Between 1785 and 1805, the United States was at the mercy of the Barbary Pirates. The Barbary Pirates, actually fundamentalist Moslems, waged war against those who weren't Moslems. The Barbary States, Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli, were engaged in a centuries long war with Christendom. They fought all of Christianity and enslaved their captives. When the American frigate USS Philadelphia was on blockade duty off Tripoli in 1804, she tried to capture the Tripolitans but ran aground on the shoals. To prevent her from falling into enemy hands, Steven Decatur, who said "My country right or wrong," burned the ship with the help of a Neapolitan ship, captured by Decatur and his men, and named the Intrepid.

This is the story of America's first steps onto the world stage: her fight against the Barbary pirates. C.S. Forester, grand master of the naval adventure novel, here writes not a novel, but simply a story, of young America's struggle to gain freedom of the seas against a harsh and cruel enemy that was seizing American ships and enslaving American sailors. The rest of the world had put up with this state of affairs literally for centuries. America, armed with resolve but no money, and virtually no navy, determined to end it.

Forester does not gloss over the difficulties and the folly that America committed along the way as it tried to figure out how to end the menace of the Barbary Pirates. We tried to buy them off, but they couldn't be bought off, and these efforts endgendered contempt and even more depredations against American ships and men. American politicians, even the great Jefferson, feared establishing a powerful Navy on the theory that such a Navy might become a threat to the young Republic's liberty by bringing forth tyrants. This quaint theory would cause young America endless problems, both with the war against the pirates, and later in the War of 1812 against Britain.

Forester writes in a crisp narrative that completely holds the reader's interest, and he tells a complicated story in a manner that gets his point across without burying the reader in detail. This is a short, sharp book that tells a great story from the early history of America and which holds lessons that are relevant to today's events and problems.

As Forester notes, every country at some time or another in its history brings forth an unusually large number of particularly gifted and great men. This was such a time for America, which brought forth Preble and Decatur, naval heros who lived to become legends in their own times, and whose leadership brought honor to the American nation and Navy as it finally crushed the pirates, establishing the doctrine of Freedom of the Seas which even today is a bedrock of American policy.