CHAPTER 9

The Doldrums of Summer

The advance period of the season . . . has made it so late, as to render it impossible to appear off Tripoli before January.

—Captain Richard Valentine Morris, October 15, 1802

Up until 1802, the American navy had been suffering setbacks, but these misfortunes were brought about by circumstances, not failures of leadership. Storms, disease, shipwreck, Barbary trickery, and a lack of support at home had kept Dale and his captains from full success. Now, circumstances had changed. The new navy had all of the manpower and authorization necessary to put an end to Barbary tyranny once and for all. Unfortunately, poor leadership would cause a frustrating delay.

Captain Richard Valentine Morris was the president’s choice for commander of the new flotilla. A victor in several sea battles with the French in 1798, Richard Morris was a bold young officer who accepted the assignment eagerly. But the thirty-four-year-old captain’s marital status had changed since his service in the Caribbean—and it was Mrs. Morris who submitted an unusual appeal regarding her husband’s terms of deployment. Writing directly to the secretary of the navy, she asked permission to sail with her husband.

The request was not without precedent, but it was rare for a wife to travel on her husband’s ship at a time of war. Nevertheless, the secretary immediately granted it, and when Captain Morris came aboard the Chesapeake he was accompanied by not only his wife but also their young son. It isn’t precisely clear what the sailors thought of the family’s presence, but their remarks about Mrs. Morris were not flattering; a midshipman observed that “her person is not beautiful, or even handsome, but she looks very well in a veil.”¹ Whatever Mrs. Morris’s charms, she had not won over the crew, and her presence seemed indicative of a larger problem: her husband’s mind was not on his job.

The secretary of the navy wanted an American show of force off Tripoli as soon as possible, so the six ships sailed not as a convoy but as soon as their individual preparations permitted. Aboard the Chesapeake, Morris wanted an easy passage and chose to wait out blustery conditions at Norfolk. After departing at last on April 27, the ship’s progress was slowed three days out by the appearance of a crack in the frigate’s mainmast. Rot was detected in the great timber, and an inspection revealed defective spars. Making matters worse, poorly stowed cargo meant the ship rolled dramatically, further contributing to a slow and anxious crossing. “I never was at Sea in so uneasy a Ship,” reported Morris after finally dropping anchor in Gibraltar on May 25.²

Since replacement of the mast and spars was required, the Chesapeake could go nowhere until the repairs were completed. But that proved no hardship for Morris and his wife, who soon settled into the busy social life of the British port, dining with the new governor of Gibraltar and hobnobbing with British royalty. The English officers and their wives welcomed both the commodore and the “Commodoress,” as Mrs. Morris came to be known. Meanwhile, disgruntled American sailors found themselves sentenced to remain in port for a period of weeks—which stretched out into months. While their captain feasted with foreign aristocrats, they were stuck swabbing the decks, sewing their sails, and waiting.

As the first of Morris’s squadron to cross the Atlantic, the USS Constellation had dropped anchor at Gibraltar on April 28, 1802, well before Morris arrived. By Captain Alexander Murray’s reckoning, the absence of Commodore Morris put him in charge, and that suited the aging Murray—he was an old salt who’d been a ship’s captain since before the War of Independence. He took on provisions and promptly sailed for his post off Tripoli, where a determined blockade was to begin.

After a stop at Algiers—Consul Richard O’Brien came aboard for a briefing—Murray and the Constellation sailed east to Tunis and took aboard fresh vegetables and other goods. Captain Murray also unloaded an impressive array of long-promised tribute that the bey found “highly pleasing.” This included diamond-studded daggers and gold-inlaid pistols from the finest London makers. Calculated to the penny, the American taxpayers had footed a bill for $27,576.96. But this fresh cache of tribute—it was the cost of doing business in a country with which the United States remained officially at peace—still did not pacify the leader in Tunis, who soon demanded of Consul Eaton a fully armed warship. Another purchased peace was becoming too expensive.

But Murray did not want to start a new war on his own, and by June 9, he had moved on from Tunis and now patrolled the waters off Tripoli. The American captain thought his ship made a good impression. “It is not amiss,” he reported to the secretary of the navy, “to shew these Folks our Ships, now, & Then, they are powerful advocates in our favor.”³ Aside from a trip to replenish the ship’s water supply, Captain Murray had little else to report—until the arrival of two corsairs.

