Jefferson's War Read online

  IX

  THE PHILADELPHIA DISASTER

  A just comparison of our situation, is one man tied to a stake attacked by another with arms.—believe me that it cannot be fully concieved but by those who may sadly experience.

  —Captain William Bainbridge of the Philadelphia, in a letter to U.S. Consul General Tobias Lear

  October 31, 1803, 9:00 a.m.

  The Philadelphia’s lookouts sounded the alarm: An unidentified xebec, a Mediterranean ship the size of a small frigate, was cruising near the shore east of Tripoli. The mystery ship’s sentinels spotted the Americans about the same time. The xebec raised a Tripolitan ensign as it hastened westward for Tripoli’s harbor, staying close to shore.

  At that moment, Captain William Bainbridge undoubtedly regretted having sent the smaller, shallower-draft Vixen to Cape Bon ten days earlier to chase a corsair that had slipped out of Tripoli harbor and past the blockade. The schooner’s departure left Bainbridge and his 44-gun frigate cruising alone near the capital city.

  Unwilling to let the xebec go, Bainbridge ordered the Philadelphia to give chase. The frigate’s 307 men edged toward their rendezvous with destiny.

  After commanding the Essex under Dale in 1801—2, Bainbridge had returned to the United States to supervise construction of light warships and had missed Morris’s incompetent tenure. The Vixen was one of the new ships. So were two others with Preble off Morocco—the Siren and Nautilus. A fourth, the Argus, commanded by Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, Jr., was due to arrive soon in the western Mediterranean.

  Preble had dispatched the Philadelphia, under Bainbridge, and the Vixen, commanded by Lieutenant John Smith, to Tripoli while he dealt with a new Moroccan crisis. The emperor was upset over the loss of Meshuda and her cargo of weapons and powder, captured by Rodgers while its captain tried to sneak through the Tripoli blockade. Soliman Ben Mahomet had bombarded Consul James Simpson with demands that the Meshuda be returned to him. The Moroccans had grown tired of Simpson’s inaction, and when Preble reached Gibraltar, he discovered that Morocco was at war with the United States for the second time in as many years.

  The commodore had teamed the Philadelphia with the Vixen, liking the pairing of muscle and mobility. Preble knew it was important to continue to project U.S. power at Tripoli despite the Morocco emergency. In mid-September, Nicholas Nissen, the Danish consul, had reported that he hadn’t seen a U.S. warship in three months, and that all of Tripoli’s cruisers were in the harbor: four ships of 8—14 guns and thirteen smaller craft, including six gunboats. It was an excellent time to blockade the enemy’s port and trap his best ships inside the picket.

  The Philadelphia and Vixen reached Tripoli on October 7 and cruised for nearly two weeks before parting company. Now, with the Vixen a day’s sail away, Bainbridge and his officers studied the ship’s charts, confident they could pick their way through Tripoli harbor’s tricky shoals and reefs as they pursued the xebec.

  Unfortunately for Bainbridge, Kaliusa Reef, a long, narrow sandbar four and half miles east of the city and a mile and a half from shore, didn’t appear on any of the Philadelphia’s charts.

  Born a year before the Revolutionary War and the fourth son of Dr. Absalom Bainbridge, president of the New Jersey Medical Society, William Bainbridge never was interested in medicine. At an early age, he found another calling: the sea. Brawny and bold, young Bainbridge was a natural leader. He quelled a mutiny on a Hollandbound merchantman at eighteen, and four years later put down another shipboard insurrection in Bordeaux. While captain of the 4-gun merchantman Hope, he repelled an attack by an English schooner off St. John’s, Newfoundland, and forced it to strike its flag. But later, when the Hope was boarded by officers from an English warship, Bainbridge could only watch helplessly as one of his seamen was impressed into the Royal Navy. He vowed to the English captain that he would impress an English sailor the first chance he got—and did so, announcing to the captain of the merchantman that he boarded who he was and why he was taking the sailor.

