The Shores of Tripoli

by James L. Haley

  “Sir, you won’t even be close to sailing again before we get back.”

  “Do you believe you will get back?”

  Preble sank into his chair and looked almost like he was sulking, but he was not, he was reflecting on his own youth, and his memory that young men must and will stand their turn at danger or corrode from not getting it out of their systems. He knew that he could not be seen to favor Bliven or keep him out of harm’s way. Finally, he flung his hands up in the air. “Go!”

  Early in the morning of February 5, 1805, Decatur, late of the Enterprise but now the Intrepid, and Stewart of the Siren, gathered in Preble’s sea cabin. For more than a week sailors on the Constitution had watched the lucky volunteers gradually become decked out in costumes as Italian fishermen or peasants as more and more discarded clothes were rounded up from local families.

  There was a man in the cabin they did not know, but Preble was eager to introduce them. “Gentlemen, I would like to present to you Salvatore Catalano of Palermo. He knows the harbor of Tripoli intimately, he speaks Maltese and fluent Arabic with an Italian accent, and he has volunteered to get you next to the Philadelphia. Finding him was the special favor of the Italian commandant at Syracuse, and I believe he has done us a capital service.”

  The last things that Intrepid took on board were the combustibles that would be used to torch the Philadelphia if, as they believed, they found her not seaworthy. Riding the northerlies, it took only four days for Intrepid and Siren to reach the waters off Tripoli. With seventy-four men in a forty-ton boat, none could call it pleasant, especially after they discovered that their meat was foul. But they anchored that night off the Tripoli reef, and sent a small boat to reconnoiter the western entrance to the harbor, which Catalano pronounced impassable in that wind and tide.

  And truly they had lost their chance, for from nowhere blew a gale that cost the Siren her anchor and forced both vessels clear enough of the coast to ride out the storm, in which they tossed for four pitching and yawing days. By the time the wind abated, most of them vowed that a death in battle would be preferable to what they had been enduring.

  With Siren standing off on the night of the sixteenth, Catalano took the Intrepid into the harbor flying British colors, coasting in the lightest breeze toward the Philadelphia. The only sound was the harbor chop as it slapped against their bow as the single sail of their ketch edged them closer into the unknown. A quarter of a mile in, no alarm had been raised that they could determine; there was a good chance they had not yet been seen. To the west the lights of the city became clearer, and to the south, the lanterns of the Tripolitan ships could be seen intermittently twinkling.

  Bliven stood next to Decatur on the quarterdeck, his spine tingling, the hair standing up on his neck. The wind was light and chill, but he knew that was not why he was shivering—it was the consciousness that this dark was like that of the jungle, that death could await them where they could not see it and come from a quarter they did not expect. At least in a sea battle, he thought, you could see your enemy, know how to prepare and respond. But this—he was certain that this night’s dark was the most complete in which he had ever been immersed. He took a deep breath. Who knew from where a cry might pierce, or muzzle flashes illumine the night? Yes, he thought, give him his fight with the Tripoli any day, over this.

  Well into the harbor, Catalano nudged the wheel to starboard in a broad turn, placing themselves between the enemy fleet and the Philadelphia, which lay nearer the north mole. Bliven was much surprised to discover that the night could not have been as dark as he’d imagined, for as they neared the captive frigate she loomed even darker, her lanterns showing much higher and only suggesting her dimensions. A bit nearer and he realized that she rode on an even keel, and he shook his head. If only Bainbridge had held out a bit longer, as he surely had the men and the guns to do, the tide itself would have floated him free. But he had hastened them into trouble and then hastened to conclude that all was lost. That was what made Bliven angry; had Philadelphia sailed under a prudent commander, none of this would have happened, and his life and the lives about him would not be at hazard.

  Yet Bainbridge was lionized. The nation had had its fill of prudence, and the last person with whom Bliven could share his doubts was Decatur. Cloaked as a Sicilian merchant, he stood by Catalano, to all appearances relishing everything that Bliven found not unnerving, for he was in possession of his nerves, but stupidly dangerous. Decatur was, he judged, another Bainbridge, younger and even more reckless.

