Dawn Like Thunder: The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the U.S. Navy

By Glenn Tucker

Dawn like Thunder: The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the U.S. Navy, first published in 1963, is the definitive account of the fledgling Navy and Marine Corps of the United States in the early 1800s. The book details the struggle of American ships such as the USS Constitution and Constellation against the pirates and Muslim warlords of the Mediterranean and North Africa in what would become known as the Barbary Wars. Also covered are the key players of the time, from presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, to talented naval officers such as Edward Preble and Stephen Decatur. In addition, the ongoing political battles to obtain funding for the Navy and the construction of needed ships are described. Author Glenn Tucker (1892-1976) conducted extensive research in the preparation of Dawn like Thunder, including research at the archives in Tripoli; he was the author of more than a dozen books on American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burtyrki Books
• Release date: Jan 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839742071

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

DAWN LIKE THUNDER

The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the U.S. Navy

GLENN TUCKER

Dawn Like Thunder was originally published in 1963 by The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., New York. Maps by Dorothy Thomas Tucker.

Cover: Burning of the frigate Philadelphia in the harbor of Tripoli, 16 February 1804, by Edward Moran, painted 1897.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

CHAPTER ONE — New Colors in a Far Port 5

CHAPTER TWO — A Firman Bridles the Dey 18

CHAPTER THREE — Piracy, Habit of a Hungry Shore 30

CHAPTER FOUR — To Repel Force by Force 41

CHAPTER FIVE — The Building of the Ships 56

CHAPTER SIX — Two Poets and a Peace 69

CHAPTER SEVEN — Bribes, Tributes, Insults, Haggles 82

CHAPTER EIGHT — The Fleet Goes Out 98

CHAPTER NINE — An Arm’s-Length Blockade 115

CHAPTER TEN — The Battle of the Feluccas 131

CHAPTER ELEVEN — Preble Enforces Peace with Morocco 144

CHAPTER TWELVE — The Tripolitans Capture the Philadelphia 159

CHAPTER THIRTEEN — Tripoli and the Karamanlis 167

CHAPTER FOURTEEN — The Captives 179

CHAPTER FIFTEEN — Preble’s Preparations 184

CHAPTER SIXTEEN — Burning the Philadelphia 184

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN — The Battle of the Gunboats 184

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN — Preble Bombards Tripoli 184

CHAPTER NINETEEN — Somers and the Intrepid 184

CHAPTER TWENTY — The Passing of Preble 184

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE — Eaton’s Quest for Bashaw Hamet 184

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO — The March Across the Libyan Sands 184

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE — The Amazing Capture of Derna 184

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR — Tobias Lear and Peace at a Price 184

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE — Reward and Neglect 184

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX — Decatur and Peace Without Price 184

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 184

BIBLIOGRAPHY 184

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 184

CHAPTER ONE — New Colors in a Far Port

The clear, languid dawn of November 9, 1800, crept out of the Bosporus and across the Sea of Marmora and revealed to early watchers along the shore a strange ship riding at anchor inside the Golden Horn.

She had come up under darkness, at 10 o’clock on the night before, and now at daybreak she flew from her mizzenmast a novel flag of red and white stripes and white stars on a field of blue, colors unknown in these waters.

The American frigate George Washington, of 24 guns, Captain William Bainbridge commanding, out of Philadelphia, was calling on official business at the Sublime Porte.

Across the city seated on its rolling hills sounded the long, singsong wails of the Moslem priests, calling plaintively from the rooftops, towers, and mosques, notifying the faithful that Allah had bequeathed a new day.

Scarcely were these morning supplications ended and faces turned from Mecca to matters close at hand, when a harbor patrol boat put out from the waterfront castle. Coming alongside the American ship, the captain of the harbor hailed the impertinent newcomer who had penetrated unannounced to the very heart of the Ottoman power, and now held beneath her guns the sacred mosque of Mohammed the Conquerer, Standard Bearer of the Prophet, and the art and treasures of the Moslem world. Captain Bainbridge replied politely that the colors he flew were those of the United States of America. The inquiring officer wasted no time in conversation but turned his boat back toward the shore.

Bainbridge had displayed considerable daring in venturing unheralded into the harbor of Constantinople and might expect to face any consequence, considering that the world was being torn apart by Napoleon’s wars, which had fallen with early fury on the Near East. Anywhere in the Levant, unfamiliar elements might be looked on with suspicion. He had effected his passage of the Dardanelles, where it was the imperious rule of the Porte that all vessels must be inspected and those cleared be given the required passport before entering the Sea of Marmora, by a ruse characteristic of the resourcefulness of early American seamanship.

Never before, as long as memory, record, or tradition extended back into Constantinople history, to the year 1453 when the Ottoman’s overran the ancient seat of Greek and Roman power, had an armed foreign vessel entered the harbor of the Golden Horn without having first been granted leave at the Dardanelles way station, two powerful fortresses overlooking both sides of the narrows near the entrance to the historic strait. What a visitor required was a firman, the distinctive passport of royal decree, issued by the Grand Seignior himself, the Sultan of the Turks.

But Bainbridge was concerned neither with inviolable precept nor Oriental form. He was on a mission which from the beginning had irked his sensibilities and galled his ardent patriotism and he wanted to be done with it with the least possible delay. He was justifiably apprehensive. He had learned back in Algiers that he would probably be compelled to remain in the strait until word of his approach could be carried to Constantinople and the willingness of the government to receive him ascertained. He was taking no chances that his ship might not be cleared and that his long, tedious voyage thus would be rendered fruitless.

As he approached the towering citadel which guarded his side of the passage of the Dardanelles, he directed his crew to scurry across the decks and give evidence that they were taking in sail, indicating that the George Washington would heave to and inquire the pleasure of the Turkish commander. Then he began firing a salute—of eight guns, according to the ship’s log.

Quickly the fort returned the salute. Bainbridge counted six guns, but they were enough that both ship and fort were soon enveloped in heavy billowing smoke. Under this screen, undetected by the shore batteries, unsuspected by the Turkish captain, the American commander had his seamen hurriedly load on canvas and speed the frigate forward.

