Jefferson's War (31 page)

 

 

The battle, a stunning demonstration of American fighting prowess, buoyed the spirits of the squadron's crewmen and officers. They had itched for a fight like this since Sterrett demolished the
Tripoli
nearly three years ago to the day. In the savage hand-to-hand fighting at which the Tripolitans supposedly excelled, the Americans had proven they were fiercer, better trained, and better led. “I always thought we could lick them their own way and give them two to one,” said Decatur, and in unsurprising nineteenth-century fashion added, “Some of the Turks died like men, but much the greater number like women.” Grateful as he and the other Americans were for the Neapolitans' help, Decatur was more amused than impressed by their battle demeanor. “While we fought they prayed.”

Forty-four Tripolitans perished in the close-in fighting on the three captured ships, with thirty-five taken prisoner and twenty-six wounded, three later dying of their wounds. Gunfire killed and wounded many other enemy on other gunboats and the fortress batteries. James Decatur was the only American battle death; Trippe, Stephen Decatur, and a dozen others were treated for wounds. The squadron's rapid, accurate gunnery sank three enemy vessels and cleared the decks of several others. The Tripolitan gunners consistently fired high, hitting sails and rigging, never once hulling an American ship.

Besides the combat casualties, there was one other American
victim of the battle: Lieutenant John Blake. Blake's gunboat never closed with any enemy gunboats; it kept to the fringes of the action. His unhappy crew could only fire from a distance on the harbor and fortresses, but being where targets were fewest, their gunboat fired the fewest rounds. In an alert squadron such as Preble's, Blake's evasion was known to one and all within hours. Whispers of cowardice wafted through the squadron wardrooms. While Preble never reprimanded Blake officially, indignation among the officers reached such a pitch that Blake tendered his resignation as gunboat commander, rather “than to continue under a Suspicious Eye.” Preble accepted the resignation without comment.

 

 

 

 

 

Stung by their losses, the Tripolitans uneasily watched the American squadron lingering just beyond the harbor, wondering when it would attack again. To soothe their apprehension, they ascribed the Americans' surprising violence in the recent battle to drunkenness and attempted to exorcise their fears by abusing the
Philadelphia
prisoners. They put them to work repairing fortress walls and replenishing the forts' powder from the castle magazine, abusing them constantly. “The infuriate Turks, wherever we met them, would strike, spit upon and stone us.”

A few days after the gunboat battle, the squadron stopped a French privateer leaving the harbor, and after ascertaining that her papers were in order, Preble persuaded the captain to take ashore fourteen badly wounded Tripolitans. Preble's humane gesture did not evoke a commensurate action by the bashaw toward the American prisoners. “They did not abate their cruelties to us in consequence of it,” Ray wrote. If anything, the beatings worsened, to the point where the Americans petitioned Yusuf's intercession.
He ordered the abuse stopped, but then impassively watched a guard flail a captive without intervening.

After a long day of patching up the victims of Preble's attack, Cowdery decided to no longer aid or comfort the enemy. Motivated primarily by patriotism, he also saw that with this turning into a real shooting war, he soon could be overwhelmed with Tripolitan casualties. But Cowdery had no stomach for the ugly confrontation with the bashaw that a blunt refusal to serve would necessitate. Two days after the attack, the ship's surgeon was asked to treat a soldier's shattered hand from a bursting blunderbuss. Cowdery took a dull knife and amputated all but one finger, then very deliberately dressed the wound “in a bungling manner.”

 

Cowdery had accurately assayed Preble's character and intentions. The commodore was indeed relentless. His orders from Secretary Smith were virtually the same as Morris's had been: to blockade and “annoy the Enemy” and to work in concert with Lear to negotiate peace if possible. But Smith also had added, “The conduct for sometime past pursued by our squadron in the Mediterranean, has, unhappily, not been calculated to accomplish the object of government nor to make a just impression on the Enemy of our national character.”

For the first time, Smith had chosen the right man to prosecute the war. Preble was determined either to force the bashaw to make a reasonable peace “or to destroy his city ... I wish to close the war with the Barbarians by conduct which shall establish our naval character among them and make them have a respect for peace....”

