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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.
He never revealed how he hit upon “sympathetic ink,” the “invisible ink” of spy and detective fiction. After experimenting with milk and diluted lemon and lime juice, Bainbridge determined that lime juice was the most reliable medium. In early 1804 he began sending Preble intelligence written in “sympathetic ink” on the envelopes in which Nissen brought books to the officers, and between the lines of his routine letters to Preble. The censors’ eyes discerned nothing unusual when they scanned Nissen’s plain envelopes or read Bainbridge’s reports to Preble. But when warmed over a flame, the envelopes and letters yielded their secrets as if by magic.
Nearly simultaneously, Preble, Bainbridge, and Lt. Stephan Decatur, Jr. independently proposed destroying the Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor, right under the bashaw’s nose. Bainbridge suggested to Preble on December 5, 1803, that a disguised merchant ship could be sailed right up to the Philadelphia, and men hidden aboard could then destroy her. Surprise and stealth were paramount. He ruefully counseled against trying to sail the frigate out of the harbor “owing to the difficulty of the Channel.” On December 10, at least a week before Preble would have received Bainbridge’s letter, Preble himself was recommending the same bold action to Navy Secretary Smith. “I shall hazard much to destroy her—it will undoubtedly cost us many lives, but it must be done.” Two decades later, when Decatur’s widow was pressing a claim in Congress, Lieutenant Charles Stewart swore it was Decatur’s idea; Decatur, he said, volunteered his schooner, the Enterprise, for the mission, but Preble did not want to risk one of his warships. He favored using a vessel whose loss would not matter, perhaps a captured enemy ship.
Tripoli’s possession of the Philadelphia wasn’t going to upset the western Mediterranean balance of power right away. A month after the frigate’s capture, the bashaw was looking for a buyer, because he lacked trained seamen to crew her properly. U.S. consuls throughout Barbary were hearing that Yusuf might sell the frigate to Algiers or Tunis. But it made little difference to Preble whether the warship was put into service by Tripoli, Tunis, or Algiers. He well knew that America might find itself at war with any of them at any time. By mid-December, he had resolved to burn the Philadelphia. He methodically began gathering the tools for the mission.
Preble needed firsthand intelligence about Tripoli’s harbor defenses, the Philadelphia’s exact location, and the extent of the guard placed on her. While Bainbridge’s intelligence was invaluable, Preble wanted to see the harbor for himself. Two days before Christmas 1803, he and Decatur sailed to the edge of the harbor and made a reconnaissance with telescopes. When Dale’s squadron first called at Tripoli in 1801, the harbor forts scarcely mustered enough cannons to fire a proper salute. Preble and Decatur now counted 115 operable cannons on the parapets of the city’s fortresses, testimony to Yusuf’s progress in turning his regency into a first-class Barbary military power. Most importantly, Preble noted that the Philadelphia had been brought into the harbor within range of those guns. Clearly, to have any hope of succeeding, the mission would need to be executed with stealth, surprise, and speed.
While snooping around the edges of the harbor, Preble and Decatur had the good fortune to happen upon one of their mission’s critical components, absent until this point: an expendable vessel to carry the commandos into Tripoli harbor. The Mastico was flying British colors when they intercepted her as she was leaving Tripoli, but the ketch was Tripolitan, with a Turkish master. The crew and passengers consisted of 7 Greeks, 4 Turks, 12 Tripolitan soldiers and officers, and 43 black slaves. The ship actually belonged to the bashaw; 23 of the slaves were intended as presents from Yusuf to the Turkish grand admiral in Constantinople. The other 20, belonging to Tripolitan merchants and ship’s officers, were to be sold.
Under interrogation, a Mastico officer admitted having served on one of the gunboats that had harried the Philadelphia into surrendering. Preble’s men searched the ketch, looking for loot from the Philadelphia. They turned up a sword and belt belonging to Lieutenant Porter, and a gold watch. “I believe from circumstances that not only the Tripoline Soldiers but the Turkish captain of this Vessel was active in boarding the Philadelphia and plundering the Officers,” Preble wrote Bainbridge. He brought the ship and captives to Syracuse, his new operations base.
