Stephen Decatur and the Intrepid
Stephen Decatur was born in January 1779, just west of modern day Ocean City near what is now Berlin, Maryland. He was a daring and famous American naval hero. This is one of his exploits.
On the night of February 16, 1804, the two-masted ketch Intrepid sailed into Tripoli harbor on the Barbary Coast of the Mediterranean Sea, in what is now Libya. As the lights of the city of Tripoli and the castle on the bluffs above grew closer, most of the ship’s crew hid beneath closed hatches. On deck, the ship’s officers, all U.S. Navy, were disguised as Mediterranean sailors. Their captain, Stephen Decatur wore his hair pulled back, with dark sideburns framing his face and its prominent nose.
At Decatur’s command, his crew steered the Intrepid through the night toward the largest ship in the harbor, a captured frigate that had once belonged to the U.S. They were still in the middle of the harbor when voices floated across the water. The Tripoli harbor patrol had discovered them.
By the 1800s, pirates from Tripoli had been capturing merchant ships and enslaving their crews for more than two centuries. During that time, the United States and European nations paid tribute to the pirates so their ships could pass safely. As a result, Tripoli had collected enough booty to fortify the city and build a castle to guard its harbor.
In 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli raised the required tribute. European nations continued to pay, but the U.S. found the new amount unacceptable. In 1803, it dispatched a naval squadron to cow the Pasha and resolve the problem. The squadron included a 40-gun frigate, the Philadelphia.
And thus, one sunny day when the Tripolitan pirates were happily pillaging, they were unpleasantly surprised to see the Philadelphia and its 300-man crew bearing down on them. The pirates fled for the safety of Tripoli harbor. The Philadelphia gave chase, but the waters near the harbor were treacherous, and the Philadelphia ran aground on a sandbank.
The reprieved pirates surrounded the grounded ship. As more and more pirates arrived, the Philadelphia’s captain ordered his crew to push the ship’s cannon overboard, hoping to lighten her enough that she would float off the sandbank. It didn’t work, and when pirate gunboats fired at her, the Philadelphia couldn’t fire back. Her captain surrendered.
The pirates sent the Philadelphia’s crew away to prison and slavery. They hauled the Philadelphia off the sandbank and towed her into the harbor. Then they fished her guns up from the bottom of the bay, remounted them, loaded them, and ran them out ready to fire.
As a result, the Philadelphia represented a potent new pirate threat that the U.S. could not tolerate. The commander on the scene ordered up a raiding party to go into Tripoli harbor and destroy her. The idea was simple enough, but there were a few troublesome details:
A 25,000-man army defended Tripoli, supported by 115 cannon overlooking the harbor from the walls of the city and the castle above it. The Philadelphia was anchored well within range of those guns. A fleet of 24 vessels, ranging from galleys to sailing ships, patrolled the harbor itself. Those ships carried another 83 guns and an additional 1,000 men. Assessing the prospects, the U.S. commander said, “It will undoubtedly cost us many lives. But it must be done.”
Lieutenant Stephen Decatur commanded a ship in the American squadron, and he offered to lead the raid. He gathered his ship’s crew on deck and asked for men willing to go with him into Tripoli harbor. Every man volunteered.
Decatur and his men loaded a captured Tripolitan ship, renamed the Intrepid, with “combustibles,” 19th century naval terminology for things that burn fiercely.
On February 3, 1804, they set sail, but a gale blew up before they reached Tripoli, and the direction of the wind prevented them from entering the harbor. They waited for the storm to blow itself out in a ship about 50 feet long and, at its widest point, 15 feet wide. If you stand on a street corner today and look diagonally across the intersection to the other corner, that’s roughly 50 feet. Fifteen feet is approximately the length of today’s passenger cars.
Seventy-five men were packed into that 50-by-15 foot space as waves rose above the level of the deck and crashed on board. Anything larger than the smallest scrap of sail immediately blew away, forcing the men to steer using only the pressure of the wind on the ship’s bare masts. For nine days, the ship rocked and pitched with every wave blown up by the storm.
