Jefferson's War Page 18

  For months, Jefferson had been losing faith in the Navy’s ability to chasten Tripoli and had all but abandoned his single-minded quest for a winner’s peace. He was impatient to end the war, and willing to settle for less than complete victory if it couldn’t be won soon. So while the president hoped Preble would soon appear off Tripoli and beat “their town about their ears,” he was prepared to negotiate a peace with the bashaw if Preble failed.

  The disheartening Dale and Morris squadrons had greatly diminished Jefferson’s high hopes of winning a peace at no cost. On May 8, 1803, he had convened his Cabinet and asked, “Shall we buy peace with Tripoli?” The Cabinet, whose optimism had similarly been deflated by the squadron’s lackadaisical performance, responded unanimously, Yes. Upon learning of the Philadelphia’s loss, Jefferson had hedged his bets yet again by ordering preparations for a fourth Mediterranean squadron.

  Tobias Lear, the former private secretary and close friend of George Washington, was the new Barbary consul general. He had crossed the Atlantic on the Constitution with Preble. Besides being instructed to parley with Yusuf if possible, he was loaded with $43,000 cash to buy the biennial and consular presents for Algiers’s dey and to satisfy a $15,000 debt with Miciah Bacri, the dey’s chief moneylender. And Tunis also would need Lear’s attention, for it had no U.S. consul; Cathcart, shunned by the bashaw and dey, also had been rejected by Tunis’s bey. He would soon resign. But, unexpectedly, it was Morocco that absorbed Lear and Preble’s energies from the instant they touched at Gibraltar.

  Two days after reaching the Mediterranean, Bainbridge had stumbled upon Morocco’s war plans, possibly averting a full-blown war. Off Cape de Gatt on August 26, 1803, the Philadelphia had hailed the Mirboha, a 22-gun Moroccan cruiser. Oddly, or so it had struck Bainbridge, an American brig was keeping the Mirboha company. The Celia, claimed the Mirboha’s commander, Ibrahim Lubarez, had decided to sail with him to Spain. He claimed that he had boarded, but had not detained her.

  After this brief interview over open water, conducted in the typical fashion with speaking trumpets, Bainbridge was even more suspicious. He sent a lieutenant to the Mirboha to check for prisoners. Lubarez wouldn’t allow him to come aboard. Now certain that Lubarez was lying, Bainbridge dispatched a boatload of armed men, and the Mirboha captain permitted them to board his ship. Belowdeck, they found the Celia’s captain, Richard Bowen, and several crewmen—held as prisoners. Bowen’s Boston ship had been captured nine days earlier 25 miles east of Malaga. When Bainbridge demanded to know by whose authority Lubarez had seized the American brig, the Moslem captain showed him unsigned orders that he said were issued by Tangier Governor Hashash Alcayde. The orders listed the nations whose ships Lubarez was authorized to capture. Leading off the enemies’ list was “the Americans.” After liberating the Celia and her crew, Bainbridge made the Mirboha a prize and Lubarez and his men prisoners.

  The emperor deeply resented Rodgers’s seizure of the Meshuda and America’s refusal to return the ship and crew. James Simpson, the U.S. consul in Morocco, had predicted that Soliman Ben Mahomet would abandon diplomacy for aggression and warned on August 15 that two Moroccan frigates had sailed with sealed orders, most likely instructing them to hunt U.S. merchantmen. Bainbridge had spoiled Morocco’s plan to force the Meshuda’s release by retaking an American ship and its captor. The United States now possessed two Moroccan vessels instead of one.

  Morocco was only one of a host of problems that beset Preble upon his arrival in Barbary. Algiers’s dey was demanding brass cannons, Tunis was still clamoring for a frigate, and both were petulantly threatening war in so many words if their wishes were thwarted. And then there was waspish relationship with Rodgers, the interim commodore whom Preble was supposed to relieve. Enmity sprang up right away between the two strong-willed men over a petty issue: Preble flying the commodore’s pennant on the Constitution. Rodgers objected to it. Preble informed Rodgers icily that the pennant’s purpose was not to give offense to Rodgers, but to identify the ship as the squadron commander’s vessel. He quoted pedantically from his orders naming him squadron commander. Rodgers shot back that while he wasn’t offended personally by the pennant, “my feelings as an officer has been most sensibly injured.” Then he came to the nub of the matter—that since Rodgers’s commission as a naval officer preceded Preble’s, he was senior to him, and not even the government could sanction Preble’s showing disrespect for Rodgers. After their tempers cooled, the captains managed to conduct a proper, but chilly, professional relationship that carried them through until Rodgers’s departure a few months later.

