Jefferson's War (2 page)

Mole—Breakwater that protects a harbor from the sea.

Muster Book—Shipboard book listing the names of everyone aboard.

Passport—A pass issued by the Barbary States to merchantmen from friendly nations, protecting them against capture by corsairs. During the U.S.-Tripolitan war, U.S. consuls issued passes to Barbary traders as a guaranty against capture by U.S. naval vessels.

Polacre—A two- or three-masted, lateen-sail Barbary vessel comparable in size to a Navy brig or small frigate, often employed as a corsair.

Port—Left side of a vessel, viewed from the rear.

Privateer—Privately owned ship authorized by a government to capture enemy shipping in time of war. Privateers were granted government “letters of marque” permitting them to take possession of enemy prizes. If the captured vessel were condemned in a “prize court,” the captor crew was entitled to share in the value of the spoils.

Prize Court—Place where captured ships, or “prizes,” were adjudicated and shares of condemned prizes awarded to captor crews.

Quarantine—A restriction placed on ships arriving from ports notorious for disease. A quarantined crew could not land until local health officials cleared them. Quarantines normally lasted no more than 40 days.

Quay—A manmade strip of land in a harbor where ships can load or unload cargo or passengers.

Schooner—A two-masted vessel typically carrying eight to 12 guns and slightly smaller than a brig.

Shoal—Shallows in an area of deeper water.

Ship Log—Offrcial ship record book, updated daily with observations on navigation, weather, and occurrences.

Ships of the Line—Ships of 64 to 130 guns that carried sufficient firepower to take positions in the “line of battle,” a formation from which an admiral could bring the utmost firepower to bear at one time.

Sloop—A small sailing vessel, often one-masted, usually with fewer than eight guns. The term sometimes is used generically to refer to small warships.

Spar Deck—The upper deck behind the main mast from which the captain commanded his ship.

Speaking Trumpet—A crude megaphone used by officers to shout orders and communicate with other ships.

Sprung Mast—Mast that has broken free of its fastenings and must either be repaired or replaced.

Squadron—A small number of warships under one commander.

Starboard—Right side of a vessel, viewed from the rear.

Stern—The rear of a ship.

Struck his Flag—Lowered the flag in surrender.

Tack—An oblique ship's maneuver enabling it to sail into the wind.

Watch—On shipboard, the 24 hours of the day were divided into five four-hour and two two-hour watches, with the crewmen assigned to a watch responsible for the ship's operation during that period.

Xebec—A three-masted Mediterranean vessel, similar to a polacre. Xebecs were often used as corsairs.

 

 

(Source:
The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea
, Peter Kemp, editor, Oxford University Press, 1976.)

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The spelling and syntactical irregularities that recur in the correspondence, diaries, and ships' logs cited in this book reflect the era preceding uniform U.S. educational standards. Eighteenthcentury men with scant formal schooling often became naval officers, diplomats, and government officials, whose public and private utterances subsequently became part of history.

PROLOGUE

August 2, 1802

L
ieutenant Andrew Sterett surveyed the horizon from the
Enterprise
quarterdeck. Curly-haired and fair, with a powerful, curved nose, his sideburns nearly reaching his chin, the fire-eating young U.S. Navy skipper was especially watching for the square sails and long prow of a Barbary corsair. But for the moment, he had to curb his eagerness for combat because the sparkling Mediterranean lay empty. Canvas rustled above him, where the
Enterprise‘
s crew worked the topsails to catch the faint breeze. From the bow and aloft, Sterett's lookouts continued to scan for signs of sail.

The Barbary War was only two months old, and the U.S. squadron—Commodore Richard Dale's 44-gun
President,
two smaller frigates, and Sterett's lightly armed, fast schooner—had been in the Mediterranean scarcely a month. The U.S. warships had not yet seen action against the Tripolitan navy. But that would change on this day.

