Stephen Decatur
Stephen Decatur was born in January 1779, near what is now Berlin, Maryland, a town close to both Route 50 and the Atlantic Ocean. The history and historical detail given here are accurate.
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On the night of February 16, 1804, the two-masted ketch Intrepid sailed boldly into Tripoli harbor. The ship’s captain, Stephen Decatur, watched the lights of the city of Tripoli and its castle grow closer. Decatur was of normal height for the time and as active as the most vigorous sailor. His face, framed by dark sideburns, was punctuated by a prominent nose. He wore his hair pulled back, but a ringlet had come loose and hung down over his forehead.
Most of the ketch’s crew hid beneath closed hatches, but Decatur and his officers were on deck, disguised as Mediterranean sailors. They steered for the largest ship in the harbor, a captured frigate formerly belonging to the U.S. Navy.
A voice floated across the water. They had been discovered by the Tripoli harbor patrol.
For more than two centuries, pirates from Tripoli, on the Barbary Coast of the Mediterranean Sea, had been capturing merchant ships and enslaving their crews. The nations of Europe, joined by the United States, paid the pirates tribute so their merchant ships could pass unharmed. Over the years, the pirates had collected enough booty to fortify their cities and build castles to guard their harbors.
In 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli raised the required tribute. European nations continued to pay, but the U.S. felt the new amount was unacceptable. To deal with the problem, in 1803 the U. S. dispatched a naval squadron that included the 40-gun frigate Philadelphia.
And so, 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 their harbor. In treacherous waters near the shore, the Philadelphia sailed onto a sandbank and stuck tight.
The reprieved pirates surrounded the grounded ship, and 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 the pirate gunboats fired, the Philadelphia couldn’t fire back. Her captain had to surrender.
The pirates sent the Philadelphia’s crew away to prison and slavery. They hauled the Philadelphia off the sandbank and towed her into Tripoli harbor. After fishing her guns up from the bottom of the bay, they remounted them, loaded them, and ran them out ready to fire.
The captured frigate represented a potent new pirate threat that could not be tolerated, and the U.S. commander on the scene decided to destroy her. To do it, he ordered a raiding party to go into Tripoli harbor. The idea was simple enough, but there were a few troublesome details.
Tripoli was defended by a 25,000-man army, supported by 115 cannon mounted on the walls of the city and the castle overlooking the harbor. The Philadelphia was anchored well within range of these guns. The harbor itself was patrolled by a fleet of twenty-four vessels, ranging from galleys to sailing ships, that carried another 83 guns and were crewed by an additional 1,000 men. Assessing the prospects, the U.S. commanding officer concluded, “It will undoubtedly cost us many lives. But it must be done.”
Stephen Decatur, a lieutenant commanding a ship in the American squadron, offered to lead the raid. He gathered his ship’s crew on deck and asked for men to go with him into Tripoli harbor. Every man volunteered.
On February 3rd, 1804, Decatur and his men set sail in a captured Tripolitan ship that had been renamed the Intrepid. They carried a cargo of “combustibles,” 19th century naval terminology for things that burn fiercely.
Before they reached Tripoli, a gale began to blow, and the direction of the wind prevented them from entering the harbor. They had to wait for the gale to blow itself out.
The Intrepid was about fifty feet long. If you stand on a street corner today and look diagonally across the intersection to the other corner, that’s roughly fifty feet. The ship was about fifteen feet across at its widest point, approximately the length of today’s passenger cars. Seventy-five men were packed into that fifty-by-fifteen foot space, which rocked and pitched with every wave blown up by the storm.
The gale blew for two, three, four days while 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.
It turned out the ship’s store of salt meat, carried in the barrels on which the sailors slept, was rotten, so Decatur and his men lived on bread and water.
The ketch rolled in waves that rose above the level of the deck, and the sea crashed on board continuously as the gale roared on for five, six, seven days. They steered using only bare masts, with possibly the smallest scrap of sail, since anything larger immediately blew away. But in their hours of trial they were not alone. Their ship had previously carried slaves of poor hygiene, and so they suffered from what one officer called an “attack of innumerable vermin.”
The gale blew for a full nine days before subsiding on February 16th, and that was the night Decatur and his men sailed into Tripoli harbor. They could already see the Philadelphia when the harbor patrol hailed them. 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 and could they tie up next to that big ship over there? The harbor patrol approved, and the Intrepid’s crew had already passed lines to the Philadelphia when a guard raised the alarm.
The Intrepid’s raiding party immediately swarmed from below decks. With Decatur in the lead, they scrambled up the side of the larger ship and used cutlasses, pikes, and hatchets to attack the Tripolitan guards. 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 in the Philadelphia, the men climbed down steep ladders and raced along low passageways through dark lower decks. Soon fire coursed through the Philadelphia. Orange flames leapt out of her hatches and climbed her masts. Acrid smoke lay low across her deck, choking the raiding party and making it hard for them to find their way back to the Intrepid. They had to do that in a hurry, because the fire was so fierce it threatened to burn their own ship.
The men tumbled back down into the Intrepid, and Decatur was the last man off. As they pushed away from the Philadelphia and hoisted their sails, the ships guarding the harbor began to fire on them. Shore batteries opened fire, too, and cannon balls plummeted about them, sending up cascading fountains of water.
To the raiding party’s surprise, heavy guns also opened fire from close behind. 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 terrific explosion. One of her captured crew, held prisoner in the city, 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 it because 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.
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 revised his lyrics. And so Francis Scott Key took a song about Stephen Decatur and wrote “The Star Spangled Banner.”