Thus, behind the smoke clouds, the George Washington moved fleetingly and gracefully out of range. She had already doubled a protecting promontory before the perplexed Turkish commander understood the wily American’s stratagem. Bainbridge had a notation entered in his log that the castles have the Outward appearance of Being very Strong, with eight tiers of guns, the lowest tier being on the water’s edge. They were reputed at the time to throw the largest shot in the world, even to cannon balls with a diameter of three feet!

Midshipman Benjamin Page, of Providence, Rhode Island, who kept the log, either was a student of the classics—though his syntax and spelling would not suggest familiarity with his hometown college of Brown or nearby Harvard or Yale—or else he had a translation of Homer on board, for he was entranced with landmarks of the great conflict of Greek against Trojan as he went through the Aegean and Dardanelles. He took note during the voyage of Tenedos, opposite which stood famous Troy; of Mount Ida where the Gods Assembled to view the Battle; and of the island of Lemnos where they fed there [sic] horses of Nectar and Ambrosia—the Island where Vulcan Lit when he fell from Heaven and Established his forge.

Now that the George Washington was securely in the harbor, how the Turkish government would receive her was any sailors guess. Soon the dispatch boat returned with the startling message for Captain Bainbridge that neither his flag nor the nation of the United States of which he spoke had ever been heard of by the Turkish government before. He was directed to be more specific in explaining whence he came. All that the captain could do was append to his earlier communication a short lesson in history and geography. He said he and his vessel were from the New World which Christopher Columbus long since had discovered far across the seas.

Several hours passed. All aboard the George Washington waited patiently in the lower harbor. Finally the dispatch boat put out again and this time the harbor captain, serving as emissary for the Sublime Porte, deigned to set foot on freshly scrubbed New World timber, while behind him came porters bearing to the frigate’s deck the symbolic gifts of a lamb and a bouquet of flowers, the first offered as a token of peace, the second an expression of welcome. Obviously someone had been found in Constantinople, and perhaps it was the Sultan himself, a ruler enlightened above most Oriental despots of his day, who had heard something about George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and the United States of America.

By order of the Sultan, the captain of the harbor was to conduct the frigate to the upper bay, and this he did at considerable leisure several days later. Bainbridge, in evidence of his appreciation, fired the recognized international salute of twenty-one guns as he sailed past the royal palace, an act for which the Sultan later made known his gratification. The ship moved about a mile up the harbor and was moored at 3:00 p.m., on November 15.

Thus for the first time in history, by chance rather than orders, without diplomatic exchanges or prearrangement, without the assent of either of the governments involved, an American warship visited the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, and gave visible notice to the Mohammedan world of the birth of the Western republic.

The George Washington—and what name could have been more appropriate for such a pioneering event?—stood at the meeting place of East and West, the crossroads of the ages, inside the great harbor of the Golden Horn, five miles wide, big enough to accommodate all the frigates of both the Old World and the New. She was peacefully at anchor in front of this vast city of Mussulmans, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews: the ancient Byzantium of the Greeks; a city reared to world splendor by the Vision of the Flaming Cross; mother of law and of the concept of society founded on a code of equal justice. Justice!—a word synonymous with an era of her imperial past. Nursemaid of learning, theology, and the arts. City of the impregnable citadel, held in turn throughout the centuries for Zeus, Jupiter, God, and Allah, but fortress indeed for any god, where a few might hope to stand off a million, guarded by the moat of the Bosporus in front and the natural bastions of looming hills behind.

Bainbridge could well note that almost from the beginning all adventurers had come this way. Here Jason passed in the first war galley, the Argos, created by Athena for the seekers of the Golden Fleece. Here dwelt the Harpies who harassed blind King Phineus. Here, much more securely recorded, Xenophon led his ten thousand Greeks. Here and along the Dardanelles—the Hellespont of the Greeks, the crossing place of Helle, daughter of the cloud goddess—the phantasies of antiquity gave way to the accepted versions of history; legend merged into reality, myth yielded to verity, the recited narrative became the written word. Here Constantine conquered, Theodora lived, Theodosius the Great ruled the better part of the world. Through Constantinople, Tancred, Bohemond, Geoffrey, and Saint Giles rode with their iron men of the First Crusade. Here the splendid warrior Suleiman the Magnificent dreamed with his viziers and admirals of the triumph of Islam and planned campaigns that carried the armies of the Prophet to the walls of Vienna and Ratisbon.

Yet probably none of these fancies of long-cherished lore or actual occurrences of ancient, medieval, and modern times was more far-reaching in significance in the long story of human progress than this chance, unacclaimed, trifling arrival of a single frigate from a faraway shore, if it may be considered that the raising of the American flag on the mizzenmast of the George Washington gave notice to all ancient realms and distant peoples of the birth of the new American Republic. The United States, daughter of time, latest of the eager offspring of the ages, was announcing its fresh, youthful entry, to bid feebly at first, mightily in the end, for a place among the world powers.

Probably the Sultan’s decision to accept the uninvited Americans and welcome them cordially was based not so much on prescience as on the caprice of the moment. He liked Bainbridge’s flag. As he had scanned the ship from his palace when it came up the bay, he had noticed the stars in the blue field and had commented that the flag of the United States, like that of Turkey, was decorated with heavenly bodies, a coincidence which might be a harbinger of cordial relations between the two nations in future times. Most flags had national insignia or royal coats of arms. Not the American or Turkish. He even went so far as to venture that because of the similarity of the ensigns some affinity in laws and customs must exist between the Moslems and Americans!

Selim III was as good a sultan as the circumstances of the age and the caprices of the Janissaries would permit. Admirous of the cultural distinction that had been won by the French court during the passing century, he aspired to establish French modes and introduce literature and the arts into his physically elegant portal city between East and West. With unusual perception and tolerance, he strove to lift the level of common education among the Turks, where illiteracy was almost the universal rule, and was making strenuous efforts to establish schools and procure Western instructors.