  Bainbridge had risen rapidly to command in the U.S. Navy. He was a seasoned, dedicated skipper, but he was unlucky. His name was linked irrevocably with the surrender of the Retaliation in 1798 off Guadaloupe and with the ignominious George Washington episode, when he unwillingly became the dey’s courier, delivering tribute and a menagerie of exotic animals and slaves to Constantinople. So deep was his shame afterward that he had sought—and obtained—an audience with President Jefferson so that he could explain personally what had happened. He evidently could be persuasive when he wished, for when the Navy was scaled back to just nine captains in 1801, Bainbridge was one of them, even though he was twenty-seventh in seniority. But while he had been vindicated in both instances, he was haunted by the specters of ruin and disgrace.

  October 31, 1803, 11:00 A.M.

  Bainbridge was unable to head off the xebec before it reached Tripoli, so he tried to bring the Philadelphia close enough to shell her. While his crew took depth soundings, he studied the charts to make sure he didn’t shoal the frigate. He got within cannon range of the xebec at a safe depth of 42 feet—the Philadelphia drew 18½ feet forward and 20½ aft—and opened fire. After a thirty-minute cannonade at long range, Bainbridge broke off the action and turned the Philadelphia seaward.

  And then, to the horror of the ship’s company, a loud, grating sound arose from the frigate’s hull—the sound of wood rubbing on packed sand and rocks. The crew was staggered by a sharp jolt. The Philadelphia had run aground.

  A boat was lowered to take soundings. The news was bad. The frigate was stuck on rocks and a sandbar in 12 feet of water forward and 17 aft. The Americans were less than 5 miles east of Tripoli and 1½ miles from shore. They had to get off the reef

  In Tripoli harbor, enemy gunboats stirred to life. Singly and in pairs, they approached the American frigate cautiously, like hyenas circling a wounded lion. The Philadelphia crew fired their deck guns toward them. Soon, nine gunboats had assembled in a loose semicircle around the Philadelphia, careful to keep out of the range of the deadly 24-pounders.

  Bainbridge saw that with the frigate not so badly shoaled aft as forward, he might lay all the sails back and try backing off the reef. But when he did this, nothing happened. He ordered the crew to start water in the hold, then pump it out, hoping the rapid shift in ballast would shake the frigate loose. It didn’t. Three anchors were cut away from the bows; water casks were drained. All the guns were thrown overboard except the quarterdeck cannons. The Philadelphia remained on the sandbar.

  Suddenly their predicament worsened. Wind and waves drove the Philadelphia higher on the shoal, and she tipped sickeningly to one side so that none of her cannons could be trained on the gunboats. In an attempt to utilize the deck guns, the crew cut away part of the stern, but when they fired the cannons, sparks set the stern on fire. Only the most desperate firefighting measures prevented the entire ship from being consumed. In a last attempt to jar loose the frigate, Bainbridge ordered the foremast cut away. When it fell, it carried away the main topgallant mast with it. Yet the ship didn’t budge.

  Seeing the Philadelphia’s guns rendered impotent, the Tripolitan gunboats drew closer and began to fire on the frigate. Shots whistled through the Philadelphia’s rigging and damaged her remaining masts.

  At 4:00 P.M., after attempting every trick known to him that might conceivably break the sandbar’s hold on the Philadelphia, Bainbridge met with his officers. Their situation was hopeless, they agreed unanimously. If they made a stand and fought, there would be unnecessary casualties. They had to surrender. “Some Fanatics may say that blowing the ship up would have been the proper result,” bristled Bainbridge in his report to Preble, anticipating the disapproving second-guessing to come. “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.”

  If the ship were going to be surrendered, Bainbridge wanted it handed over stripped of everything of value and sinking. C
annons, arms, and ammunition were dumped overboard. Carpenters bored holes in the ship’s bottom. When seawater was pouring into the hold, Bainbridge gave the order for the Philadelphia to strike flag—the second surrender of a U.S. Navy vessel; Bainbridge was responsible for both. “Misfortune necessitates me to make a communication, the most distressing of my life,” the demoralized Bainbridge would begin his report to Navy Secretary Smith.

  The Philadelphia crewmen, who had expected to stand and fight, were astonished and angered by their officers’ decision. The sailor manning the ensign halyards refused Bainbridge’s order to lower the flag, even when threatened by an officer with being run through by a sword; a midshipman pushed the crewman aside and performed the disgraceful duty himself The Stars and Stripes crept down the mast as crewmen “begged of the captain and officers to raise it again, preferring even death to slavery,” bitterly recounted Marine Private William Ray in his Horrors of Slavery: or the American Tars in Tripoli.

