When our little fleet arrived off the Barbary coast, Morocco and Tunis stopped grumbling and soon came to terms. We were then free to deal with Tripoli.
Our war ships had orders simply to look after our merchantmen, without doing any fighting. Still, to give the proud ruler of Tripoli a hint of what he might soon expect, one of our small vessels, the Enterprise, afterwards commanded by Decatur, fought a short but furious battle with a Tripolitan man-of-war.
| Fight between Dale and the Tripolitan Pirates |
The pirate captain hauled his flag down three times, but hoisted it again when the fire of the Enterprise ceased. This insult was too much for Dale. Bringing his vessel alongside the pirate craft, he sprang over her side, followed by fifty of his men. The pirate crew, with their long curved swords, fought hard; yet in fifteen minutes they were beaten.
Our sailors now cut away the masts of the enemy's vessel, and, stripping her of everything except one old sail and a single spar, let her drift back to Tripoli, as a hint of how the new nation across the Atlantic was likely to deal with pirates.
"Tell your pasha," shouted the American captain, as the Barbary ship drifted away, "that this is the way my country will pay him tribute after this."
In the year 1803, the command of our fleet was given to Commodore Preble, who had just forced the ruler of Morocco to pay for an attack upon one of our merchant ships. The famous frigate Constitution, better known to every wide-awake American boy and girl as "Old Ironsides," was his flagship.
Among his officers, or "schoolboy captains," as he called them, were many bright young men, who afterwards gained fame in fighting their country's battles. One of these officers was Stephen Decatur, the hero of this story, who afterwards, as captain of the frigate United States, whipped the British frigate Macedonian after a fight of an hour and a half.
One morning late in the fall of 1803, the frigate Philadelphia, one of the best ships of our little navy, while chasing a piratical craft, ran upon a sunken reef near the harbor of Tripoli. The good ship was helpless either to fight or to get away.
The officers and crew worked with all their might. They threw some of the cannon overboard, they cut away the foremast, they did everything they could to float the vessel. It was no use; the ship stuck fast.