Of equal significance as a measure of popular reform, he was struggling to break the ages-old control of the Janissaries. This austere, rigorously trained and sternly disciplined body of troops, composed mostly of Christian Albanians and Bulgars, was supposed to serve the Ottoman Empire as a hard core of defense, but judged that the best manner of serving was by controlling it. Selim would eventually learn that he could not suppress the Janissaries, who had four centuries of power behind them and nearly three decades ahead. For his efforts to reduce them and break them, his eunuchs would find his richly clad figure on the divan of his seraglio one morning, with a silken cord around his throat.

Undoubtedly the most disconcerting aspect to the Porte involved in the sudden appearance of the American frigate was that the Turkish fleet was absent. Spacious as might be the harbor, it gave berth to few Moslem warships of consequence. The great Turkish fleet, of numerous ships of the line and frigates and a swarm of lesser craft, which would remain one of the most powerful in the world until it encountered Sir Edward Codrington twenty-seven years later in Navarino Bay, was cruising, intent on mopping-up exercises among the Ionian Isles. Under the command of the Capudan Pasha Hassan, Grand Admiral and brother-in-law of the Sultan, it was seeking isolated pockets of the French invaders who had been brought to the Near East by Napoleons dream of conquest, and left behind when the vision of Oriental empire vanished in the smoke at Acre. The fleet was not expected to return for at least twenty days.

The Sublime Porte was involved at the moment in the most peculiar alliance of its history, a league of the Mussulman and the Slav, which disclosed how the genius of the Corsican might induce desperate enemies to lodge in the same barracks room and mess on victuals from the same galley. A rapport had been established between Turkey and Russia the year before, after nearly a century of conflict. The succession of eighteenth-century wars between the sultans and the czars had been touched off when Charles XII of Sweden, fleeing from Peter of Russia after the disastrous defeat of the Swedes at Poltava, gained sanctuary with Ahmed III. Russian soldiers pursued him across the Turkish border, and the conflicts unloosened came to afflict the Mediterranean shores from Venice to Suez and inland Europe from Vienna to the Caspian Sea.

Now that Bonaparte, a more flashing meteor than Charles XII, was streaking across the military heavens, and since he had deluged the Near East with blood, triumphed over the Mamelukes before the Pyramids, invaded Syria, and threatened to found a new empire in the Levant, Turkey and Russia had united their naval forces for common security. Turkey had fought the heavy part of the desperate war against the Corsican, whose flaming triumphs had announced him to the Ottomans as the Sultan of Fire and the Favorite of Victory.

Aided by British artillerists and engineers, and fortified by the great resolution of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, the alliance had eventually turned Acre into a French shambles when the loss of that city probably would have laid all Turkey at the invaders feet. Now that Napoleon had returned to France for greater glories on European battlefields, and since Britain was preparing an army for Egypt, and Turkey and Russia were acting in concert, French influence was weakening in the Near East.

But Bainbridge was visiting an Old World still desperately engaged in conflict. Already the new century—if the year 1800 may be regarded as the beginning of the new and not the end of the old—had been stained red at Marengo and would get another blood bath before the years end at Hohenlinden. The capable French General Kléber, left behind in Egypt, had won another resounding victory over the Turks at sanguinary Heliopolis, then had been stabbed by an Arab assassin—an act which presaged the loss of Egypt to France. In the autumn of 1800, when Bainbridge was crossing the Mediterranean and sailing through the Dardanelles, Lord Nelson, having cleansed the eastern Mediterranean of the French fleet, was making his way by easy land journeys from Naples toward England, feted at all stops for his great triumph in the Battle of the Nile.

Still, enough remained to be done to keep the Turkish fleet employed. For eight days the George Washington lay in the harbor of Constantinople, awaiting the pleasure of the Sultan, who in turn awaited the return of his Grand Admiral before entering into matters connected with the visit of the American frigate.

Meantime Captain Bainbridge was visited by the dragoman of the Reis Effendi, the principal civil officer of the Turkish government, who put the American at once on the defensive by inquiring if he did not know that such an office existed. Bainbridge, perceiving there was surely no greater affront in his lack of familiarity with the Reis Effendi than there was in the ignorance of Turkish officialdom about the existence of the United States, replied that he did not. Thereupon the dragoman advised him that he had sailed stealthily into Constantinople Harbor without the advance knowledge or assent of the Ottoman power, then had compounded his disrespect with dereliction by failing to report himself to the proper governmental authority, an oversight and indignity which called for reparation. Consequently, the Reis Effendi summoned the American to appear before him at 10 o’clock on the following morning. It looked as if a fine were in contemplation. When Bainbridge asserted that appearing was the very last thing he had in mind to do, the dragoman advised him that the commands of such a notable official as the Reis Effendi were not to be dismissed so lightly.

A lone American commander in a strange distant port, Bainbridge was sufficiently concerned that he determined to solicit advice. In Algiers he had obtained from the American consul, Richard O’Brien, letters of introduction to diplomatic representatives of some of the European powers residing in Constantinople and these he now brought into play. Going ashore, he called on the Danish and British ambassadors, who received him warmly, the first promptly, the second upon reflection.

Great Britain was represented in Constantinople by one of those men of large capacity often found, at times at the outset of their distinguished careers, in the British diplomatic service. He was the Scotchman Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, statesman and connoisseur, whose striking accumulation of Greek sculptures, known as the Elgin Marbles, became one of the basic collections in the British Museum in London. Though he was to serve for half a century in the House of Lords, his term of three years as diplomat in Constantinople, from 1799 to 1802, was notable not only to British interests in the Near East, and to Britain’s treasurers of ancient art—loot, some termed it, though he bought and paid for it with his own coin—but also because of the temporary convenience it gave to the first American naval captain ever to sail a warship into the inner waters of the Ottoman power.

