After an interview with the consul, Commodore Decatur wrote a letter to the Bey demanding an indemnity for the captured prizes. This was duly delivered, and the consul, going ashore, had several interviews with the Tunisian minister. Next day Captain Gordon and Captain Elliott were presented to the Bey, who consented, much against his will, to pay the money. Three days later the squadron sailed for Tripoli, where a similar demand was made. The Pasha hesitated; but on learning what had happened at Tunis and Algiers, and remembering what this same Captain Decatur had done ten years before in his own harbor, he concluded that it would be wiser for him to yield. So he paid the money, and in addition released ten Neapolitan captives, whom Decatur desired to restore to their native country, as a return for the favors which the King of the Two Sicilies had shown the squadron in the earlier war. Thus was accomplished the whole object of Decatur's mission in fifty days after his arrival in the Mediterranean. Since that day there has been no trouble with the States of Barbary. The effect of Decatur's acts was rendered tenfold greater by the appearance of another squadron a month later, under Commodore Bainbridge, with his broad pennant on the new line-of-battle ship "Independence," and having with him besides the frigate "Congress" and three other vessels. The three ports of Barbary were visited in succession; and great was the astonishment of the Turks at this second display of naval strength. "You told us," said the Algerine Prime Minister to the British Consul, "that the Americans would be swept from the seas in six months by your navy; and now they make war upon us with some of your own vessels!" Late in September the frigate "United States" with four sloops in company arrived at Gibraltar, and here all the squadrons assembled in one great fleet under Commodore Bainbridge,--the grandest fleet which had ever been gathered under the flag of the United States. There was the great seventy-four the "Independence;" five frigates,--the captured "Macedonian," the "United States" which had captured her, the new "Guerrière," the "Congress," and the "Constellation;" the sloops "Erie" and "Ontario;" the brigs "Firefly," "Flambeau," "Saranac," "Boxer," "Enterprise," "Spark," and "Chippewa;" and the schooners "Torch," "Lynx," and "Spitfire,"--in all eighteen sail. And it was no slight satisfaction to the officers of the American squadron, when in this British port, that its two commodores were Bainbridge and Decatur, each of whom had taken a British frigate, and that the "Macedonian" and the "Boxer" were in the squadron, and flying the stars and stripes of the country that had captured them.[3]