The city of Tripoli stood about three miles away. The enemy ship looked too far ahead to catch. Captain Bainbridge granted Lieutenant Porter permission to fire a few more rounds before heading out to sea. Porter, not shy, unleashed quite a few. A diplomat in town hearing the last burst of cannon fire called it a “fanfaronade,” that is, a braggadocio, or a mad fanfare of farewell.
Porter then relayed the captain’s order to haul the ship about and head out to sea. The topgallant sails used in the chase were furled, ropes were tied to change the angle of the sails. Bainbridge sent Porter up the mizzen topmast, the sternmost of the three masts, so he could use the spyglass to assess the vessels in Tripoli harbor as the Philadelphia headed back out to sea.
Lieutenant Porter, in his blue uniform with a single gold epaulet, was halfway up the mizzen rigging, about seventy-five feet above the deck, when he felt himself flung forward hard. Porter gripped the ropes as they flung him backward now.
The Philadelphia had beached itself on an uncharted reef; the bow rode up on this shelf of sand and rested several feet above its normal water level. Bainbridge later said he couldn’t have been more surprised than if this had occurred in the middle of the ocean.
In the first moment of shock, Captain Bainbridge coolly gave the next order: full sail ahead to try to surmount and pass the reef.
Bainbridge hadn’t ordered any soundings to determine the height of the reef fore or aft, or to ascertain where the deep water lay. The ship, with wind in its sails, rose up and beached itself higher on the reef. Lieutenant Porter would later confirm Bainbridge’s command at a Court of Inquiry. “All sails were instantly set to force her over the bank,” testified Lieutenant Porter, who added a touch cattily: “After this did not succeed, Captain Bainbridge asked the witness’s opinion.”
At that moment, the Tripoli blockade runner, which had been darting away, now hove to and rolled out its guns for the first time. A couple miles beyond that vessel, more than a dozen ships bobbed inside Tripoli harbor. (The U.S. schooner Vixen would have come in handy now, but Bainbridge had sent it away toward Tunis two weeks earlier to scout for other ships.)
Philadelphia was stuck in Tripoli. Anyone on duty in the Mediterranean knew the consequences of being captured: Barbary slavery. For many of the 307 men aboard, it evoked a greater fear than shipwreck, which brought quick death, because Barbary slavery was portrayed as long, humiliating death-in-life.
In colonial days, preacher Cotton Mather had described Barbary slaves as living for years in dug-out pits with a crosshatch of bars above, and their taskmasters were “barbarous negroes.” Galley slaves also lived to tell of being chained naked to an oar, forced to row ten hours at a stretch. Slaves, facing forward, pushed the forty-foot-long oars by rocking back to near horizontal, as though in a grotesque limbo contest, and then lurching with full strength, again and again. During hard chases, they were sustained by a wine-soaked rag shoved in their mouths.
Accounts of North African slave auctions showed white Americans treated like black slaves. Rituals varied, but in one account an American stated that after being purchased: “[I] was forced to lie down in the street and take the foot of my new master and place it upon my neck.” Another described being forced to lick the dust along a thirty-foot path to the throne of the Dey of Algiers.
John Foss survived captivity in Algiers, and his popular account ran in several American newspapers in the late 1790s, fleshing out the nightmare. He wrote of prisoners routinely shackled with forty-pound chains, forced to perform sunrise-to-sunset labor ranging from digging out sewers to hauling enormous rocks for a harbor jetty. He matter-of-factly described the most common Barbary punishment for light infractions: bastinado of 150 strokes. “The person is laid upon his face, with his hands in irons behind him and his legs lashed together with a rope. One taskmaster holds down his head and another his legs, while two others inflict the punishment upon his breech [his buttocks] with sticks, some what larger than an ox goad. After he has received one half in this manner, they lash his ankles to a pole, and two Turks [Moslems] lift the pole up, and hold it in such a manner, as brings the soles of his feet upward, and the remainder of his punishment, he receives upon the soles of his feet.”
American and European accounts depicted a slave’s life in Barbary as an unending hell of tortures, including the bastinado (left) and forced circumcision (right).
With cheery thoughts such as these running through their heads, the crew and officers of Philadelphia worked desperately to free the 150-foot-long vessel off Kaliusa Reef.