Decatur and his four officers shared a single tiny cabin with a ceiling so low they couldn’t stand upright. The midshipmen and the marines had only a crude shelter on deck, and they, too, risked banging their heads on the ceiling — when they sat up. The common sailors slept on top of barrels stored down in the hold. The barrels held the ship’s store of salt meat, but the meat turned out to be rotten, so Decatur and his men ate bread and water.
But in their hours of trial these men were not alone. Before it was captured, their ship had carried enslaved people of poor hygiene, and so they suffered from what one officer called an “attack of innumerable vermin.”
The gale finally subsided on February 16th, and that night Decatur and his men sailed into Tripoli harbor.
When the harbor patrol hailed the Intrepid, Decatur and his ship were already headed for the Philadelphia. Decatur’s pilot, a Sicilian who knew the harbor, replied in Arabic, saying they were from Malta and had lost their anchors in the storm. Could they tie up next to that big ship over there? The harbor patrol approved. The Intrepid’s crew had already passed lines to the Philadelphia when the guards on its deck raised the alarm.
The Intrepid’s raiding party immediately swarmed up from their hiding places. With Decatur in the lead, they scrambled up the side of the larger ship and attacked the Tripolitan guards with cutlasses, pikes, and hatchets. Knots of men fought hand to hand across the deck, grunting and shouting amid the bang of pistols, the clang of edged weapons, and spurts of blood. Twenty guards were killed, and the rest ran for the railings and jumped overboard into the night.
Decatur’s men then handed up the combustibles from the Intrepid. To place and light them, the men climbed down steep ladders inside the Philadelphia and raced along low passageways through the dark, lower decks. Soon fire coursed through the ship. Orange flames leapt out of her hatches and climbed her masts, and acrid smoke choked the raiding party. The fire was so fierce it threatened to burn the Intrepid. The men tumbled back down off the Philadelphia to their own ship, Decatur the last man off.
As the men pushed the Intrepid away from the Philadelphia and hoisted sail, ships guarding the harbor began to fire. Shore batteries opened fire, too, and cannon balls plummeted about the ship, sending up cascading fountains of water.
To the raiding party’s surprise, heavy guns also opened fire from close behind them. They looked back for this new threat and saw … the Philadelphia. Her guns, primed and shotted, were ready for action, and the heat of the fire set them off one by one, sending cannon balls whistling past the Intrepid and her crew.
Soon, though, the Philadelphia’s cables burned through, and she drifted ashore near the castle. When the flames reached her powder room, she blew up with a huge, deafening explosion. One of the Philadelphia’s captured crew, held prisoner in Tripoli, wrote, “Tumult, consternation, confusion, and delay reigned in every section of the town and castle.”
Decatur and the Intrepid sailed through the uproar and away into the night. Only one Tripolitan shot scored, and they only knew of it when a hole suddenly appeared in a sail above their heads. The total American casualty list: one man wounded.
The story of Decatur’s raid was told around the world. England’s Lord Nelson, the greatest fighting sailor of the time, called it “the most bold and daring act of the age.” When the news reached the United States, it caused a sensation. Decatur was promoted to captain, the youngest ever in the U. S. Navy. Congress awarded the Intrepid’s men an extra two-month’s pay — thirty-four dollars each.
As the country celebrated, a young man was inspired to take a popular English drinking song called “To Anacreon In Heaven” and write new words for it, commemorating Decatur’s feat. A few years later, this same man watched the British bombard Fort McHenry, and he revised his lyrics. And so Francis Scott Key took a song about Stephen Decatur and wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.”
This is a piece from www.route-50.com, where you can find stories about people, places, and things along the 3,073 miles of U.S. Highway 50.
The map of Tripoli harbor is public domain from the Naval History and Heritage Command, www.history.navy.mil.
The photo of Stephen Decatur is public domain through creativecommons.org from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