They were about to make a mockery of the powerful American frigate.

While Morris luxuriated in Gibraltar, on June 17 three corsairs had escaped Murray’s blockade of Tripoli. Once in the open sea, the pirates spotted the Franklin, an America merchantman bound for the Caribbean, its hold loaded with wine, oil, perfumes, soaps, and hats. When the pirates pointed their cannons at him, the captain of the American ship had little choice but to surrender. The Tripolitans boarded the Franklin, put its officers and crew in chains, and sailed for Algiers. There they sold their prize and its cargo before sailing for home with their captives. The story of the Dauphin, the Maria, and many other ships was being replayed.

Returning to Tripoli, the pirates boldly sailed into port within sight of the Constellation. The American ship’s size made it difficult for Murray to follow the speedy and maneuverable pirate ships through the shallow coastal waters, so the men aboard the Constellation were merely humiliated spectators as the pirates flew the Stars and Stripes upside down in contempt of the American warship. Safely in the harbor, the Tripolitans celebrated with cannon fire in salute of their success.

Once on land, the Franklin’s captured captain and his crew were paraded through the streets while Murray and his men made no rescue attempts. Only the intercession of the Algerian dey, Bobba Mustapha, gained the Americans’ freedom—but that would be nearly three months later and only after the payment by the United States of $5,000 in ransom.

When Consul William Eaton heard the story of the failure of the Constellation to intervene, he wrote to James Madison, “Government may as well send out quaker meeting-houses to float in these seas as frigates.”⁴

The words were damning. This was no “close and vigorous blockade,” as ordered by the secretary of the navy.⁵ Although American ships could destroy them in a fight, the elusive pirate boats still interfered with American commerce.

As a Tunisian minister warned William Eaton, “Though a fly in a man’s throat will not kill him, it will make him vomit.”⁶ Even with Captain Murray within sight of Tripoli, the national humiliation of the United States off the Barbary Coast was far from over.

A few days after the failure to intervene on behalf of the crew of the Franklin, Captain Murray had another chance to confront a corsair.

As the sun rose to fresh breezes and pleasant weather, the Constellation sailed easily on July 22, 1802. The ship was a dozen miles northeast of the city of Tripoli when, at nine o’clock, the lookouts sighted ships just west of the town. Though the seas had begun to grow heavy, Murray decided that on this day he would give chase.

Within the hour, the Constellation had narrowed the distance enough to distinguish nine gunboats. One of the corsairs fired on the American frigate, but the range was too distant. As the pirates “plyed their Oars, & sails,” the Constellation kept coming.⁷

At eleven o’clock, Murray returned fire with the pair of guns mounted in the bow. As the battle escalated and the cannons continued to boom, Murray’s men took a precautionary depth sounding. Though they were near the shore, the depth of seventy feet seemed safe enough but sharp eyes spied a shallows in the ship’s path and warned Murray. Seeing the Tripolitan’s “design was to entice us on a reef, which lay between us and them,” Murray ordered that the Constellation turn away from the wind, avoiding the trap.

Under fire from the Constellation, the Tripolitan gunboats scattered, some heading for the rocky cover and inlets ashore. From Murray’s ship, now less than two miles away, guns could fire not only on the retreating ships but on threatened Tripolitan troops, now visible on land. Captain Murray estimated they were several thousand in number, including cavalry, which had appeared on the sand hills above the shore.

When the cannons in a nearby Tripolitan fort began to fire at the ships, the shots fell short but still uncomfortably close to the Constellation. With the wind shifting dangerously—Murray could not risk being driven into shallow waters—he and his men abandoned the battle and were soon well away.⁸ In Murray’s judgment, it had been a near thing: “Had they Been 1 mile more to leeward of the reef,” he wrote in the ship’s journal, “we must inevitably have destroyed them all.”⁹

Murray reported on the action to the secretary of the navy, noting that the fight “had a pleasing effect upon our Young Officers, who stood their fire admirably well.”¹⁰ Reportedly at least a dozen of the enemy had been killed, among them one of the bashaw’s favorite generals. In his mind, the skirmish was ultimately a victory despite his early withdrawal.

