XII
I am convinced by what I have already seen, that we can reduce Tripoly to a heap of Ruins...
—Commodore Edward Preble, in a letter to Citizen Beaussier, French charge d‘affaires in Tripoli
... a vast stream of fire, which appear’d ascending to heaven.
—Midshipman Robert T. Spence, in a letter to his mother
Preble’s fate was sealed by the Philadelphia surrender, which had spurred the Jefferson administration to send Commodore Barron and the additional frigates across the Atlantic. Only after the relief force was embarked did Jefferson and his Cabinet learn of the Philadelphia’s destruction. Whenever Barron arrived, Preble would have to give up command of the squadron, for Preble was senior to only two other Navy captains—Isaac Chauncey and James Barron, who was sailing with his older brother. Commodore Barron and the other two captains in his squadron—Hugh Campbell and Preble’s nemesis, John Rodgers—were senior to Preble.
Navy Secretary Smith tried to soften what he knew would be a heavy blow to Preble’s pride: “You have fulfilled our highest expectations,” he said, and his conduct had been honorable “and in all respects perfectly satisfactory to us.” In a sense, this only made matters worse, for if Preble’s conduct were so exemplary, why must he be relieved? Rather than quibble, Preble gave way gracefully. While he regretted that “our naval establishment is so limited as to deprive me of the means and glory of completely subduing the haughty tyrant of Tripoli, while in the chief command,” he would do everything possible to assist his successor.
Noble words notwithstanding, Preble’s pride was crushed, as his journal entries showed. “... how much my feelings are lacerated by this supercedure at the moment of Vicotry cannot be described and can be felt only by an Officer placed in my mortifying position.” Not wanting others to think that he was being forced out for poor performance, he circulated Smith’s letter among Sir Alexander Ball, the British governor of Malta, and his other Mediterranean contacts.
Yusuf rejected Cowdery’s request to take some men and bury the twelve American sailors and officers whose bodies had washed ashore after the naval battle on August 7. Weeks later, when Cowdery was returning to the city from the bashaw’s country palace, he came upon the remains “in a state of putrefaction.... They were scattered on the shore for miles, and were torn in pieces by dogs.”
The days crept by without any sign of Barron. The John Adams, it turned out, had arrived with only eight serviceable guns, and, thus, was of no use to Preble, adding to his irritation over being superseded. Chauncey had stripped his ship so she could carry more provisions. He had transferred all but eight gun carriages to the Congress and Constellation, which were somewhere in the Atlantic with Barron’s President and the Essex.
While Preble waited, he weighed resuming the attacks on Tripoli, but first decided to try to negotiate a ransom and peace, hoping to end the war one way or the other while still squadron commander. Since the failed parley in June, he had sent Bainbridge an invisible-ink message urging him to make the same $60,000 offer to the foreign secretary, Sidi Mohammed Dghies, and to see where it went. Dghies, however, said the bashaw would not negotiate with prisoners. Preble tried Citizen Beaussier, the French charge d‘affaires in Tripoli, as an intermediary. Preble and the American consuls were dubious about Beaussier’s motives and sympathies, but he was willing to shuttle proposals and counterproposals back and forth, and he had Yusuf’s ear.
Two days after the bombardment, Preble offered $80,000 to ransom the American captives and make peace, plus a $10,000 gift for the bashaw when the new U.S. consul took his station. Beaussier returned the following day with a counterproposal: $150,000. Impossible, Preble said. He did some saber rattling. “Perhaps after the next attack he [Yusuf] may be willing to acceed to mine.” But Preble evidently had second thoughts, and made a new offer on August 11: $100,000 for ransom and peace, $10,000 in gifts to the bashaw’s officers and a $10,000 consular present. Yet he couldn’t resist adding in an aside to Beaussier. “I am convinced by what I have already seen, that we can reduce Tripoly to a heap of Ruins: the destruction of Derna & Bengaza will follow, and the blockade be constantly continued, unless the present terms are accepted.” The bashaw made no reply.