Preble had shifted the squadron’s home from Gibraltar to what he believed was one of the best harbors in the Mediterranean. Meat, vegetables, fruit, candles, and rice were cheaper in Syracuse than even in the United States. Desertions had become a major problem in the squadron, but Syracuse afforded no hiding places, as did Gibraltar and Malta, where the British fleet always welcomed fugitive American sailors. Syracuse’s inhabitants were friendly, and the government was grateful for the U.S. presence because it would keep away marauding Tripolitan corsairs. At no charge, it supplied moorings and warehouse space for storing boats and spars.
With custody of the 60 Turks, Tripolitans, and slaves from the Mastico, Preble believed his prospects for ransoming the Philadelphia captives at a reasonable cost had improved markedly. He also was certain the bashaw was hearing the rumors circulating throughout Barbary of his preparations for a summer offensive. Before the Mastico’s capture, Lear and O‘Brien had quoted sums ranging to $500,000, based on comparisons of America’s situation with other nations’, and consultations with moneylenders in Algiers. Preble was sure the price had since dropped, and set out to learn what the bashaw was now demanding. Yusuf’s agent at Malta laid out the new terms: swapping the 60 Mastico prisoners for 60 Philadelphia captives, paying $100,000 to free the 240 remaining captives (2 had died, 5 turned Turk), and giving the bashaw a schooner for the Philadelphia. The proposal tempted the commodore so far as to suggest giving the bashaw a bad schooner. But Preble decided that he could get even better terms by first attacking Tripoli.
February 16, 1804
At twilight, the Americans and their Sicilian pilot, Salvador Catalano, scanned Tripoli harbor from the deck of the former Mastico, now the Intrepid. Scarcely visible nearby lay the Intrepid’s shadowy companion. As the darkness deepened and the sliver of moon—shaped like the crescent on the Ottoman flag—spilled out a ghostly light to steer by, the ketch drifted into the silent harbor, headed for the largest ship. As they glided toward the big frigate, the Americans could see the outline of her bare topmasts, stripped of sails. Her lower yards lay on the gunwales. A few cruisers bobbed at anchor nearby in the gentle swell. The ketch, armed with only four cannons, appeared at first glance to be a typical Mediterranean trader. Decatur and the handful of men on deck with him all were outfitted in the loose-fitting garb of the region’s natives. But belowdecks were hidden dozens of commandos, poised to pour from the passageways with knives and swords when given the command. Everyone knew tonight’s password; it was easy enough to remember. The password was “Philadelphia. ”
Four future American naval heroes sailed on the Intrepid: Decatur, Lieutenant James Lawrence, and Midshipmen Thomas Macdonough and Charles Morris. All of them would forever be remembered for their deeds during the War of 1812, where Lawrence would lose his life on the Chesapeake. But this mission belonged to Decatur. He had mustered the seventy volunteers on the balky little ketch, led them through a weeklong gale off the coast that had tested the crew’s mettle to its limit, and brought them safely into the enemy’s harbor.
Who was the U.S. Navy’s first bona fide hero, whose name would grace twenty American communities and several ships, who would die in a famous 1820 duel, and whose epitaph would read: “The pride of the Navy, the glory of the Republic”? Stephen Decatur, Jr. was born in 1779 in Worcester County, Maryland, where his parents had moved after the British occupied their home city, Philadelphia. He was the son of a U.S. naval officer and the grandson of Etienne Decatur, a French naval lieutenant who came to America to recover his health, married, and died, leaving an infant son. Etienne’s son, Stephen Decatur, Sr., was a privateer captain during the Revolutionary War and a captain in the U.S. Navy during the Quasi-War, when he became responsible for the first capture of an enemy ship by a U.S. Navy vessel; near the mouth of Delaware Bay, he forced the French schooner Le Croyable to strike its flag. Le Croyable became the Retaliation, the ship Bainbridge surrendered in November 1798. In another irony, Captain Decatur, at the request of Philadelphia’s citizens, became the first commander of the subscription frigate Philadelphia, the second ship Bainbridge surrendered and which Decatur’s son now was intent on destroying.
Stephen Decatur, Jr. grew up in Philadelphia, where he spent his summers swimming in the Delaware River. He was a thin, sickly boy with curly black hair, dark eyes—and a racking cough. When he was eight, Stephen sailed to Bordeaux with his father, was cured of his cough by the sea air, and contracted a lifelong love of the sea. After attending the University of Pennsylvania for one year, he went to work for Gurney & Smith, the same company that employed his father as a merchant captain and that served as agents for the new U.S. Navy and its first frigate, the 44-gun United States, built by Joshua Humphreys. Decatur helped equip the United States, getting in on the ground floor of the Navy. When the frigate was completed, he rode it into the Delaware. Then he joined its crew as a midshipman, with Richard Somers and Charles Stewart, schoolboy friends from Episcopal Academy. They sailed off to the Quasi-War under the legendary Captain John Barry.