  Alerted by Bainbridge to Morocco’s hostile intentions, Preble sent the Argus and Enterprise to cruise off Morocco and warn away U.S. merchantmen. Preble hovered off Tangier, awaiting Emperor Soliman Ben Mahomet’s return from a tour of the countryside. It took weeks. The large imperial entourage traveled slowly, and river flooding slowed them further. Meanwhile, the almost-war with Morocco simmered, threatening to burst into a shooting war any day. The American merchantman Hannah and her crew were captured at Mogadore. Officers from the Constitution boarded the 30-gun Moroccan cruiser Maimona off the Spanish coast. Preble and Lear suspected she was hunting American merchantmen, although her captain presented a valid passport and claimed he was only sailing to Lisbon from Sallee, Morocco. Preble let him go.

  Finally, the emperor arrived in the capital on October 4 with 2,500 cavalry, attendants, one of his lives, and his brother. Preble and the Constitution sailed into Tangier harbor the next day with the New York, John Adams, and Nautilus, and anchored in front of Tangier’s fortress in a display of naval prowess. Preble made a show of clearing his ships for action. The squadron’s guns were primed, and the crews kept at quarters all night. The emperor’s troops reciprocated with their own martial show. More than 10,000 Moorish cavalry lined the beach for two and a half miles, turned toward the Americans in the harbor, then performed a facing maneuver and marched into Tangier, firing volleys as the emperor’s band played a march. Tangier’s fortress and the Constitution thundered cannon salutes at one another. The delighted emperor, taking in the dazzling panorama through his telescope, ordered ten bullocks, twenty sheep, four dozen fowl, and other provisions sent aboard the U.S. ships as a goodwill gesture. Preble, Lear, and two midshipmen went ashore to parley. Midshipman Ralph Izard was struck by the unpretentiousness of the emperor and his suite. He was “a small man, wrapped up in a woollen haik or cloak sitting upon the stone steps of an old castle in the middle of the streets, surrounded by a guard of very ill looking blacks with their [fire]arms covered with cloth to prevent rusting.”

  The negotiations proceeded smoothly. The emperor suspended hostilities immediately, and Preble and Lear agreed to release the Mirboha and Meshuda. Soliman then reratified the 1797 treaty made by his father, Maulay Sulaiman. He blamed the “misunderstanding” on his Tangier governor. As the two nations formalized the agreement on October 11, the emperor reminded Preble and Lear that he had not yet received the 100 gun carriages that Simpson had promised him a year earlier. They assured him they were on the way. The emperor had heard that before, but, in fact, the carriages really were en route to Morocco this time, although their arrival occasioned some disappointment. Many were built for 12-pound ordnance while Morocco’s was nearly all 18- and 24-pound. All were designed for sea service, when they were wanted for fortress use. And each carriage came with just one wooden handspike for maneuvering the gun, instead of the usual two. When Simpson purchased additional handspikes, the gift was pronounced satisfactory.

  Back in Tripoli’s crumbling, verminous dungeons, the Philadelphia crewmen suffered the indignities of their first days of captivity in quiet misery. The morning after the surrender, a “frightful hag” appeared in the crew’s quarters. Revered by the Tripolitans as a prophetess and sorceress, the old woman supposedly had predicted the Philadelphia’s shoaling and capture, then had made it happen with her incantations. The Americans shifted uneasily under her hard, appr
aising gaze, fearing the worst. She pointed to a black crewman, and he was led away—not to be punished or executed, but to become a cook for the castle’s Mamelukes, although his mates didn’t know that then. The captives were left to their hunger pangs and vain attempts to ward off the castle’s chilly dampness. Exploitative Neapolitan vendors visited them next, peddling lagby—a whiskeylike liquor made from dates—at exorbitant prices, cheating them a second time when he made change.

