Skeletons On The Zahara by Dean King Read Free Book Online Page A

Commerces could further amuse themselves in hearing again the result of Jabez's monetary prudence. During a later storm at sea, certain that his vessel would founder, Jabez put a note with the location of his buried cash in a bottle and threw it overboard, regretting his extreme secrecy and trusting that an honest person would find it and deliver it to his wife. The vessel somehow survived the storm, however, and Jabez rushed home, dug up his money, and deposited it in a chartered bank. When the bank promptly failed, the captain bitterly cursed the fact that he had survived only to make his wife poor.
    During quiet times on deck, in the evening or at dawn, Riley had the leisure to reflect on his own experience. He thought back to the debacle of the Two Marys. Getting tangled up in the European war had been most unfortunate for him. Chased by one side, he had been robbed by the other and stranded on the Continent. Although he witnessed “many important operations in the science of war” there, his most lasting souvenirs were a facility with French and Spanish and, as he put it, “lessons in the school of adversity, which tended to prepare and discipline my mind for future hardships.”
    The Commerce crossed the Atlantic in good time, about six weeks, and knifed into the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar, the thirty-six-mile gap that separates two continents and two cultures.4 At the eastern end of the Strait, the men of the Commerce looked upon two mighty promontories, the mythic Pillars of Hercules, which were said to have once been part of the same mountain range until the fabled strongman wrenched them apart, thus joining the two seas. The sailors would have two weeks to explore the fourteen-hundred-foot Rock of Gibraltar on the European side, while they would only view the almost-three-thousand-foot African promontory Jebel Musa from the sea.
    On August 13, four days after reaching Gibraltar, the Commerce landed her cargo of flour and tobacco. On shore, Riley conducted business with a Gibraltar merchant, Horatio Sprague, who entertained him at his home. Sprague, a bachelor who hailed from Boston, was a stout, vivacious man with wavy, slightly disheveled hair, a broad face, and owlish eyes. He and Riley got on famously. It was a heady time for Americans in the Mediterranean. In June, Decatur's squadron had captured the forty-six-gun frigate Mashouda, killing the Algerian admiral who had terrorized the Mediterranean, and prompting the Dey of Algiers to agree to return his American captives, make reparations, and establish normal relations— thus renouncing the right to tributes from the United States. In July, the thirty-six-year-old Decatur gave the Bey of Tunis twelve hours to accept similar terms. Before accepting, the exasperated potentate exclaimed, “Why do they send wild young men to treat for peace with old powers?”
    Horatio Sprague, Esq.
    (from Sequel to Riley's Narrative, 1851)
    Decatur's squadron proceeded to Tripoli, where in 1804, as lieutenant, Decatur had made his name in a daring raid to burn the U.S. frigate Philadelphia, which had run aground and fallen into the hands of the Tripolitans. Then Decatur had saved face for the U.S. Navy; now he brought the Bashaw of Tripoli to his knees, capping off a campaign that ushered in a new era of free trade in the Mediterranean.
    The acting U.S. consul in Gibraltar took advantage of the high spirits generated by these events to beg Riley to accept a passenger, a penniless old sailor who was anxious to work his passage across the Atlantic. Antonio Michel, a native of New Orleans, had recently been wrecked on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. Riley agreed, and Michel came on board with little more than the clothes on his back.
    Riley also met Captain Price of the American schooner Louisa, which had just arrived from New York City. She was bound for Barcelona and was standing off and on in the bay waiting for Price to return to proceed east.