By the time he arrived in the Mediterranean for the Barbary War—where he was later joined by a younger brother, Lieutenant James Decatur—Stephen Decatur was known for his dash, boldness, fearlessness, and coolness under fire. He was a noted duelist. He settled his first affair of honor in 1799 with an English merchant sailor, whom he shot in the hip, with Somers as his second. Later, he was Somers’s second at one of the most bizarre duels ever fought. Decatur inadvertently started the trouble by calling his friend a “fool” while joking around at dinner one day. Somers accepted the jibe in the proper spirit, but the other junior officers did not; they snubbed Somers when he failed to take offense and challenge his old friend Decatur. The shunning so angered Somers that he decided to issue a challenge after all—to his hypercritical messmates, all six of them, one after the other. The first duelist shot him in the right arm, and the second winged him in the thigh, causing him to faint from loss of blood from the large-bore wound. Decatur urged his friend to give it up or to yield his place to him, but Somers refused, insisting on continuing from his seat on the floor, although he could not even hold his pistol firmly. With Decatur squatting beside him and steadying his pistol for him, Somers wounded the third officer, and there it ended.
In the Mediterranean, Decatur served under Bainbridge on the Essex in Dale’s squadron and under Barron on the New York in Morris’s. Before he was sent home as a result of Joseph Bainbridge’s deadly duel with the Maltese governor’s secretary, Decatur and Macdonough had an adventure in Syracuse one night, when three unfortunate robbers accosted them on the street. The trio quickly discovered they had picked two victims who happened to be armed with sharp swords and who exulted in combat. Decatur and Macdonough wounded two of the highwaymen, and Macdonough chased the third onto a rooftop. The cornered robber hurled himself to his death rather than face the lieutenant’s bloodied sword.
The “secret expedition,” as Preble called the clandestine mission, consisted of the Intrepid, with Decatur and his volunteers, supported by the 16-gun Siren, commanded by Decatur’s friend, Lieutenant Charles Stewart. Decatur had assembled his Enterprise crew and requested volunteers for a mission. As a testament to the high esteem in which Decatur’s men held their youthful commander, the entire ship’s company had stepped forward. Stewart encountered the same reaction when he asked the Siren’s crew for ten volunteers for an undisclosed operation.
In company with the Siren, the Intrepid left Syracuse on February 3 with 71 men: 12 officers and midshipmen, 5 of them from the Constitution; 50 seamen; 8 Marines; and the Constitution’s pilot, Salvador Catalano. The Siren’s crewmen were not told the purpose of their mission until they were at sea the next morning. They gave three loud cheers when they learned they were going to finally strike back at the bashaw. Midshipman Ralph Izard wrote proudly to his mother: “We shall astonish the Bashaw’s weak mind with the noise of shot falling about his ears. Perhaps some shot more lucky than the rest may reach his heart & free our countrymen from Slavery.”
Preble’s instructions called for the Intrepid crew to board the Philadelphia and subdue the frigate’s Tripolitan crew as quietly as possible—with cold steel. “It will be well in order to prevent alarm to carry all by the Sword.” The assault force would set fire to the gunroom berths, cockpit storerooms, and the “birth deck,” and then aim the 18-pound deck guns down the hatches and blow out the bottom. Boats from the Siren would roam the harbor, destroying targets of opportunity—any moored corsairs they happened upon—and then would cover the Intrepids withdrawal.
The strike force arrived off Tripoli on February 8 in heavy seas and wind. Catalano scouted the harbor alone in a small boat and returned shaking his head over the weather. If they went in, he said glumly, they would never come out again. Decatur postponed the mission as conditions worsened rapidly. Seas became so rough that the Siren was unable to weigh anchor; swinging capstan bars flattened and injured several crewmen when they attempted to do so. Daybreak found the Siren still struggling to weigh anchor in the wild, battering waves. Fearing discovery by the Tripolitans, Stewart finally ordered the anchor cut away. The ships went to sea to weather the gale. It lasted a week.
