Dawn Like Thunder

The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the U.S. Navy

Glenn Tucker

• Publisher: Burtyrki Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839742071
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Dawn like Thunder: The Barbary Wars and the Birth of the U.S. Navy, first published in 1963, is the definitive account of the fledgling Navy and Marine Corps of the United States in the early 1800s. The book details the struggle of American ships such as the USS Constitution and Constellation against the pirates and Muslim warlords of the Mediterranean and North Africa in what would become known as the Barbary Wars. Also covered are the key players of the time, from presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, to talented naval officers such as Edward Preble and Stephen Decatur. In addition, the ongoing political battles to obtain funding for the Navy and the construction of needed ships are described. Author Glenn Tucker (1892-1976) conducted extensive research in the preparation of Dawn like Thunder, including research at the archives in Tripoli; he was the author of more than a dozen books on American history.

CHAPTER ONE — New Colors in a Far Port

The clear, languid dawn of November 9, 1800, crept out of the Bosporus and across the Sea of Marmora and revealed to early watchers along the shore a strange ship riding at anchor inside the Golden Horn.

She had come up under darkness, at 10 o’clock on the night before, and now at daybreak she flew from her mizzenmast a novel flag of red and white stripes and white stars on a field of blue, colors unknown in these waters.

The American frigate George Washington, of 24 guns, Captain William Bainbridge commanding, out of Philadelphia, was calling on official business at the Sublime Porte.

Across the city seated on its rolling hills sounded the long, singsong wails of the Moslem priests, calling plaintively from the rooftops, towers, and mosques, notifying the faithful that Allah had bequeathed a new day.

Scarcely were these morning supplications ended and faces turned from Mecca to matters close at hand, when a harbor patrol boat put out from the waterfront castle. Coming alongside the American ship, the captain of the harbor hailed the impertinent newcomer who had penetrated unannounced to the very heart of the Ottoman power, and now held beneath her guns the sacred mosque of Mohammed the Conquerer, Standard Bearer of the Prophet, and the art and treasures of the Moslem world. Captain Bainbridge replied politely that the colors he flew were those of the United States of America. The inquiring officer wasted no time in conversation but turned his boat back toward the shore.

Bainbridge had displayed considerable daring in venturing unheralded into the harbor of Constantinople and might expect to face any consequence, considering that the world was being torn apart by Napoleon’s wars, which had fallen with early fury on the Near East. Anywhere in the Levant, unfamiliar elements might be looked on with suspicion. He had effected his passage of the Dardanelles, where it was the imperious rule of the Porte that all vessels must be inspected and those cleared be given the required passport before entering the Sea of Marmora, by a ruse characteristic of the resourcefulness of early American seamanship.

Never before, as long as memory, record, or tradition extended back into Constantinople history, to the year 1453 when the Ottoman’s overran the ancient seat of Greek and Roman power, had an armed foreign vessel entered the harbor of the Golden Horn without having first been granted leave at the Dardanelles way station, two powerful fortresses overlooking both sides of the narrows near the entrance to the historic strait. What a visitor required was a firman, the distinctive passport of royal decree, issued by the Grand Seignior himself, the Sultan of the Turks.

But Bainbridge was concerned neither with inviolable precept nor Oriental form. He was on a mission which from the beginning had irked his sensibilities and galled his ardent patriotism and he wanted to be done with it with the least possible delay. He was justifiably apprehensive. He had learned back in Algiers that he would probably be compelled to remain in the strait until word of his approach could be carried to Constantinople and the willingness of the government to receive him ascertained. He was taking no chances that his ship might not be cleared and that his long, tedious voyage thus would be rendered fruitless.

As he approached the towering citadel which guarded his side of the passage of the Dardanelles, he directed his crew to scurry across the decks and give evidence that they were taking in sail, indicating that the George Washington would heave to and inquire the pleasure of the Turkish commander. Then he began firing a salute—of eight guns, according to the ship’s log.

Quickly the fort returned the salute. Bainbridge counted six guns, but they were enough that both ship and fort were soon enveloped in heavy billowing smoke. Under this screen, undetected by the shore batteries, unsuspected by the Turkish captain, the American commander had his seamen hurriedly load on canvas and speed the frigate forward.

