A Call to Arms

A Call to
ARMS

A NOVEL BY

WILLIAM C. HAMMOND

NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS

Annapolis, Maryland

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2012 by William C. Hammond

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hammond, William C., 1947–

A call to arms : a novel / by William C. Hammond.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-61251-145-0 (ebook) 1. United States. Navy—History—18th century—Fiction. 2. United States--History, Naval—To 1900—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3608.A69586C35 2012

813'.6—dc23

2012028105

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First printing

Prologue

One: Batavia, Dutch East Indies, May 1801

Two: Bermuda and Hingham, Massachusetts, October 1801

Three: Hingham, Boston, and Portland, November 1801—May 1802

Four: Boston, Massachusetts, June 1802–July 1803

Five: USS
Constitution,
August–September 1803

Six: USS
Portsmouth,
October 1803

Seven: Malta, October–November 1803

Eight: Syracuse, Sicily, November 1803–January 1804

Nine: Tripoli Harbor, February 1804

Ten: Tripoli, Egypt, and Syracuse, March–June 1804

Eleven: Off the City of Tripoli, August 1804

Twelve: Off the City of Tripoli, September 1804

Thirteen: Cyrenaica, Tripoli, Winter–Spring 1805

Fourteen: Hingham, Massachusetts, April 1805

Fifteen: Derne, Tripoli, April–May 1805

Epilogue

Glossary

About the Author

In loving memory of my sister

D
IANA
H. O'N
EILL

In war there is no substitute for victory.

G
EN
. D
OUGLAS
M
AC
A
RTHUR

T
HE CONVENTION
of Mortefontaine, signed in September 1800, ended the Quasi-War with France. The Caribbean had provided an inspiring testing ground for the infant U.S. Navy, which over the course of two years had proven its mettle against French privateers and heavily armed French frigates. The treaty's terms were generally favorable to the United States and reestablished “inviolable and universal” peace between the two countries.

The dispatches defining the terms of the treaty that reached Washington in early October bolstered the spirits of President John Adams if not his chances for reelection. Each of the sixteen states chose its own election day, and the voting that had begun in April was just wrapping up when the military packet boat arrived from Brest. The campaign had been a bitterly fought affair between two rivals who had once been close friends and colleagues. In the end, by the margin of just one vote in the Electoral College, Thomas Jefferson was elected the nation's third president. Aaron Burr was elected his vice president.

The new president's stance vis-à-vis the military—specifically, the Navy—remained a subject of some concern, especially in the commercially vibrant New England states. Their merchant fleets were the life-blood of the American economy and the British-held West Indian islands. Those fleets were now carrying their trade around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Enterprising New England shipping families—the Cutlers of Hingham, Massachusetts, among them—had opened the doors to the exotic Spice Islands of the Orient and the riches those lands promised. In these Far Eastern waters, however, lurked pirates eager to seize American cargoes. Would President Jefferson truly cut naval expenditures at a time when America desperately
needed a strong navy to protect these vital trade routes? Would he willingly sacrifice the blood of American sailors just to save money, as his new treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, seemed to be advocating? Most Federalists viewed such a policy as not only penny-wise and pound-foolish, but treasonous and suicidal as well. And it seemed uncharacteristic of Jefferson.

Was he not the man who, fifteen years earlier as minister to France, had angrily proclaimed force to be the only deterrent to terror? Did he not, as vice president under John Adams, argue that maintaining a substantial naval presence would be cheaper and more honorable than kowtowing to Barbary tyrants? On this issue, at least, Jefferson seemed more federalist than the Federalists.

But the facts were indisputable. One of Jefferson's first acts as president was to approve the Peace Establishment Act, which summarily cut the size of the U.S. Navy. USS
Constitution
and other magnificent ships of war were being laid up in ordinary, and officers worthy of promotion following the Quasi-War saw their promotions deferred or denied and found themselves languishing on the beach at half pay.

Navy Secretary Benjamin Stoddert was so frustrated by the president's flip-flopping that he resigned his post and returned to civilian life. So poor were the Navy's prospects that the first four men who were then offered the post declined the honor.