The Intrepid was small, frail, and a poor sailor in bad weather. Her officers and crew took turns on the ship’s pumps as the craft bucked and shuddered in the towering seas. Accommodations were cramped and uncomfortable. When they weren’t busy trying to keep the ketch afloat, all that the men were able to do was lie down—Decatur, the other officers, and the surgeon in the tiny cabin; six midshipmen and the pilot on a platform over the starboard water casks; and the eight Marines over the portside casks. The rest of the crew was hunkered down in the hold, shut off from light and air, among tumbling crates and scurrying rats. There was little to eat, as a consequence of having been provisioned with rotten beef The most recent beef shipment had arrived at Syracuse in the “worst sort of fish barrels,” with the pickling leaking and some beef already spoiled. Preble had disgustedly thrown most of it overboard. Yet some barrels evidently had made it onto the Intrepid. The commando crew was reduced to eating biscuits and water.
The storm finally subsided on February 15, and the ships approached Tripoli again. They missed the port in the dark that night, but at sunset the next day they stood just outside the harbor. The Intrepid slowly approached the mole, flying English colors, with Decatur and his men using weighted draglines to delay their arrival until after nightfall. The British consul raised the royal ensign on shore in welcome.
Another gale was coming from the north. To avoid being trapped in the harbor by the weather, Decatur launched the mission a half hour early. Decatur divided his force into teams, each assigned a specific task. Lieutenant Lawrence and Midshipmen Macdonough and Alexander Laws were to lead ten men to fire the berth deck and forward storeroom. Midshipman Morris and eight men were to set the cockpit and after storeroom ablaze. Midshipmen Izard and Rowe were to take fifteen men and hold the Philadelphia’s deck against a counterattack. Midshipman Thomas Anderson of the Siren would cruise alongside the frigate in a boat and cut down any enemy crewmen trying to escape. Lieutenant Jonathan Thorn and Gunner William Hook would remain on the Intrepid, ready to send more powder and combustibles to the Philadelphia if needed. Also staying behind would be Surgeon’s Mate Lewis Heerman and seven men, to guard the Intrepid in case of a surprise counterattack.
Preble had handpicked Catalano, his flagship’s pilot, to guide the Intrepid. The thirty-two-year-old Sicilian knew Tripoli harbor’s shoals, sandbars and tricky currents from his years of sailing merchant ships between Tripoli and Malta. Now, as the Intrepid drew within hailing distance of the Philadelphia, Catalano’s presence paid double dividends. A voice in the darkness called out to him, in Barbary’s lingua franca—a mix of Arabic, Berber, and Mediterranean dialects in which Catalano was fluent—to state his business. Replying in the same dialect, Catalano said he was a trader who had lost his anchors in a gale at Cape Mesurado. He asked permission to run a line to the Philadelphia.
It was 9:30 P.M.
As the ketch edged toward the stripped-down frigate, from their hiding places below deck, the crewmen could hear Catalano talking to the Philadelphia officer about the weather and the lost anchors. They fingered their swords and dirks nervously—only edged weapons would be used on this night—and doublechecked the powder and combustibles to ensure they were ready to be fired quickly. They made sure they all had candles, which they would light after capturing the ship, to illuminate the places where they would set the fires.
The Philadelphia’s officer on deck asked Catalano about the mysterious ship everyone in the harbor could see lurking offshore. The Sicilian had a ready answer—she was the Transfer, an overdue Tripolitan ship. That and his story about the lost anchors evidently satisfied the Tripolitan. He gave the Intrepid permission to moor beside the Philadelphia for the night. A boat crewed by Intrepid sailors disguised as Mediterranean merchant seamen tensely towed a rope from the ketch to the frigate, fearing discovery at any moment. When the rope was secured to the frigate’s forechains, the Intrepid’s deck hands hauled on it, bringing the ketch snug against the Philadelphia.
And then, from the darkness came the heart-stopping alarm the American sailors had all dreaded: “Americanos!”
Instantly, the Philadelphia’s gun ports swung open. The commandos could hear the tampions being knocked from the cannons.
“Board!” shouted Decatur. The shock force surged toward the frigate with Decatur leading. While leaping to the Philadelphia, Decatur slipped, and it was Morris who claimed the honor of being the first aboard, with Decatur and Laws close behind. The Americans swiftly formed a line across the deck and attacked the Tripolitans with swords and knives.
