VII
Government may as well send quaker meeting-houses to float this sea ...
—William Eaton
“We find it is all a puff! We see how you carry on the war with Tripoli!”
—Tunisian minister assessing U.S. lack of aggression to William Eaton
For the next two years, the Mediterranean squadron scrupulously avoided Tripoli harbor. Commodore Dale and his successor, Richard Valentine Morris, gave many reasons for their dilatoriness: It was too late in the season for offensive operations, they lacked the warships to be successful, they were too busy convoying. When they weren’t convoying or blockading, they were shuttling mail, food, and water. Wheat, guns, and corsairs leaked through the porous blockade. After watching this purposeful busyness for a year and a half, Yusuf and Murad Reis concluded that the United States was just another mercantile nation, like Sweden, Denmark, and Naples, that could be bullied into paying tribute. This wasn’t the outcome Jefferson had envisioned when he set out to chastise the North African regencies.
Dale perversely interpreted his orders to mean he couldn’t attack Tripoli, but only defend U.S. interests and capture enemy corsairs at sea. So, instead of gathering his meager force for a climactic battle in Tripoli harbor, he dispersed it. The Essex convoyed merchantmen; the President and Enterprise blockaded; and the Philadelphia waited outside Gibraltar Bay for Murad to show. Dale complained there weren’t enough ships for a proper blockade, much less to confront Tripoli. An effective blockade would require two frigates, two sloops of war, and a small bomb vessel to shell the town. In that assessment, he was remarkably accurate, but it evidently never occurred to him that he might bring his entire squadron before Tripoli, beard the bashaw, and end the war.
In truth, his heart was never in the cruise. By October, just three months into his cruise, he was talking of suspending the blockade and going home. “I don’t expect there will be any great Necessity of your being at sea this Winter,” he wrote to Barron. The Tripolitan corsairs stayed in port during the stormy months between October and March. “You will take a look now and then into Tripoli, to let that fellow see and know that you are on the look out for him.” Between convoy duty and occasionally appearing off Tripoli to keep up the appearance of a blockade, the weeks would fly “until you are releaved by some Ship of the next Squadron that is to come out, which I suppose to be soon....” Dale made plans to depart for home in early December, even though his deployment supposedly was for a full year.
While overly modest about his squadron’s prospects, Dale was ebullient about his successor’s, provided he was permitted to attack Tripoli—the commodore tenaciously clung to his belief that he was not—and if he were given enough vessels to prevail. As early as August 1801, only a month after reaching Gibraltar, he was predicting that his successor, presumably with more ships than he, would pressure Tripoli, “and now and then heave a few shells into the Town,” until the bashaw sued for peace the following summer. “There never was, nor will there be again, for some time to come so favourable an opportunity for the United States to Establish a lasting reputation, for its flag in those seas.” And without a drop of irony, he declared that his squadron already had proven to the world “what the Government of the United States can do.”
A combination of winter gales, paperwork, and bad luck spoiled Dale’s December leave-taking, and 1802 still found him in the western Mediterranean. En route to Toulon to have the President’s bottom checked for wormholes and rot, the Port Mahon harbor pilot ran the flagship onto a rock. Then Dale and his crew were quarantined for fifteen days.
If not a fighting commander, Dale was certainly efficient. He kept his squadron humming with paperwork and errands, and he was impatient with sloppy subordinates. Captain Daniel McNeill, whose frigate Boston had joined the squadron after delivering the new U.S. ambassador to France, was the opposite: administratively loose, but combative. Inevitably, the men clashed. McNeill gave Dale ample cause. To avoid quarantine in Toulon, McNeill had told the French authorities he had been to no other ports recently, when he had been to several. Dale rebuked McNeill angrily when he found out. Before the memory of that lapse of integrity had faded, McNeill was in trouble again. He sailed from Malaga minus three lieutenants, the ship’s purser, and three other crewmen—all still ashore. As though to compensate for leaving Malaga with too few crewmen, at Toulon he sailed with three French officers and the President’s parson. They had come aboard for supper, overstayed, and awakened the next morning to find themselves under sail. “I hope you will be more particular in your enquirys on Board, when you are about to sail from any place,” Dale fumed at McNeill. “You can have but little idea what trouble and displeasure it gives, and the consequence of leaving Officers behind, and taking, Officers of other Nations away contrary to their expectations.” He asked Robert Smith, the new Navy secretary, to cashier McNeill.