Thus, behind the smoke clouds, the George Washington moved fleetingly and gracefully out of range. She had already doubled a protecting promontory before the perplexed Turkish commander understood the wily American’s stratagem. Bainbridge had a notation entered in his log that the castles “have the Outward appearance of Being very Strong,” with eight tiers of guns, the lowest tier being on the water’s edge. They were reputed at the time to throw the largest shot in the world, even to cannon balls with a diameter of three feet!

Midshipman Benjamin Page, of Providence, Rhode Island, who kept the log, either was a student of the classics—though his syntax and spelling would not suggest familiarity with his hometown college of Brown or nearby Harvard or Yale—or else he had a translation of Homer on board, for he was entranced with landmarks of the great conflict of Greek against Trojan as he went through the Aegean and Dardanelles. He took note during the voyage of Tenedos, “opposite which stood famous Troy”; of Mount Ida “where the Gods Assembled to view the Battle”; and of the island of Lemnos “where they fed there [sic] horses of Nectar and Ambrosia—the Island where Vulcan Lit when he fell from Heaven and Established his forge.”

Now that the George Washington was securely in the harbor, how the Turkish government would receive her was any sailors guess. Soon the dispatch boat returned with the startling message for Captain Bainbridge that neither his flag nor the nation of the United States of which he spoke had ever been heard of by the Turkish government before. He was directed to be more specific in explaining whence he came. All that the captain could do was append to his earlier communication a short lesson in history and geography. He said he and his vessel were from the New World which Christopher Columbus long since had discovered far across the seas.

Several hours passed. All aboard the George Washington waited patiently in the lower harbor. Finally the dispatch boat put out again and this time the harbor captain, serving as emissary for the Sublime Porte, deigned to set foot on freshly scrubbed New World timber, while behind him came porters bearing to the frigate’s deck the symbolic gifts of a lamb and a bouquet of flowers, the first offered as a token of peace, the second an expression of welcome. Obviously someone had been found in Constantinople, and perhaps it was the Sultan himself, a ruler enlightened above most Oriental despots of his day, who had heard something about George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and the United States of America.

By order of the Sultan, the captain of the harbor was to conduct the frigate to the upper bay, and this he did at considerable leisure several days later. Bainbridge, in evidence of his appreciation, fired the recognized international salute of twenty-one guns as he sailed past the royal palace, an act for which the Sultan later made known his gratification. The ship moved about a mile up the harbor and was moored at 3:00 p.m., on November 15.

Thus for the first time in history, by chance rather than orders, without diplomatic exchanges or prearrangement, without the assent of either of the governments involved, an American warship visited the capital city of the Ottoman Empire, and gave visible notice to the Mohammedan world of the birth of the Western republic.

The George Washington—and what name could have been more appropriate for such a pioneering event?—stood at the meeting place of East and West, the crossroads of the ages, inside the great harbor of the Golden Horn, five miles wide, big enough to accommodate all the frigates of both the Old World and the New. She was peacefully at anchor in front of this vast city of Mussulmans, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews: the ancient Byzantium of the Greeks; a city reared to world splendor by the Vision of the Flaming Cross; mother of law and of the concept of society founded on a code of equal justice. Justice!—a word synonymous with an era of her imperial past. Nursemaid of learning, theology, and the arts. City of the impregnable citadel, held in turn throughout the centuries for Zeus, Jupiter, God, and Allah, but fortress indeed for any god, where a few might hope to stand off a million, guarded by the moat of the Bosporus in front and the natural bastions of looming hills behind.

Bainbridge could well note that almost from the beginning all adventurers had come this way. Here Jason passed in the first war galley, the Argos, created by Athena for the seekers of the Golden Fleece. Here dwelt the Harpies who harassed blind King Phineus. Here, much more securely recorded, Xenophon led his ten thousand Greeks. Here and along the Dardanelles—the Hellespont of the Greeks, the crossing place of Helle, daughter of the cloud goddess—the phantasies of antiquity gave way to the accepted versions of history; legend merged into reality, myth yielded to verity, the recited narrative became the written word. Here Constantine conquered, Theodora lived, Theodosius the Great ruled the better part of the world. Through Constantinople, Tancred, Bohemond, Geoffrey, and Saint Giles rode with their iron men of the First Crusade. Here the splendid warrior Suleiman “the Magnificent” dreamed with his viziers and admirals of the triumph of Islam and planned campaigns that carried the armies of the Prophet to the walls of Vienna and Ratisbon.