The enemy’s bloodcurdling screams shattered the harbor’s nighttime tranquillity. Within ten minutes, before the enemy crew could fire a single cannon, the deck was littered with dead Tripolitans. Some escaped by leaping overboard and casting off in a boat, which Lieutenant Anderson intercepted. His men killed several crewmen.
The Philadelphia was back in American hands.
Decatur fired a rocket, the prearranged signal to the Siren that he had seized the Philadelphia. The assault teams lit their candles and went to work burning the frigate.
If the screams didn’t awaken them to the fact that they were under attack, the rocket and lit candles unmistakably did. The Tripolitans opened up with their fortress cannons. Crewmen from the two nearby corsairs, both within easy cannon-fire range, peppered the commandos with inaccurate small-arms fire, but the corsairs’ cannons, which might have done real damage, inexplicably remained silent.
The Philadelphia went up so fast that the flames chased the boarders from below deck, shooting out of portholes and from the spar deck hatchways. The blaze arced into the rigging as the Americans fled to the Intrepid, already beginning to pull away as tongues of fire leaped out at her.
Decatur was the last to leave. He looked around the burning deck one more time and flung himself into the Intrepid’s rigging. As she swung away, a round from a shore battery whistled through her topgallant sail.
The attackers hastened to escape the harbor. In the two boats towing the ketch, the American crewmen strained at their oars, and the Intrepid’s sweeps also dug deep into the water. The rowers watched flames hungrily lick up the Philadelphia’s masts receding behind them. The frigate’s guns, loaded for harbor defense, suddenly began firing themselves, and, almost as if making a last defiant gesture, she blasted a full broadside into the city.
Morris described the sight of the burning frigate as “magnificent”; the flames climbing the rigging and masts formed “columns of fire, which, meeting the tops, were reflected into beautiful capitals.” A little later, the frigate’s cables gave way and the dying hulk drifted under the bashaw’s castle. It burned there all night long.
With seamless precision, the Americans had captured and destroyed a frigate in an enemy harbor, within range of 115 fortress guns and two warships, and escaped—all inside twenty-five minutes, with only one man slightly wounded. They had killed at least twenty enemy soldiers and taken one prisoner. The exploit would have embroidered the record of any commando unit, in any era.
Five miles away on the Siren, Stewart watched the Philadelphia’s topmasts fall. He hadn’t gotten into the fight. The Intrepid’s early embarkation had thrown off the attack timetable. Thirty Siren crewmen in two boats had set off for the harbor, only to meet the Intrepid as she was heading out to sea. They turned back without getting a chance to damage other enemy ships in the harbor. The two ships met off Tripoli about 1:00 A.M. and set sail together for Syracuse. At daybreak, they were 40 miles away from Tripoli, yet they still could see the light from the burning frigate. The Philadelphia burned to the waterline. Her ribs weren’t found until 1903.
On February 19, lookouts at Syracuse announced the approach of two ships. The quarterdecks of all the squadron’s vessels blossomed with field glasses scanning the horizon. To Preble’s immense relief, it was the Intrepid and the Siren. Having received no messages from Stewart and Decatur since they had left Syracuse two weeks before, Preble was full of gnawing fears and questions. At least now they had safely returned. The commodore signaled impatiently, “Have you succeeded?”
“Yes,” the Siren answered.
The commandos sailed triumphantly into Syracuse harbor to loud cheers from the crews of the Constitution, Vixen, and Enterprise. Stewart and Decatur wasted no time in boating to the Constitution. They reported to their commander that they had destroyed the Philadelphia without losing a single man. While Preble noted later that day in his memo book, with his customary terseness, “Syren and Intrepid arrived having executed my orders,” he was more fulsome in his praise when reporting to Navy Secretary Smith: “Their conduct in the performance of the dangerous service assigned them, cannot be sufficiently estimated—It is beyond all praise.”
The Philadelphia’s destruction in Tripoli harbor electrified Europe and America. From the Victory off Toulon, Admiral Horatio Nelson called it “the most bold and daring act of the age.” Pope Pius VII was moved to extol the actions of Decatur and his men: “The American commander, with a small force, and in a short space of time, has done more for the cause of Christianity than the most powerful nations of Christendom have done for ages!”
The U.S. Navy schooner Enterprise (right) defeats the Tripolitan warship Tripoli, on August 1, 1801, in the first battle of the Barbary War. (Naval Historical Center).