Lord Elgin met Bainbridge cordially and listened without comment to his story about the Reis Effendi. That night Bainbridge, writing to Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Stoddert, said the Briton received him politely but made no offer of services, while the Dane, Baron de Huslech, proffered his good offices in the most friendly terms. But on the following morning Bainbridge was compelled to amend his dispatch. Lord Elgin sent word that his office and services would be at the disposal of the American commander. More than that, he gave assurance that the matter of the Reis Effendi could be forgotten. He would take care of it himself. What the Turkish official had in mind was the procurement of a bribe. Lord Elgin would send his own dragoman with a message covering the circumstances, and the American could rest assured there would be no further annoyance on any score of reparations. For the remainder of the American’s stay, no attentiveness could have been more solicitous and helpful than that of this pleasant and accomplished British diplomat.

Lord Elgin’s attitude is of interest because his was one of the many actions by British representatives in the Mediterranean during the Barbary War years which tend to refute the long accepted notion of American history that Great Britain, jealous of the rapidly expanding American merchant marine, covertly encouraged the forays of the Barbary powers against American shipping—a belief often expressed in the thought that if a Barbary Coast had not existed Great Britain would have had to create one. This impression that depredations in the Mediterranean were nurtured by British self-interest was first reported in 1783 by Benjamin Franklin, who said he had heard it advanced as a maxim of the London merchants that, in effect, Algerian piracy was a cornerstone of British trade. Whatever may have been the situation regarding American shipping during the Revolutionary War years, the encouragement of piracy against the Americans did not exist after the treaty of peace and ratification of American independence in 1783. While there may have been individual lethargy and disinterest among British representatives about the fate of American ships at times, nothing like fostering the corsairs because of their annoyance to the Americans ever attained the weight of either official or covert policy.

Perhaps never was a more singular voyage made than that of Bainbridge and the George Washington to Constantinople in 1800, nor was a sea captain ever cast in a less congenial role.

His ship was one of the merchant vessels purchased and hurriedly converted into frigates when war with France threatened in 1798, at a time when the projected new American warships, authorized under President Washington but delayed in their construction by legislative restraint, were still on the ways. She was bought in Providence, Rhode Island, for $69,025, and when she no longer seemed to be needed was sold for $52,000 in Philadelphia in 1803; but during the five years she was in commission she gave the Navy a full measure of extraordinary service for the $17,025 capital outlay she entailed. Had Jason’s Argonauts secured the Golden Fleece and carried it back through the Bosporus, that coveted legendary hide could by no stretch of the imagination have been as valuable as the treasure of coin and cargo carried by Bainbridge aboard the George Washington as a tribute from the United States to Algiers, and the specie and cargo he then transported to Constantinople as an abject and placating payment by the Dey of Algiers, a principality of the Porte.

His instructions from the Secretary of the Navy, issued June 25, 1800, when he took command, were to take on only a partial crew, limited to 130 officers and seamen, so that there would be ample room for the necessary six months’ provisions, the goodly portion being salt meat, and a large cargo of plank, cables, cannon, foodstuffs and valuable European goods which were being assembled under the direction of Secretary of State John Marshall. Still, the ship must not be loaded so heavily that she would be in no condition to fight. The undeclared war with the French Directory was still bursting into sporadic sea clashes and every war vessel had to be prepared.

The George Washington weighed anchor at midnight August 8, 1800, and made her way down the Delaware River in fair weather under fresh breezes toward the open sea. On the crossing of the Atlantic she was cleared for action at times and both the Great guns and small arms were exercised, a result of sighting unidentified sails. Though bound on a positive and somewhat urgent mission, Bainbridge could not resist giving chase to two strange schooners. One showed the American colors, but both put on all canvas and outdistanced the George Washington, which was a dull sailor. They were judged to have the appearance of French cruisers. Anchoring September 7 at Gibraltar, where he assisted two British frigates which were drifting ashore when their cables parted in heavy weather, he was off Algiers at 4:00 p.m. on September 17, after a passage of forty days from Philadelphia. The American consul, Richard O’Brien, came aboard with the captain of the port, and Bainbridge, unwarned and unsuspecting, allowed the Algerian officer to pilot the ship into the harbor to an anchorage beneath the fort and shore batteries. The British consul, John Falcons, paid a courtesy call to Bainbridge in his cabin.

Two days later the American captain began unloading his cargo of coffee, tea, sugar, herring, bales of nankeen, fustic, gunpowder, chinaware and trinkets such as might have been leftovers from the stocks commonly employed by the treaty-makers on the western frontier in their bartering for Indian lands. He took on board supplies of fine fruit such as Grapes, Green Figs, Oranges, Almonds, pomegranates & Prickly Pears. Midshipman Page, in keeping the log, was sufficiently initiated in North African fare to drop the capital letters when mentioning pomegranates. He understandably applied capitals to other fresh fruits after a voyage of forty days.

At this juncture Bobba Mustapha, Dey of Algiers, despotic and uncivil,—an animal, the American consul Eaton termed him—who was recipient of annual tribute paid for the protection of shipping by the new American Republic, as had been his predecessor, Hasan Pasha, after the negotiation of the treaty with the United States in 1795, interposed to demand that the George Washington enter into his service under the Algerian flag and sail on his behalf, and with his cargo, to Constantinople. The ship would carry also emissaries to the Sultan, to mollify him with American money. The Sultan’s feelings were ruffled because Algiers—remote from the Ottoman capital, which ordinarily governed with a light rein as long as revenues were not in arrears from the satrapies—had negotiated a treaty with France at the very moment when the existence of the Ottoman Empire was menaced by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Syria. Any of these Moslem states might consider themselves perfectly free to molest, goad, and pillage the maritime powers of Christian Europe or infant America, but they trembled in terror at any evidence of displeasure by the Porte. President John Adams had sent the tribute to Algiers in a war vessel with a thought that her guns might cow the arrogant Dey, but the captain of the harbor had neutralized Bainbridge’s power by giving him a mooring under the harbor batteries which could blast his ship’s timbers into splinters before he could let loose a broadside. (A map of Algiers Harbor appears at the end of the book.)