  Upon seeing the American flag come down, the gunboats ceased their shelling, and, for long minutes, nothing happened. It soon became apparent that the Tripolitans weren’t about to board the Philadelphia without reassurances that the Americans wouldn’t resist. Bainbridge sent an officer in a boat over to persuade the enemy that it was safe to take possession of his frigate.

  Bainbridge mustered the crew on deck and lectured them about the unhappy fate to which he was consigning them as prisoners of war. They would be paid while they were in captivity, he told them. He urged them to hope for a speedy ransom. He counseled them to behave well. The practical-minded sailors and Marines raced to their sleeping quarters and rummaged through their sea chests, putting on as much clothing as possible, expecting to take it into captivity with them. They were a ludicrous sight when they reemerged on deck in three or four shirts and multiple pairs of trousers, pockets stuffed with cached food.

  The Tripolitans finally gathered up the nerve to board the Philadelphia. Once assured of the crew’s docility, they became rapacious, pillaging unrestrainedly as the Americans watched. Soon their eyes fell on the comically attired crew, and all the carefully hoarded clothing was ripped away. The greedy Tripolitans fell to fighting among themselves for loot. To restore order, the Moslem officers with their swords sliced off the hands of some of their own men. As the tide tipped the frigate farther onto her side and the sun dipped toward the horizon, the Tripolitans shoved the Americans into boats and at swords’ point forced them to row to town. Nearing shore, they pushed the sailors and Marines into the surf and made them swim and wade the rest of the way. The American prisoners arrived in Tripoli shivering and wet.

  Their captors herded them into the bashaw’s castle, through a gantlet of armed janissaries and into a large room, where they stood soaking wet, wiping the janissaries’ spittle from their faces. The bashaw himself received them. Seated on a small throne, Yusuf wore a white turban decorated with ribbons, and a blue silk robe embroidered with gold and tinsel. His belt glittered with diamonds and bore two gold-mounted pistols and a gold-hilted sword, with a chain and scabbard. “He counted us, viewed us with a smile, and appeared highly pleased with us,” wrote Jonathan Cowdery, a Philadelphia surgeon’s mate. The crew was marched to a large, chilly storage room in another part of the castle and ordered to clear it out. For the months to come, it was to be their home. They slept on sailcloth that they spread over the hard, uneven ground.

  The officers and midshipmen were quartered in Cathcart’s former consular home. During their first days of captivity, they were permitted to walk on the rooftop terrace overlooking the harbor. From this vantage point, they witnessed a melancholy sight the next day: the badly listing Philadelphia surrounded by boats, men carrying off armloads of clothing and goods. It wasn’t long before Cowdery was noting, “We could see these robbers running about town, with our uniform coats and other clothing on.”

  An even more demoralizing sight greeted them on November 2: the Philadelphia, supposedly reefed and scuttled, floating placidly in Tripoli harbor, free of Kaliusa Reef. Spurred to uncharacteristic industry by the prospect of such a fine prize, the Tripolitans had plugged the holes the Philadelphia’s carpenters had bored dutifully in her bottom. Almost as a reward for the Tripolitans’ arduous labors, the weather gods cooked up a gale from the west that raised the sea level, enabling the frigate to float off the rocks. Now added to the Americans’ misery was the tormenting realization that had Bainbridge held out forty hours, they could have sailed away. Tripolitan divers even managed to salvage the ship’s guns from the harbor bottom. The bashaw now possessed a fully equipped 44-gun frigate.

  And Bainbridge didn’t know it, since Kaliusa Reef did not appear on his charts, but only a few hundred yards beyond where the Philadelphia had reefed was a navigable passage through the sandbar. Had he waited a few minutes longer before attempting to turn seaward, he would have passed through unscathed. But the passage didn’t show up on Bainbridge’s charts, either.