Lt. Andrew Sterrett, the Enterprise commander, was a demanding officer who once ran a seaman through with his sword for cowardice in battle. (Naval Historical Center).
The U.S. Navy frigate Philadelphia ran aground in Tripoli harbor on Oct. 31, 1803. The disaster gave Tripoli a frigate and 307 American prisoners. (Naval Historical Center).
Upon surrendering the Philadelphia, Capt. William Bainbridge owned the unhappy distinction of having commanded the only two U.S. naval vessels captured during wartime. (Naval Historical Center).
Commodore Edward Preble, the Barbary War’s most effective American naval leader, was dismayed by the loss of the Philadelphia, but quickly set into motion plans for her destruction. (Naval Historical Center).
Lt. Stephen Decatur’s crew boards the Philadelphia before setting her ablaze under the enemy’s nose on February 16, 1804. (Naval Historical Center).
Lt. Stephen Decatur led the daring mission to destroy the Philadelphia, becoming an international hero. (Naval Historical Center).
The Philadelphia burns in Tripoli harbor. (Naval Historical Center).
Commodore Preble’s squadron enters Tripoli harbor on August 3, 1804, to destroy enemy shipping and fortifications in what became known as the Battle of the Gunboats. (Naval Historical Center).
Lt. Stephen Decatur’s deadly struggle during the Battle of the Gunboats with the Mameluke captain who Decatur believed fatally wounded his brother, James. (Naval Historical Center).
The fireship Intrepid mysteriously exploded September 4, 1804, while on a mission to destroy shipping in Tripoli harbor, killing all 13 crewmen. It was America’s last naval offensive of the war. (Naval Historical Center).
William Eaton, former U.S. Army captain and consul to Tunis, planned a surprise attack on eastern Tripoli in 1805 with the Tripolitan ruler’s deposed brother, Hamet Karamanli. (Naval Historical Center).
William Eaton (right) and Hamet Karamanli (left) led an invasion force of U.S. marines, dissident Tripolitans, Arabs and European mercenaries 520 miles through the desert to the outskirts of Derna, Tripoli. (Naval Historical Center).
Marine Lt. Presley O‘Bannon, William Eaton’s most trusted officer, planted the Stars and Stripes atop the battlement at Derna, the first American flag-raising on hostile foreign soil. (Naval Historical Center).
Lt. Presley O‘Bannon’s headstone and historical marker in a cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky. (Photo by Walter Chisholm).
The Tripoli Memorial, the oldest U.S. military monument, dedicated to the six naval officers killed during the Barbary War. It stands behind Preble Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. (Photo by Brian Greenlee).
During a 1949 ceremony, markers were placed at the Tripoli gravesites of five Intrepid crewmen. Among those present were (1-r) Captain William Marshall, commander of the USS Spokane; Orpay Taft, U.S. consul to Tripoli; Rear Admiral Richard H. Cruzen, division commander; and Joseph Karamanli, Tripoli’s mayor and a direct descendant of Yusuf Karamanli, the nation’s ruler during the Barbary War. (Naval Historical Center).
This was what Jefferson had longed for all these twenty years: to show the world the United States was different from the Old World, that it was a nation of dauntless men, that the ship that bore Decatur and his crew to glory was aptly named and embodied the new nation’s spirit. He undoubtedly warmed to Consul George Davis’s report of the reaction at Tunis: “... it is the only occurrence, which has forced them to view the American character with proper respect.”
In America, Decatur quickly became the new Navy’s most celebrated hero. He was promoted to captain over the heads of other, more senior lieutenants, making him at twenty-five the youngest naval officer to hold that rank. Congress commended Decatur formally, awarded him a sword, and rewarded him and his crew with two months’ extra pay. A silent play written for the occasion, “Preparations for the Recapture of the Frigate Philadelphia, ”began with the song “Hail Columbia,” and ended with a procession honoring the Intrepid and her crew.
Francis Scott Key was moved to pen a song to the tune “To Anacreon in Heaven.” “To Anacreon” was originally composed in the 1770s in Britain by John Stafford Smith for a London gentlemen’s drinking club, the Anacreontic Society, to honor its namesake, Anacreon, the convivial bard of ancient Greece. In 1798, Tom Paine wrote different words to the music and called it “Adams and Liberty”; it was a hugely popular political song. Key’s new, forgettable lyrics, which appear in his works under the simple title “Song,” were sung at a banquet honoring the Intrepid crew. A decade later, the British attack on Fort McHenry inspired Key to write new lyrics to the old tune. He called it “The Star-Spangled Banner.” One of the verses honoring America’s Barbary heroes:
In conflict resistless, each toil they endur’d,
‘Till their foes shrunk dismay’d from the war’s desolation:
And pale beam’d the Crescent, its splendor obscur’d
By the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation,
Where each flaming star
Gleam’d a meteor of war,
And the truban’d head bowed to the terrible glare,
Now, mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.
