Jefferson's War (18 page)

In 1801 the city of Tripoli had 30,000 Moslem and 2,000 Jewish inhabitants, a fraction of the Tripoli regency's population of roughly 1 million. It was blessed with a hospitable climate, with most days sunny and the air clear. A rocky reef shielded the city from the winter storms. Flowering hibiscus, olives, and palms, sweet jasmine and oleander flourished along the narrow belt of fertile land hugging the coastline. In the countryside, the cultivated fields yielded pomegranates, aloes, tobacco, millet, barley, and watermelons weighing up to 100 pounds. The city itself was a warren of white flat-topped homes hugging narrow, winding streets. Slaves did all the heavy work. Moslem men prayed five times daily and conducted business leisurely under shady trees and in the dim recesses of their shops in their white robes and burnooses while drinking thick black coffee. They ate, smoked, slept, and spent time with their wives and children and entertained themselves with horse- and ostrich-racing and cockfighting.

The bashaw and his ancestors had wielded power in Tripoli since 1711. Hamet the Great founded the Karamanli dynasty by slaughtering the Turkish garrison and then leading a conquering army against the tribal Berbers who occupied the parched accordion hills outside Tripoli and the sandy wastes beyond. After he had subdued them, Hamet smoothed over matters with the Ottoman sultan, whose Tripolitan janissaries lay in fresh graves. This was seldom a problem so long as recognition of the sultan's suzerainty was accompanied by lavish gifts. Evidently, Hamet paid proper obeisance; the sultan recognized Hamet as Tripoli's legitimate ruler. During his long reign, Hamet expanded Tripoli's
borders eastward and added the oases to the south, controlling the North African caravan routes. So thoroughly did Hamet cement his power that he occupied the throne long past his prime, until he was blind and had lost much of his authority. In 1745 he killed himself and was succeeded by his son Mohammed and, after him, Mohammed's son Ali.

When it came time for Ali to name a successor, logically enough he chose Hassan, his eldest son. Yusuf, the ambitious, conniving third son and only twenty at the time, enlisted the middle brother, Hamet, in a plot against Hassan. In front of his mother in the royal palace one day in 1790, Yusuf shot Hassan twice. Then, to make sure Hassan would die, he and his coconspirators stabbed his dying brother up to a hundred times. Public outrage over the coup forced Yusuf to name Hamet the bashaw and to remain in the background.

This arrangement didn't suit Yusuf for long. He led a revolt and besieged Hamet in the capital city for two years while their father, Ali, vacillated, first supporting one son and then switching allegiance to the other. The chaotic situation didn't escape the notice of an opportunistic Turkish freebooter named Ali Borghul, who had been watching the civil war from Egypt. In 1793 he suddenly appeared at Tripoli at the head of an army of Turkish mercenaries. He captured the city without firing a shot. Had Borghul been satisfied with this conquest, he might have enjoyed a long tenure, but instead he decided also to seize the island of Jerba—a Tunisian possession. Tunis promptly became a staunch ally of Yusuf's, enabling him to return to Tripoli with a patriotic army, vowing to free his people from the invader's yoke. By 1795 Borghul was ousted, and Yusuf and Hamet were back in power, Hamet as bashaw, and Yusuf nominally in charge of maritime affairs.

One day while Hamet was traveling in the countryside, Yusuf made his move. When Hamet returned on July 11, 1795, the city gates were closed to him, and his wife and five children had become Yusuf's prisoners. Hamet went into exile in Tunis. A few years later, he made the acquaintance of William Eaton, the new U.S. consul. They became friends and then allies.

 

From his Tunisian consulate, on July 23, 1801, Eaton sent a circular letter to U.S. agents and consuls throughout Europe announcing that the U.S. squadron was blockading Tripoli and asking them to inform the European powers. At this point, the blockade consisted of the
President
and the
Enterprise
cruising off the Tripoli coast. The
Essex
was busy escorting U.S. merchantmen, while the
Philadelphia
lurked off Gibraltar, waiting for the
Meshuda
and her consort to emerge. The Tripolitan warships, however, didn't budge from their anchorage.