It was not top-level resignations, however, that soon forced the president's hand. It was the Barbary States. For centuries the rulers of the Barbary regencies had relied on piracy, extortion, and bullying to extract annual payments of tribute from European nations whose merchant ships plied the Mediterranean. True, they did not demand such tribute from England, France, or Spain, whose well-armed navies could fight back. But even these maritime powers offered consular gifts of jewels and coin and naval stores to maintain the goodwill of the Barbary rulers—and, not coincidentally, encouraged pirate attacks on ships of lesser nations to cripple commercial competition. The petty despots were only too happy to oblige. The merchant ships of Greece, Denmark, Naples, and other Christian nations continued to find their cargoes appropriated and their crews enslaved until ransoms were paid for their release. And the annual tributes rose ever higher.

American ships suffered in the same way, especially in the late 1790s when the infant U.S. Navy was preoccupied in the Caribbean. More than a hundred American merchant sailors had been seized and imprisoned, some for more than a decade. A peace treaty signed in Algiers in 1796 had
proved ephemeral, as peace treaties involving the Barbary States usually did. The rulers of these nations relied on the booty their corsairs brought back not only to enrich themselves, but also to provide the wherewithal to add warships to their fleets and promote their reign of terror on the high seas. All this was justified, in the eyes of man if not of Allah, as a
jihad
, a sacred war against Christian nonbelievers.

Yusuf Karamanli, bashaw of Tripoli, was particularly put out. He felt slighted by the Christian nations, inferior in their eyes to the dey of Algiers, the bey of Tunis, and the sultan of Morocco, and he placed the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of the new American president. Thomas Jefferson had not yet paid the $225,000 Yusuf had demanded to ensure peace between the two nations. Nor had he paid the $25,000 in annual tribute that Yusuf claimed had come due; nor even the paltry sum of $10,000 to console the bashaw for the death of former president George Washington. Compounding the problem, because of a recent treaty with Sweden, Tripoli was now at war with no nation. Tripolitan sea captains and crews were growing restless, a potentially dangerous state of affairs for a despot whose sole source of power lay in his military.

By May 1801 Yusuf Karamanli had had enough. The six-month deadline of the ultimatum he had granted the United States to pay had come and gone. Worse, rumor had it that an American naval squadron was on its way to the Mediterranean to protect American shipping in the region. These upstart Americans had insulted him, his country, and the glory of Allah for the last time. Following a vote in the Divan whose outcome was never in doubt, he ordered his soldiers to march to the American consulate, chop down its flagstaff, and toss the Stars and Stripes over the city walls into the sea.

Tripoli had declared war.

D
ECK, THERE! SAIL HO!”

The cry of alarm came from high above on the mainmast crosstrees. Below on the weather deck, hard by the helm, Agreen Crabtree shielded his eyes and peered up into the fierce equatorial sun. “Deck, aye! What d' you see, Hobbes?”

“Two sets of canvas, sir,” the lookout called down. “Lateens.”

“Where away?”

“Fine on our larboard beam.” The lookout pointed in the general direction and added, “Standing southeast by east on a starboard tack.”

“Ensigns? Other identification?”

“None that I can see, sir.”

“Very well, Hobbes. Keep me informed.”

Agreen cursed under his breath as he glanced down at the rudimentary chart he held in his right hand. Until recently, the waters that defined the gateway to the fabled Spice Islands had been off-limits to American merchantmen, and ship captains of other nations were still reluctant to share information that might aid a competitor. The chart merely indicated that the waters in these western regions of the Sunda Strait were deep, while those off Java, across the strait, offered hazardous shoals and sandbars—and thus, so sea lore cautioned, treacherous tidal currents. Agreen ran his left hand through his shoulder-length, reddish-blond hair as he considered his choices. He quickly concluded that he didn't have any.
Falcon
had sailed too far into the strait to wear ship or take some other evasive
action. He had to maintain his present course and try to weather Cape Tua on the southeastern tip of Sumatra before jibing her over to eastward.

The cry from aloft brought Caleb Cutler up to the weather deck through a hatchway amidships. His eyes scoured the ocean to larboard before he strode aft toward Will Cutler standing by the mainmast chain-wale. “Good morning, Will,” he said somewhat nervously. “What do we have?”

“Good morning, Uncle,” Will replied cheerfully, adding in an equally cheerful tone, “Trouble, it would seem.”

“What sort of trouble?”

Will deferred to Agreen, whom he and Caleb joined by the helm. “Two vessels are approaching us,” Agreen explained. “It's possible they're coastal traders, though I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Wrong rig. And they're on a course of interception . . . there.” He pointed ahead to the northern limits of the strait where a mere fifteen miles separated Bakahuni on Sumatra from Merak on Java. “I'd bet a month's pay that we're lookin' at a pirates' reception committee.”