Preble reconnoitered the harbor on the 16-gun brig Argus. Every officer in the squadron, Preble included, adored the Argus. She was fast and trimly built, a mariner’s delight. Stephen Decatur, Jr. had exulted in her handling during the Atlantic crossing. Isaac Hull, when he took her over from Decatur, had noted that she easily outsailed the Siren, a virtually identical ship. Preble had declared her to be “so fine a Vessel, and so well calculated and armed for the service” that he wanted to take her into Tripoli harbor. He did just that on his scouting run, but in his enjoyment of her maneuverability, he strayed within range of Tripoli’s batteries. Enemy gunners opened up on the Argus, raking the copper off the bottom and hulling her with a round of heavy shot 3 feet above the water line. It hit right below where Preble was standing on the quarterdeck. He hastily ordered the Argus back to sea, and she limped out of the harbor.
With no sign yet of Barron, and the summer slipping away, Preble decided to resume the attacks on Tripoli and to continue them without letup until Barron arrived. Early on August 24, the squadron towed the gunboats and bomb vessels into position. At 2:00 A.M., they leisurely shelled the batteries and city until daylight. Preble called the effect “uncertain.” Beaussier was blunter, describing the bombardment as “perfectly null—Not a single Bomb was thrown beyond the Forts....”
Yet the nervous bashaw reinforced the city with 1,000 country militia, motley troops with rusty muskets, who liked to beckon and sing to the Americans to run their vessels aground.
Storms kept the squadron away from Tripoli, but as soon as the weather cleared, Preble led his warships and gunboats—the mortar boats were being repaired back in Syracuse—into the harbor. Their magazines were full of powder, shot, and shell, their decks cleared for action, and their crews eager to get in some licks at the bashaw’s forces.
The gunboats anchored within pistol range of the bashaw’s castle, and at 3:00 A.M. on August 28 they began shelling the city, harbor boats, and batteries. This bombardment was livelier than the last. For three hours, the Americans blasted the enemy with hundreds of rounds of shot, grape, and canister, sinking a large ship and badly damaging several others. Four Tripolitan sailors were killed on a gunboat raked by grapeshot. The Tripolitans fired back furiously, shredding sails and rigging and sinking a cutter from the John Adams, killing three sailors.
Inside the city, shot and shells killed and maimed citizens and soldiers, forced gunners to abandon several batteries, damaged the sailors’ prison, shattered the houses of the Spanish, Swedish, and Dutch consuls, and killed a camel. Bainbridge was nearly killed in his bed when a 36-pound cannonball crashed through the wall of his room, tearing off his bedclothes and burying him in stone and mortar. Fellow officers dug him out, bruised and nursing a wound on his right ankle that caused him to limp for months.
At daybreak, Preble brought the Constitution and her 50 guns close to the batteries, exposing her to the fire of 80 guns while the stately frigate poured 300 rounds of solid shot and 300 more of grapeshot and canister into the city, the batteries, and the bashaw’s castle. The barrage lasted forty-five minutes, which must have seemed an eternity to the fortress gunners, showered with stone and dust after every salvo. They fired back gamely, but the Constitution was positioned so close to the walls that the Tripolitans could not depress their guns enough to hull it.
A few days later, blockading American ships stopped a Spanish vessel leaving Tripoli harbor. Her captain, who had been in Tripoli during the shelling, reported the attack had wreaked “great havoc and destruction” and killed “a vast number.”
Carpenters and gunnery mates made repairs while Preble planned yet another attack. He was determined to smash the bashaw’s forts and destroy his warships before Barron’s squadron arrived. In possession of forty-two Tripolitan prisoners from the gunboat battle of August 3, Preble suggested a prisoner exchange. But Preble found the damage and casualties he had inflicted had only stiffened Yusuf’s resolve. Beaussier reported that the bashaw had defiantly vowed “to encounter all your forces in Order that Europe & Africa may conceive a favorable opinion of his strength & courage.” The bashaw not only rejected Preble’s prisoner exchange, Beaussier said, but now demanded $400,000 for ransom and peace, plus presents for himself and his officers. Preble answered the best way he knew: with another attack.
The squadron returned to Tripoli harbor on September 3 with six gunboats and the two repaired mortar boats in tow. At 3:30 P.M., they began throwing shells into the city, while the Siren, Vixen, Argus, Nautilus, and Enterprise poured a withering fire into enemy shipping in the harbor and one of the main fortresses, Fort English. A fusillade of cannon fire roared from the bashaw’s castle, the mole, the crown, and the city’s batteries.
