07 February 2006

Barbary pirates, again

"From the halls of Montezuma, To the shores of Tripoli..."

For those who've slept under a rock for the last two hundred and thirty years, that's the first line of the Marine Corps hymn.
The "shores of Tripoli" they mention were part of a previous series of wars with the Muslim world, in the early 1800s, when the merchant marine of the fledgling United States began to be preyed upon by the Barbary pirates who had tormented the Mediterranean (and as far away as Iceland) for several hundred years.
A Philadelphian, Stephen Decatur, played a prominent role in both the First and Second Barbary Wars. His life was saved (during an attempt to burn the captured American frigate Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor) by Boatswain's Mate Reuben James who, "with both of his hands already wounded, positioned himself between Lieutenant Decatur and a swordwielding pirate."
With piracy springing up as a nascent economic sport among coastal Muslims from Somalia to Indonesia, perhaps it's time for the current Reuben James to revisit the Barbary Pirates, and maybe take along a few of those Marines...

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