Ray, who had wanted to be a newspaperman, captured the scene.
His throne on which he was seated, was raised about four feet from the surface, inlaid with mosaic, covered with a cushion of the richest velvet, fringed with cloth of gold, bespangled with brilliants [jewels]. The floor of the hall was variegated marble, spread with carpets of the most beautiful kind. The walls were of porcelain, fantastically enameled but too finical to be called elegant. The bashaw made a very splendid and tawdry appearance. His vesture was a long robe of cerulean silk, embroidered with gold and glittering tinsel. His broad belt was ornamented with diamonds, and held two gold-mounted pistols, and a sabre with a golden hilt, chain and scabbard. On his head, he wore a large white turban decorated with ribbons. His dark beard swept his breast. He is about five feet ten inches in height, rather corpulent, and of a manly majestic deportment. When he had satiated his pride and curiosity by gazing on us with complacent triumph, we were ordered to follow a guard.
Bashaw Yussef was ecstatic at the victory granted him by Allah. He told diplomats that he felt deeply indebted to his local marabout, or Moslem holyman, for he believed that the man’s prayers had delivered, like a present, almost gift-wrapped, an armed American frigate.
Guards crammed the soaking wet American crewmen into a chamber that barely had room enough for them to stand. Slaves, most from Naples or Malta, came with bundles of tattered but dry clothes to exchange for the Americans’ wet garments. The prisoners naïvely expected their own clothes to be returned; instead, they were sold to Jewish merchants, who would later offer to sell them back to the American prisoners at a steep premium.
Near midnight, soldiers herded the American sailors to a covered piazza, walled on three sides but open on the fourth to the sea winds. Their just-received “new” clothes did little to keep them warm. The prisoners, such as seventeen-year-old Thomas Prince from Rhode Island, curled up shivering and tried to sleep on the frigid tile floors.
The loss of the Philadelphia and its 307 crewmen and officers on Kaliusa Reef in Tripoli harbor marked a national disaster for the young United States. The Bashaw, a wily and worthy adversary, would set his first ransom demand for the American slaves at $1,690,000, more than the entire military budget of the United States.
Navy officers like the fierce Captain John Rodgers would beg for the chance to attack Tripoli to avenge and free his comrades; diplomats such as Tobias Lear, a Harvard graduate, yearned for the glory of negotiating their release. But the man who would one day speed their freedom more than all others was a stubby disgraced former army officer on his way to the nation’s new capital, Washington City.
CHAPTER 2
Washington City
If the Congress do not consent that the government shall send a force into the Mediterranean to check the insolence of these scoundrels and to render the United States respectable, I hope they will resolve at their next session to wrest the quiver of arrows from the left talon of the [American] Eagle . . . and substitute a fiddle bow or a cigar in lieu.
—WILLIAM EATON
VISITORS WHO HAD SEEN grandiose maps of the nation’s new capital were flummoxed on arrival, some even asking where Washington City was, while standing in the middle of it. Pennsylvania Avenue was a triumphant three miles long but contained only a handful of unfinished and gargantuan neoclassical buildings. These stood out like bizarre experiments in the swampy greenery, like wishful thinking for a toddler nation. That “Goose Creek” had been renamed the “Tiber” said it all.
No bridge crossed the Potomac, and fewer than 5,000 people lived in the humid district that ex-surveyor George Washington had personally selected because of the site’s commercial potential as a river-and-sea port. (While General George lived, the place was called “Federal City”; the river traffic bonanza never materialized thanks to waterfalls, mudbanks, and dangerous currents at Greenleaf’s Point.) With building going so slowly, land values had crashed, and empty shacks tilted against unfinished brick edifices. “It looks like a deserted city,” wrote one senator. Hunters shot quail near the president’s house. Running water connected to indoor plumbing remained a dream, as did the hope for rows of retail shops. Many of the thirty-four senators stayed at the same overpriced boardinghouses, and often, more politics happened there over ham and peas than at the half-built, wing-less Capitol; entertainment consisted of the Marine Band and itinerant jugglers and actors visiting the Washington Theater; there was little to do there but drink, drink more, talk, or wait for the next government meeting. Congressmen were so exasperated with the discomfort and dullness of the place that they soon introduced a bill to move the nation’s capital to that nearby metropolis, Baltimore.