But Murad Reis and his 366 crewmen on the
Meshuda
were growing desperate. The British Gibraltar government, friendlier toward American warships than Tripolitan cruisers, was refusing him provisions, and the hungry crew of the
Meshudu's
14-gun companion brig had mutinied and gone ashore. There they broke into a bakery and ate the sweepings. Murad unbent his cruisers' sails and threatened the crew of a moored Ragusean ship with war on their Sicilian province if they didn't take the Tripolitans across the Strait to North Africa. The Raguseans reluctantly ferried them to Morocco. Murad, happily rid of his rebellious crew, took a separate passage on a British merchant ship to Malta in November. Soon he was back in Tripoli. Only after the Tripolitans had left Gibraltar did the
Philadelphia's
officers learn that they had abandoned their ships.

Commodore Richard Dale's first inkling that a ship from his squadron had decisively beaten a Tripolitan warship in battle was when his flagship, the
President,
encountered a hulk drifting toward North Africa under a dwarfish, tattered sail. When hailed by the Americans, the wounded captain said they were Tunisians. His 14-gun cruiser, he said, had been shot up by a 24-gun French corvette off Malta. Dale gave him a compass and let him go, certain the ship was Tripolitan, not Tunisian.

It wasn't long before his suspicions were confirmed by Lieutenant Andrew Sterett, upon his return on the
Enterprise
with fresh water from Malta. Sterett excitedly described his schooner's smashing victory on August 1 over the
Tripoli.
During a three-hour gunnery battle on the high seas, the
Enterprise
had coolly emasculated her adversary, despite the
Tripoli
's two-gun advantage over Sterett's ship. When it was over, thirty Tripolitan dead littered the enemy cruiser's decks, her masts were smashed, and her sails were shredded, while the Americans had sustained no casualties and no ship damage. After attending to the thirty wounded Tripolitans, who included all the ship's officers, the Americans had erected a stubby sail and sent the
Tripoli
on her way back to port. This was the very hulk that Dale had encountered.

With the aid of the compass supplied by Dale, the
Tripoli
's wounded captain, Mahomet Rous, and the surviving crew members managed to reach the city of Tripoli. News of the shattering defeat spread quickly through the narrow streets and cafés, finally arriving in the palace.

The furious bashaw ordered Mahomet Rous mounted backward on a jackass. With sheep entrails draped around his neck, he
was paraded through the city streets and jeered and hooted by his countrymen. Then he was punished with 500 bastinados.

 

From Washington to Naples, Americans toasted the
Enterprise
's brutal dismemberment of the
Tripoli.
Sterett was awarded a ceremonial sword and recommended for promotion to captain; the Enterprise's ninety-four Navy crewmen and Marines received a month's extra wages.

The victory inspired a play,
The Tripoli Prize, or American Tars on an English Shore.
New York audiences loudly cheered its debut in November 1802, although reviewer Washington Irving derided its implausible story line: A storm blows the
Enterprise
and
Tripoli
from the Mediterranean to the English Channel, where the American captain's son falls in love with an English girl, but then realizes after a climactic sea battle that duty comes before love.

In a congratulatory letter, Jefferson warmly noted that Sterett had “first taught our countrymen that they were more than equal to the pirates of the Mediterranean,” and affirmed his steadfast determination to rid the Mediterranean of The Terror:

Sterett's promotion, however, ran aground on the Naval Reduction Act, which had left the Navy only nine captaincies, all filled at the moment. Before the war ended, Sterett would unhappily resign from the Navy when Stephen Decatur, Jr. was promoted to captain ahead of him.

The
Enterprise
skipper's bitter disappointment might have been the first instance of dashed expectations by American fighting men in Barbary, but it certainly would not be the last.

Nor would this be the last time the Barbary War's combatants would try to gain an advantage over one another by feigning surrender and flying false colors—ploys as old and new as war itself. As commanders well know, deception and surprise can win battles against a more numerous or better-armed enemy. Americans and Tripolitans would both use trickery when it suited them.

VII

THE WAR THAT WASN'T

—William Eaton

—Tunisian minister assessing U.S. lack of aggression to William Eaton

 

 

F
or 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.”