But before his recall, McNeill revealed his virtues as a vigorous, able blockader, capturing four Tunisian coastal vessels trying to smuggle grain and oil to Tripoli. He then joined Swedish blockaders in repelling a squadron of Tripolitan corsairs and shot away the mast of a Tripolitan gunboat in Tripoli harbor. His solo accomplishments exceeded the rest of the squadron’s combined achievements, chief of which was the capture of a Greek ship off Tripoli with twenty-one Tripolitan soldiers, fourteen merchants, five women, and a child.
Thinking ahead to when a future squadron might seriously prosecute the war, Dale generously freed the prisoners in Tripoli, thinking he was ensuring a reciprocal gesture in the event Tripoli captured Americans in the future. Then, as though having second thoughts about appearing too soft, Dale asked Nicholas Nissen, the Danish consul in Tripoli and a loyal American friend, to inform the bashaw, “He is much mistaken in the character of the Americans, if he thinks they are to be Frighten’d. They love peace, but it must be an Honorable one....” Unimpressed by either Dale’s bluster or his generosity, Yusuf deemed the forty-one freed captives would be worth the release of exactly six Americans. The remainder of Dale’s tame cruise furnished no opportunities to find out whether the bashaw would honor the pledge.
Richard Valentine Morris wasn’t a seasoned combat officer like Dale or Truxtun, but Thomas Jefferson owed much to his family. Richard’s brother, Lewis Robert Morris, was a Vermont congressman when the cliffhanger 1800 presidential election, which culminated in an Electoral College tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr, came before the U.S. House for resolution. Over the tense days of congressional balloting, resulting in tie after tie, Morris steadily voted for Burr, keeping the Vermont delegation’s vote split evenly between Burr and Jefferson. But on the thirty-sixth ballot, Morris abruptly abstained, swinging Vermont to Jefferson and handing him the presidency. While no conclusive evidence suggests that Morris’s selection as commodore was a quid pro quo, it may well have been.
Morris evidently anticipated an uneventful tour of duty in the Mediterranean. He brought along his wife, his baby son Gerard, and the family maid, Sal. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, wives and paramours often accompanied officers to sea, but seldom on warships bound for a war zone. As a consequence of his bringing his family, Morris’s ship became known as a “happy” ship and not a “tight” one, and his own, personal comfort became more important to him than his mission. Navy Secretary Smith had been only too happy to grant Mrs. Morris permission to sail with her husband. “Immediately upon receiving it,” Smith informed the commodore in April 1802, “I wrote to her complying with her request.” Smith’s eagerness to please very possibly stemmed from the fact that his first choice for the job—Truxtun again—had backed out at the last minute.
Truxtun had accepted the appointment initially, but, as the squadron’s sailing date neared, he revived his old complaint, the one that had caused him to refuse command a year earlier: He wanted a captain to command his flagship so he could devote himself exclusively to squadron operations. It was a reasonable request: freed from daily management of a frigate and its 300 men, he could dedicate himself wholly to prosecuting the war. But the rest of his request wasn’t so reasonable: unless his stipulation were granted, he would resign from the Navy. Smith disliked ultimatums from his captains. “The condition, Sir, is impossible,” he shot back. No extra captains were available because of the Navy’s force reduction. “As this must have been known to you—I cannot but consider your notification as absolute.”
Truxtun was out of the Navy.
Morris’s squadron assembled piecemeal at Gibraltar. The 36-gun Constellation, commanded by Captain Alexander Murray, arrived on April 28; the 36-gun Chesapeake under Morris came in on May 25; and the 28-gun Adams, under Captain Hugh Campbell, on July 21. Morris’s other ships—the Enterprise, with Sterett still in charge, and the Boston—were already there.
