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There have been many accounts of Decatur's exploit on this Tripolitan gunboat, with considerable variation as to particulars. That which follows is the story as it was told to me by Admiral Stewart, who received it from Decatur himself, immediately after the fight. Decatur presented the weapon, called an espontoon, to Stewart, and I naturally examined it with great interest.
The coast afforded few good harbors; the heavy northerly winds made navigation both difficult and hazardous; the Tripolitan galleys and gunboats with their shallow draft could stand close in shore and elude the American frigates; and the ordnance on the American craft was not heavy enough to inflict any serious damage on the fortifications guarding the harbor.
He resolved to fit out a fireship and to send her into the very jaws of death, hoping to destroy the Tripolitan gunboats and at the same time to damage the castle and the town. He chose for this perilous enterprise the old Intrepid which had served her captors so well, and out of many volunteers he gave the command to Captain Richard Somers and Lieutenant Henry Wadsworth.
The son also served on the Constellation in the Tripolitan war, and afterward gave his attention to ordnance. The surrender of Detroit by General William Hull at the opening of the war gave the British control of the Territory of Michigan and Lake Erie.
On her arrival at Tripoli, so great was the terror produced, that the sailors abandoned the cruisers then fitting out, and not a man could be procured to navigate them. The Tripolitan cruisers continuing to harass the vessels of the United States, Congress determined in 1803, to fit out a fleet that should chastise their insolence.
This, also, is a patriotic delusion. The money question between the President and the Pacha was simply one of amount. Our chief was willing to pay anything in reason; but Tripolitan prices were too high, and could not be submitted to.
Twice within the next four weeks, Tripolitan forces were beaten back only with the greatest difficulty. Derne was to be evacuated! Peace had been concluded!
And then, could he change the sky of Paris, restore to the unhappy Levantine her patio paved with marble, where she used to pass long hours in a cool, delicious sleepiness, listening to the water as it dripped on the great alabaster fountain with its three basins, one over the other, and her gilded barge, with its awning of crimson, which eight Tripolitan boatmen supple and vigorous rowed after sunset on the beautiful lake of El-Baheira?
After all the prisoners had been exchanged man for man, the Tripolitan Government demanded, and the United States paid, the handsome sum of sixty thousand dollars to close the contract. This treaty, however, awakened the conscience of Europe, and from the day it was signed the power of the Barbary Corsairs began to wane.
A Tripolitan fisherman, Mohammed Ben Ali el Bad, a holy man nearly seventy years of age, who had twice made the journey to Mecca and who now in his declining years occupied himself with reading the Koran and instructing his grandsons in the profession of fishing for mullet along the reefs of the Gulf of Cabes, had anchored for the night off the Tunisian coast, about midway between Sfax and Lesser Syrtis.
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