Piracy 200+ years ago

Oliver North:

Piracy has long been the consequence of disorder. America's first foreign war -- undeclared but authorized by Congress -- was waged by President Thomas Jefferson against the Barbary pirates. It is instructive history for those who believe that the problem of Somali piracy can be solved the same way.

By the late 1700s, the European powers were incapable of maintaining maritime law and order, and Islamic piracy became a flourishing enterprise in the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic coast of North Africa. Despite "tribute" payments to the "governments" in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Morocco by the British, French and new American governments, merchant mariners were at risk of being taken hostage for ransom and having their ships and cargoes sunk or stolen.

By the time of Jefferson's inauguration, in 1801, American ransoms and "tributes" amounted to more than $1 million per year -- nearly one-fifth of the U.S. budget. Jefferson pledged to end the payments and dispatched -- with congressional approval -- the nascent U.S. Navy to protect American-flagged merchant vessels and prosecute a naval campaign against the pasha of Tripoli. It almost worked.

In February 1804, U.S. Navy Lt. Stephen Decatur succeeded in boarding and destroying a captured U.S. combatant -- the USS Philadelphia -- and liberating surviving members of the ship's imprisoned crew. A year later, a small party of U.S. Marines and mercenaries led by U.S. Marine Lt. Presley O'Bannon conducted an intrepid overland expedition to assault Derna and force the surrender of the Tripolitan leader, Yussif Karamanli. The Mameluke sword he surrendered to O'Bannon is memorialized to this day in the dress swords worn by Marine officers and by the line "to the shores of Tripoli" in the "Marines' Hymn." It seemed like a glorious victory for American arms....

North goes on to worry over the hostage aspects of the campaign that still occur today. The piracy that existed in 1800 had been happening since the failure of the Crusades and the conquest of the Ottoman empire whose naval forces supported and facilitated the piracy and slavery in the Mediterranean for centuries.However the point of attacking the source of the piracy still holds and should be used in Somalia.

BTW, I still have my O'Bannon Mameluke sword. It is beautiful.