Gibraltar vibrated with rumors of war, between France and England, and, at various times, between America and each of the Barbary States. The bashaw was sending five corsairs into the Mediterranean in defiance of the blockade. Algiers had sent twelve corsairs against Portugal and already had captured a frigate, boarding it so quickly the crew hadn’t had time to unlock the ship’s arms lockers. Forced to fight with handspikes, seventy-two Portuguese crewmen died before the ship was surrendered.
Moroccan Emperor Soliman Ben Mahomet was pestering U.S. consul James Simpson for a passport for the Meshuda, which was still penned up at Gibraltar. Without a passport issued by an American consul, the Meshuda, as a onetime Tripolitan cruiser of uncertain ownership, could be seized by U.S. warships as a prize the instant it left Gibraltar. Throughout the Tripolitan war, merchants from all the noncombatant North African nations routinely obtained passports from their American consuls to avoid having their vessels boarded by suspicous U.S. naval officers and searched for wartime contraband. But since the Moroccan emperor neither explained how the Meshuda had become Morocco’s, nor what its business would be as a merchant ship, he did not receive a U.S. passport.
During the American squadron’s Atlantic crossing, the Chesapeakes mainmast came loose just four days out of Hampton Roads. Carpenters discovered 3-inch-deep rot and defective spars, but managed to stabilize the mast so the Chesapeake was able to continue her voyage. Between the impaired mast and poorly packed ballast and cargo, however, the crossing was anything but smooth. “I never was at Sea in so uneasy a Ship, in fact it was with the greatest difficulty we saved our masts from rolling over the side.” After the flagship limped into Gibraltar, the British assisted with repairs.
The Adams brought Morris’s orders to Gibraltar, and they couldn’t have been clearer. The commodore was to collect Cathcart at Leghorn and appear before Tripoli with the entire squadron. “Holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations, may produce a peaceful disposition towards us in the mind of the Bashaw, and essentially contribute to our obtaining an advantageous treaty with him.” Cathcart had similar instructions from Madison—accompany the squadron to Tripoli and open negotiations with the bashaw, but let him make the first overture, so “awe inspired by a display of our force” could have its effect. Don’t buy a peace, Madison warned. “To buy a peace of Tripoli, is to bid for War with Tunis....” Seldom have such forthright instructions been so utterly disregarded.
The Moroccan emperor’s irritation over the blockaded Meshuda mounted. Soliman now announced defiantly that he would violate the U.S. blockade by bringing the Meshuda and her consort to Tangier, loading them with grain and then sailing to Tripoli. Certain the emperor intended merely to hand over the warships to Tripoli, Consul Simpson patiently tried to explain that a blockade’s purpose was to keep all ships from entering an enemy port, but Soliman stubbornly insisted on the passports for the Meshuda and the brig. Simpson knew Moroccan corsairs could begin attacking American shipping at any moment if Soliman wasn’t given the passports. He asked Morris, whose authority exceeded his when it came to the blockade, to permit him to issue them, in hopes of averting the unending trouble that would result from captured ships and prisoners, but Morris refused starchily. To no one’s surprise, except possibly Morris’s, the emperor banished Simpson from Tangier and, on June 19, 1802, declared war on the United States.
Morris notified the Navy secretary he would need more ships to fight both Morocco and Tripoli, but no sooner had he done so than the Moroccan emperor, Soliman, began backpedaling, possibly after considering that it might be unwise to antagonize a nation with five warships so close at hand when he lacked a credible fleet. He invited Simpson to return to Tangier. Simpson silkily reminded the emperor that the United States was sending him 100 gun carriages soon as a gift, and the touch of customary obeisance did the trick—Soliman called off the war, even if he hadn’t altogether given up on the Meshuda. Moroccan crews soon were spotted in Gibraltar readying it and the brig for sea. Morris put a watch on them, wondering how he could legitimately stop the two ships from leaving, for they clearly belonged to Morocco now. The commodore reluctantly instructed Simpson to issue the passports.
