Jefferson's War (26 page)

Even without a modern media serving up constant reminders of their agonizing plight, the
Philadelphia
captives were in their countrymen's thoughts and their prayers. John Greenleaf Whittier's sympathetic description of the captives in “Derne,” although written after the war, reflects American sentiment at the time:

John Morrison, a twenty-seven-year-old crewman, was mortally injured while loading timber into a wagon and carried on a litter to town. In the Americans' dungeon, he “lay three days in the most excruciating pain.” An Algerian with supposed medical expertise examined him. When he was finished, he claimed nothing was wrong with Morrison and called him a shirker. Ray recounted what happened next. “He went to the dying man, told him to rise, called him an infidel and a dog, and struck him several times with his cane. How our men burned to immolate the ferocious villain.” After three days, death ended Morrison's suffering.

“Behave like Americans, be firm and do not despair, the time of your liberations is not far distant,” Preble wrote the crew. “... obstinately persist in your rights of being treated as prisoners and not as Slaves.” But the Americans were in Tripoli now, and Tripolitans not infrequently treated their own people worse than they did the Americans. It was a land of absolutes: absolute power, the absolute authority of law, the absolutes of Islam. There were masters and slaves, freemen and captives. Justice was meted out with expeditious severity, as Ray was able to attest after witnessing capital punishment, Tripoli-style. A janissary cut off the victim's left hand and right foot with an ax shaped like a half moon, and then the victim's raw, twitching stumps were dipped in boiling pitch. He was dragged screaming out of the city and left to die in agony outside the gates.

 

The
Philadelphia's
officers routinely were granted comforts and leisure the crewmen only could dream of. During their early
captivity, they lived in Cathcart's old consular home. It was cramped, but no dungeon, and immeasurably superior to their men's quarters in the damp storeroom. The officers were excused from all manual labor. They were permitted to walk into town or the countryside, six at a time. They ate better food, too—none of the coarse black bread on which their men subsisted. Typically, they had two eggs and a piece of bread with rainwater for breakfast and supper, and beef or camel and sometimes boiled cabbage with rainwater for dinner. Nissen augmented their ration by bringing them pomegranates, dates, and oranges. They passed the time writing, and reading books that had been plundered from the ship and that they had bought back on the street, and others loaned them by Nissen. Besides availing themselves of their little library, the midshipmen attended classes in mathematics, navigation, and tactics, taught by their officers. “We have lost all relish for dainties except books which we are supplied with,” Bainbridge reported. “Our prison represents a College of Students.”

Because of their rank, Bainbridge and Cowdery, the surgeon, enjoyed the best treatment of all. The captain even was invited to a celebration of the end of Ramadan. He and Lieutenant David Porter were served sherbet and coffee, and conversed with the bashaw and his family and officers. Then they shared a similar repast with the prime minister, followed by tea, coffee, sherbet, cakes, and fruits with the foreign minister, Sidi Mohammed Dghies, a kind man who mediated the Americans' disputes with their captors.

Cowdery was drafted into Yusuf's service as the royal physician after treating the bashaw for blindness in one eye—unsuccessfully, it turned out; blindness was a relatively common curse of the Barbary Coast, due to the sun, blowing sand, biting insects, and
improper care. With happier results, Cowdery attended to the bashaw's eleven-month-old son, who was suffering from an unspecified illness. When the boy recovered fully, a grateful Yusuf rewarded Cowdery by lending him a horse and servant so he could visit the royal gardens two miles from the capital city.

 

The crewmen's desperate misery pushed them into rash acts. After a month of captivity, a sailor cut his own throat. He didn't die; the Tripolitans interceded before he could finish the job. One hundred forty English-born crewmen signed a petition to Lord Nelson asking that he claim them as British subjects so they could go free. Marine First Lieutenant John Johnson reported to Commandant William Burrows that Nelson's “... Answer was, if he done anything in the Business, it would be to have the Rascels all hung....” Five crewmen “turned Turk,” which automatically freed them from captivity and excused them from hard labor. The first convert was John Wilson, the
Philadelphia's
coxswain. He wasted no time making trouble for his former shipmates, telling the bashaw he had seen Bainbridge throw nineteen boxes of dollars and a bag of gold overboard before surrendering the
Philadelphia.
Bainbridge denied it. The bashaw threatened to flog Bainbridge's servant if the captain didn't tell him the truth. Bainbridge convinced him Wilson was lying, and Yusuf released the servant unharmed. Wilson became one of the captives' most abusive overseers.

X

A DARING COUNTERSTROKE

—Horatio Nelson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P
reble 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.