Miracles and Massacres by Glenn Beck

brought, naked and shivering, into port and jailed. The Pasha of Tripoli renamed the ship The Gift of Allah .
    William Ray and hundreds of other U.S. sailors and Marines were his prisoners.
    Now, almost two months into their captivity, Ray stood with an empty stomach in the bitterly cold ocean, shoveling sand from the seafloor. The Pasha’s cruel slave masters seemed to take joy in the prisoners’ suffering. Each day, from sunrise through midafternoon, the Americans were kept in the ocean without so much as a morsel of bread. Whenmen fainted from exhaustion, the guards beat them until they somehow found the strength to rise again.
    In the afternoon, the sailors and leathernecks were usually given some water and black bread. As they ate, Ray and the others tried everything possible to get warm, from clapping their hands to running in place. They were then returned to the freezing water to work until sunset. Bed was a stone floor covered in tiny rocks. They slept in the same cold, wet clothes they worked in.
    William Ray had not always been a praying man, but on this night his plea was solemn and sincere. “Dear God,” he whispered, “I pray that I might never experience the horrors of another morning.” Ray thought back to that night on the bank of the Delaware River and wished that instead of turning his head toward the sound of the drum, he’d stuck it under the rushing water.
    Mediterranean Sea
    Off the North African Coast
    Aboard the USS Essex
    February 16, 1804
    Stephen Decatur paced from starboard to port and back, unable to hide his anxiety. His commodore had asked him to undertake a suicide mission. Always the loyal officer, Decatur hadn’t hesitated to accept. When he asked his crew for volunteers, none of them had hesitated, either.
    â€œWe are now about to embark on an expedition which may terminate in our sudden deaths, our perpetual slavery, or our immortal glory,” he said to the sixty-seven men gathered on the deck of the USS Essex .
    At sunset that evening, Decatur and his men—all dressed as Maltese sailors—left their frigate and boarded an aptly named ketch called the Intrepid . The Intrepid would attract less notice than the Essex both because of its smaller size and because, as a ketch that had been previously captured from the enemy, it would not look to the Tripolitans like a threat.
    The course was set for the port of Tripoli, only a few miles in the distance. At nine thirty the silhouette of the city’s ramparts, dimly lit bylanterns, appeared on the horizon. A few minutes after that, the three masts of the captured USS Philadelphia , now The Gift of Allah , came into view. They glided silently forward, knowing that if Tripoli’s sentries were alerted they didn’t stand a chance.
    â€œMan hua?” a voice cried out. Who goes there?
    Decatur didn’t speak any Arabic, but his helmsman did. He yelled back that they were Maltese traders seeking port for the night.
    â€œTayyib.” Very well.
    With the wind dying down in port, the sixty-foot ketch coasted on its own momentum toward the docks. Its destination was not, however, any slip.
    It was the Philadelphia .
    Silent, except for the heavy breathing of the crew and the lapping of water against the hull, the ketch maneuvered alongside the great warship. It’s a shame it has come to this , Decatur thought.
    His men grabbed the cannon nozzles of the Philadelphia and affixed ropes to the hull.
    â€œBoard now,” Decatur whispered. The sailors clambered over the gunnels.
    â€œAmreeki!” Shouts rang out from ship—Americans! Twenty Tripolitan guards on board the Philadelphia had seen Decatur’s men. They were swiftly silenced with muskets, but the secret was out.
    Decatur’s men turned the Philadelphia ’s great cannons toward the city, launching volley after volley and making quick work of the clay and brick buildings in port. Then they lit a fuse to the