  Two hundred yards from the frigate, Decatur sent Bliven forward to light the lantern on their bow, lighting one hanging from the stern at the same moment. Then he walked the bare ten yards to the opening of the hatch. “All right, boys, this is it,” he rasped. “Have your guns ready, but don’t use them unless you have to; have your grappling hooks ready to throw. Once we hail them, there’s no turning back, you understand? Even if we are discovered, we can take them. Boys, some sailors serve their whole lives and never have a chance for such glory as this. Are you with me?”

  Excitedly whispered agreement issued from the hold.

  When challenged from the Philadelphia’s deck, Catalano opened his act, performing piteously in Arabic that they had lost their anchor in the storm, asking to make fast to them until morning. After minimal convincing the Tripolitans passed a hawser down for the ketch to tie up, and she was almost secure by the time those on the frigate spied Intrepid’s anchor on her far side and raised an alarm. Decatur already had found footing on the Philadelphia’s chain plates and bellowed the order to board.

  Bliven’s part was to lead a squadron up the larboard netting, cutlass in his right hand as he pulled himself up with his left. Through the netting he peered onto the deck, making certain that no blade was raised to hack them down as they topped the railing. He waved his sword above those behind him. “All right, boys, over we go!” They came over the railing in a swarm, gaining the spar deck in so many places that the light guard retreated and formed themselves in a defensive line behind the hatch, unsure what to do next.

  Knowing better than to discharge guns and awaken the harbor, Decatur led a charge with drawn swords. The Tripolitans’ deck guard numbered no more than a dozen, and having lost to surprise and momentum and numbers, broke and ran for the starboard rail, launching themselves into thin air, hitting the water with terrific splashes, and began swimming to shore. Other splashes that Bliven heard but didn’t see let him know that other Moors belowdecks were shimmying out the twenty-fours’ gun ports and making the same escape.

  The ship was secure within a very few minutes, and the men began fanning out to the tasks that they had had many days to verbally rehearse as the gale blew them about. Bliven’s task was on the berth deck. Torch in hand, he dragged a pile of bedding forward to the galley and, finding live coals in the camboose, raked them out onto the blankets. He upended the coal bucket on them and cast a lit battle lantern down hard upon them, making enough of a blaze to illuminate the deck, well enough to see that it, too, was deserted.

  He descended the forward ladder to the orlop deck. By torchlight he discovered the sail room and, taking an armful of canvas patches, rushed lower still to the paint stores in the very lowest curve of the bow. Knowing that fires were burning above him, he felt for the first time the tightness in his chest of being in a tight, cramped space—an awful place to be trapped and burnt to death. Quickly he piled the canvas against buckets of paint and held the torch beneath them until they caught fire. Back up to the orlop deck he set fire to the canvas in the sail room; flames were already licking about the hatch from above on the berth deck. He shielded his face from them, but felt the heat pressing close as he regained the gun deck and greedily sucked in the cool night air on the open spar deck. Other teams torched the wardroom, the cockpit, the after storage areas, steerage—all the blazes quickly became self-sustaining, and it was astonishing how fast and how completel
y the ship took light. Perhaps, he thought, it was the hundreds of tons of long-dried wood, perhaps it was the tar that sealed the gaps, but the ship was full engulfed as the men began descending the netting back to their ketch. Wary eyes kept on the flotilla of gunboats deep in the harbor detected no movement whatever.

  Last on the Philadelphia’s deck was Decatur himself. Illuminated by the fiery lace of burning rigging, he seemed almost to stroll amid the destruction, peering up contentedly as flames licked higher up the masts and spread out in the yards, engulfing the main and mizzen tops and turning them into balls of fire twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. At these great pillars of fire Decatur gazed, almost as a painter looks upon his masterpiece. Bliven waited, bobbing with the others at the foot of the boarding ladder, anxious to pull well away from the hulk before the blaze worked its way down to the magazine. At last Decatur swung a leg leisurely over the rail and descended, dropping finally into his Intrepid. Bliven was the first to see the look in his eyes; satiety, like a predator who had fed. Such a countenance, such weirdness in a man, perhaps madness, is not to be looked upon without emotion. Perhaps that was why the Berber sailors had broken their line and run until they launched themselves overboard. Not that they feared the marines’ charge, but perhaps, he thought, Mohammedans feared Satan as much as Christians did, and they saw that look in Decatur’s eyes.

