Stephen Decatur, on gunboat No. 4, had been given command of the left division of three gunboats. Casting off the tow-lines from his larger consorts, he got under weigh, and bore down for a rift between the reefs at the eastern entrance to the harbor, where the Tripolitan fleet, cleared for action, lay awaiting him. The wind was on his bow, and he was obliged to hold a course close to the wind in order to weather the point. The gunboat lumbered uncertainly in the cross-sea, for she had no longer the steady drag of the “Constitution’s” hawser to steady her. The seas came up under her flat bottom, and seemed to toss rather than swing her into the hollows. She was at best an unsteady gun-platform, and nice sail-trimming was an impossibility. But they got out their sweeps, and that steadied her somewhat. Great volumes of spray flew over the weather-bow as she soused her blunt nose into it, and the fair breeze sent it shimmering down to leeward. Decatur stood aft by the helmsman, watching the quivering leeches, and keeping her well up into the wind. Beside him stood his midshipmen, Thomas Macdonough--afterwards to win a great victory of his own--and Joseph Thorn. Both of them had smelt powder before, and Macdonough had been one of the first on the deck of the ill-fated “Philadelphia.” This was to be a different sort of a fight from any they had seen. It was to be man to man, where good play of cutlass and pike and youth and American grit might mean victory. Defeat meant annihilation. But youth is good at a game of life and death, and as they looked at Decatur there was never a moment’s fear of the result. They leaned against the rail to leeward, looking past the foam boiling on the point to the spars of the African gunboats, and their eyes were alight with eagerness for battle. The men were bending steadily to their sweeps. Most of them were stripped to the waist, and Decatur looked along the line of sinewy arms and chests with a glow of pride and confidence. There was no wavering anywhere in the row of glistening faces. But they all knew the kind of pirates they were going to meet,--reckless, treacherous devils, who loved blood as they loved Allah,--the best hand-to-hand fighters in the Mediterranean. The ring of the cutlasses, loose-settled in their hangers, against the butts of the boarding-pistols was clear above the sound of the row-locks and the rush of the waters, while forward the catch of a song went up, and they bent to their work the more merrily.