Twenty years later, after both Preble and Decatur had died, the question that had long been debated by Navy men in ships’ messes and harbor taverns suddenly captured the attention of Congress: Could the Philadelphia have been saved? Susan Decatur made the issue timely by filing a claim, as Stephen’s widow, to government prize money for the Philadelphia. Her claim asserted that the frigate could have been taken intact, and that Stephen Decatur always believed that he could have towed the frigate out of the harbor. Salvador Catalano, the Intrepid’s pilot, also stated that he believed all along that she was salvageable, and had shared his opinion with Decatur moments before she was burned. But, he said, Preble’s orders prevented them from making the attempt.
Other crew members, however, filed affidavits asserting that it would have been impossible to save the ship. Her sails were unrigged, there was no one to man her, and she was moored near two corsairs and within range of the fortress cannons. Mediterranean diplomat M. M. Noah urged the government to pay Mrs. Decatur’s claim, evidently as a gesture to a naval hero’s widow, for he also pointed out that it didn’t really matter whether the Philadelphia could have been saved or not; America made a stronger statement by burning her.
The night of the commando attack, the American captives were jarred awake by screaming, shouting, and the rumble of the bashaw’s castle cannons. The commotion also awakened the Philadelphia’s officers at the consul’s house, where they flung open the windows facing the harbor and beheld the spectacle of flames swallowing their ship. How it came about remained a great mystery to them all until the next day.
At daybreak the next morning, the crewmen’s keepers rushed into their prison and began beating everyone they could lay hands on, “hissing like serpents of hell.” As the reason for their fury gradually dawned on the Americans, they could not contain their exultation. Their obvious high spirits over the bashaw’s loss of his prize served as a goad to every Tripolitan they encountered. “Every boy we met in the streets would spit on us and pelt us with stones; our tasks were doubled, our bread withheld and every driver exercised cruelties tenfold more rigid and intolerable than before.” Their captors withheld the twice-monthly ration of pork and beef and confined the American officers to their quarters. Cowdery, forbidden to could visit patients, observed, “The Turks appeared much disheartened at the loss of their frigate.”
The bashaw, who had watched her burn from his castle, summoned country militia to the city, expecting a full-scale assault by American troops. The city ramparts were hastily repaired, but when the soldiers tried to mount cannons salvaged from the burned hulk, the gun carriages broke down and one of the guns exploded, killing and wounding five soldiers.
More guards were placed over all the captives, and the officers were summarily moved out of the relative comfort of the consul’s home into the castle. Their new home was a large, smoky room illuminated by a single grated skylight. “I have seen the Sea four times in five months,” Bainbridge grumbled to Preble in July 1804. “Close kept under lock & key.”
Six weeks after the raid, Preble returned to Tripoli with the Constitution and Siren to find out whether the bashaw wished to parley. Yusuf was more intransigent than ever, refusing to exchange prisoners and demanding at least $500,000 for the captives and peace. One reason for the stiff terms was that the Tripolitans believed that Decatur and his commandos had massacred some of the Philadelphia’s Tripolitan crew. Three bodies had washed up “covered with wounds,” Tripoli’s foreign minister, Sidi Mohammed Dghies, informed Bainbridge, asking, “How long has it been since Nations massacred their Prisoners?” The bashaw wanted to question the Tripolitan prisoner in U.S. custody.
Preble refused to bring the prisoner ashore and said Decatur had reported no massacre. The boarders had fought with edged weapons, and “people who handle dangerous weapons in War, must expect wounds and Death, but I shall never countenance or encourage wanton acts of Cruelty.” Preble also declared that he would sooner sacrifice all the Philadelphia prisoners than submit to unfavorable terms. The bashaw forbade Preble to send clothing ashore for the captives; he said such items could only be landed in a neutral vessel.
Preble sailed away and resumed preparations for the summer attacks on Tripoli that he was planning.