Time Surfing: Experience History.
Historical Backrop
In the autumn of 1803 the 36-gun American frigate Philadelphia chased a corsair too close to shore, struck an uncharted reef off Tripoli, and was captured with her whole crew — 307 men, including Captain William Bainbridge — dragged into the Bashaw’s dungeons. The captured frigate, refloated and moored under the guns of the castle, was now the most powerful warship in Barbary hands. Commodore Edward Preble decided she had to be destroyed. He gave the job to 25-year-old Lieutenant Stephen Decatur Jr., who volunteered, and to a small captured Tripolitan ketch renamed Intrepid with seventy-some volunteers. The only man aboard not an American was Salvador Catalano, a 43-year-old Sicilian merchant pilot from Palermo, hired because he knew the reefs of Tripoli harbor by heart and could speak enough Arabic to talk his way past a sentry in the dark.
Date/time and location: 16 February 1804, 4:40 a.m. — aboard the ketch Intrepid, roughly eighteen miles north-northeast of Tripoli, Mediterranean Sea
You wake because a rat runs over your ankle. There is no room to sit up. Seventy-five men are packed into a sixty-ton ketch built for a dozen, and you are wedged between a water cask and a sleeping gunner’s mate whose breath is sour with spoiled beef. The hold stinks of bilge, tar, wet wool, vomit and the cargo the Tripolitans left behind. You crawl up the ladder for air. The deck is cold and slick with dew. Sixteen days at sea now, eight of them hove-to in a gale that nearly drove you onto the shoals you are supposed to pilot the ship through tonight. You put your hand on the tiller out of habit, taste salt on your cracked lips, and watch the black east for a line of grey.
Date/time and location: 16 February 1804, 7:15 a.m. — masthead of the Intrepid, standing in toward the Barbary coast
You climb the mainmast because no American aboard can read this coastline. Twenty feet up, the swell throws you against the shrouds and the tarred rope burns the inside of your knees. From here you see it: a low white smear on the horizon, the flat roofs of Tripoli, three minarets, and the mole. And there — bare poles, a frigate’s proportions, wrong among the lateen rigs. Philadelphia. You count reefs by the color of the water, brown-green over the Kaliusa, deep blue in the channel. Astern, the brig Siren keeps her distance, disguised, her gunports painted over to look like a fat merchantman. Decatur waits below you with his hand on the ratlines, saying nothing, just watching your face for what you have found.
Date/time and location: 16 February 1804, 9:00 a.m. — the hold of the Intrepid
Breakfast is what is left. The beef in the cask has gone slimy and grey and the smell makes a boy from Baltimore heave into the ballast stones. Bread is honeycombed with weevils; men rap it on the deck beams to knock them out and eat it anyway. You drink a half pint of water that tastes of the cask’s old wine. Every man has lice; you have stopped scratching. Two sailors lie sick and yellow-eyed on the stones, and the surgeon, Heermann, crouches over them in the dark with a candle stub, because there is no sick bay and no daylight. Somebody’s damp shirt drips on your neck. You chew, and you think about the channel, and the sunset.
Date/time and location: 16 February 1804, 10:40 a.m. — the after deck of the Intrepid
Decatur chalks the frigate’s decks on the planking and kneels beside it, and his officers crowd in — Lawrence, Bainbridge’s brother, Morris the boy midshipman, Macdonough, Izard. Each party gets a hatch and nothing else: berth deck, cockpit, forward storeroom, wardroom, gun room. No firearms. Cutlass, pike and tomahawk only, because a pistol shot brings the whole harbor awake. The word is Philadelphia. Then Decatur turns to you and says, do it again. So you say it again, the Maltese-Italian singsong of a trader in trouble: we lost our anchors in the gale, let us moor by you until morning. You say it a dozen times. You watch their faces to see if they believe you. Tonight the ones who must believe you will be twenty feet away with muskets.
Date/time and location: 16 February 1804, 12:30 p.m. — amidships, Intrepid
You help make the fire. Bundles of oakum soaked in spirits of turpentine, kegs of tar, casks of shavings, canvas bags of powder, coils of slow match cut to length, and the port-fires stowed apart in a bucket of sand. Every bundle is tied to a stick so a man can carry it one-handed down a ladder. The turpentine gets on your fingers and burns in the cracks. Behind you a grinding wheel squeals as cutlasses go across it, and the pikes are being scraped bright, because rust makes a sound when you draw a blade. Somebody laughs too loud and stops. There is enough powder within six feet of your knee to leave nothing of this ketch but planks.
Date/time and location: 16 February 1804, 2:20 p.m. — the Intrepid, standing off and on out of sight of the batteries
They dress the ketch as a liar. The American ensign comes down and stays down. Grapnels are muffled in canvas, fenders slung over the side, a stout warp coiled ready to pass. Only eight or ten men will show themselves on deck, and those in Maltese and Levantine clothes like yours — loose shirts, sashes, caps, bare feet. Everyone else lies flat on the deck under a tarpaulin, packed like fish, and they will lie there for hours without moving or speaking. You look at the shape of it and think it will pass at night. You look again and think about what a boarding party sees when a stranger comes alongside a stolen frigate: nothing, if the man at the rail sounds like a Maltese.
Date/time and location: 16 February 1804, 4:45 p.m. — the deck of the Intrepid, sunset gun-metal sea
Grog is served out and it is the best thing you have tasted in two weeks. Men eat standing, elbow to elbow, and nobody talks much. A Marine ties a scrap of white cloth around his upper arm so that in the dark on a strange deck his own side will not cut him down. You do the same. You take the crucifix off your neck, kiss it, and put it back inside your shirt where a blade will not catch it. Decatur speaks for about a minute. Cutlass work, nothing else. Silence until the word. Nobody stops to plunder, nobody stops to fight what he can leave behind. Then the sun goes down over the water like a door closing.
Date/time and location: 16 February 1804, 7:20 p.m. — the Intrepid, entering the outer harbor of Tripoli