Consul Eaton took a dimmer view—he offered direct criticism of Murray and the other U.S. Navy captains and their laughable attempts at a blockade. The incident with the Franklin demonstrated their impotence, the Tunis consul wrote to Madison. Two years of U.S. Navy warships in the Mediterranean, Eaton wrote, had produced “nothing . . . but additional enemies and national contempt.”¹¹

Despite making a good initial show, thus far American naval power had impressed few on the North African coast, American or Barbarian. Only the arrival of Morris and more ships could change that. But would it?

When the USS Adams, far behind her sister ships, arrived in Gibraltar on July 21, 1802, her captain found Morris’s Chesapeake still at anchor, though her mast was repaired and she was fully seaworthy. The Morris family was enjoying the high life in the port city and seemed to have no desire to move on to war.

The new arrival carried orders from the secretary of the navy for the lazy commodore. Now three months old, the instructions were clear and specific. Morris was to take his entire naval force to Tripoli. The hope was that “holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations [will] produce a peaceful disposition toward us in the mind of the Bashaw, and essentially to contribute to our obtaining an advantageous treat with him.”¹² The flotilla was to make the case for peace even as it threatened military action.

On August 17, Morris finally left Gibraltar, but still chose not to do as instructed. He made no strong military show off Tripoli, but instead cruised the southern European coast, making stops at friendly ports. At one port he found Captain Murray and the USS Constellation, which had left Tripoli in need of both water and repairs. That meant the ineffective American blockade had officially ceased. Far from Tripoli, Morris wrote his first report in several months to the secretary of the navy. Morris would make no effort to reestablish a naval presence in enemy waters—because of the “advanced period of the season,” he explained, it would be “impossible to appear off Tripoli before January.”¹³ The Chesapeake would not see the Barbary Coast until February 1803, after spending the winter among allies; more than nine months had passed since it left American shores. The Tripolitan pirates had little to fear that winter.

Back in Washington, President Jefferson had many matters to occupy his mind. Worried at the presence of the French along the Mississippi, he told Congress in a secret session his plans for negotiating the purchase of New Orleans, and the treaty to acquire the entirety of the Louisiana Territory would be signed that spring. Jefferson and Madison were also engaged in an angry wrestling match with another Virginian, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, over presidential appointments; the landmark Marbury v. Madison case, with its broad ramifications concerning judicial review, would soon be handed down.

Yet despite these distractions, President Jefferson, even an ocean away from Tripoli, was mindful of the lack of aggression in the Mediterranean. Now two commodores had failed him: Dale through no fault of his own, but Morris because of laziness. Morris, it was clear, was a wartime tourist more interested in convoying ships and visiting friendly harbors than sailing at Tripoli. “I have for some time believed that Commodore Morris’s conduct would require investigation,” Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin, his secretary of the treasury, in early 1803.¹⁴ The angry president, well aware that a year had been wasted, indulged in an uncharacteristically sarcastic aside. “His progress from Gibraltar has been astonishing.”

Before a change in command could be made, matters got worse.

In the new year, Commodore Richard Valentine Morris at last sailed south to the Barbary Coast. He stopped first at Tunis, arriving on February 22, 1803. For Consul William Eaton, the long-awaited sight of the American flotilla was deeply gratifying. Three imposing frigates in Tunis Bay—the New York, John Adams, and Chesapeake, accompanied by the schooner USS Enterprise—made a fine display of cannons and sails.

Eaton’s relief at seeing the ships was both patriotic and personal. For years the former army captain had been the most outspoken of the Barbary consuls on the necessity of a show of force in the region. More recently, however, he had also occupied himself on behalf of his country in the quiet pursuit of the plan to depose Bashaw Yusuf at Tripoli. In order to carry it out, America’s naval presence off the coast would need to be strong, and now the required ships had appeared.

While waiting for final approval of his plan for regime change, Eaton encouraged Hamet Qaramanli by giving him $2,000, with the promise of more. Although the reigning bashaw offered Hamet a post in the eastern city of Derne, Eaton warned him he should refuse. “Remember that your brother thirsts for your blood,” he warned Hamet. “I have learned from a certain source that his project of getting you to Derne was to murder you. He . . . has intercepted some of your letters to your friends in Tripoli.”¹⁵ Hamet now waited in exile with his family still held hostage—but Eaton had a larger and more immediate problem right here in Tunis.