  News of the U.S. naval catastrophe rolled like thunder through Barbary and across the Atlantic to the United States, while in the cramped consular house Bainbridge vacillated miserably between self-recrimination and defensiveness. “Had I not sent the Schooner from us, the Accident might have been prevented,” he wrote Preble, adding quickly that he dispatched the Vixen to Cape Bon to protect American commerce. Striking the reef, he told his commander, “was as unexpected to me as if it had happened in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.” He would have made a stand had there been any reason to hope for victory or relief, he reported to Preble. “I trust that a want of Courage can never be imputed where there is no chance of resistance....” To U.S. Consul General Tobias Lear, Bainbridge wrote: “A just comparison of our situation, is one man tied to a stake attacked by another with arms. Believe me that it cannot be fully concieved but by those who may sadly experience.”

  Bainbridge confidently told Smith that he expected an official inquiry to exonerate him, but privately despaired, certain his record was irrevocably stained and his Navy career over. “I have zealously served my Country and strenuously endeavored to guard against accidents, but in spite of every effort misfortune has attended me through my Naval life. Gaudaloupe and Algiers have witnessed part of them, but Tripoli strikes the death blow to my future Prospects....” Bainbridge’s torment moved his officers to draft a statement supporting his conduct.

  Busy convoying, Preble didn’t learn of the disaster until November 24, when he hailed the British merchant ship Amazon off Sardinia and was given a sketchy account of what had happened. He instantly grasped its import. “This affair distresses me beyond description and very much deranges my plans of operation for the present. I fear our national character will sustain an injury with the Barbarians.” It destroyed his hopes of ending the war the next spring. He feared that Tunis or Algiers would exploit the squadron’s weakened state by raiding U.S. shipping. Bainbridge’s quick surrender in no way squared with the commodore’s warrior code. “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 save them from either.” To his brother Henry Preble, he wrote that Bainbridge never would have lost his ship had he kept the Vixen close by. But while his first communications to his captive captain were brusque, Preble never blamed him for losing his ship, and later he did his best to bolster Bainbridge’s low spirits. “I have not the smallest doubt, but that you have all done everything which you conceived could be done, to get the ship off ... and I most sincerely regret, that your exertions were not attended with success. ... You may rest assured, that in me you have a friend, whose exertions shall never be wanting in endeavours to relieve you....” Preble promised to do everything possible to ease the crew’s plight and obtain their freedom. “Keep up a good heart and for God’s sake do not despair. Your situation is bad indeed but I hope ere long, it will be better.”

  It was nearly five months before the bad news reached Washingt
on, because Joseph Pulis, the U.S. naval agent at Malta, had fallen into the habit of not shipping mail to the United States, either because of sloth or mental incapacity—it was never clear which. Preble discovered months’ worth of mail piled up in Pulis’s office when he visited him in February 1804. They included Preble’s letters to the Navy secretary and Bainbridge, and even unshipped clothing and provisions for the Philadelphia prisoners. In disgust, Preble appointed William Higgins to replace Pulis, whom he said spoke no English—Preble never stated his nationality—and “has no respectability attached to his character.”

  Jefferson’s political enemies blamed the Philadelphia’s capture on his tightfisted fiscal policies. The Federalist-leaning New York Evening Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1801, called it “a practical lesson in Jefferson’s economy.” The administration’s critics claimed that had enough ships been on blockade duty, the Philadelphia never would have been lost. Jefferson was willing to capitalize on their outrage to obtain more money for warships. “This accident renders it expedient to increase our force and enlarge our expences in the Mediterranean beyond what the last appropriation for the Naval service contemplated.” Within a week, Congress authorized him to spend up to $1 million in unappropriated money from the Treasury to build two ships with up to 16 guns and to hire gunboats.

  Of more far-reaching significance, Congress established a special “Mediterranean Fund,” whose sole purpose was to underwrite the war. Until now, no revenue had been earmarked exclusively to fight Tripoli. Financed with a 2.5 percent tax on all imports, the “Fund” was to remain operational until three months after ratification of a Tripoli peace.

  U.S. diplomats in Europe enlisted Napoleon’s intercession with the bashaw and Czar Alexander I’s with the Turkish Porte to obtain the Philadelphia crew’s release. The ministers’ resourceful actions only irritated Jefferson, touchy about seeking diplomatic favors when he was trying to earn Europe’s respect. “I have never been so mortified as to the conduct of our foreign functionaries,” he raged to Madison. “They appear to have supposed that we were all lost now, without resource: and they have hawked us in forma pauperis begging alms at every court in Europe.”