The American fire smashed two Tripolitan gunboats in the harbor and destroyed the home of the bashaw’s chief naval contractor in the city. The bombardment threw the city’s inhabitants into “the utmost terror and distraction,” observed Jonathan Cowdery, the captive Philadelphia surgeon. Yet for some reason—probably improperly set fuses—few shells landing in the city actually exploded. There were so many unexploded shells that the bashaw offered a bounty for every intact one brought to him.
To draw off some of the hot fire aimed at his warships and gunboats, Preble once again sailed the Constitution close to the batteries and the bashaw’s castle, cruising back and forth within range of scores of guns and flashing deadly broadside after broadside—eleven in all—into the castle, town, and batteries. The Constitution silenced one battery and heavily damaged buildings and homes, while shot and shell from seventy enemy guns splashed the water around her, the spray wetting her nearly to the lower yards. Cannon fire and grape shot tore through her sails, rigging, braces, bowlines, tacks, and lifts, but Preble kept her so close to the walls that no one could hull her. A little after 4:30, Preble gave the signal to withdraw. The Americans hadn’t suffered a single casualty.
Preble’s reckless sorties awed the bashaw’s men, who thought Preble mad for parading the Constitution beneath the city’s guns as he had, firing broadsides at the castle and city. “That he ever lived to return was ascribed, by them, to some superior agency’s invisible protection.”
The hard-bitten commodore set his crews to work the next morning making repairs, while he put into play a destructive scheme he had long contemplated: sending a fireship into the harbor and blowing it up among the enemy shipping. The Intrepid, which had served Decatur and his commandos well when they burned the Philadelphia, would be converted into a floating bomb. A small handpicked crew would sail her as close as possible to the enemy corsairs’ moorings and the bashaw’s castle, light a fuse, and row away in two fast boats before the ketch blew up.
An overabundance of officers and crewmen volunteered for the extremely dangerous commando raid. Preble picked Somers to lead it. His executive officer would be Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth. When Somers asked his Nautilus crew for volunteers, every man stepped forward. He carefully added that no one need enlist in the operation who was not prepared “to blow himself up, rather than be captured.” No one backed out. Instead, his crew gave three cheers, and all of them begged for the privilege of lighting the fuse. “It was a glorious moment, and made an impression on the hearts of all witnessing it, never to be forgotten,” wrote Midshipman Charles G. Ridgely.
The five attacks on Tripoli had turned Preble’s young officers into seasoned combat leaders. Far more than his two predecessors, Preble had carried out former Navy Secretary Samuel Smith’s instructions to train a new corps of naval officers. “One great object expected from this Squadron is, the instruction of our young men: so that when their more active service shall hereafter be required, they may be capable of defending the honor of their Country,” Smith had written in 1801 when he sent Dale to Barbary at the head of the first Mediterranean squadron. Dale and Morris had convoyed and blockaded, but had not fought. Preble was waging a real war, and the young officers who served under him, forever known as “Preble’s Boys,” were absorbing the experience in their sinews.
“No place presents so good a nursery for them at present as the Mediterranean,” Cathcart had observed. The Barbary War was not a crisis, but an opportunity, “the effects of which will be more visible in a few years.” In the backs of the minds of American leaders—from Washington and Adams to Jefferson and Madison—had loomed the specter of war with England. Britain’s sixty-year-old war with France had bought the United States precious time to prepare for the inevitable war with England they believed would come one day.
Tensions between the former mother country and her excolony were evident during Preble’s cruise. In Malta in May, sailors from the HMS Narcissus had boarded an American prize and impressed three seamen, refusing to give them up when confronted by the officer in charge. The previous October, three American sailors had deserted at Gibraltar to the HMS Medusa, whose captain claimed they were British subjects and would not turn them over for arrest. A few days later, two Constitution seamen deserted to a British warship. Preble himself demanded their return, but the British captain would not comply; the deserters were British subjects, he said. He suggested that Preble should turn over all the British subjects in his squadron.