He had accumulated debts on behalf of both his government and himself. He now owned two small commercial ships that had made him a prosperous man. But the falling prices of goods and unexpected expenses had meant borrowing money—and his primary creditor was the Tunisian government’s chief agent for trade. This debt was a personal embarrassment and, even worse, a serious liability to America’s relations with Tunis. Whether out of shame or apathy, Eaton told Morris nothing about his situation. This proved a major mistake.

After a formal written exchange with the bey of Tunis, Commodore Morris, newly arrived in Tunis, was rowed ashore. The country’s leader greeted Morris in his palace. After the ceremonial shaking of hands and the ritual drinking of coffee, the two leaders opened up negotiations concerning a Tunisian ship that the Enterprise had captured a month earlier. All problems seemed solvable and the men reached an understanding, much to Morris’s satisfaction. Then Eaton’s debt surfaced, and what had been a personal matter suddenly became an international issue.

As the commodore, his officers, and other American officials stood at the breakwater in the harbor, preparing to return to the fleet, the Tunisian minister suddenly demanded payment of Eaton’s debts. Morris, unaware that Eaton could not pay, disregarded the demand and prepared to leave, readying himself to climb aboard a small Tunisian harbor boat hired to row him down the channel to the Chesapeake. But the bey’s prime minister claimed that Eaton had promised that, on arrival of the American fleet, the debt of $34,000 would be paid—by the Commodore.

The prime minister wanted the money. Now.

Eaton denied making any such promise, but the Tripolitan was insistent and, to Morris’s surprise, made clear that Commodore Morris was going nowhere until the debt had been cleared.

The Americans were obliged to return to their nation’s consulate onshore.

The next morning, Morris met with the bey, an audience that went on for two hours. As the same ground was revisited again and again, his protests ignored, Consul Eaton lost his patience. He demanded of the bey whether the Tunisian leader had ever been deceived by him.

“You have a good heart,” the bey told Eaton, “but a bad head.”¹⁶

Eaton retorted angrily, “[If ] my head is bad [t]hen I am surrounded by imposters.”

The Tunisian minister, from a culture where to insult an absolute ruler was to flirt with severe punishment or even death, recoiled in amazement. The enraged bey spoke next: “‘You are Mad’ stuttered the [Bey] in a Phrenzy, at the same time curling his Whiskers.” Eaton was courting disaster.

Speaking through an interpreter, the angry bey ordered, “I will turn you out of my kingdom.”

“I thank you,” Eaton replied, refusing to back down. “I long wanted to go away.”

Commodore Morris agreed to take Eaton out of the leader’s sight, but that would not be for five more days, during which time Morris would be held under house arrest until the debt was at last satisfied. When the U.S. Navy contingent finally returned to its ship, Consul Eaton accompanied them but, unwelcome aboard the furious Morris’s Chesapeake, Eaton was forced to find a berth on the Enterprise.

Even when he tried to do his duty, Commodore Morris had encountered rough waters. Like Bainbridge before him at Algiers, Morris had blundered into a great embarrassment. As he subsequently reported to the secretary of the navy, “I should not have put myself in the power of the Bey of Tunis.”¹⁷ With his superiors in Washington growing impatient, his time to prove himself was running short.

Commodore Morris had one more chance, and it was about to blow up—in a very literal sense.

Due for a refitting, the Chesapeake had been ordered back to the United States. But Commodore Morris was to stay in the Mediterranean and transfer to a new flagship, the New York. On departing Gibraltar, Morris made his usual leisurely stop in Leghorn, then sailed to Malta, where his wife and children now resided (a second child had been born in a Maltese hospital), before sailing for Tripoli. Not quite eleven months into his service in the Mediterranean station, the commodore now planned to lay eyes—for the first time—on the place he had been assigned to blockade.

As the sun rose on Monday, April 25, 1803, the New York sailed easily just off the coast of Sardinia. At eight o’clock, the drums called the sailors to eat and, tin cups in hand, they waited their turns for their morning meal.

A loud boom! interrupted breakfast. The sound echoed from belowdecks and, moments later, the warning that sailors dread most was heard: “The magazine is on fire!”¹⁸ The storeroom where the gunpowder was kept was in flames.