Slow communication between Washington and the Mediterranean kept the two chronically out of step. Handwritten letters and reports crossed the Atlantic on sailing ships in one to three months, depending on whether the trip was “downhill”—sailor vernacular for America to Europe, a one-month voyage—or “uphill,” against the prevailing westerlies, from Europe to America, which could take up to three months. The Navy Department sent the John Adams—a 28-gun frigate like her sister ship, the Adams—and New York to the Mediterranean upon receiving Morris’s appeal for more ships to fight Morocco, and canceled the shipment of 100 gun carriages for Morocco. But by then, Soliman had called off the war. So the gun carriages didn’t arrive as Simpson had promised, and another year went by before they did. When they finally showed up, the goodwill gesture was largely wasted because of the emperor’s vexation over the delay. The John Adams and New York reached the Mediterranean just as Jefferson, Smith, and Madison learned that Soliman had canceled the war.
Even though they were not needed against Morocco, Jefferson decided to keep the two additional warships in the Mediterranean. The president’s staunch belief in a navy’s utility had evolved into a philosophy of perpetual naval preparedness. Belying his unyielding opposition to a strong central government, he wanted to build even more ships, and was working with architect Benjamin Latrobe on a blueprint for a roofed dry-dock at Washington Navy Yard where decommissioned warships could be warehoused “in a state of perfect preservation and without expence.” Idle ships would be hoisted out of the water to keep the organism-rich harbor waters from eating away their bottoms, and placed under roofs out of the wet weather that rotted and warped masts and decks. Congress, which supported Jefferson’s financial austerity policies without sharing his enthusiasm for naval preparedness, flinched at the dry-dock’s $417,276 cost, and the plan died.
No sooner had the Moroccan crisis subsided than Tripoli snatched an American merchantman. Two corsairs had slipped through the blockade in early June, as the American merchant ship Franklin sailed unescorted from Marseilles for St. Thomas with wine, oil, soaps, perfume, and hats. Before the Franklin reached Gibraltar, on June 17, 1802, the corsairs overtook and seized her, with seven crewmen and two passengers. The Frdnklin’s captain, Andrew Morris, and his crewmen owned the unhappy distinction of having become Tripoli’s first U.S. prisoners of war.
Firing cannon salutes, the corsairs brazenly paraded the Franklin through the blockade, manned by the Constellation and a Swedish frigate, and into Tripoli harbor, as Morris fumed over his countrymen’s inaction. The Tripolitans marched the crew through the city streets past shouting Moslem crowds, jubilant at the sight of captive Christians—a raucous scene that might have been reprised from 1793, 1785, or even 1635. English and French consuls swung into action and quickly gained the release of three crewmen who were British nationals and the two passengers who were French. But Captain Morris and three American crewmen remained captives.
The absence of a U.S. consul in Tripoli hampered efforts to gain their release, although William Eaton did what he could from Tunis. Eaton tried to open a parley with Murad Reis when he appeared in Tunis, but Murad wouldn’t negotiate or permit Eaton to visit the captives.
Algiers intervened unexpectedly. Bobba Mustapha reminded Yusuf that in 1801 he had promised one day to release six Americans when Dale had freed the forty-one prisoners from the captured Greek ship. If any proof was needed of Algiers’s continued preeminence among the Barbary regencies, Bobba’s intercession and Yusuf’s response supplied it. On October 11, the freed American captives suddenly showed up in Algiers. Yusuf, however, couldn’t resist levying a small ransom, agreement or no; after all, these were American Christians, and Tripoli was at war with their country. Richard O‘Brien, the U.S. consul general in Algiers, paid the bashaw the $6,500 he demanded.
Richard Morris might have wrung an honorable peace from the bashaw had he sailed swiftly to Tripoli with Cathcart and negotiated at cannon’s mouth—in other words, followed orders. He did not, even with Navy Secretary Robert Smith prodding him to act in a letter reaching him while he lingered at Gibraltar in the summer of 1802. “Let me at this time urge you to use every exertion to terminate the affair with Tripoli and to prevent a rupture with any of the other Barbary Powers.”
Instead, the commodore began to display the indolence that would become the signature of his command. Two and a half months passed before he managed to pry himself away from Gibraltar and the balls and banquets, and the many opportunities to rub elbows with admirals, aristocrats, and diplomats. On August 18, 1802, Morris and the Chesapeake finally sailed from Gibraltar. He did not make for Tripoli, but leisurely escorted U.S. merchantmen in a happy ramble along the southern European coast, touching at many pleasant ports—Malaga, Toulon, and Marseilles—and arriving on October 12 in Leghorn, where he met Richard Cathcart.