  Murad Reis made the trip to the dungeon to gloat over the Americans he hated so much. Was Bainbridge a coward, or was he a traitor? Tripoli’s grand admiral wanted to know. When the crewmen replied that he was neither, Murad sneered, “Who with a frigate of 44 guns, and 300 men, would strike his colours to one solitary gunboat, must surely be one or the other.” He said his men would never have tried to board the Philadelphia, and the wind eventually would have carried her off the sandbar.

  While the crewmen received only subsistence rations from their captors—each day, two 12-ounce loaves of black barley bread, coarse and full of straw and chaff, and three-quarters of a gill (about 4 ounces) of oil; and every two weeks, a little beef or pork—they learned to sell the bread on the streets, at least during the more liberal periods of their captivity when they were permitted to leave the castle in groups. With the money they received for the bread, they bought enough vegetables at the market to feed three men. Organizing small mess teams, they made vegetable soup and ate it with the bread and oil they didn’t sell. They improved their sleeping arrangements by making hammocklike rope beds that they hung from hooks they had anchored in the prison walls.

  Tripolitan foremen called “drivers” abused the weary, undernourished men with whips and sticks to make them work hard every day. The fortunate few with skills valued by their captors built gunboats and bored cannon. But the rest carried pig iron, powder, and mortar for repairing the castle walls, toiled in the inhumane rock quarries, and were set to work at even more impossible tasks. Three days before Christmas 1803, the drivers marched 150 prisoners to the harbor to raise an old wreck buried to her scuppers in sand. From sunup until early afternoon they labored in frigid water up to their armpits. “The chilling waves almost congealed our blood, to flow no more,” William Ray wrote. “The Turks seemed more than ordinarily cruel, exulting in our sufferings. We were kept in the water from sunrise until about two o‘clock, before we had a mouthful to eat, or were permitted to sun ourselves.” That night, they were forced to sleep on the ground in their wet clothes. Many of the captives became ill. Ray privately despaired over the ceaseless misery. “With such usage life became insupportable, and every night when I laid my head on the earth to sleep, I most sincerely prayed that I might never experience the horrors of another morning.”

  Even without a modern media serving up constant reminders of their agonizing plight, the Philadelphia captives were in their countrymen’s thoughts and their prayers. John Greenleaf Whittier’s sympathetic description of the captives in “Derne,” although written after the war, reflects American sentiment at the time:Rough-bearded men, whose far-off wives,

  Wear out with grief their lonely lives;

  And youth, still flashing from his eyes

  The clear blue of New England skies,

  A treasured lock of whose soft hair

  Now wakes some sorrowing mother’s prayer;

  Or, worn upon some maiden breast,

  Stirs with the loving heart’s unrest!

  John Morrison, a twenty-seven-year-old crewman, was mortally injured while loading timber into a wagon and carried on a litter to town. In the Americans’ dungeon, he “lay three days in the most excruciating pain.” An Algerian with supposed medical expertise examined him. When he was finished, he claimed nothing was wrong with Morrison and called him a shirker. Ray recounted what happened next. “He went to the dying man, told him to rise, called him an infidel and a dog, and struck him several times with his cane. How our men burned to immolate the ferocious villain.” After three days, death ended Morrison’s suffering.

  “Behave like Americans, be firm and do not despair, the time of your liberations is not far distant,” Preble wrote the crew. “... obstinately persist in your rights of being treated as prisoners and not as Slaves.” But the Americans were in Tripoli now, and Tripolitans not infrequently treated their own people worse than they did the Americans. It was a land of absolutes: absolute power, the absolute authority of law, the absolutes of Islam. There were masters and slaves, freemen and captives. Justice was meted out with expeditious severity, as Ray was able to attest after witnessing capital punishment, Tripoli-style. A janissary cut off the victim’s left hand and right foot with an ax shaped like a half moon, and then the victim’s raw, twitching stumps were dipped in boiling pitch. He was dragged screaming out of the city and left to die in agony outside the gates.