Yet probably none of these fancies of long-cherished lore or actual occurrences of ancient, medieval, and modern times was more far-reaching in significance in the long story of human progress than this chance, unacclaimed, trifling arrival of a single frigate from a faraway shore, if it may be considered that the raising of the American flag on the mizzenmast of the George Washington gave notice to all ancient realms and distant peoples of the birth of the new American Republic. The United States, daughter of time, latest of the eager offspring of the ages, was announcing its fresh, youthful entry, to bid feebly at first, mightily in the end, for a place among the world powers.

Probably the Sultan’s decision to accept the uninvited Americans and welcome them cordially was based not so much on prescience as on the caprice of the moment. He liked Bainbridge’s flag. As he had scanned the ship from his palace when it came up the bay, he had noticed the stars in the blue field and had commented that the flag of the United States, like that of Turkey, was decorated with heavenly bodies, a coincidence which might be a harbinger of cordial relations between the two nations in future times. Most flags had national insignia or royal coats of arms. Not the American or Turkish. He even went so far as to venture that because of the similarity of the ensigns some affinity in laws and customs must exist between the Moslems and Americans!

Selim III was as good a sultan as the circumstances of the age and the caprices of the Janissaries would permit. Admirous of the cultural distinction that had been won by the French court during the passing century, he aspired to establish French modes and introduce literature and the arts into his physically elegant portal city between East and West. With unusual perception and tolerance, he strove to lift the level of common education among the Turks, where illiteracy was almost the universal rule, and was making strenuous efforts to establish schools and procure Western instructors.

Of equal significance as a measure of popular reform, he was struggling to break the ages-old control of the Janissaries. This austere, rigorously trained and sternly disciplined body of troops, composed mostly of Christian Albanians and Bulgars, was supposed to serve the Ottoman Empire as a hard core of defense, but judged that the best manner of serving was by controlling it. Selim would eventually learn that he could not suppress the Janissaries, who had four centuries of power behind them and nearly three decades ahead. For his efforts to reduce them and break them, his eunuchs would find his richly clad figure on the divan of his seraglio one morning, with a silken cord around his throat.

Undoubtedly the most disconcerting aspect to the Porte involved in the sudden appearance of the American frigate was that the Turkish fleet was absent. Spacious as might be the harbor, it gave berth to few Moslem warships of consequence. The great Turkish fleet, of numerous ships of the line and frigates and a swarm of lesser craft, which would remain one of the most powerful in the world until it encountered Sir Edward Codrington twenty-seven years later in Navarino Bay, was cruising, intent on mopping-up exercises among the Ionian Isles. Under the command of the Capudan Pasha Hassan, Grand Admiral and brother-in-law of the Sultan, it was seeking isolated pockets of the French invaders who had been brought to the Near East by Napoleons dream of conquest, and left behind when the vision of Oriental empire vanished in the smoke at Acre. The fleet was not expected to return for at least twenty days.

The Sublime Porte was involved at the moment in the most peculiar alliance of its history, a league of the Mussulman and the Slav, which disclosed how the genius of the Corsican might induce desperate enemies to lodge in the same barracks room and mess on victuals from the same galley. A rapport had been established between Turkey and Russia the year before, after nearly a century of conflict. The succession of eighteenth-century wars between the sultans and the czars had been touched off when Charles XII of Sweden, fleeing from Peter of Russia after the disastrous defeat of the Swedes at Poltava, gained sanctuary with Ahmed III. Russian soldiers pursued him across the Turkish border, and the conflicts unloosened came to afflict the Mediterranean shores from Venice to Suez and inland Europe from Vienna to the Caspian Sea.

