The pirates were brave enough when they had only merchant ships to deal with, but they acted like cowards when they found warships on their track. They fled in all directions, and many of their ships and barges were taken. After that they kept quiet for a time, but soon they were at their old work again.
In 1823 Captain David Porter, he who had fought so well in the Essex, was sent against them. The brave young Farragut was with him. He brought a number of barges and small vessels, so that he could follow the sea-robbers into their hiding places.
One of these places was found at Cape Cruz, on Porto Rico. Here the pirate captain and his men fought like tigers, and the captain's wife stood by his side and fought as fiercely as he did. After the fight was over the sailors found a number of caves used by the pirates. In some of them were great bales of goods, and in others heaps of human bones. All this told a dreadful story of robbery and murder.
Another fight took place at a haunt of pirates on the coast of Cuba, where Lieutenant Allen, a navy officer, had been killed the year before in an attack on the sea-robbers.
Here there were over seventy pirates and only thirty-one Americans. But the sailors cried "Remember Allen!" and dashed so fiercely at the pirate vessels, that the cowardly crews jumped overboard and tried to swim ashore. But the hot-blooded sailors rowed in among them and cut fiercely with their cutlasses, so that hardly any of them escaped. Their leader, who was named Diabolito, or "Little Devil," was one of the killed.
In this way the pirate hordes were broken up, after they had robbed and murdered among the beautiful West India islands for many years. After that defeat they gave no more trouble. Among the pirates was Jean Lafitte, one of the Lafitte brothers, of whose doings you have read above. After the battle of New Orleans he went to Texas, and in time became a pirate captain again. As late as 1822 his name was the terror of the Gulf. Then he disappeared and no one knew what had become of him. He may have died in battle or have gone down in storm.
But the pirates of the West Indies and the Gulf were not the only ones the United States had to deal with. You have read the story of the Moorish corsairs and of the fighting at Tripoli. Now I have something more to tell about them; for when they heard that the United States was at war with England, they tried their old tricks again, capturing American sailors and selling them for slaves.
They had their own way until the war was over. Then two squadrons of war vessels were sent to the Mediterranean, one under Commodore Bainbridge, who had commanded the Constitution when she fought the Java, and the other under Commodore Decatur, the gallant sailor who had burned the Philadelphia in the harbor of Tripoli.
Decatur got there first, and it did not take him long to bring the Moors to their senses. The trouble this time was with Algiers, not with Tripoli. Algiers was one of the strongest of the Moorish states.
On the 15th of June, 1815, Decatur came in sight of the most powerful of the Algerine ships, a forty-six gun frigate, the Mashouda. Its commander was Rais Hammida, a fierce and daring fellow, who was called "the terror of the Mediterranean." He had risen from the lowest to the highest place in the navy, and had often shown his valor in battle. But his time for defeat had now come.