On September 4, 1804, during the First Barbary War, the harbor of Tripoli was briefly illuminated by a catastrophic explosion. Lt. Richard Somers led 12 volunteer officers and sailors aboard the USS Intrepid, a captured ketch converted into an “infernal”—a floating bomb loaded with roughly 100 barrels of gunpowder and 150 explosive shells. Their mission was to enter Tripoli Harbor under cover of darkness, place the vessel among the enemy fleet, ignite its fuses, and escape by small boat before the ship detonated.
The mission ended in disaster. Before Intrepid reached its intended target, it exploded violently, killing Somers and all 12 volunteers with him. The American squadron saw the flash and felt the concussion, but no survivor could explain what had happened. The cause remains uncertain: historians have considered enemy fire from shore batteries, an accidental ignition, or the possibility that Somers and his crew detonated the ship after being intercepted, rather than allow its explosive cargo to fall into Tripolitan hands.
Though tactically unsuccessful, the mission became an enduring symbol of sacrifice in the early U.S. Navy. The loss devastated Commodore Edward Preble and the Mediterranean Squadron, and Somers’s death came to embody the extreme risks accepted by American sailors in the war against the Barbary states. Some of the men’s remains later washed ashore and were buried in unmarked graves outside Tripoli; five sailors’ graves were identified in Tripoli’s Protestant cemetery in 1949.
Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
