The pilot took them a few hundred yards off the beam of the larger vessel before signaling to stop; the block was knocked from the chain and the anchor plunged into the water with an enormous crashing rattle.
The bizarre ship that so arrested their attention was low-waisted like a schooner, although much larger than the Enterprise, and with a raised quarterdeck, rigged as a brig, and despite the nine open gunports along her main deck she presented the most unwarlike appearance imaginable. She was painted yellow with a broad white stripe, her stern a brilliant green, and the muzzles of her guns painted red. She flew the red and yellow stripes of Tripoli.
“There, boys!” Bliven heard one of the tars call out, as a hairy sunburnt arm pointed her out. “Look’ye over there, I know that ship!”
Bliven strode to the rail. “What ship is it, Murfin?”
“Ha! Do ye not know a Boston brig when ye see one?”
Bliven would have died before admitting that he did not. “Yes, but what ship, Murfin?”
“Why bless me, sir, it is the Betsy, taken by pirates five, seven year ago.”
Bliven heard Sterett come up behind him. “Sir, Murfin says it—”
“I heard him, Mr. Putnam, thank you.” Lieutenants Porter and Curtis followed him, prompting Bliven to retire from the conversation but remain within hearing.
“Shall you hail him, sir?” asked Porter.
“No, we should wait for the squadron. Commodore Dale will decide what to do. I suppose we had best go ashore and look up the American consul. Then we’ll see if we can find some fresh food and water for the men.”
• • •
IT TOOK FIVE DAYS MORE for the squadron to arrive, in late afternoon inching past the mole under topgallants; as they nosed into the harbor the British batteries saluted them with seventeen guns, which placed Dale at ease, for he desired to be correct in his formalities but there was no international convention on how many guns to salute to whom. A naval squadron entering a friendly port, however, was surely a requisite occasion. To the British, twenty-one guns was a royal salute, seventeen guns less so, but Dale knew that it was an average and acceptable salute for a monarch
y to render the flag of a republic. The President returned the salute, gun for gun, which was always a safe policy. The pilot eased the flagship—Sterett thought it must have been at Dale’s request—between them and the gaudy Tripolitan brig, within hailing distance, before dropping anchor, with the Philadelphia and the Essex close behind.
Sterett took his cutter over at once to report, and found Captain Samuel Barron of the Philadelphia and William Bainbridge of the Essex already there, as well as James Barron, who commanded the President while Dale concerned himself with matters of the squadron and the question of how to position his four ships to protect American commerce in the entirety of the Mediterranean. He had need of at least twice that many.
They could see that their arrival had engendered a lively commotion on the Tripolitan, whose port side swarmed with staring, open-bloused Moors, and a quarterdeck whose officers clustered about a large, black-bearded man in a red fez and black tunic whose front was emblazoned with gold filigree.
Dale put his speaking trumpet to his lips. “I am Captain Richard Dale, United States frigate President.” The other officers found that typical of Dale’s modesty; he could have stated his rank as commodore but did not.
“I am Murad Reis, grand admiral of the Tripolitan navy,” answered the impressive bearded man. “Warship Meshuda.”
The American officers looked at one another, dumbfounded, until Bainbridge said, “He’s no more an Arab than I am.”
“Why, he’s Scottish. What in hell?” wondered Samuel Barron.
Again Dale spoke him. “We are five weeks at sea. Are Tripoli and the United States at peace, or at war?” There was no risk in the answer, for they were in a neutral port.
The Shores of Tripoli Page 3