  As they exited the harbor the dying Philadelphia herself saluted them, for her double-shotted guns began discharging in the heat of the fire, the port guns sending balls skipping among the gunboats swinging at anchor, the starboard guns leveling house and shop walls somewhere in the city.

  • • •

  PREBLE WAS DELIGHTED TO HEAR of Decatur’s success in the Intrepid, and equally pleased to have Bliven back aboard the Constitution as his right hand. Preble spent much of the spring writing letters to the bashaw of Tripoli, now stripped of his captured frigate, with increasingly attractive offers of peace, including large sums of money. Yusuf Pasha responded to each one, sometimes truculently, sometimes with a hint of interest in restoring calm, until it became clear that he was leveraging each letter to get still better offers. The year 1804 offered a stifling hot summer at Syracuse, as Preble’s impatience to strike at Tripoli was repeatedly frustrated. Difficulties of supply kept his Sicilian auxiliaries from being ready; he could not assemble sufficient firepower of his own because American commercial traffic kept his own vessels out to escort them. During these long months Bliven learned how much of a junior officer’s energy was drained away as he changed into a bored, impatient secretary.

  By the end of July, Preble had had enough waiting, strung his Sicilian auxiliaries, totaling now six gunboats and two bomb scows together, and sailed to assault Tripoli itself. Escorting Constitution, he assembled Enterprise, Argus, and Siren, and another Tripolitan capture that he weighed down with no fewer than sixteen six-pounders and named the Scourge. Upon raising Tripoli they discovered that Yusuf Pasha had used the intervening months well to prepare, and he deployed twenty-two gunboats to defend his harbor and city.

  On the morning of August 3 Preble attacked in full fury. The Constitution did not risk the shallow harbor waters, but stood off, and Bliven supported the schooners with longer-range fire from his eighteens and twenty-fours. When action was broken off they had sunk three of the Tripolitan vessels and rendered five more ineffective for want of crew left alive, against an American cost of one dead and a dozen wounded. That one death, however, was grievous. Stephen Decatur’s brother, James, in command of a gunboat, boarded a Tripolitan after she surrendered, and her captain shot him through the head as she resumed the fight. When Bliven heard it he remembered Lieutenant Sterett and the Tripoli, and marked these people down as having truly no honor.

  After this action the Tripolitans could not be brought to battle again, and after the Constitution silenced the fortress’s batteries things reached a stalemate, for Preble had no force with which to land in the city.

  Stephen Decatur’s wild success in torching the Philadelphia reached even the ears of Lord Nelson, who pronounced it the most daring act of their time. It also led Preble’s other junior officers into conceiving other, equally chimerical schemes, so that their luster would not pale next to Decatur’s. Only one of them made sense to the commodore, however.

  Yusuf’s wounded flotilla of gunboats would not attack, but they took up a strong defensive position that could equally not be attacked without grievous loss. Then it was the praying Somers who proposed to improve the odds. Somers proposed sacrificing the tiny Intrepid as a bomb ship. Load her with tons of explosives, set her course into the Tripolitan fleet, let her crew light her fuses and escape in a small boat. Such a devastating explosion could destroy the greater number of enemy ships at one blow.

  It was risky, but Preble agreed. Volunteers were called for, and once again, few were chosen from the number who stepped forward. Intrepid was loaded with a hundred thirteen-inch mortar shells from his bomb scows, fifty nine-inch shells, and five tons of black powder. Somers picked a crew of a dozen, the bare minimum needed to handle the vessel, and they tied a longboat to her stern.

  Just as she made ready for the mission, Preble ran up signal flags for her to wait as he scratched out additional orders. He looked in the wardroom and saw Joseph Israel was the only one present.

  “Mr. Israel!”

  The chair scooted back noisily as he leapt to his feet. “Sir?”