Preble’s Boys would teach Great Britain to respect American sea power during the War of 1812. In Preble’s hard, exacting school off Tripoli, they learned the art and science of naval warfare: Stephen Decatur, Charles Stewart, Isaac Hull, James Lawrence, Thomas Macdonough, John Trippe, Charles Morris, Joseph Bainbridge, David Porter, and Isaac Chauncey. A decade later, Hull, Bainbridge, and Stewart would take turns commanding the Constitution; Decatur would capture an English frigate; Chauncey would command the naval forces on Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes; and the rest would distinguish themselves as well. Even in 1803, Preble knew what he had: “many remarkable fine young men whose conduct promises great things to their Country.” After he had spent some time schooling them, he reported proudly: “I have an excellent set of officers who dare do anything I order them to do.” They now were poised to add another page to their resume: sailing a fireship into the harbor under the bashaw’s nose and blowing it up.
September 4, 1804, 8:00 P.M.
The commandos made their somber final arrangements in case they didn’t return. The crewmen told their shipmates how their clothing should be apportioned, while Somers bade farewell to his friends Decatur, Stewart, and Joseph Bainbridge. Somers impulsively removed a ring and broke it into pieces that he handed around to them. They gave back the keepsakes, unwilling to jinx the mission. They shook hands and said they would see him soon. Then he was gone.
The Argus, Vixen, and Nautilus escorted the Intrepid as far as the reef. Midshipman Joseph Israel suddenly appeared alongside in a boat, bearing Preble’s last-minute instructions and best wishes. Impulsively, he asked to remain on the fireship. Somers gave his consent, bringing the Intrepid’scomplement to the unlucky number of thirteen.
The convoy watched the ketch enter the harbor. The commandos were supposed to fire a signal rocket after they lit the fuse and evacuated the vessel. The Intrepid was loaded for pyrotechnics: The magazine was packed with five tons of gunpowder in 100 barrels and 150 fused shells. The powder-train fuse was supposed to give the officers and ten crewmen—four from the Nautilus, six from the Constitution—fifteen minutes to row off a safe distance before the fireship exploded.
Anxiously, the squadron’s officers, sailors, and Marines peered into the black harbor.
At 9:45, the fortress batteries suddenly opened fire.
Right on the heels of that, a massive explosion filled the sky with flaming shells soaring hundreds of feet over the water “like so many planets, a vast stream of fire, which appear’d ascending to heaven.” The huge concussion from the blast echoed off the harbor’s old stone walls and “awed their batteries into profound silence with astonishment,” wrote Preble. The ensuing eerie silence was pierced by frightened shrieks from within the city, carrying miles across the water. The loud cries “informed us that the town was thrown into the greatest terror.” Kettledrums beat the garrison soldiers to arms.
The squadron waited tensely for the signal rocket, for the slap of oars on water. The Nautilus showed a light to aid her shipmates, and the enemy batteries rained shot down all around the schooner. The crew paid the shelling no mind, instead suspending themselves with lighted lanterns from the sides of the ship until their heads nearly touched the water—to watch for signs of movement in the harbor. To signal her location, the Constitution began firing her guns and rockets every ten minutes. She didn’t stop until 9:00 A.M. But there was no boat, no signal.
In the morning light, there was no sign of the Intrepid or her boats, only three damaged enemy gunboats being towed toward shore. The Intrepid had been blown to pieces, with no survivors.
The explosion caused little damage to Tripolitan shipping, and if any Tripolitans were killed, the captives never heard about it. They surely would have, for the city’s Neapolitan captives, Jews, Greeks, and Maltese normally were quick to inform the Americans of every Tripolitan setback.
Without any basis in fact, Preble concluded in his official report that the Intrepid probably was surrounded suddenly by enemy gunboats and boarded and, true to their vow, Somers and the crew lit the fuse and blew themselves up, preferring “death and the destruction of the enemy to captivity and torturing slavery....” However, this was only speculation. It is more likely that the Intrepid exploded by accident, or that her magazine sustained a direct hit from the city batteries. It will never be known for certain.
Over the next days, thirteen bodies torn beyond identification were found floating in the harbor or washed up on the shore. This time, the bashaw permitted Cowdery to bury the dead Americans properly. With the Philadelphia’s boatswain and some crewmen in attendance, he held a service and interred Somers, Wadsworth, Israel, and the ten sailors just east of the town wall.
The bashaw and his officers threw a feast in thanksgiving to Allah.
Dirty weather set in, and Preble sent the gunboats and bomb vessels back to Syracuse. Then Barron and his four frigates arrived. The new commodore assumed command of the squadron in a ceremony September 10 on the President.
