Pike & Cutlass: Hero Tales of Our Navy

by George Gibbs

THE BIGGEST LITTLE FIGHT IN NAVAL HISTORY

It should have been renown enough for one man to have performed what Nelson was pleased to call “the most daring act of any age.” But the capture of the “Philadelphia” only whetted Decatur’s appetite for further encounters. He was impetuous, bold even to rashness, and so dashing that to his men he was irresistible. But behind it all—a thing rare in a man of his peculiar calibre—there was the ability to consider judiciously and to plan carefully as well as daringly to execute. His fierce temper led him into many difficulties, but there was no cruelty behind it; and the men who served with him, while they feared him, would have followed him into the jaws of death, for they loved him as they loved no other officer in the American service. Once while the frigate “Essex,” Captain Bainbridge, lay in the harbor at Barcelona, the officers of the American vessel suffered many petty indignities at the instance of the officers of the Spanish guardship. Having himself been subjected to a slight from the Spanish commander, Lieutenant Decatur took the bull by the horns. He bade his coxswain pull to the gangway of the Spaniard, and he went boldly aboard. His lips were set, for he had resolved upon his own responsibility to make an immediate precedent which would serve for all time. The Spanish commander, most fortunately, was absent. But Decatur none the less strode aft past the sentry to the gangway and, lifting his great voice so that it resounded from truck to keelson, he shouted,—

“Tell your comandante that Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, of the ‘Essex,’ declares him to be a scoundrelly coward, and if Lieutenant Decatur meets him ashore he will cut his ears off.”

So among the men of the squadron Decatur came to be known as a man who brooked nothing and dared everything.

But when the crusty Preble took command in the Mediterranean he was not over-impressed with the under-officers of his command. Not one of the lieutenants was over twenty-four and none of those higher in authority had turned thirty. Decatur and Somers were twenty-five; Charles Stewart was only twenty-six, and Bainbridge the younger; Morris and Macdonough were barely out of their teens.

It was not the custom of the commander-in-chief to mince his words. So sparing himself the delicacy of secluding himself behind the saving bulkheads of the after-cabin he swore right roundly at his home government for sending him what he was pleased to call “a parcel of d— school-boys.” He was a martinet of the old style, and believed in the school of the fo’c’s’le, and not in young gentlemen whose friends at home sent them in by the ports of the after-cabin. He held the youngsters aloof, and not until he had tried them in every conceivable fashion would he consider them in his councils. A year had passed, and Decatur, Morris, Bainbridge, Macdonough, and Somers had helped to add glorious pages to naval history, before the old man, with a smile to Colonel Lear, the consul, consented to say,—

“Well, after all, colonel, they are very good school-boys!”

Although Decatur’s success in the destruction of the “Philadelphia” had removed a dangerous auxiliary battery from the harbor of Tripoli, the bashaw was far from overawed, and, with the officers and crew of the “Philadelphia” as hostages, declined to consider any terms offered by the Americans; and so it was resolved by Commodore Preble to make an attempt upon the Tripolitan batteries and fleet. The Americans had the “Constitution,”—“Old Ironsides,”—Commodore Preble, and six brigs and schooners mounting twelve and sixteen guns each. Preble had also succeeded in borrowing from “the most gracious king of the Sicilies,” who was then at war with the bashaw, two bomb-vessels and six single gunboats,—quite a formidable little force of a hundred and thirty-four guns and about a thousand men.

It was not until the morning of the 3d of August, 1804, that the weather, which had been very stormy, moderated sufficiently to allow the squadron to approach the African coast. The gunboats were unwieldy craft, flat-bottomed, and, as the sea made clean breeches over them, they were a dozen times in danger of sinking. But by ten o’clock the sky to the southward had lightened, and the heavy storm-clouds were blowing away overhead to the westward. “Old Ironsides” shook the reefs out of her topsails and, spreading her top-gallant-sails, she beat up for the entrance of the harbor of Tripoli with two of the gunboats in tow. Her tall spars, seeming almost to pierce the low-rolling clouds, towered far above the little sticks of the “Siren” and “Nautilus,” which bore down directly in her wake. The sea had lashed out its fury, and, before the little fleet had reached the reef, the gray had turned to green, and here and there a line of amber showed where the mid-day sun was stealing through.

Stephen Decatur, on gunboat No. 4, had been given command of the left division of three gunboats. Casting off the tow-lines from his larger consorts, he got under weigh, and bore down for a rift between the reefs at the eastern entrance to the harbor, where the Tripolitan fleet, cleared for action, lay awaiting him. The wind was on his bow, and he was obliged to hold a course close to the wind in order to weather the point.