Jefferson's War (33 page)

 

The hard-bitten commodore set his crews to work the next morning making repairs, while he put into play a destructive scheme he had long contemplated: sending a fireship into the harbor and blowing it up among the enemy shipping. The
Intrepid,
which had served Decatur and his commandos well when they burned the
Philadelphia,
would be converted into a floating bomb. A small handpicked crew would sail her as close as possible to the enemy corsairs' moorings and the bashaw's castle, light a fuse, and row away in two fast boats before the ketch blew up.

An overabundance of officers and crewmen volunteered for the extremely dangerous commando raid. Preble picked Somers to lead it. His executive officer would be Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth. When Somers asked his Nautilus crew for volunteers,
every man stepped forward. He carefully added that no one need enlist in the operation who was not prepared “to blow himself up, rather than be captured.” No one backed out. Instead, his crew gave three cheers, and all of them begged for the privilege of lighting the fuse. “It was a glorious moment, and made an impression on the hearts of all witnessing it, never to be forgotten,” wrote Midshipman Charles G. Ridgely.

 

The five attacks on Tripoli had turned Preble's young officers into seasoned combat leaders. Far more than his two predecessors, Preble had carried out former Navy Secretary Samuel Smith's instructions to train a new corps of naval officers. “One great object expected from this Squadron is, the instruction of our young men: so that when their more active service shall hereafter be required, they may be capable of defending the honor of their Country,” Smith had written in 1801 when he sent Dale to Barbary at the head of the first Mediterranean squadron. Dale and Morris had convoyed and blockaded, but had not fought. Preble was waging a real war, and the young officers who served under him, forever known as “Preble's Boys,” were absorbing the experience in their sinews.

“No place presents so good a nursery for them at present as the Mediterranean,” Cathcart had observed. The Barbary War was not a crisis, but an opportunity, “the effects of which will be more visible in a few years.” In the backs of the minds of American leaders—from Washington and Adams to Jefferson and Madison—had loomed the specter of war with England. Britain's sixty-year-old war with France had bought the United States precious time to prepare for the inevitable war with England they believed would come one day.

Tensions between the former mother country and her excolony were evident during Preble's cruise. In Malta in May, sailors from the HMS
Narcissus
had boarded an American prize and impressed three seamen, refusing to give them up when confronted by the officer in charge. The previous October, three American sailors had deserted at Gibraltar to the HMS
Medusa,
whose captain claimed they were British subjects and would not turn them over for arrest. A few days later, two
Constitution
seamen deserted to a British warship. Preble himself demanded their return, but the British captain would not comply; the deserters were British subjects, he said. He suggested that Preble should turn over all the British subjects in his squadron.

Preble's Boys would teach Great Britain to respect American sea power during the War of 1812. In Preble's hard, exacting school off Tripoli, they learned the art and science of naval warfare: Stephen Decatur, Charles Stewart, Isaac Hull, James Lawrence, Thomas Macdonough, John Trippe, Charles Morris, Joseph Bainbridge, David Porter, and Isaac Chauncey. A decade later, Hull, Bainbridge, and Stewart would take turns commanding the
Constitution;
Decatur would capture an English frigate; Chauncey would command the naval forces on Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes; and the rest would distinguish themselves as well. Even in 1803, Preble knew what he had: “many remarkable fine young men whose conduct promises great things to their Country.” After he had spent some time schooling them, he reported proudly: “I have an excellent set of officers who dare do anything I order them to do.” They now were poised to add another page to their resume: sailing a fireship into the harbor under the bashaw's nose and blowing it up.

The commandos made their somber final arrangements in case they didn't return. The crewmen told their shipmates how their clothing should be apportioned, while Somers bade farewell to his friends Decatur, Stewart, and Joseph Bainbridge. Somers impulsively removed a ring and broke it into pieces that he handed around to them. They gave back the keepsakes, unwilling to jinx the mission. They shook hands and said they would see him soon. Then he was gone.

The
Argus, Vixen,
and
Nautilus
escorted the
Intrepid
as far as the reef. Midshipman Joseph Israel suddenly appeared alongside in a boat, bearing Preble's last-minute instructions and best wishes. Impulsively, he asked to remain on the fireship. Somers gave his consent, bringing the
Intrepid's
complement to the unlucky number of thirteen.

The convoy watched the ketch enter the harbor. The commandos were supposed to fire a signal rocket after they lit the fuse and evacuated the vessel. The
Intrepid
was loaded for pyrotechnics: The magazine was packed with five tons of gunpowder in 100 barrels and 150 fused shells. The powder-train fuse was supposed to give the officers and ten crewmen—four from the Nautilus, six from the
Constitution
—fifteen minutes to row off a safe distance before the fireship exploded.

Anxiously, the squadron's officers, sailors, and Marines peered into the black harbor.

At 9:45, the fortress batteries suddenly opened fire.

Right on the heels of that, a massive explosion filled the sky with flaming shells soaring hundreds of feet over the water “like so many planets, a vast stream of fire, which appear'd ascending to heaven.” The huge concussion from the blast echoed off the
harbor's old stone walls and “awed their batteries into profound silence with astonishment,” wrote Preble. The ensuing eerie silence was pierced by frightened shrieks from within the city, carrying miles across the water. The loud cries “informed us that the town was thrown into the greatest terror.” Kettledrums beat the garrison soldiers to arms.

The squadron waited tensely for the signal rocket, for the slap of oars on water. The
Nautilus
showed a light to aid her shipmates, and the enemy batteries rained shot down all around the schooner. The crew paid the shelling no mind, instead suspending themselves with lighted lanterns from the sides of the ship until their heads nearly touched the water—to watch for signs of movement in the harbor. To signal her location, the
Constitution
began firing her guns and rockets every ten minutes. She didn't stop until 9:00 A.M. But there was no boat, no signal.

In the morning light, there was no sign of the
Intrepid
or her boats, only three damaged enemy gunboats being towed toward shore. The
Intrepid
had been blown to pieces, with no survivors.

 

The explosion caused little damage to Tripolitan shipping, and if any Tripolitans were killed, the captives never heard about it. They surely would have, for the city's Neapolitan captives, Jews, Greeks, and Maltese normally were quick to inform the Americans of every Tripolitan setback.

Without any basis in fact, Preble concluded in his official report that the
Intrepid
probably was surrounded suddenly by enemy gunboats and boarded and, true to their vow, Somers and the crew lit the fuse and blew themselves up, preferring
“death and the destruction of the enemy to captivity and torturing slavery....
” However, this was only speculation. It is more likely that the
Intrepid
exploded by accident, or that her magazine sustained a direct hit from the city batteries. It will never be known for certain.

Over the next days, thirteen bodies torn beyond identification were found floating in the harbor or washed up on the shore. This time, the bashaw permitted Cowdery to bury the dead Americans properly. With the
Philadelphia's
boatswain and some crewmen in attendance, he held a service and interred Somers, Wadsworth, Israel, and the ten sailors just east of the town wall.

The bashaw and his officers threw a feast in thanksgiving to Allah.

 

 

 

Dirty weather set in, and Preble sent the gunboats and bomb vessels back to Syracuse. Then Barron and his four frigates arrived. The new commodore assumed command of the squadron in a ceremony September 10 on the
President.

A couple of days later, Preble chased down two strange ships that turned out to be carrying 16,000 bushels of wheat to Tripoli. The capture was Preble's last act as a fighting captain. He took the prizes to Malta and proudly turned over command of the
Constitution
to Captain Stephen Decatur, Jr., “whose merits eminently entitle him to so handsome a command.”

Barron cruised off Tripoli with his impressive squadron for three weeks without going into action, then sailed to Malta and Syracuse for the winter.

 

Preble returned to America in triumph. President Jefferson took time from the celebration of his second inauguration to congratulate him. The commodore dined with James and Dolley Madison, called on former President John Adams at his home in Braintree, Massachusetts, sat for a portrait by Rembrandt Peale, and was
feted at ceremonial dinners from Philadelphia to Portland. Congress struck a gold medal in his honor.

He was placed in charge of building nine gunboats. With Preble overseeing the work in New England with his usual rigor, the ships all were finished on time and launched in 1806 and 1807, a feat of organization and efficiency that seems incredible in the twenty-first century, when government contract work often drags on past deadline.

 

 

 

Preble's squadron had brought the war to the bashaw's city for the first time. In only a month, it inflicted more damage on Tripoli than during all of the three previous years. American shot, shell, and cold steel claimed the lives of hundreds of enemy soldiers and sailors, at a cost of thirty U.S. servicemen killed and twenty-four wounded. But as September 1804 ended, the
Philadelphia
crewmen in Tripoli's soul-killing dungeons now for eleven months, were no nearer liberation.

The squadron officers, led by Lieutenant David Porter, pooled their money to honor the six “Preble's Boys” killed during the battles in Tripoli harbor in August and September 1804. With $1,245 that they raised, they hired a Leghorn sculptor, John Charles Micali, to build a monument to the fallen junior officers. It was America's first military monument. Micali hewed the statues and pedestal from Italian marble. After the monument was completed in 1806, it was disassembled, packed into fifty-one cases at Leghorn, and shipped to the United States on the
Constitution.
First erected in the Washington Navy Yard, the monument was vandalized in August 1814 by marauding British troops who hacked at it with swords. It was repaired and moved outside the Capitol, where it resided more than forty years. In 1860 it was
moved again, on the steamship
Anacostia,
to the new U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. It stands today behind Preble Hall, home of the Naval Academy Museum. Its inscription reads: “To the Memory of Somers, Caldwell, Decatur, Wadsworth, Dorsey, Israel.”

In Portland, Maine, young Henry Wadsworth's grieving sister, Zilpah, and her husband, Stephen Longfellow, named their infant son Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He grew up to become the most beloved American poet of his age. The Longfellows' nextdoor neighbor was Edward Preble.

 

In 1938, the State Department began an official inquiry into the
Intrepid
crew's remains. With singular energy, Mustafa Burchis, the Tripoli harbormaster, took it upon himself to locate them. He interviewed the descendants of families that had lived in Tripoli in September 1804, and studied journals, diaries, and records. He sent a report to the U.S. embassy in Rome, but it was burned with other embassy papers when war broke out in 1941. After the war ended, Burchis reconstructed his findings, which suggested the final resting place of at least some of the crew was the Protestant Cemetery, established by European and American consuls in 1830. In a corner of the old walled burial ground, near a cliff, Burchis and U.S. consular officials located five unmarked graves
above the beach where the Americans' bodies reportedly had washed ashore.

In April 1949, the U.S. cruiser
Spokane
arrived in Tripoli harbor. No fortress guns fired on her. No Tripolitan gunboats sailed out to dispute the harbor. U.S. sailors and Marines and a British Army unit marched the half mile from the city to the cemetery, with a Scottish Cameron Highlanders band playing martial music. One of the fifty dignitaries in the solemn procession was Tripoli's mayor, Joseph Karamanli, a direct descendant of the bashaw.