  “Get a boat, take these over to Intrepid, quickly, as she is ready to sail.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Several minutes later the jolly boat sidled up to the Constitution’s boarding ladder, landing one oarsman before rounding under the stern shear to be hoisted back up to its davits. The sailor reported to the watch officer, who sent him below to report to Bliven, who was now reading in the wardroom. “Sir?” said the sailor uncertainly.

  Bliven looked up and returned his salute. “Yes?”

  “Sir—um—Mr. Israel did not return from the Intrepid.”

  Bliven sat back in his chair. “What do you mean, he did not return?” The sailor, a redheaded Irish boy named Keegan, related the more complete story.

  Bliven exhaled mightily, fearing the storm to come, but then rapped twice in quick succession on the door of Preble’s sea cabin, paused, and rapped a third time, a short code that they worked out so the commodore would know who was knocking. “Enter,” came Preble’s reply.

  “Beg pardon, sir.” Now it truly was too late, he noticed, for Preble was standing at his stern windows, watching the little Intrepid bob and slap her way into the west pass of Tripoli harbor, with the Siren close alee and behind. Unlike her abortive attempt the night before, this time the wind stayed behind her and she scooted between the reefs and under the guns of the fort, toward the Tripolitan fleet. “Sir, I have to inform you that Midshipman Israel did not return from the Intrepid.”

  “What!” Preble spun around. “What in hell do you mean, ‘did not return’?”

  “Sir, obeying your command, he carried your last orders over to her. He noted the full hold of powder, and the two guns she mounts with which to defend herself, if necessary. He asked who was experienced to handle them safely in proximity of so much powder; he volunteered to stay aboard as their gunner, and positively refused to leave.”

  Preble’s eyes grew wide. “Somers allowed this?”

  Bliven looked out the window. “Apparently so, sir.” He smiled sardonically. “Maybe he thinks to convert him to his own faith.”

  The look of ferocity in Preble’s eyes faded and lightened until, to Bliven’s amazement, he began to laugh. “That clever little Jew boy has taken the weather gauge on me. I wonder if he knows.”

  “Knows what, sir?”

  “That I once did the same thing myself.” Preble grasped his chair and sat gently. “When I first became a captain, in seventeen and ninety-nine, they gave me command of the Esse
x, and orders to the Pacific to escort a convoy of East Indiamen home. We sailed with the Congress under Captain Sever. He was senior, he was a pompous old hen, and I did not like taking orders from him. Essex was new from the yard, and her rigging was set in cold weather; we got near the equator and the rigging slackened so I could not sail her hard at all. Then one night we hit contrary winds and I gradually worked away. In the morning the Congress was nowhere to be seen. So I rounded the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the Indian Ocean to Batavia. Brought the Indiamen home safe, too, and loaded with dishes and silks and spices. My stock was high with the Boston merchants after that, let me tell you.”

  “Oh, look, sir, two alarm guns firing from the fort. They must have seen Intrepid coming in. Well, I wonder that you were not court-martialed, sir.”

  “What could they do? Sever and I had agreed that if we became separated we would proceed independently and rendezvous in Cape Town. When I got there the harbor was empty but for a British squadron of four sail, so I victualed and watered and sailed on. I followed my orders to the letter—as far as anyone knew. Heh!”

  “My!” was all Bliven could manage, finding himself awash in astonishment, and at being trusted with such a confidence.

  “If you ever repeat that story I will hang you.”

  “Never, sir.”

  “I paid for it, though,” said Preble. “I tell you, Putnam, the food in those islands”—he shook his head. “They have spices so hot that no white Christian has any business to eat them. Burn a hole right through your stomach, and don’t I know it? That is where I got my ulcers, and I carry them to this day.” He stopped and sighed. “Well, our Mr. Israel has gone on his own hook from here into Tripoli, which is an offense surely less egregious than going from Boston to the Indies. Now, if he were running from a fight, I would have them overtaken and I would hang him in front of the whole squadron. But he is running to the fight, and such alacrity is wanted. If he survives, I shall reprimand him, and then by God I shall see him promoted.”