In the subsequent attacks on the city, there were many incidents of interest to American readers. A heavy shot penetrated the castle one day where the American prisoners were confined. It covered Captain Bainbridge with the débris of the wall and snatched the clothes off the bed on which he was lying.
While one of the American gunboats was firing on a shore battery, a hot shot penetrated her magazine and she was blown up. At the moment of the explosion Midshipman Robert T. Spence and a gun’s crew were loading the big gun on the bow. As it happened, the explosion did not injure either them or their gun, although it opened wide the bottom of the boat. And so it came to pass that, as the smoke cleared away, spectators saw Spence and his men still at work loading the gun. And not only did they complete their work; as the boat sank under them they gave three cheers for the flag, and fired their last shot at the enemy, with the rising water wetting their feet.
The Battle of Tripoli, August 3, 1804.
From the painting by Corné, 1805, at the Naval Academy, Annapolis.
Spence was not able to swim, but he got hold of a big oar, and so kept afloat with eleven others until picked up, when he and the others saved turned to and continued the fight.
The story of the most stirring and the most unfortunate attack on the city remains to be told. Captain Preble, “desirous of annoying the enemy by all means,” decided to send a fireship among their shipping. The ketch Intrepid, that had served so well in the attack upon the captured Philadelphia, was selected for the sacrifice. A hundred barrels of powder in bulk and 150 fixed shells and a lot of old iron were placed in a bin amidships, and from this a pipe led to a room well aft, where a huge mass of combustibles was placed. It was intended to handle the ketch as a blockade runner and so get her into the midst of the enemy’s shipping. She was then to be fired in the after-room, and the blaze there, it was supposed, would be fierce enough to prevent the Tripolitans extinguishing it. Meantime a train regulated to burn fifteen minutes would be running through the pipe to the magazine. Two swift rowboats were placed on the ketch, and in these her crew hoped to escape to the smaller vessels that would be in waiting to pick them up.
Map of the HARBOR OF TRIPOLI,
Showing where the Philadelphia grounded and where burned and where Intrepid was blown up.