To Western eyes, such as Ray’s, Tripoli appeared like a page out of the Arabian Nights. Camels turned the city’s flour mill. Wealthy turbaned men congregated daily at the centre-ville coffee house to smoke six-foot-long pipes and drink coffee while slaves fanned away flies. The Bashaw’s dinner table was nine inches high, and he ate there sitting cross-legged. Moslem women glided like Cyclopian ghosts through the streets while (comparatively) brazen Jewish women showed both eyes and even their entire faces. Jewish men, constrained by law to wear black, were forced to walk barefoot whenever they passed the street outside a mosque. The slave market sold whites as well as blacks. The sounds of Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Italian, and Lingua Franca collided in the streets.
During his second week there, Ray, returning from drawing water, passed through the main city gate when he saw a hand and a foot hanging from a wall “fresh bleeding.” Ray noticed a crowd gathering and walked over. “The object of their curiosity was a wretch with his left hand and right foot recently amputated, faint and almost expiring . . . the stumps had been dipped in boiling pitch.” Ray failed to learn the man’s crime, but he discovered this extreme punishment was not rare. “You will see a great number of men in Tripoli hobbling about the street thus mutilated.”
How a man reacts to his enslavement reveals much about his character. Some prisoners were meek and obsequious to the guards; others refused even to doff their caps and took a beating for it. Ray, a somewhat despondent bookish man, was amazed by the upbeat behavior of most of the crew. The ones forced to work repairing Philadelphia smuggled salt pork back to their friends. (The meat was gnawed raw then swallowed, and hunger made it taste “delicious.”) And Ray observed that the American sailors, now slaves, “would caper, sing, jest, and look as cheerful, many of them, as if they had been at a feast or wedding.”
But when Ray soon learned details of the officers’ lives in captivity, he was infuriated. (In truth, it didn’t take much to infuriate Ray.) The officers, staying at the spacious former American consulate, had an ample diet of meat and fruits. They did not have to work. Bainbridge quickly arranged a line of credit through the kindly Danish consul, Nicholas Nissen, who also supplied the officers with blankets, provisions, books, paper, ink, quills. (Few, if any, of the navy men realized that it was William Eaton’s generosity in brokering the return at face value of six Danish ships captured by Tunis in 1801 that had first kindled the friendship of Denmark.)
While the officers had plenty of food and leisure time, they were hampered in one regard. They lacked clothes, since most of their uniforms had been stolen. The foreign minister of Tripoli, in an apparent show of sympathy, offered to find their uniforms and return them. Mohammed Dghies did in fact locate twelve trunks and he offered to deliver them for . . . $1,500, payable over time. The officers declined. And Jewish merchants also tracked down jackets and trousers and shirts, but their prices were so “enormous,” in the words of one officer, that few bothered to buy their own clothes back.
Physical comforts, helpful Danes, bottles of Madeira, however, could not wash away their frustration and disappointment over what had happened to their frigate. From the first moment of captivity, Captain William Bainbridge was tormented by his surrender. From the roof, he could see Philadelphia. On the very first day, he wrote an extraordinary letter to his wife in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, one that would not arrive for almost six months. While his navigational and leadership skills might be questioned, William Bainbridge here shows himself as an articulate, at times eloquent, letter writer, and a master at shaping a tale.
My Dear Susan,
With feelings of distress which I cannot describe, I have to inform you, that I have lost the beautiful frigate which was placed under my command, by running her a-foul of rocks, a few miles to the east of this harbour, which are not marked on any charts. After defending her as long as a ray of hope remained, I was obliged to surrender, and am now with officers and crew confined in a prison in this place.
My anxiety and affliction does not arise from my confinement and deprivations in prison—these, indeed, I could bear if ten times more severe; but is caused by my absence, which may be a protracted one, from my dearly beloved Susan; and an apprehension which constantly haunts me, that I may be censured by my countrymen. These impressions, which are seldom absent from my mind, act as a corroding canker at my heart. So maddened am I sometimes by the workings of my imagination, that I cannot refrain from exclaiming that it would have been a merciful dispensation of Providence if my head had been shot off by the enemy, while our vessel lay rolling on the rocks.