With winter approaching, Morris was loath to forsake Italy’s amenities to cross to Tripoli. It was so late in the season, he wrote to Smith on October 15 in his first report since reaching the Mediterranean, “to render it impossible to appear off Tripoli before January.” Morris confided to Cathcart that he wouldn’t undertake a major operation against Tripoli until May or June.
It was a missed opportunity for securing favorable peace terms. Reports from Tripoli suggested the bashaw was open to negotiations. O‘Brien had learned the bashaw would settle for $60,000 in cash and $10,000 in presents. For another $30,000, Algiers would mediate. When all the other bribes were paid, the treaty would cost $120,000. O’Brien was confident that it could be signed for less. Yusuf’s openness to a negotiated peace was by no means a testament to the effectiveness of Morris’s blockade. “This year has proved a great deal richer in grains than ever could be expected, so that the Blockade from that Side neither seems to be of much Service... ,” Nicholas Nissen, the Danish consul in Tripoli, had reported to Eaton in July. The bashaw’s amenability to talks more likely was due to concern over the U.S. military buildup.
But the propitious moment passed without Morris’s acting. Sweden made peace with Tripoli for $150,000, plus an $8,000 consular present and $8,000 in annual tribute. The new treaty removed any pressure on Tripoli to negotiate with the United States, now its only enemy. With the rich harvest, Sweden’s cash, and gifts of $40,000 and an 18-gun cruiser from France, the bashaw was confident he could fight a war, endure a blockade, or thwart any coup attempt.
The commodore and the “commodoress,” as Mrs. Morris was now known among the Chesapeake’s crew, dallied in Leghorn nearly a month. In his journals and letters, Henry Wadsworth, a midshipman on the Chesapeake, displayed the family gift for composition that would reach its zenith in his nephew and namesake, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Young Wadsworth thought highly of Mrs. Morris, describing her as an avid reader who was particularly knowledgeable about geography and history. Yet he couldn’t resist a wry dig at her looks, noting that “her person is not beautiful, or even handsome, but she looks very well in a veil.” She was not the only woman aboard the Chesapeake; the boatswain, carpenter, corporal, and the captain of the forecastle all brought their wives, too. The forecastle captain’s wife, Mrs. James Low, gave birth to a boy in the boatswain’s storeroom.
Morris’s lethargic cruise left the squadron’s officers and men with plenty of time to get into trouble—chiefly, by drinking and dueling. During the long layover in Leghorn, Marine Captain James McKnight was killed by Navy Lieutenant Richard H. L. Lawson after a simmering feud between the two Constellation officers culminated in McKnight, a seasoned duelist, challenging Lawson. Dueling among American officers was a lethal byproduct of Europe’s Romantic Age, when a gentleman’s honor was more important than life itself. It was so widespread during the early nineteenth century that two-thirds as many U.S. naval officers died on the “field of honor” as were killed in battle. Lawson, who had never dueled, proposed three paces, counting on the brief distance to negate McKnight’s experience. McKnight’s second denounced Lawson as “an assassin” for suggesting such a ridiculously short distance, Lawson called McKnight a coward, and they finally agreed on two pistol shots each at six paces. If both remained standing and their honor still craved satisfaction, they would fight on with cutlasses until it was.
They trooped ashore. McKnight and Lawson stepped off their six paces, turned and fired simultaneously. McKnight missed, but Lawson’s bullet struck McKnight in the chest, piercing his heart and killing him instantly. Marine Captain Daniel Carmick and other witnesses carried the body to the American Hotel, where they were staying. The staff, anxious to spare the other guests a grisly spectacle, turned the officers away, telling them Leghorn’s coroner needed to conduct a postmortem to determine the cause of death, but they wouldn’t permit it at the hotel. The Americans lugged McKnight to the cemetery, laid him on a raised grave marker, and sent for the coroner.