The day after he began discharging his cargo Captain Bainbridge called on the Dey to pay his respects, in company with Consul O’Brien. The presumptuous ruler over the city of 100,000 Moslems at once announced from his embroidered cushion that he desired the George Washington as a favor to him from the United States to transport his ambassador to Constantinople and then return to Algiers. Consul O’Brien, more accustomed to such negotiations, replied that neither his nor the captain’s orders would admit of such a trip, nor were there any powers inherent in their offices that would justify them to comply on their own responsibility. The American frigate would be unable to defend the Dey’s ambassador or property from Portuguese or Neapolitan vessels, being authorized to fight only french Corsairs, as O’Brien put it.

Fat, placid Bobba Mustapha was unimpressed, but closed the conference to reflect. Bainbridge went back to his ship and O’Brien stopped to tell the Algerian Secretary of State precisely what he had told the Dey, that the George Washington would not go. Eight days later he was summoned again by the Dey, who inquired if he still declined to allow the ship to carry the ambassador and presents to the Grand Seignior. He answered with all his earlier arguments and explained, as he later put it, that this ship of the U.S. & Crew would be in a Very singular Predicament in going to Constantinople on the business of the Regency we haveing no Ambasador or Consul at these places. Except for his peculiar use of periods and capitals he got his idea across.

The Dey flew into a passion, saying other nations had rendered such favors to Algiers and why not the United States. But he agreed that if British Consul Falcons would promise on his honor a British warship for the journey the American could go home. Falcons was present and said that Admiral Lord George Keith, commander of British naval forces in the Mediterranean, had promised to supply a warship for the very business of transporting the ambassador and presents to the Porte. The ship might be expected daily. The Dey agreed to wait. The ship, a frigate, arrived shortly, but meantime the Dey’s ministers began to object to the employment of a British war vessel for the purpose.

When the Dey, after an outing, returned from his country seat on October 9 he informed O’Brien there was now no alternative. The American ship would have to go. O’Brien remonstrated, but the Dey fell into such a tantrum that it was clear he was resolved. He declared he wanted no more excuses and that his Mind & his Ministry was Soured against the British. What it amounted to was that neither the Dey nor his ministers wanted to trust the British ship with the amount of money they intended to send, considering the friendly relations they were maintaining with Britain’s enemy, France. He made it evident that the American had no choice between compliance and open warfare. Then he heaped on the crowning insult. The American warship would have to fly the Algerian flag from her main topgallant masthead.

When Bainbridge was informed of these decisions he demanded an audience, at which he accomplished nothing. He remonstrated again, then visited the office of the Algerian Marine, where he announced his refusal to hoist the flag of Algiers to the mainmast. After a great deal of discussion and examination of precedents under which warships of Spain, France, and other nations had raised the Algerian flag to the main while on missions for the Dey, Bainbridge finally acknowledged that if he were under compulsion in one matter he might as well yield on the other, but he merely dropped his remonstrances and made no promise on the flag. Writing to the Secretary of the Navy the next day, October 10, 1800, he explained that every effort had been exerted by both O’Brien and himself to avoid the cruise, which would cost from fourteen to sixteen thousand dollars and promote not a bit of good will for the United States. It was not in the nature of the Algerian regency to consider anything a favor that was done by a Christian nation, he explained.

The light that this Regency looks on the United States [he wrote], is exactly this: you pay me tribute, by that you become my slaves, and them I have a right to order as I please. Did the United States know the easy access of this barbarous coast called Barbary, the weakness of their garrisons, and the effeminacy of their people, I am sure they would not be long tributary to so pitiful a race of infidels.

The American captain was moved to yield to the obdurate Dey by two considerations. The first was the virtual certainty that if he refused to make the trip Algiers would renounce the treaty with the United States and renew the wanton seizure of American merchant vessels. The second was the probability that if he tried to take his ship out of the harbor it would be sunk before he could inflict any considerable damage on the city. The main elements of the Algerian fleet were the American-built frigate Crescent, the American-built brig Bashaw and the American-built schooner Skolderbrand, all having been offerings from the United States as tribute to the Dey. Apart from these good ships Algiers had a mean hodgepodge of xebecs, schooners, small cruisers, and gunboats. The harbor fortifications were historically among the strongest of the North African coast. Still, although Algiers was a minor naval power and not formidable even in its home waters, Bainbridge was in no condition to fight it. Could he have slipped out by night? It does not appear so. After his discussions with the Dey and later the naval authorities—a very warm dispute, he termed it, which was very near causing a declaration of war—and after his insistence that the ship be allowed to wear its own flag, his decks were overrun by a procession of glowering Moslem officers. The Minister of Marine, the Admiral of the Fleet, and a swarm of Algerian captains came on board without paying the slightest attention to protests or arguments. Some of the officers went impudently to the maintop, where they hauled down the American pennant and hoisted the red Algerian flag in its place. Probably in all its history, the United States Navy never sank to such abjection. What a Preble, a Decatur, or a Lawrence would have done in this situation is anyone’s conjecture. Bainbridge was in a tight squeeze, but that was the kind of a risk some young naval officers of the time might have relished.

Had we 10 or 12 frigates and sloops in those seas, Bainbridge wrote to Secretary Stoddert, I am well convinced in my own mind that we should not experience those mortifying degradations that must be cutting to every American who possesses an independent spirit.

So Bainbridge was compelled to go to Constantinople. He and O’Brien agreed there was no other course. He explained his compliance to his own satisfaction:

The loss of the frigate, and the fear of slavery for myself and crew, were the least circumstances to be apprehended; but I knew our valued commerce in these seas would fall a sacrifice to the corsairs of this power, as we have here no cruisers to protect it...I hope I may never again be sent to Algiers with tribute, unless I am authorized to deliver it from the mouth of our cannon.