  The Philadelphia’s officers routinely were granted comforts and leisure the crewmen only could dream of. During their early captivity, they lived in Cathcart’s old consular home. It was cramped, but no dungeon, and immeasurably superior to their men’s quarters in the damp storeroom. The officers were excused from all manual labor. They were permitted to walk into town or the countryside, six at a time. They ate better food, too—none of the coarse black bread on which their men subsisted. Typically, they had two eggs and a piece of bread with rainwater for breakfast and supper, and beef or camel and sometimes boiled cabbage with rainwater for dinner. Nissen augmented their ration by bringing them pomegranates, dates, and oranges. They passed the time writing, and reading books that had been plundered from the ship and that they had bought back on the street, and others loaned them by Nissen. Besides availing themselves of their little library, the midshipmen attended classes in mathematics, navigation, and tactics, taught by their officers. “We have lost all relish for dainties except books which we are supplied with,” Bainbridge reported. “Our prison represents a College of Students.”

  Because of their rank, Bainbridge and Cowdery, the surgeon, enjoyed the best treatment of all. The captain even was invited to a celebration of the end of Ramadan. He and Lieutenant David Porter were served sherbet and coffee, and conversed with the bashaw and his family and officers. Then they shared a similar repast with the prime minister, followed by tea, coffee, sherbet, cakes, and fruits with the foreign minister, Sidi Mohammed Dghies, a kind man who mediated the Americans’ disputes with their captors.

  Cowdery was drafted into Yusuf’s service as the royal physician after treating the bashaw for blindness in one eye—unsuccessfully, it turned out; blindness was a relatively common curse of the Barbary Coast, due to the sun, blowing sand, biting insects, and improper care. With happier results, Cowdery attended to the bashaw’s eleven-month-old son, who was suffering from an unspecified illness. When the boy recovered fully, a grateful Yusuf rewarded Cowdery by lending him a horse and servant so he could visit the royal gardens two miles from the capital city.

  The crewmen’s desperate misery pushed them into rash acts. After a month of captivity, a sailor cut his own throat. He didn’t die; the Tripolitans interceded before he could finish the job. One hundred forty English-born crewmen signed a petition to Lord Nelson asking that he claim them as British subjects so they could go free. Marine First Lieutenant John Johnson reported to Commandant William Burrows that Nelson’s “... Answer was, if he done anything in the Business, it would be to have the Rascels all hung....” Five crewmen “turned Turk,” which automatically freed them from captivity and excused them from hard labor. The first convert was John Wilson, the Philadelphia’s coxswain. He wasted no time making trouble for his former shipmates, telling the bashaw he had seen Bainbridge throw nineteen boxes of dollars and a bag of gold overboard before surrendering the Philadelphia. Bainbridge denied it. The bashaw threatened to flog Bainbridge’s servant if the captain didn’t tell him the truth. Bainbridge convinced him Wilson was lying, and Yusuf released the servant unharmed. Wilson became one of the captives’ most abusive overs
eers.

  X

  A DARING COUNTERSTROKE

  The most bold and daring act of the age.

  —Horatio Nelson

  Preble and the Mediterranean diplomats sprang into action to meet the American prisoners’ emergency needs. The Danish consul, Nicholas Nissen, America’s only dependable friend in Tripoli, supplied extra food, clothing, books, and bedding, and served as a conduit for money, clothing, and goods shipped by U.S. consuls and Preble’s agents. From Leghorn, Cathcart arranged for $3,000 to be sent to distribute among the prisoners. Lear opened an account in Tunis, authorizing Bainbridge to draw up to $10,000 from it. O‘Brien, still in Algiers but with no official capacity, sent Bainbidge $2,000 in a box by Spanish ship. Charles Pinkney, a minister in Madrid, arranged with French and British agents to supply the prisoners with up to $4,000. Preble instructed William Higgins on Malta to buy whatever the captives needed, and to send Bainbridge regular stipends.

  From the officers’ prison in the U.S. consul’s former home, Bainbridge was able to communicate with Preble, although his letters were scrutinized—as was all American correspondence—by Tripolitan censors, to ensure that intelligence harmful to Tripoli did not make it onto the neutral vessels that carried American correspondence to and from Tripoli. Determined to slip the information past the censors anyway, Bainbridge looked for ways to conceal intelligence in his letters to the commodore. He first tried embedding codes and ciphers in otherwise innocent letters, and this worked until the Tripolitan censors became suspicious when they couldn’t make sense of some of his letters and showed them to the bashaw. Yusuf ordered the censors to hold up any correspondence that wasn’t written clearly. Bainbridge had to invent a new method.