Books › Blue Book v072 n04 [1941-02], 1941 › scan 5
Scan 5
Blue Book v072 n04 [1941-02], 1941
18 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Hannah, from Beverly, Massachusetts, commanded by Capt. Nicholson Broughton, captured a British vessel. The Hannah, owned by Col. John Glover, of Salem, ranks officially as the "mother" of the American navy.
3The following year the Stars and Stripes flag was adopted by the Continental Congress; Old Glory was born, and fluttered from the masthead of every American ship. But a government by free men is always bought at a price. Part of that price was paid by the withdrawal of former British protection to Colonial ships and crews on the high seas. Six years later the Supreme Court of Massachusetts outlawed slavery because in the State Bill of Rights was written that far-reaching and imperishable idea: "All men are born free and equal."
5FROM ancient times the Mediterranean has been the scene of naval strife and piracy. Men chained to the galley-thwarts have writhed under the lash of Pagan, Mohammedan and Christian. The Barbary corsairs, particularly the Algerines, scoured the sea for booty, raiding not only the Mediterranean islands, the Italian and Spanish coasts, but those of Ireland and even far-away Iceland. These wolves of the sea would descend out of the night and push inland, looting villages and carrying off defenseless inhabitants into slavery.
7The object of the Barbary pirates was to seize plunder from the ships, and money by ransom of their captive crews. Robbins stated in his journal that some of the captured American sailors of the Commerce were sold on the public auction block to the desert Arabs, for as high as forty camels apiece, while ransom of 150 pounds sterling for a single American captive was disdainfully refused as a mere bagatelle by the more sophisticated Algerines.
9Against American protests to the enslaving of our crews by the Algerines and their exorbitant demands the Dey replied: "It has been the custom, from time immemorial, for all nations to redeem their people on the best terms they could."
11Through the middle of the Sixteenth Century the power of the Barbary States was at its height, but the crushing defeat of the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, which was really the last Crusade, put a stop to their aggression in the eastern Mediterranean. From then on, their naval supremacy began to decline, and the line of the famous Barbary corsairs ceased and degenerated into a race of petty pirates. These marauders continued to infest the Mediterranean until their extermination in the Nineteenth Century.
13Before the Mediterranean was freed from piracy, Christian slaves could be counted by tens of thousands in Algiers and other cities of Barbary. At the time of Washington's presidency, the great maritime powers of Europe were paying an annual tribute to the rulers of the little piratical states of Barbary. This was for freedom from molestation of their ships and crews in the Mediterranean. In fact, strange as it may seem, they had been doing this for centuries. Even England for 230 years had paid tribute, through her consuls at Algiers; and as late as 1816 English slaves, presumably captured under the flags of other countries, were ransomed in Algiers.
15After the Revolution, American merchantmen could no longer claim Britain's protection on the high seas; in fact, at one time they were actually denied the use of Gibraltar. The new flag of the Americans had scarcely appeared in the Mediterranean before the pirates of Barbary knew that the ships and crews of this young, weak power beyond the seas, without a navy, were an easy prey for their galleasses, xebecs, dhows and feluccas. Attacks, particularly by the Algerines, with the Tripolines a close second, now centered on American ships, and secondly on those of Italy. The Sultan of Morocco, however, "showed a friendly disposition toward us, and claimed to have been the first sovereign to recognize the independence of the United States."
17PETITIONS to induce Congress to bring relief or protection to our merchant marine in the Mediterranean seemed to fall on deaf ears. But it was the pleas that American women made to George Washington, on behalf of Barbary enslaved husbands, sons and brothers, which really initiated the movement for the freedom of the Mediterranean. It was at Mt. Vernon in 1786 that General Washington first learned from them that a number of American merchantmen had been captured by certain Barbary States, and when payment for the release of the crews was refused, these Americans were sold as slaves. Washington also learned something else: that other maritime nations, headed by England and France, paid tribute to the rulers of Barbary and the Sultan of Turkey, for freedom to sail the Mediterranean without molestation.
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