The cargo he took on board, the peace offering from the Dey to the Grand Seignior, was a vast conglomeration of ingredients assembled from animal, mineral, and vegetable worlds. The most important item, apart from the American crew numbering 131 officers and men, and the other humans, was $800,000 in specie, a neat sum which the Dey believed would oil up the creaking political mechanisms that connected the Porte with the remote Algerian satrapy, in spite of his treaty with Turkey’s deadly enemy, France. There were jewels of indefinite value, but estimated to increase the worth of the cargo to about a million dollars. Surely the gold in the fleece Jason sought would not have commanded that much on the market of Midas, Croesus, or a Greek demigod. Consul O’Brien had to give the Dey a security for the safe delivery of the money. If it went down, the United States, not Algeria, would have to make the replacement.

In addition to money and jewels there were 100 Negro slaves on board, one-half of them women; 4 lions, 4 tigers, and 4 antelope; 12 parrots, 25 homed cattle, 4 horses, 150 sheep, and several head of ostriches, which apparently were never still long enough for anyone to get a good count. But the problem was not with lions, parrots, homed cattle, ostriches, or jewels. It was with the Algerian ambassador and his suite of 99 other Mussulmans, who overran the decks, got in the way of the sailors, and threatened often to lead to a bloody renewal of time-honored clashes between the Crescent and the Cross.

The George Washington made sail out of the harbor of Algiers at 6:00 p.m., October 19, 1800. She fired a signal gun for sailing and was answered by eight guns from the fort. As soon as he was out of range, mindful that he had made no promises, Bainbridge ran up the Stars and Stripes to the position of precedence on the topgallant.

Word of the sailing reached the United States with the arrival of the merchant ship Brutus, which made Salem, Massachusetts, December 3, after a forty-day voyage from Algiers. Captain William Brown of the Brutus witnessed much of the controversy between the Americans and the Dey and for a time was in danger of having his own ship impressed into the Algerian service. The Dey demanded that the Brutus unload her own cargo and go to Rhodes to get a cargo of Turks, at no freightage payment or passenger fare. O’Brien argued that the vessel was privately owned and had a perishable cargo. Unexpectedly he won a stay in the potentate’s demands.

Captain Brown reported in Salem that the Dey threatened to hold officers and crew of the George Washington as slaves if Bainbridge did not make the voyage to the Levant. After the George Washington sailed, Captain Brown got the Brutus out of the harbor and made for Gibraltar and the United States. He said Algiers held 2,300 Europeans as slaves, some of them from the first families of Europe. He, too, declared the place looked strong but thought six or seven ships of the line could batter it to pieces. His report aroused American opinion to a new attitude about the Barbary powers. The Jefferson administration was soon to take office and it would find the impressment of the George Washington humiliating and provocative in the extreme.

Soon after the George Washington sailed, friction developed on the main deck. There were too many passengers for a warship of 624 tons, which was not half the capacity of the new frigates Constitution, United States, and President. With 100 slaves, 100 Mussulmans, and 131 crew, 331 persons jammed a vessel that had to devote much of its space to incompatible and separately caged or stabled animals. Noah might have handled the situation smoothly—Captain Bainbridge was just a seaman, chosen by an obese Dey and not by God. The Mussulmans were noisier than the parrots. The weather turned rainy and squally; then, after a pleasant spell, squally again.

The matter of religion became the Captain’s main problem. The faithful to Allah had to pray five times a day and engage in various other devotions exasperating to those manning the ship. They chose to hold their religious observances on the main deck where they could look and bow toward the Kaaba of Mecca with certainty they were facing properly. But on such a voyage amid shifting winds and gales, the vessel had to tack frequently—almost, it seemed to the Mohammedans, by the design of the curs of Christendom—and when the bow on these occasions was pointed in a new direction there was much scurrying and refacing among the worshipers to keep Mecca in their front. These incidents vastly amused the American seamen, who thought that Satan might be in tempest and God more likely in the gentle breeze than around some Black Stone in the Great Mosque in the distant desert town of Mecca. The Americans looked on curiously at first, contemptuously and scoffingly a little later. The conception of religious tolerance was not a common possession of the people of the early nineteenth century. Many rough seamen of that era sailed under the flag of any ship that needed hands. The nationality of the ship was immaterial. They identified God mainly when his name occurred in an oath. The muster roll of the George Washington shows barbers, cooks, a cooper, a carpenters mate, and other specialists, but no chaplain was on board. Probably it was to dampen their ardor and prevent friction with the Moslems that Bainbridge cut his crew to half a rum ration.

Annoying to the Moslems as well as to the crew was the frequent tacking. Finally the Dey’s ambassador, who looked on himself as the true commander of the voyage, stationed one of his officers in the binnacle so that he might watch the compass during prayer-time. This does not seem to have been to prevent tacking, but to give guidance to the faithful about the direction of the ship and reassure them when they were facing in precisely the proper manner. The voyage progressed with bad spirit but no bloodshed, until finally, at dusk on November 9, Constantinople, recorded by Midshipman Page as Beautifully situated on the sides of seven hills gently ascending from the sea, was sighted ahead.

Back in Algiers, Consul Richard O’Brien was writing Secretary of State John Marshall a letter heavy with explanations: that the yielding was to save the peace of the United States with Algiers, that the alternative was pillage and slavery; that the $40,000 the voyage would cost was inconsiderable compared with the cost of a war. He denied that he had assumed responsibility for the safety of the money and cargo but stated that if the ship were lost the Dey would cover the loss by capturing other American vessels. In one manner or another the voyage seemed to have been insured by the Americans.

Over in Tunis another American consul, William Eaton, hearing the news, was cast into one of his not infrequent emotional spasms:

Genius of My Country! How art thou prostrate! Hast thou not yet one son whose soul revolts, whose nerves convulse, blood vessels burst, and heart indignant swells at thoughts of such debasement? Shade of Washington! Behold thy orphan’d sword hang on a slave—A voluntary slave, and serve a pirate!

Then, again:

This is the price of peace. But if we will have peace at such a price, recall me, and send a slave, accustomed to abasement, to represent the nation. And furnish ships of war, and funds and slaves to his support, and Our immortal shame.

