The title, To the Shores of Tripoli, gives away the punchline, but I enjoyed this article, which cites Sam Ser at the Jerusalem Post, who “retells the story from the vantage of Michael Orren’s book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present“:
The meeting in London was doomed from the outset. The Arab strongman’s envoy held all the cards — three craft had already been hijacked, their passengers and crew held hostage in an inhospitable and almost unreachable land. The American ambassador knew the ransom demand would be high, but even he could not have imagined just how exorbitant it would be. To meet it would require one-tenth of America’s annual budget.Lest the adventurous Yanks dare to contemplate a military attack to rescue their captured comrades, Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar provided a most unpleasant revelation: the Koran declares that any nation that does not bow to the authority of the Muslims is sinful, and it is the right and duty of Muslims to make war upon it and take prisoner any of its people they may find. Further, any Muslim slain in battle against such an enemy would be promised a place in Paradise.
“We ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever,” the furious but helpless ambassador relayed to his government. Congress would authorize no such fight, however, and voted instead to pay the ransom.
Wretchard adds some important commentary:
It’s now forgotten that capitulation didn’t work. Simply didn’t work. The Barbary Pirates raised their demands until the Pashas were taking nearly 20 per cent of Federal Revenue. But in the beginning the policy of appeasement seemed perfectly. The initial extortion demand of $70,000 was far smaller than the astronomical $2 million dollars requested by Thomas Jefferson to build a Navy. In the end it proved cheaper to crush them.
Here’s a bit of historical trivia that caught my eye:
Before he revised it in the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Bangled Banner” — which would become the American national anthem — described “turbaned heads bowed” to the “brow of the brave.”