With the rising of the sun, a seaman had gone below to stow the signal lanterns that the ship ran at night. When the gunner’s mate later went to the storeroom to check that all was in its proper place, he found a still-burning candle that had been overlooked in the cockpit storeroom. He extinguished the tallow, returned to the main deck, and reprimanded the sailor for his carelessness in leaving an open flame so close to the powder magazine. On returning to the cockpit storeroom, the gunner discovered that he, too, had missed something: the candle he extinguished had started a slow, smoldering fire in a stack of sheepskins. When he shifted the skins, a shower of red-hot coals fell into a bucket on the floor below. Its contents—a small amount of high-grade gunpowder—instantly exploded.

When the flames reached powder horns hanging nearby, another blast blew off the bulkhead door of the marine storeroom. Dozens of blank cartridges were the next to explode. With flames spreading after the series of deafening roars, the nearby powder magazine was in grave danger.

The men in or near the ship’s cockpit were all badly burned. But two lieutenants on deck, David Porter and Isaac Chauncey, reacted quickly. They descended to the magazine, groping amid the wreckage in the choking smoke. Using wet blankets, they sought to protect the ship’s main powder store—every man aboard knew that one spark in the magazine would cause a chain reaction, blowing the wooden ship to smithereens, killing them all.

The sailors formed two lines, passing water hand-to-hand in buckets to douse the flames. An hour and a half later, the exhausted crew—coughing, blackened by smoke—could take the measure of their losses.

The fire was out, but a toll had been taken. According to the New York’s log, fourteen men were “so shockingly burnt that their lives are despair’d of.”¹⁹ Lieutenants Chauncey and Porter would survive (and later gain fame in the War of 1812), but four men, including the gunner, died of their burns.

Forced to seek repairs, the USS New York returned to Malta. Morris’s arrival to blockade Tripoli would be delayed yet again.

For a grand total of five weeks, commencing May 22, 1803, Morris did manage to watch over the enemy’s harbor. Together with the frigates John Adams and Adams and the sloop Enterprise, the USS New York patrolled the outer harbor at Tripoli. There were several skirmishes during that time, including one where the New York delivered more damage by friendly fire to the rigging of the John Adams than to the pirate ships. Though the great American warships engaged in sporadic fire with a few smaller enemy ships in their weeks off Tripoli, the fleet accomplished little before once again sailing for Malta.

By early July, his family once again aboard, Morris headed for Gibraltar. He was about to be relieved of duty, and the end of the commodore’s service was an anticlimax. William Eaton, having returned to Washington in the late spring, had duly reported on Morris’s inactivity. By Eaton’s count, Morris had been off the coast of Tripoli a total of only nineteen days in the course of his seventeen-month tour of duty. Perhaps motivated partly by his humiliation at Morris’s angry response to his debt, Eaton told the Speaker of the House of Representatives, “It is true that during this term . . . [the Commodore] never burnt an ounce of powder; except at a royal salute fired at Gibraltar in celebration of the birth day of his Britanic Majesty.”²⁰

When Commodore Morris arrived in Málaga, Spain, he found a letter addressed to him from the secretary of the navy. The words were unambiguous: “You will upon receipt of this consider yourself Suspended in the command of the Squadron on the Mediterranean Station.”²¹ Morris had been relieved of duty.

Given his lackluster performance, he would be required to face a court-martial. The trial lasted for nine days. After due deliberation, the four-man panel determined that “captain Morris did not conduct himself, in his command of the Mediterranean squadron, with the diligence or activity necessary.” His bravery was not questioned; his fault, the panel ruled, lay in “his indolence, and want of capacity.”²² He was forthwith dismissed from the U.S. Navy.

By then, however, the command of a still larger and more powerful Mediterranean fleet had been put in more capable hands. Jefferson wanted the United States of America to have the respect of the world; it was a matter of pride—and of financial necessity—that American trading ships be able to ply international waters safely. Yet the late efforts of his navy sent no message of intimidation. Jefferson put it plainly in a letter to a friend. Morris’s tour of duty in the Mediterranean had amounted to “two years of sleep.”²³

This was not effective foreign policy. On the contrary, as former Tunisian consul Eaton had reported, “The Minister puffs a whistle in my face, and says; ‘We find it is all a puff! We see how you carry on the war with Tripoli.’”²⁴ Jefferson could only hope that the new commodore could accomplish what Morris hadn’t gotten around to attempting.