It was all a part of Eaton’s routine reports to the Secretary of State—reports undoubtedly without parallel for their heated outbursts in all the Department’s long history and its trillions of words, perhaps, of diplomatic correspondence.

CHAPTER TWO — A Firman Bridles the Dey

Bainbridge was a moderate. He was no Thomas Truxtun who could strut as well as he could fight, and Truxtun was no mean fighter; nor an Edward Preble, whose name on his commission ought to have been written in gunpowder with a seaman’s oath for an exclamation point; but he was personally brave, outwardly composed, always punctual, generally competent.

Most of his decisions lacked flare or sensationalism. Fame, an uncertain goddess on land and faithless indeed on the water, especially to those who sued her most ardently, seldom sailed with the usually sound Bainbridge, but once or twice she did touch her hand gently to his shoulder. His career as frequently stirred doubt, even distrust, not of his character, but of his capacity.

Dr. Thomas Harris, naval surgeon and a close friend of Bainbridge, who saw him under all circumstances of disease and health, exhilaration and depression, and judged him a shipmaster of extraordinary capacity, thought the Navy was indeed fortunate in all its first officers.

To them he applied the attributes of manly dignity, devoted patriotism, energetic boldness, and untiring zeal. Of none did he use such terms with greater assurance than with the New Jersey lad who had won his way up the tough and tricky ladder of the merchant service, where it was easier to become schooled in perfidy and downright meanness than in moral rectitude. That applied to the ordinary-run deckhand. Worthy virtues were not missing in the upper echelons of the naval services of the leading powers, in a period of sea history that was dominated by the deeds of Hood, de Grasse, Rodney, and John Paul Jones, and looked toward the coming of Nelson. The sea during the chivalric era of the great sails was a profession in which knight-errantry lingered and gallantry and courage were recognized as freely in enemy as in friend.

Bainbridge was the fourth son of a Princeton, New Jersey, physician. He was born in the New Jersey college seat May 7, 1774, too late for participation in the Revolutionary War, but in time to feel the impact of its tremendous patriotic upsurge. The naval exploits of American sea captains during the struggle for independence—John Paul Jones, John Barry, Richard Dale, Stephen Decatur, Sr., and Bold Joshua Barney of the Hyder-Ally privateer being notable among them—fired his vigorous mind and robust body with a yearning for action and a longing for the sea. Though he had gone to Monmouth County, New Jersey, to be educated by his maternal grandfather, John Taylor, he broke away from the books at the age of fifteen, journeyed by Princeton to gain the assent of his parents, and soon had a seaman’s hammock on a merchant vessel out of Philadelphia.

His naval career was founded on an incident in the merchant trade with Holland. He had been appointed first mate, at the age of eighteen, when he had opportunity to display his resourcefulness and courage. The crew mutinied. He came on deck just as the mutineers were about to toss the captain overboard. Of powerful physique and with a strict sense of duty, he dashed into them, followed by a single old-time sailor who served as second mate. He liberated the captain, felled mutineers right and left with his big fists until they were finally all downed or scattered, and then clapped the ringleader into irons. The result was both a hearty respect for him among the seamen as the story was spread through the merchant marine service, and a confidence by the shipowners in his ability to handle unruly crews. They appointed him captain. Thus at the age of nineteen, a year younger than that at which the celebrated Joshua Barney had become captain of the Hyder-Ally, and with it had captured the British General Monk off the Delaware capes, Bainbridge had his own ship. And like Barney, he had opportunity to fight an action in the next year, at the age of twenty.

Passing from Bordeaux to the Caribbean with his armed merchant vessel, the Hope, he was off St. John of the Virgin Islands when he was hauled up by an armed schooner showing no flag. The schooner fired without warning and, when Bainbridge replied briskly, showed the British ensign.

Bainbridge had but four 9-pounders and eleven men on his small craft, while the Britisher had a crew of thirty and eight carriage guns. But Bainbridge pounded the schooners hull, riddled her decks, and brought down her spars and rigging. Firing with destructive accuracy, he crippled the attacking ship and killed and wounded a goodly portion of her gun crews. The British captain was compelled to strike his colors. Bainbridge resisted the urgency of his own crew to board and take the schooner as a prize. He held that his armament was for defense only and that he had no legal authority for offensive measures, his country being at peace with Great Britain. But he hailed the British captain and told him to go about your business and report to your masters and inform them that if they wanted the Hope they would have to send more power or better seamanship to fetch her.

Back in the Garonne River, before sailing for the Caribbean, he had reaffirmed his ability to cope with mutineers. While anchored opposite Bordeaux he was hailed by a fellow American merchant captain nearby who asked aid against his rebellious crew. Bainbridge boarded the ship and again quelled the disturbers, though it is not clear that the same amount of fistwork was involved. But there was enough of a melee for the ships routine and fixtures to be overturned and Bainbridge came within a jot of losing his life when some gunpowder was accidentally ignited. From that time, during a long naval career, he was never again plagued with mutinies.

Some other incidents help one to understand this seafaring Jerseyite, in the light of adversities that were later to beset him. In a crossing from Europe his merchantman was intercepted by the powerful British frigate Indefatigable, commanded by Captain Edward Pellew, who had fought against Benedict Arnold on Lake Champlain and in later life was to be distinguished as Lord Exmouth and eventually as Vice-Admiral of the British Fleet. A search party headed by a Lieutenant Norton took a member of Bainbridge’s crew, despite the irate American’s warning to the indifferent British commander that he would retaliate promptly by seizing the first British seaman he could lay hands on.

That chance came five days later when the tough little Hope encountered a British merchant brig, which Bainbridge brought up with a shot across her bow. Though the brig had eight guns and twenty men, the American had her broadside to bear, her guns loaded, her matches lit. He sent his first mate, who returned from the British vessel with the required seaman (an unmarried man, as Bainbridge had specified), having left in exchange a message to be delivered to Captain Pellow, stating that Bainbridge had, as promised, retaliated for the seaman Lieutenant Norton had taken from the Hope.

