OCR Text |
Show Reuben James, Forgotten T HEN the radio flashed word ' recently that a ship of the United States navy had been torpedoed tor-pedoed and sunk by a German submarine, sub-marine, it rescued from the obscurity obscu-rity which had engulfed it for more than a century the name of one of 1 America's "forgotten heroes" and , gave it world-wide fame. For the ' destroyer, which now rests 011 the bottom of the Atlantic with its crew j of nearly 100 otlicers and men, victims vic-tims of the modern "pirates," was j named in honor of Reuben James, "common seaman," who once distinguished dis-tinguished himself by an act of gallantry gal-lantry and self-sacrifice in a battle with the pirates of another era in 1 the annals of the sea. That was away back in the early I days of the republic when we were at war with the Barbary pirates I of the north coast of Africa who had been preying upon American commerce for years. On August 3, 1804, young Captain Stephen Decatur Deca-tur led his command of three gunboats gun-boats into the harbor of Tripoli to I attack some of the pirate ships which had taken refuge there. Out to meet him came six enemy boats, all of them manned and armed twice as heavily as the American craft Undaunted by the j odds against him, Decatur urged his crews to grapple with the pi- 1 rates and board their boats. The battle immediately resolved itself j into a desperate hand-to-hand strug- 1, Reuben James saves the life of ' Capt. Stephen Decatur. (Drawn , from the famous painting by Chap- pel.) I 1 gle in which the pikes, axes and cutlasses of the Americans were pitted against the scimitars and daggers of the corsairs. Within a short time Decatur and the crew of the gunboat which he I commanded personally had cleared the deck of the pirate ship. But bad luck had overtaken the captain's younger brother, James Decatur. The leader of the pirate boat which he boarded had pretended to surrender, then had shot James Decatur through the heart. Seeing this, Captain Decatur, mad with rage, shouted to some of his men to come with him in pursuit of the murderer. mur-derer. Another officer and 10 men responded re-sponded to his call and within a few minutes they overtook the enemy's ship. Led by Decatur, they sprang aboard and cut their way through the corsairs toward their leader. The captain, a giant of a man, swung savagely at the young American Amer-ican with a pike which he was using as a broadsword. Decatur, trying to cut the blade of the pike from the shaft, snapped his cutlass at the hilt. ! Dropping his useless weapon, he ! closed in, seized the pirate captain I around the waist and back-heeled J him for a heavy fall. I As the two struggling men went j down on dock, one of the pirates I rushed forward and raised his scim-I scim-I itar to deal the American captain j a death blow. But before the weapon , could descend, Reuben James, j although badly wounded, sprang for-! for-! ward and threw himself across j Decatur's shoulders. The keen I blade of the long, curved sword i slashed across James' head, inflicting inflict-ing a terrible wound. But he had saved his commander's life. James eventually recovered. Later when asked to name his own reward, re-ward, he is said to have scratched : his scarred and battered head and j murmured bashfully: "If it's all the j same to you, Cap'n, let somebody I else give out the hammicks. It's a business I don't like." And with that classic remark Reuben James steps off the page of history, his name to be all but forgotten until i37 years later when a German torpedo sent his namesake to its watery grave. In a certain sense, Reuben James' heroic self-sacrifice was in vain. True, I he saved Stephen Decatur for even j greater service to his country later. , But it is also true that he saved I his commander's life only to have him lose it as a victim to the code duello which Decatur hated but which he was not brave enough to disobey. So in 1820 when his erstwhile erst-while friend. Commodore James Barron, who believed that Decatur had slandered him, challenged him to a duel, Decatur met him on the "field of honor" and diixl from the wound received there. |