The commodore had kept up a steady blockade that snared a half dozen prizes, including the 16-gun brig
Transfer,
which he had converted into the U.S. warship
Scourge.
Twice during July
there were sharp clashes between the Americans and Tripolitans. The Siren chased a small Tripolitan ship aground on July 7 and, with the
Vixen's
help, destroyed it with cannon fire during a skirmish with 1,000 enemy troops on the beach. A week later, another ship was chased and riddled after it was beached, but Tripolitan soldiers killed four Americans in one of the
Siren's
boats. The
Vixen
and
Siren
retaliated massively with cannon and small-arms fire, killing and wounding 150 Tripolitans. These harassing actions pleased the commodore, who had little use for the North Africans, whom he regarded as “a deep designing artfull treacherous sett of Villains and nothing will keep them so quiet as a respectable naval force near them.” Now that he had gone to the trouble of procuring gunboats and mortar vessels and towing them to Tripoli from Sicily, Preble was in no hurry to leave.

 

After a turbulent early life, Preble was only beginning to mellow in his forty-second year. When he was fourteen, he had watched the British burn his home and half the town of Falmouth, Maine (it later became Portland), making a patriot of him. Later, he joined the Massachusetts State Navy, and was a midshipman on the 26-gun frigate Protector when it captured the
Admiral Duff
off Maine—and when the
Protector
was captured by the 44-gun
Roebuck
without a fight. The British threw the American crew into the notorious prison hulk
Jersey
in New York harbor. Preble's father pulled strings and arranged an exchange for his son, and he went back to sea as commander of the 12-gun Massachusetts Navy sloop
Winthrop,
harassing Loyalist cruisers operating out of Bagaduce, Maine, and capturing the
Merriam
in a daring raid at Penobscot Bay in 1782. During the last year of the war, he cruised to Bermuda and the West Indies, seizing naval prizes.

After the war, Preble made a comfortable living as a merchant captain, but he missed the naval service. He applied for a commission when Congress established the U.S. Navy in 1794, but didn't receive it until 1798, during the Quasi-War naval expansion. At thirty-seven, he was old for a lieutenancy, but he accepted. Displaying that he was a fighting commander, Preble earned a rapid promotion to captain. He then had the great luck of being given command of the 36-gun frigate
Essex,
leaving Newport, R.I., on an epic voyage to Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, from where he was to convoy eleven U.S. merchantmen home. The Essex was the first American warship to cross the equator, the first to show the flag in the East Indies, and the first to round the Cape of Good Hope twice. While it was a thrilling voyage of discovery, it exacted a heavy toll on Preble; he contracted malaria and a chronic stomach ailment, possibly ulcers, that shadowed him to a premature death and forced him to turn down commands in Dale's and Morris's squadrons.

A husky six-footer with hard, appraising, dark blue eyes, his fair skin bronzed by years at sea, Preble was known as a harsh disciplinarian and, at times, for being a violent man. As recently as 1799, criminal charges had been brought against him in Boston for striking a man in the head with a pistol. He avoided prosecution by paying $45 for medical bills; later, Preble sent the man another $200 when he discovered that he remained laid up months after the attack.

The
Constitution's
crew disliked him at first. He was irritable and remote. He posted a Marine sentry at his cabin door, permitting only quarterdeck officers and a few others in to see him. His junior officers felt the lash of his sharp tongue whenever their performance failed to meet his high standards. Although it would
have been of small consolation had his men known it, Preble was well aware that he needed to control his outbursts. In a letter to his close friend, War Secretary Henry Dearborn, he referred to advice Dearborn had given him previously on “the government of temper.”