When the undeclared war with France broke during the John Adams administration, Bainbridge served under the fathers of two of the great captains of American naval history, and if they imparted to him a modicum of what they must have to their resolute sons, his naval training was well rounded. They were Stephen Decatur, father of the better-known Stephen of the War with Tripoli and the War of 1812, and Commodore Christopher R. Perry, father of Oliver Hazard Perry, who snatched victory out of defeat in the Battle of Lake Erie. In Decatur’s squadron, Bainbridge commanded the schooner Retaliation, the former le Croyable of the French navy. Decatur had captured her and she was the first warship ever captured by the government of the United States.

One bit of unusual recognition came to Bainbridge when, under the orders of Commodore Perry, he patrolled the waters off Hispaniola looking for Frenchmen. At Cap François his ship fired a salute in honor of the Negro government of Toussaint L’Ouverture. When the salute was returned by the fort, Bainbridge went ashore and was received with great urbanity, according to his friend Dr. Harris, by the Negro leader of Haiti. A little later, though Toussaint had declined to visit French, British, and other American ships, he accepted Bainbridge’s invitation to inspect his brig. General Henry Christophe and others accompanied the party, which had such pleasure that Toussaint invited the American captain to dinner on shore, conducted, by Dr. Harris’ account, with great decorum. Bainbridge was the only white man present with about forty of Toussaint’s Negro officers.

Bainbridge’s great misfortune in these days was to be the first United States naval officer ever to strike his colors to an enemy ship, when he was confronted by overwhelming power. That, taken with his adversities during the approaching wars with the Barbary States, tended to associate his name with failure, and both the government and a vocal public liked successes. But he cleared his record admirably in some spectacular sea duels during the War of 1812.

One cannot understand the resolution in this captain’s make-up without looking ahead to the 1812 period, when the long-discussed war with England finally was about to break. Bainbridge had returned to the merchant service after the war with the Barbary powers, had traded in the Baltic, and was on a second visit to St. Petersburg in the winter of 1811-1812. When he heard that war was imminent, the port of St. Petersburg was closed. He was unwilling to await the spring thaw. Hiring bobsleds, he set out across the frozen Russian wastes, and traveled through Finland and almost the length of Sweden, on a journey so hazardous that few would contemplate it. Passing through blizzards and sub-zero cold, he finally got a vessel to the United States, where he arrived in time to command the Constitution in its decisive victory over the Java late in the year 1812.

But now he was in the harbor of Constantinople with an Algerian ambassador, much money, and a grotesque cargo of animals and goods to deliver to the Sultan. That sensible potentate, irked by Bobba Mustapha’s double-dealings with France, declined to have anything whatever to do with the Algerine ambassador, at least not until the return of the Capudan Pasha with the fleet.

At length the great ships came in—fifteen sail of the line, along with a fleet of frigates and numerous attending craft. The George Washington, dwarfed by such naval might, fired a salute and was momentarily perplexed when it was not answered, but it was observed and later verified that at the very instant when the flagship of the Capudan Pasha, Admiral Hassan, was about to reply, a squall from off the Thracian coast struck his ship. All hands had to work diligently to prevent her from being cast on the Bosporus shore. Soon Zacbe, the well-educated, polished private secretary of the Turkish admiral, fluent in English and French, came aboard the George Washington, explained the emergency that had prevented a return of the salute, and invited the American captain to the palace of the Capudan Pasha. On the next day, with full formality, the Turkish flagship fired a salute in answer to the George Washington’s greeting.

Captain Bainbridge was to learn that all of the courtesy and chivalry did not belong to the navies of the Christian world. When he called at the palace of the Capudan Pasha he was met with cordiality and given what would have been termed in modern times the key to the city of the Golden Horn.

The cosmopolitan Admiral Hassan greeted him: As the Ottoman Government have sufficient liberality to protect strangers, I beg you will place yourself under my protection, and accept me as your representative to the Sultan.

This was more than Bainbridge could remotely expect. The burst of friendship was clarified somewhat when he noticed that the dragoman of the British ambassador was present and learned that Lord Elgin had assured the Capudan Pasha that the American ship was under his protection. But the Admiral would have none of that, and decided that if the American needed protection, he would take on the job himself. Since the Capudan Pasha and the Sultan were kinsmen as well as brothers-in-law, who had been born in the harem together, been educated together, served Turkey together, and apparently were quite fond of each other, while the Reis Effendi, the grand vizier or secretary of state of the Ottoman power, was not of royal blood, Bainbridge now felt thoroughly secure.

Zacbe, it developed, was not only a gifted linguist but one who knew Occidental history and had no uncertainties about the existence of the United States or the meaning of the American Revolution. Since the Porte was closely allied with Great Britain against France, he saw nothing incompatible in friendship with the new republic, especially when it was being sponsored in Constantinople by the British representative. And was it not battling the frigates of France, the deadly enemy of the Ottomans? One of his heroes, and indeed, friends, had been Benjamin Franklin, whose acquaintance he had formed in Paris. He understood the American Constitution and was intrigued with it. Nothing like it had been known to the East. But his inquiries seemed constantly to go back to the benign Philadelphian who was already being claimed and owned by the world: the seer, scientist, and inventor Franklin. And he took delight in Bainbridge. Years after the voyage of the George Washington had passed into history, Bainbridge and Zacbe were corresponding and keeping fresh the friendship they formed during their conversations about the philosopher Franklin, American institutions, and, apparently with more casual concern, the immediate affairs in the Near East.

One of the first instructions Bainbridge received from his new protector Admiral Hassan, and it came in the form of a request, was that the Algerian flag be lowered—Bainbridge had continued to fly it beneath the Stars and Stripes—and that it be kept out of sight while he was in Constantinople. The Turks, it developed, were fully aware of all that had been transpiring in the Mediterranean. Bobba Mustapha of Algiers had been preying on Austrian and Neapolitan vessels, waging war on the enemies of France and consequently on the allies of the home government, Turkey. Nor was the Algerine