The
Enterprise
was sailing to Malta to fill its water casks and the
President
's, depleted during Commodore Dale's initial diplomatic visits to all four Barbary States and a week of cruising off Tripoli. Above the
Enterprise
's stern fluttered the British ensign; Sterett was following Navy Secretary Samuel Smith's orders to fly false colors, knowing the Tripolitan policy of avoiding enemy warships. With England and Tripoli at peace, the corsair captains wouldn't shy away from British ships; they might even draw near for a piece of news, and thus be lured into a fight the Americans would welcome.

The
Enterprise
was the third American ship by that name, and she would not be the last. Her two predecessors had served without distinction during the Revolutionary War. Not until World War II would there be another
Enterprise
whose colorful history would rival that of Sterett's 12-gun schooner. During the Quasi-War that had ended in 1800, she had captured nine French ships in the West Indies in just half a year, including
Le Flambeau,
which had nine 14-pounders and a crew of more than 100. Later, after she was reconfigured as a brig in 1811, the
Enterprise
would claim more glory during the War of 1812, followed by action against the pirate Jean Lafitte in the Gulf of Mexico. By then, she would have picked up the nickname “Lucky.”

Cries from Sterett's lookouts announced they had sighted a ship. Poking over the horizon was a square-sail brig with a long, pointed bow—unmistakably a Barbary corsair. The
Enterprise
's gun crews and Marines raced to battle quarters.

Before the
Enterprise
had departed for Malta, Dale instructed Sterett to engage the enemy only if he thought he could win—a broad mandate for an aggressive young naval officer thirsty for glory. If he encountered and defeated a Tripolitan corsair while en
route to Malta, “you will heave all his guns overboard, cut away his masts, and leave him in a situation that he can just make out to get into some port.” If he met a corsair on the return trip, the prize was to be brought to the squadron. In other words, fresh water took priority.

When they drew within hailing distance of the new ship, Sterett and his officers saw that she was indeed a Tripolitan corsair, aptly named the
Tripoli.
The American officers counted fourteen open gun ports—two more guns than the
Enterprise.
The
Tripoli‘
s captain, Rais Mahomet Rous, exchanged greetings with Sterett. Thinking he was speaking to a British officer because of the ensign swinging above the stern in the light breeze, Mahomet Rous revealed he was hunting American merchantmen.

The instant he uttered those words, events moved at a gallop. Sterett lowered the British ensign and raised the Stars and Stripes. Enterprise Marines opened fire from the deck and firing platforms aloft, their musket balls clattering like hail on the
Tripoli
's deck. The startled corsair crew replied with a partial broadside.

It was 9:00 A.M., August 1, 1801. The first naval battle of the Barbary War had begun.

 

The
Enterprise
was outgunned by the
Tripoli,
but Sterett was confident of his men's abilities. A demanding skipper, Sterett had drilled the
Enterprise
's gunners during the Atlantic crossing until they were fast and accurate. He also knew the Barbary corsairs had notoriously poor gunners; they preferred pistols and steel at close quarters to exchanging broadsides. Sterett was determined that gunnery would determine this battle's outcome.

The
Tripoli
edged closer for boarding, and the pirates crowded onto the long bow. The
Enterprise‘
s Marines, commanded by
Lieutenant Enoch S. Lane, shot them down. Then, like a boxer, the
Enterprise
sidestepped and pummeled the Tripoli with its 6-pounders from 30 yards away.

Twice more the
Tripoli
tried to close with the
Enterprise
for boarding, with the same bloody result.

As the combatants' fire-belching guns flickered in the dense smoke like summer lightning, the
Enterprise
's superior gunnery began to tell. The
Tripoli‘
s decks soon were littered with dead and maimed soldiers and sailors lying beneath smashed, crazily tilted masts. The hull was torn with jagged holes above the waterline.

The
Tripoli
lowered her flag in surrender. The
Enterprise
gun crews rushed onto the top deck cheering, only to come under renewed fire from the
Tripoli,
which had only feigned capitulation.

Sterett ordered another broadside. The roaring cannon fire crashed through the
Tripoli‘
s hull, spraying the gun crews with deadly splinters. The Marines in the
Enterprise'
s rigging and on deck shot at everything that moved on the
Tripoli‘
s spar deck. The screams of the wounded pierced the thick gunsmoke in the lulls between cannonades.