Now that Bonaparte, a more flashing meteor than Charles XII, was streaking across the military heavens, and since he had deluged the Near East with blood, triumphed over the Mamelukes before the Pyramids, invaded Syria, and threatened to found a new empire in the Levant, Turkey and Russia had united their naval forces for common security. Turkey had fought the heavy part of the desperate war against the Corsican, whose flaming triumphs had announced him to the Ottomans as the “Sultan of Fire” and the “Favorite of Victory.”

Aided by British artillerists and engineers, and fortified by the great resolution of Admiral Sir Sidney Smith, the alliance had eventually turned Acre into a French shambles when the loss of that city probably would have laid all Turkey at the invaders feet. Now that Napoleon had returned to France for greater glories on European battlefields, and since Britain was preparing an army for Egypt, and Turkey and Russia were acting in concert, French influence was weakening in the Near East.

But Bainbridge was visiting an Old World still desperately engaged in conflict. Already the new century—if the year 1800 may be regarded as the beginning of the new and not the end of the old—had been stained red at Marengo and would get another blood bath before the years end at Hohenlinden. The capable French General Kléber, left behind in Egypt, had won another resounding victory over the Turks at sanguinary Heliopolis, then had been stabbed by an Arab assassin—an act which presaged the loss of Egypt to France. In the autumn of 1800, when Bainbridge was crossing the Mediterranean and sailing through the Dardanelles, Lord Nelson, having cleansed the eastern Mediterranean of the French fleet, was making his way by easy land journeys from Naples toward England, feted at all stops for his great triumph in the Battle of the Nile.

Still, enough remained to be done to keep the Turkish fleet employed. For eight days the George Washington lay in the harbor of Constantinople, awaiting the pleasure of the Sultan, who in turn awaited the return of his Grand Admiral before entering into matters connected with the visit of the American frigate.

Meantime Captain Bainbridge was visited by the dragoman of the Reis Effendi, the principal civil officer of the Turkish government, who put the American at once on the defensive by inquiring if he did not know that such an office existed. Bainbridge, perceiving there was surely no greater affront in his lack of familiarity with the Reis Effendi than there was in the ignorance of Turkish officialdom about the existence of the United States, replied that he did not. Thereupon the dragoman advised him that he had sailed stealthily into Constantinople Harbor without the advance knowledge or assent of the Ottoman power, then had compounded his disrespect with dereliction by failing to report himself to the proper governmental authority, an oversight and indignity which called for reparation. Consequently, the Reis Effendi summoned the American to appear before him at 10 o’clock on the following morning. It looked as if a fine were in contemplation. When Bainbridge asserted that appearing was the very last thing he had in mind to do, the dragoman advised him that the commands of such a notable official as the Reis Effendi were not to be dismissed so lightly.

A lone American commander in a strange distant port, Bainbridge was sufficiently concerned that he determined to solicit advice. In Algiers he had obtained from the American consul, Richard O’Brien, letters of introduction to diplomatic representatives of some o...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• CHAPTER ONE - New Colors in a Far Port
• CHAPTER TWO - A Firman Bridles the Dey
• CHAPTER THREE - Piracy, Habit of a Hungry Shore
• CHAPTER FOUR - To Repel Force by Force
• CHAPTER FIVE - The Building of the Ships
• CHAPTER SIX - Two Poets and a Peace
• CHAPTER SEVEN - Bribes, Tributes, Insults, Haggles
• CHAPTER EIGHT - The Fleet Goes Out
• CHAPTER NINE - An Arm’s-Length Blockade
• CHAPTER TEN - The Battle of the Feluccas
• CHAPTER ELEVEN - Preble Enforces Peace with Morocco
• CHAPTER TWELVE - The Tripolitans Capture the Philadelphia
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Tripoli and the Karamanlis
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN - The Captives
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Preble’s Preparations
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Burning the Philadelphia
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - The Battle of the Gunboats
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Preble Bombards Tripoli
• CHAPTER NINETEEN - Somers and the Intrepid
• CHAPTER TWENTY - The Passing of Preble
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - Eaton’s Quest for Bashaw Hamet
• CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - The March Across the Libyan Sands
• CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - The Amazing Capture of Derna
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - Tobias Lear and Peace at a Price
• CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - Reward and Neglect
• CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - Decatur and Peace Without Price
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY