“The chilling waves almost congealed our blood,” wrote Ray. “The Turks seemed more than ordinarily cruel, exulting in our sufferings. We were kept in the water from sunrise until about two o’clock, before we had a mouthful to eat, or were permitted to sun ourselves.”
The guards then ordered the kitchen-help prisoners to bring out some loaves of coarse black bread, some water, and a jug of aqua-deut to pass around. The men, during their break, ran in place, clapped hands, and did everything to get warm. The guards then forced them again into the water to work until sunset, when they were marched soaking wet into the glare of the setting sun back to the prison barracks. Since none of the prisoners had a change of clothes, they all slept in an inescapable dampness curled on the ground without any blankets. That night, William Ray prayed to die in his sleep “that I might never experience the horrors of another morning.”
This grim routine continued, made grimmer by the handful of turn-Turks in their midst. The men found it easy to hate the five renegades who wore Moslem clothes and ordered them about. But there was another kind of villain in their midst as well, a subtler one.
Carpenter William Godby, the same man who had mishandled the scuttling of the ship, had accepted the Bashaw’s offer to work for wages. (The Bashaw didn’t force any of the officers to do labor; almost all refused, preferring idleness to indignity. Bainbridge and Porter opened an informal school for the midshipmen; they also put on theatrical skits to pass the time.) Godby, whether building gunboats for the Bashaw or repairing wrecks, rode the crew hard, “as cruel to our men . . . as any of the other drivers,” according to Ray.
Godby earned more than $100 for his various services; one night he came back to the officers’ quarters a bit tipsy and started bragging about his pay and privileges. U.S. Marine Sergeant David Irving and two others ragged Godby over helping the enemy. Insults led to blows, and the threesome beat up Godby. The following morning, the carpenter asked for an audience with the Bashaw. Turbaned Swedish turncoat John Wilson translated the man’s complaints. (Aboard ship, Sergeant Irving had once ordered Wilson lashed for interfering with a sentry on duty, so Wilson no doubt magnified Irving’s crimes.) The Bashaw ordered all three Americans immediately bastinadoed. “They were all most unmercifully beaten on the soles of their feet and on their posteriors,” wrote Ray, “and then hampered with a huge chain at each leg and sent to prison with us where they remained for one night.”
Disgusted, Private Ray observed that while the crew was “compelled to work or perish in tortures,” Godby, on the other hand, “was under no compulsion but solicited the undertaking.”
This distinction raises an interesting point, one close to the heart of hard men like William Eaton and Edward Preble. The generally accepted rules of warfare at the time called for enemy combatants taken in war to be held as prisoners, to be exchanged at a later date. Part of the reason the Barbary Coast pirates instilled such fear was that they refused to treat captured enemy soldiers as prisoners of war but instead called them “slaves,” forcing them to work and often threatening to auction them off.
On February 15, a remarkable month-old letter from Commodore Preble arrived in Tripoli, addressed to the entire crew of sailors and marines. (Preble gave Captain Bainbridge discretion as to whether or not to deliver this letter.)
The United States was a young country founded on precedent-breaking ideas, with a strong strain of not wanting to follow the tired lead of Europe. The commodore here displays a staunch New England demand for resistance, in tones reminiscent of Consul William Eaton when he declared he would rather be “impaled” than run an errand for the Dey of Algiers.
Preble wrote:
Altho’ the fortune of War has made you prisoners to the Bashaw of Tripoly, it has not made you his Slaves—Whether you will be Slaves or Not, depends on yourselves. Your determination not to work will be proper, and if the Bashaw should attempt compulsion by punishing you for a refusal, I shall retaliate on his Subjects which I now have and which may hereafter come into my possession.
If you conduct [yourselves] properly, you will in due time be redeemed and restored to your friends, and entitled to receive full pay from the time of your capture to your arrival in the United States. In the mean time every proper means will be taken for clothing and keeping you as comfortable as circumstances will admit of, but should any of you voluntarily engage your services to the Enemy, and afterwards fall into the hands of your justly incensed Country Men you will undoubtedly suffer death agreeable to the laws of the United States.