Mahomet Rous struck his flag again, and again Sterett stopped firing. As the
Enterprise
drifted closer, up went the Tripolitan flag and the corsair's cannons commenced firing once more.

The livid Sterett ordered the
Enterprise
to stand off and batter the
Tripoli
with its cannons. When the flag came down a third time, he told his gunners to lower their cannons and smash the
Tripoli‘
s hull at the waterline. Sink her, he commanded them.

Mahomet Rous threw his flag into the sea. He was finished.

Still suspicious, Sterett demanded that the captain or another officer come over in a boat.

But the Tripolitans were out of tricks. Their boats were wrecked, all their officers killed or wounded.

Lieutenant David Porter and a small crew rowed to the enemy ship and found the torn deck a charnel house of mangled bodies, body parts, human viscera, and blood.

“The carnage on board was dreadful,” Sterett reported to Dale, “she having 30 men killed and 30 wounded, among the latter was the Captain and first Lieutenant. Her sails, masts and rigging were cut to pieces with 18 shot between wind and water.”

Among the dead was the
Tripoli
's surgeon. While the
Enterprise
's doctor attended to the enemy wounded, Sterett's crew cut down the
Tripoli
's shattered masts and flung them overboard, along with the corsair's cannons, cannonballs, powder, muskets, swords, pistols, dirks, and pikes. The Americans raised a stubby makeshift mast and rigged it with a small sail. The wreck limped off toward Tripoli.

Sterett did a damage assessment of his own ship: At the end of a three-hour gunnery duel at pistol-shot range, or about 30 yards, “we have not had a man wounded, and we have sustained no material damage in our hull or rigging.”

 

Not every battle of the Barbary War would end so well for U.S. forces, yet when it is remembered at all, the 1801—5 war with Tripoli is often recalled as a swashbuckling adventure bookended by America's two struggles with England. It is easily forgotten because it did not fit any template formed by later U.S. conflicts, waged for union, democracy, territory, or corporate avarice. Yet, in none of those latter-day struggles did principled American outrage and improvised, unorthodox tactics coalesce as they did in the Barbary War.

Then, in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York, the United States found itself in a new war much like the one two centuries earlier. As will be seen, the war that President Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. Navy, and the Marine Corps waged against Moslem Tripoli—led by Edward Preble, William Eaton, Stephen Decatur, Jr., Andrew Sterett, and Presley O‘Bannon—was not so different from today's war on terror. In truth, the Barbary War was America's first war on terror.

Separated by 200 years, the conflicts might at first seem to have little in common other than Moslem adversaries who targeted American civilians. The Barbary States wielded terror in the name of Islam for mercenary purposes, not to advance a political agenda, the goal of Al-Qaeda and its allies. Their depredations did not occur in New York or Washington, but in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, against “infidel” civilian contractors transporting goods on sailing ships. Yet, it was terror nonetheless, prosecuted cynically in the name of Islamic “jihad,” Al-Qaeda's pretext for hijacking jetliners and crashing them into highly visible symbols of U.S. power. America's response in 1801 was the same as today: “to repel force by force,” as Jefferson put it succinctly.

Tripoli and its three Northwest Africa neighbors—Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco—had preyed on Christian Europe since the early 1600s. Their corsair fleets had relentlessly attacked, killed, maimed, and enslaved civilians on the high seas, robbing them of their ships and merchandise. The Barbary States coerced ransom and protection money from Europe and, in exchange, permitted the European powers to trade without interference in the western Mediterranean—until the next time the Barbary States unleashed their pirate fleets.

The European nations meekly signed the debasing treaties and
scrupulously bribed the bashaws, beys, deys, and emperors with cash, weapons, and ships, while the Barbary States unscrupulously broke every agreement. Only upon the greatest provocation did Europe attempt to assert its right to an unmolested trade without payment. These sporadic naval expeditions sometimes met limited success, but never caused lasting change. In 1801 the Barbary terror, although creaky with age, still commanded payments from Europe equaling $5 million in today's currency.