The coroner was a by-the-book bureaucrat. Carmick watched in horror as he cut out McKnight’s heart. He asked Carmick to vouch that the ball indeed had passed through it, then began the grotesque hunt for the pistol ball. Carmick protested the dismemberment of his friend, but the coroner and other city officials were not to be dissuaded. Carmick stalked off in disgust. “I left them up to their Armpitts in blood,” he reported to Marine Commandant William Burrows.
Murray, the Constellation’s aged, nearly deaf commander, had been unaware of the feud that had gone on right under his nose until McKnight’s death came to his attention. He displayed his violent disapproval of dueling by arresting Lawson for murder and forbidding military honors at McKnight’s burial. Murray and Morris also both boycotted the service. Carmick wrote to Burrows, “I thought he [Murray] was rather unreasonable in desiring that there be inscribed on his Tombstone; ‘That he had fallen victim to a false idea of Honor.”’ McKnight was buried near the gravesite of the British satirist Tobias Smollett, who died in Leghorn in 1771 after finishing his epistolary novel, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker.
Before the squadron left Leghorn, there was another tragedy. Carmick was returning to his ship with Lieutenant Sterett when some crewmen tried to catch the boat as it was pulling out. Sterett refused to wait for them, deciding to teach the sailors a lesson on promptness. They appropriated a barge. It overturned in the harbor’s chop, and four sailors drowned.
The squadron idled in Livonine for a pleasant spell. At length it weighed anchor for Naples, with Wadsworth writing contentedly, “Yesterday we left Livonine with as much pleasure as we enter’d it, for 20, or 30 days will generally satiate us with any place.”
Another duel caused an international incident. At Malta, where the New York had put in to wait out a storm, Midshipman Joseph Bainbridge, the younger brother of Captain William Bainbridge, was on liberty in Valletta when he had a run-in with a Mr. Cochran, secretary to Malta’s governor, Sir Alexander Ball. Cochran tried to pick a fight with the American to impress his British officer companions. After being taunted and jostled repeatedly, Bainbridge finally flattened Cochran. The governor’s secretary threw down a challenge. Concerned about Bainbridge’s inexperience, Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, Jr., Bainbridge’s shipmate and an experienced duelist—he would die in a duel in 1820 with the New York’s current commander, Captain James Barron—volunteered as Bainbridge’s second. Decatur demanded that the duel be fought at four paces. The men exchanged first shots. Cochran missed his, and Bainbridge blew off Cochran’s hat. The men reloaded and fired again. This time Bainbridge was dead accurate: Cochran “reciev’d the ball in his head and instantly died,” wrote Wadsworth. Alexander Ball, furious over losing his secretary, ordered Barron to turn over Bainbridge and Decatur to Maltese authorities for prosecution. Barron ignored the demand. The New York sailed with Bainbridge and Decatur. A Navy investigation exonerated the two, but they were sent home.
While Morris rambled among the western Mediterranean’s friendly ports, support for the war was growing back home. Congress empowered the president to prosecute the war without declaring it formally. This was at Madison’s urging; he believed the Tripoli war was too distant for effective congressional oversight. Congress also authorized armed vessels to make prizes of Tripolitan ships and, if needed, the commissioning of privateers. Navy enlistments were extended from one year to two.
Early in 1803, Navy Secretary Smith asked Congress for $96,000 for four warships of 14 to 16 guns, and $12,000 for eight gunboats. Naval officers and consuls had complained for a year and a half that the super frigates’ deeper drafts hamstrung them as blockaders; they could not pursue shore-hugging small craft into the shallow harbors divoting the Tripolitan coast. Schooners, sloops, and gunboats were needed to chase blockade runners right into their hideouts. Eager to show its support, Congress gave Smith $50,000 to build up to fifteen gunboats, and granted his $96,000 request for the small ships. Construction of the four warships began immediately.
The Navy Department also began standardizing the operation of its ships, officers, and men, issuing new rules covering everything from uniforms to discipline, shipboard duties to shipboard menus. The fleet’s diet left much to be desired when measured against later standards. Smith recommended a ration heavy on protein, carbohydrates, and liquor, with occasional vegetables to ward off scurvy:
Sunday: One and a half pounds of beef, one-half pound flour or Indian meal, 14 ounces bread, one-half pint spirits, one-half pint molasses.
Monday: One pound pork, 14 ounces bread, one-half pint spirits, one-half pint peas.
Tuesday: One and a half pounds beef, one pound potatoes, 14 ounces bread, two ounces butter, one-half pint spirits.
Wednesday: One pound pork, 14 ounces bread, two ounces cheese, one-half pint spirits, one-half pint rice.
Thursday: One a half pounds beef, one pound potatoes, one-half pound flour or Indian meal, 14 ounces bread, one-half pint spirits.
Friday: One-half pound flour or Indian meal, 14 ounces bread, two ounces butter, one-half pint spirits, one-half pint molasses, one pint rice.
Saturday: One pound pork, 14 ounces bread, one-half pint spirits, one-half pint peas, one-half pint vinegar.
Eaton was bitterly disappointed that Commodore Morris was rapidly proving himself no improvement over Dale. He chafed over the squadron’s inactivity, grumbling to Madison, “Government may as well send quaker meeting-houses to float this sea....” He also was angry with Murray of the Constellation for having refused to reprovision the Gloria at Gibraltar, stripping her of the privateer commission Eaton had awarded her, and even impressing some of her seamen into service on the Constellation. “I beleive you will find you were unauthorized in employing the Ship Gloria on Public account,” Murray had written Eaton. Eaton happened to own the Gloria and had armed her at his own expense with the profits from a trading business he and Cathcart operated on the side. It was accepted practice for American consuls to operate private businesses while representing U.S. interests. Certain consulships, such as those in the West Indies, were particularly coveted because of their opportunities for accumulating great personal wealth. Eaton had some justification for making his own ship a privateer: He used the Gloria to deliver and pick up consular mail at Gibraltar, because the squadron’s warships so rarely stopped in Tunis—over the previous six months, only McNeill had called, and just once. Murray’s high-handedness angered Eaton and revealed his unhappy tendency never to forget a slight.
Yet Eaton was right about the Mediterranean squadron, whose lackadaisical performance made the Barbary consuls’ jobs all the more difficult. The flimsy blockade and the commodores’ fussy care in avoiding a direct confrontation with the bashaw forced the American consuls in Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco to compensate with a “paper blockade”—refusing to issue passports to any vessels going to Tripoli from their regencies. All of them had been pressured to issue the passports, even threatened. Tunis’s bey had even ridiculed Eaton over the tepid blockade and the unwarlike Dale and Morris. As a former Army captain who knew how to fight and brimmed with ideas about how to bring Tripoli to heel, Eaton could only react with impotent fury to the barbs, painfully aware that the war was being prosecuted lamely. “Our operations of the last and present year produce nothing in effect but additional enemies and national contempt.... The Minister [of Tunis] 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!’ ” The United States risked disgrace, its citizens “dragged to Slavery and goaded to a lingering death under the bastinade of merciless robbers.” Worse, America would have to buy peace “on the terms of an unprincipled, overbearing Bashaw of a wretched dog-kennel.” “If America can yield to this, and look the world in the face without a blush, let her blot the stars from her escutcheon and viel with sack-cloth the sun of her former glory....” Broke and ill, he wanted to go home. His post was “intolerable abuse and personal vexation,” to no lasting purpose. He had wasted four years in Tunis.
All the consuls were unhappy, even Cathcart in his exile in Leghorn, far from any Barbary ruler. A Barbary consul, he groused, had to put up with humiliation, isolation, threats to life and limb, and “every species of insolence & degradation that a fertile brain’d Mohammetan can invent to render the life of a christian superlatively miserable ... one moment menaced with chains, the next with death & damnation, in a state of constant vigilance concern & perplexity....”
“Nothing of importance transpired in this quarter,” Morris was able to report complacently to the Navy secretary in November. During the winter of 1802—3, he enjoyed the British social swirl in Malta for several weeks. Finally, in February 1803, he weighed anchor for Tripoli, even though he no longer had seven ships to parade in front of the bashaw; three were headed home. It didn’t matter, for when he reached Tripoli, the weather was too stormy for maneuver or blockade.
Morris returned to Malta’s pleasures.