By the side of Decatur stood Midshipmen Morris and Laws. Laws, to be the first at the enemy, strove to get through a port, but his pistols caught and held him for a moment, while Decatur slipped just enough to give Morris the honor of being first, and then came Decatur and all the rest with swinging cutlasses to clear the deck.
Burning of the Frigate Philadelphia by Decatur.
From an old wood cut.
The Tripolitans had been fairly caught napping and, while never a word was spoken, the quarter-deck was cleaned in a trice. Then the Americans formed instantly in a line athwartship and charged silently forward. Whelmed by the fierce onslaught, the Tripolitans fled for life, and the rapid sound of bodies falling into the water alongside told whither many were fleeing. Others ran below, where some met death from the cutlasses and pikes of sailors who had climbed through the ports, and others hid to meet a worse fate a brief time later.
So swift and thorough was the work of the American boarders that in ten minutes the last show of resistance was ended. And then a single rocket drew its line of flame high in air to tell the anxious friends without the bar that the Philadelphia was captured.
Even while the rocket mounted, the three crews that had been assigned to fire the ship were passing up the combustibles from the ketch, and never was a work of destruction more completely done than that which followed.
Midshipman Morris, he who had first reached the enemy, was in charge of the crew that fired the cockpit, the lowest attainable point in the ship. He did his work effectually, but so swiftly had those worked on the deck above him that when he followed his men up they barely had time to escape.
On reaching the upper deck the flames were found pouring from the portholes on both sides and flaring up to lap the tar-soaked shrouds and stays. Decatur was there, waiting for those from the cockpit. When they came he paused but a moment to see that the fire was effectually set, and then over the rail tumbled every man jack of the expedition, Decatur himself being the last to leave the burning ship. Indeed, the ketch was then drifting clear, and he had to jump to reach her. He had been on board but twenty-five minutes, all told.
With poles and oars the Americans now strove to get away, but in some way the ketch swung around under the stern of the big ship with boom afoul, her sail flapping against the ship’s sides, and, at the last, with the flames pouring through the ship’s cabin windows into the cabin of the ketch, where all the ammunition of the expedition was stored, covered over with sail-cloth only. The peril was imminent, but it was averted when some one discovered that the forgotten line from the stern was still fast.