Books › Blue Book v072 n04 [1941-02], 1941 › scan 2
Scan 2
Blue Book v072 n04 [1941-02], 1941
24 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Our War In the Mediterranean
3For many years the rulers of Tripoli, Algiers and other north African states had demanded and received tribute from European nations; failing to receive it, they attacked and captured European ships and enslaved their crews. When the newly established United States of America found that we too must pay tribute,—or else!—we did not forbid these dangerous Mediterranean waters to our sailors. Instead we built us a navy, went to war and cleaned up the Mediterranean. A noted authority here tells this old but timely story.
5By COL. CHARLES WELLINGTON FURLONG
7"HAD we been called upon to meet the dangers of the sea, or to fight the enemies of our country, we should, I know, like true American sailors, have encountered them without dismay."
9So wrote Archibald Robbins of Weathersfield, Connecticut, in a journal he published in 1821, telling of the loss of the brig Commerce of Hartford, aboard which he was an able seaman. This journal describes the slavery and sufferings of the author and the rest of the crew upon the Sahara Desert during the years 1815, '16 and '17—three years of living hell for those who survived.
11"But," he continued, "after having encountered and overcome almost all the varieties of human misery: then to be cast upon a boundless plain of burning sand and flinty stones, there to be famished with hunger, devoured by wild beasts or become slaves to the most merciless of creatures that wear the form of man, was surely enough to appall the stoutest heart…. Three or four Arabs seized me and pulled me one way and another, with so much force, that I concluded they were about to settle the dispute by making an equal distribution of my body among them. At length one of them continued his hold, and he now became my sole master…. and led me off to his camels, stationed at a small distance."
13We are acquainted with the terrors of black slavery under the white man, which once ran rampant in the United States and some of the countries of South America. But of white slavery under the Arabs and blacks of Barbary, we know little, and most of that knowledge is found in the narratives of American seamen, from the ports and farms of our Atlantic seaboard, and privately published in limited editions of their journals, such as that of Robbins.
15The impressing of our seamen by European powers into their navies, in which the British took the lead, as well as the capture and destruction of our merchant vessels in the Mediterranean, and the enslaving of their officers and crews, by the Barbary pirates, hampered our commerce and caused great loss to shipowners and American trade.
17Privateers such as the eighty-ton schooner True Blue and the ship Essex, of which Capt. Lawrence Furlong(1) of Newburyport was commander and prize master respectively, were armed and sworn into the service.
19On May 12, 1775, the American sloop Unity, under Captain Jeremiah O'Brien, cruising off Machias, Maine, captured the British armed tender Marguerita and lowered the first British flag hauled down at sea in the Revolution…. The following September 6, the armed schooner
21(Continued on page 4)
23(1) Captain Lawrence Furlong was the author of "The American Coast Pilot" published in 1798, the first complete mariners' guide to the navigation of the Atlantic Coast.
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