Temper was one thing, shipboard discipline another matter altogether. Unlike Morris, Preble ran a tight ship, where even profanity was prohibited and where crewmen were punished often and severely. Two or three
Constitution
crewmen languished in irons on any given day. Floggings were administered weekly, sometimes more frequently. For example, on October 4, 1803, five seamen each received 12 lashes for negligence and “perfect neglect of duty.” On November 16, 1803, a Marine got 48 lashes for refusing duty, attempting to desert, and insubordination; a seaman was flogged 36 times for neglect of duty, drunkenness, and “insolence”; and another seaman was given 24 lashes for neglect of duty. Two weeks later, four seamen were whipped for drunkenness, with the ringleader getting 36 lashes for stealing the rum that caused their misbehavior. The next week, several more men were punished for drunkenness. Preble kept all the ships in his squadron on the same tight leash, demanding brief ports of call to keep the crewmen away from temptation and his warships at sea as much as possible.

Preble's strictness was arguably justified, given the reality of early nineteenth-century shipboard life—months of unremitting isolation and forced confinement with crewmen who often were thieves, murderers, and drunks. If officers did not punish rule breakers swiftly, their floating community of 350 might well erupt in chaos and ignominious mutiny—a commander's greatest hobgoblin; the mere whiff of insurrection had to be ruthlessly
quashed. Thus, when Robert Quinn, a seaman on the President, circulated a letter complaining about the crew's treatment by officers in June 1804, he was court-martialed for inciting mutiny. For his sentence, his head and eyebrows were shaved, and burned into his forehead with a hot metal brand was the word MUTINEER. He was given 320 lashes, meted out on the various ships of the squadron, as an example to all. “It is to be sure most cruel punishment,” remarked purser John Darby of the
John Adams,
“but the very existance of the Navy require it.”

An often oppressive disciplinarian, extremely demanding, abrupt with subordinates, Preble might have been hated and feared by his men had he not awed them with his indomitable fighting spirit, which earned their lasting respect. They were won over during a memorable nighttime encounter with a strange ship off the Spanish coast soon after the
Constitution's
arrival in the Mediterranean. The meeting took a decidedly sinister turn when the mystery warship refused to respond to repeated hails by Preble's flagship.

“I hail you for the last time,” Preble announced through the trumpet. “If you do not answer I'll fire a shot into you.”

A voice from the darkness said: “If you fire I will return a broadside.”

Preble hotly replied that he would like to see him do it, and asked the ship's name. The voice said it was the 84-gun HMS
Donegal.
He ordered Preble to send over his boat.

This was too much. Preble said he'd “be damned” if he'd send a boat.

“Blow your matches, boys!” he shouted. A gasp went up from the gun deck, and the crews readied their cannons for firing.

A tense silence fell over the two ships. Then, the slap of
approaching oars could be heard—a boat from the mystery ship. A junior officer offered apologies and said his ship wasn't the HMS
Donegal
after all, but the 32-gun HMS
Maidstone.
The Constitution had caught her napping, and her captain had bluffed to try to buy time to get his crew to quarters. The bluff had very nearly snowballed into a tragedy for the
Maidstone
—because she had underestimated Preble's temper and courage.

From that day forward, Preble's men thought the “old man” was all right.

Four days after the gunboat battle, the squadron returned to Tripoli harbor. With his strike force reinforced by the three captured enemy gunboats, which had been easily converted to U.S. gunboats under the command of Lieutenants Thorn, William M. Crane, and James Caldwell, Preble hoped to lure Tripolitan warships away from the protective batteries and sink them.

The gunboats and the two bomb vessels took up positions opposite the western part of the city and began shelling the neighborhoods and streets. The six schooners and brigs bombarded a seven-gun battery guarding the area. Crews on fifteen enemy gunboats and galleys anchored beneath the city walls watched the lively duel between the batteries and ships as though it were a sporting event, making no move to engage the Americans.

And then, without warning, Gunboat 9, Lieutenant Caldwell's prize, exploded with a roar, spraying a wide area with splintered wood and metal and mangled body parts. A one-in-a-million direct hit on her magazine by an enemy battery had done it. Thousands of eyes watched anxiously as the smoke and debris cleared. When it did, to everyone's amazement a gun crew could
be seen standing on a shard of floating deck, attending to a cannon, pieces of the vessel splashing into the water around them. The crew fired the gun once and reloaded it, but before they could fire again, their tiny platform began to sink. They gave one last cheer as they slipped beneath the waves, yet survived.