Now, on the evening of September 2, Preble hoped to deal the deathblow and demonstrate that the United States could indeed crush Tripoli. Wrote Consul Zuchet:
At 9 P.M. a blaze could be seen between the reefs that frame this port, as if a barrel had caught fire. An explosion was followed by a noise as though several enormous bombs had blown up simultaneously and at the same instant, the air was filled with grenades. The force of this noise was so horrific that it caused the earth to tremble for two miles around the city. At first, we didn’t know what to make of it all; the next day, we were assured that it was a small boat that Commodore Preble had tried to slip into the port with the idea, possibly, of destroying all the Bashaw’s sloops and gunboats, that were tucked under his castle and also to make the castle itself flip in the air. It’s impossible to know how the fire got started on the boat which is here dubbed an “Infernal”; apparently it was accidentally caused by those who guided her. The Bashaw, who went to the spot where the fire was seen in order to try to figure out what had happened, saw there the hulk of the boat sunk to the bottom. The Tripolitans also retrieved 14 dead bodies, including a mutilated one, discovered willy-nilly along the border of the reefs.
The Bashaw ordered all of the bodies transported to his arsenal. There, from his balcony, he amused himself by watching his people hurl curses and insults at the corpses. He wanted to share this spectacle with Captain Bainbridge under the pretext of letting him see whether he recognized anyone among the dead. Bainbridge identified an officer [Richard Somers] and begged the Bashaw for permission to bury him in a grave. The request was refused. The remains of these human beings were not buried until after three days later, when the greater part of them had been devoured by dogs.
Preble had failed; Yussef Karamanli of Tripoli was still unrepentant. Zuchet, a longtime observer, felt the Bashaw was becoming even more mercurial and violent. “One never knows what to expect from a prince with such a personality as this . . . one hears of nothing but murders and the most atrocious outrages. . . . Who can feel safe after these fine exploits of his? and after he has bragged, even publicly, that there are easy ways for him to avenge himself on anyone, indeed that he can cause accidents to occur without it ever being attributed to him.”
The United States had found a surprisingly resilient enemy in Bashaw Yussef. His knack for brutality and duplicity, while certainly a hallmark of most petty despots, amounted to something of a Karamanli family tradition. Yussef’s great-grandfather, Ahmed I, in fact founded the family dynasty in 1711 through a brutal trick.
For almost two millennia, this region (Tripoli in Jefferson’s day, Libya today) was juggled about by various foreign interlopers: first Greeks, then Romans, Goths, Arabian Moslems, and then, among others, neighboring Tunisians, Sicilian Normans, and Maltese knights, until finally the Turks of the vast Ottoman Empire subdued the territory in the 1550s. The Grand Sultan in Istanbul appointed a pasha (bashaw) and sent Janissaries (the Turkish elite warrior class) to maintain his grip; tribute would be squeezed out and siphoned to Istanbul.
Then came Karamanli. The leader of a small local army, Ahmed Karamanli had won a violent civil war in 1711 and claimed the throne. However, he knew his hold on power remained tenuous so long as the Turkish Janissaries still thrived and swore loyalty to the Sultan. So, pretending to crave their blessing for his rule, he invited them to a peace-making banquet.
The turbaned Janissaries, aboard jeweled mounts, toting silver-hilted scimitars, arrived at Bashaw Ahmed’s summer palace. In typical North African style, high windowless walls surrounded a central courtyard, where Ahmed, with salaams upon his lips, graciously greeted his guests. The loud thump of drums and squeal of stringed instruments, signs of a raucous party, drowned out his words of welcome. The smell of delicately spiced lamb enticed the guests inward. Each Janissary passed from the courtyard into the hallway that led to the banquet rooms. The doors shut behind them. There in the shadows lurked the Bashaw’s black slaves, his loyal palace guards, who quickly strangled each Janissary and dragged away the body. More guests arrived, more corpses slid along the tiled floors. That night, three hundred Janissaries died, and Ahmed gained a lock upon power for his family that would last more than a century. He looted all the officers’ homes and shrewdly shipped half the booty to Istanbul to placate the Sultan.
For the next two generations in Tripoli, succession flowed easily, and the nation thrived. Then came the three current brothers: Hassan, Hamet, and Yussef. All grew up as pampered princelings; when Hamet married a Circassian bride, the jewels laced into her hair weighed so much that they kept tipping her head backward.