Our Country, Right or Wrong The Life of Stephen Decatur, the U.s. Navy's Most Illustrious Commander

Chapter One Blazing Frigate The gale that halted the first attempt to steal into Tripoli harbor struck at dawn on February 7, 1807. Even so, the commander of the former Barbary slave ketch now in American hands and christened Intrepid by her captors rejected the advice of his Maltese pilot that they dare not venture farther into the rising seas. He bade the pilot and a midshipman take a boat with muffled oars to more closely inspect conditions at the harbor mouth. Only when the boat returned a near wreck with its occupants thoroughly drenched did Lieutenant Stephen Decatur decide to drop anchor and ride out the storm. One week passed before the winds subsided. All that time, seventy American midshipmen, seamen, and marines crouched or sprawled, retching and coughing, in the hold of a craft that could hardly have been more loaded in its slave-transport days. The seventy-ton Intrepid was only sixty feet long, its beam but twelve across, and it was rigged with three square sails on the foremast and a single fore-and-aft sail on the mainmast. Garbed as Arabs, men who were not doubled up behind the bulwarks clung full length to timbers laid upon water casks or huddled below amid hogsheads of combustibles. Wearied by shifts at the pumps whenever the ketch took heavy water, they also hungered for food. Few slept or ate. At Syracuse, Sicily, where they had weighed anchor the first week of the month, Decatur found that his salt beef was packed in uncleaned fish barrels and had so putrefied that it could be consumed only by the vermin that infested every corner of the Intrepid's hold. Its tiny cabin was headquarters for Decatur, three other lieutenants, and a ship's surgeon. But throughout those storm-tossed days Decatur was not always on the ketch. At times he could be found aboard the sixteen-gun brig Syren, three or four miles astern, where in relative comfort he discussed the task ahead with Lieutenant Charles Stewart, the brig's commander. Given variable winds, uncertain tides, and the probability of enemy attack, plans made on the flagship Constitution at Syracuse, the United States Navy's Mediterranean base, might well have to be altered. Stewart's orders were straightforward. His brig would follow at some distance in the Intrepid's wake but close enough to provide reinforcements when Decatur's party achieved the objective, and then to cover its withdrawal. The target, anchored in captivity with Tripolitan colors at the masthead, was the twelve-hundred-ton frigate Philadelphia, whose entire crew, from captain to loblolly boy, languished within Bashaw Yusuf Karamanli's castle. They had been imprisoned there more than one hundred days. Mediterranean-stationed European diplomats expected the Bashaw to demand up to half a million American dollars for the release of the Philadelphia's people. No ransom had yet been paid. That was for the politicians in Washington to decide. In the meantime, Edward Preble, dyspeptic commodore of the American squadron in the Mediterranean, had developed the idea of a secret mission: set the Philadelphia on fire, thus denying the Bashaw a powerful addition to his piratical fleet. And the burning would be done not noisily with newfangled Congreve rockets but through a boarding ruse coupled with reliable combustibles. Weather had driven the Intrepid so far off course it took her four days to regain a position close to Tripoli. Then darkness fell before Decatur, now on the ketch, could maneuver it sufficiently into the harbor to locate the captive ship. And his boarding party was deteriorating into a tired and famished rabble, muttering mutiny. Yet their spirits revived each time Decatur addressed them. Unlike many another officer in the American navy who depended on curses and the lash to sustGuttridge, Leonard F. is the author of 'Our Country, Right or Wrong The Life of Stephen Decatur, the U.s. Navy's Most Illustrious Commander', published 2007 under ISBN 9780765307026 and ISBN 0765307022.