A couple of days later, Preble chased down two strange ships that turned out to be carrying 16,000 bushels of wheat to Tripoli. The capture was Preble’s last act as a fighting captain. He took the prizes to Malta and proudly turned over command of the Constitution to Captain Stephen Decatur, Jr., “whose merits eminently entitle him to so handsome a command.”
Barron cruised off Tripoli with his impressive squadron for three weeks without going into action, then sailed to Malta and Syracuse for the winter.
Preble returned to America in triumph. President Jefferson took time from the celebration of his second inauguration to congratulate him. The commodore dined with James and Dolley Madison, called on former President John Adams at his home in Braintree, Massachusetts, sat for a portrait by Rembrandt Peale, and was feted at ceremonial dinners from Philadelphia to Portland. Congress struck a gold medal in his honor.
He was placed in charge of building nine gunboats. With Preble overseeing the work in New England with his usual rigor, the ships all were finished on time and launched in 1806 and 1807, a feat of organization and efficiency that seems incredible in the twenty-first century, when government contract work often drags on past deadline.
Preble’s squadron had brought the war to the bashaw’s city for the first time. In only a month, it inflicted more damage on Tripoli than during all of the three previous years. American shot, shell, and cold steel claimed the lives of hundreds of enemy soldiers and sailors, at a cost of thirty U.S. servicemen killed and twenty-four wounded. But as September 1804 ended, the Philadelphia crewmen in Tripoli’s soul-killing dungeons now for eleven months, were no nearer liberation.
The squadron officers, led by Lieutenant David Porter, pooled their money to honor the six “Preble’s Boys” killed during the battles in Tripoli harbor in August and September 1804. With $1,245 that they raised, they hired a Leghorn sculptor, John Charles Micali, to build a monument to the fallen junior officers. It was America’s first military monument. Micali hewed the statues and pedestal from Italian marble. After the monument was completed in 1806, it was disassembled, packed into fifty-one cases at Leghorn, and shipped to the United States on the Constitution. First erected in the Washington Navy Yard, the monument was vandalized in August 1814 by marauding British troops who hacked at it with swords. It was repaired and moved outside the Capitol, where it resided more than forty years. In 1860 it was moved again, on the steamship Anacostia, to the new U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. It stands today behind Preble Hall, home of the Naval Academy Museum. Its inscription reads: “To the Memory of Somers, Caldwell, Decatur, Wadsworth, Dorsey, Israel.”
The love of glory inspired them
Fame has crowned their deeds
History records the event
The children of Columbia admire
And commerce laments their fall.
In Portland, Maine, young Henry Wadsworth’s grieving sister, Zilpah, and her husband, Stephen Longfellow, named their infant son Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He grew up to become the most beloved American poet of his age. The Longfellows’ nextdoor neighbor was Edward Preble.
In 1938, the State Department began an official inquiry into the Intrepid crew’s remains. With singular energy, Mustafa Burchis, the Tripoli harbormaster, took it upon himself to locate them. He interviewed the descendants of families that had lived in Tripoli in September 1804, and studied journals, diaries, and records. He sent a report to the U.S. embassy in Rome, but it was burned with other embassy papers when war broke out in 1941. After the war ended, Burchis reconstructed his findings, which suggested the final resting place of at least some of the crew was the Protestant Cemetery, established by European and American consuls in 1830. In a corner of the old walled burial ground, near a cliff, Burchis and U.S. consular officials located five unmarked graves above the beach where the Americans’ bodies reportedly had washed ashore.
In April 1949, the U.S. cruiser Spokane arrived in Tripoli harbor. No fortress guns fired on her. No Tripolitan gunboats sailed out to dispute the harbor. U.S. sailors and Marines and a British Army unit marched the half mile from the city to the cemetery, with a Scottish Cameron Highlanders band playing martial music. One of the fifty dignitaries in the solemn procession was Tripoli’s mayor, Joseph Karamanli, a direct descendant of the bashaw.
Placed at each unmarked grave was a plaque reading, “Here Lies an Unknown American Sailor Lost from the USS Intrepid in Tripoli Harbor 1804.”
As a U.S. Marine honor guard fired a rifle salute to the gallant commandos, a bugler played “Taps.”