Research - Stephen Decatur

The Age of Sail has intrigued me for a long time, but I had never studied it in-depth or read many books about it, nonfiction or fiction. Recently, however, I read Six Frigates by Ian W. Toll - a history of the founding of the U.S. Navy - and remembered just why, and how much, I enjoyed reading about the wooden ships of the time. What I knew about them was concentrated on the British navy, naturally enough; I knew very little about the development of the United States'. But in my reading I came across the interesting character of Stephen Decatur, Jr., who is to play a fairly important role in my NaNo novel The White Sail's Shaking.

Stephen Decatur, Jr., was born in 1779 in Sinepuxent, Maryland, to parents Stephen and Ann (Pine) Decatur. His grandfather, Étienne (Stephen) Decatur, was French, but renounced that citizenship to marry Priscilla Hill; her family had been in Rhode Island since the early 1600s. Stephen Decatur, Jr., studied at the University of Pennsylvania and was encouraged by his mother not to go to sea; however, both Stephen Decatur's father and grandfather had careers on the sea, and in 1799, during America's Quasi War with France, Decatur became a midshipman on one of the famous six frigates of the United States, the USS United States. A mere month later, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant.

Decatur was an interesting character in personality as well as his naval career. In his biography of Decatur, Spencer Tucker quotes one man as saying,

"[he] possessed, in an eminent degree, the happy art of governing sailors rather by their affections than their fears. He was averse to punishment, and rarely had occasion to resort to it, being usually able to rely, for the preservation of discipline, on the reluctance of his inferiors to displease him. It was remarked of him at this period, by an officer, that 'he seemed, as if by magic, to hold a boundless sway over the hearts of seamen at first sight.'"

In an age where most leaders found it necessary to resort to floggings and the like to keep their crew out of the rum, free of mutinous thoughts, and on their proper ship, a man who could run his crew merely by the effect his own person had on them is an interesting one to study.

What is probably the most famous event in Decatur's career came during the first Barbary War, or the Tripolitan War, when he, still a lieutenant, commanded the USS Enterprize during the commodore-ship of Edward Preble. After the massive USS Philadelphia ran aground off the bay of Tripoli and its crew and officers were taken by the Tripolitans, Decatur led a night expedition in the converted Tripolitan boat Intrepid to burn the Philadelphia before the enemy could make use of it. He was successful, surprisingly so, and the event soon earned him a two-rung promotion to the rank of captain that bypassed the rank of master commandant.

Just a few years after the end of the first Barbary War, Decatur served in the War of 1812, during which he commanded his old ship, the USS United States. In October he captured the HMS Macedonian, fulfilling a bet that had been made by the Macedonian's captain, Carden, years before that if the two ships were to meet in battle, Carden would win; but he lost, and Decatur refitted the Macedonian to return to the United States. Both ships were driven into a Connecticut port by a British blockade and stayed there for the rest of the war.

British blockades during the war made it difficult for individual ships, and certainly larger squadrons, to leave their home ports. After Decatur moved his command to the frigate President, stationed at New York, he and his small squadron were commanded to sail to the Caribbean; attempting to run the blockade, he was forced to surrender to the massive ships outside port. He spent the rest of the war in Bermuda as a prisoner and then was released in February of 1815. That May, he commanded a squadron that sailed to the Mediterranean again to positively show the Barbary nations that the United States would not pay tribute; he was successful in his mission and earned himself the title of "Conqueror of the Barbary Pirates."

Perhaps the next most famous event of Decatur's life came in 1820 - his duel with Commodore James Barron, and his death as a result. Barron had commanded the USS Chesapeake (thought to be an unlucky ship) during the famous Chesapeake-Leopard Affair, when Barron had not ordered his men into readiness and had subsequently been captured by the British in the Leopard with no fight. Due to criticism Decatur gave on the subject and the fact that he had served on the court martial that found Barron guilty of unpreparedness, Barron challenged Decatur to a duel. Dueling was technically illegal in the United States at the time (Alexander Hamilton had died in his duel with Aaron Burr in 1804), but it was a matter of honor, and Decatur accepted.

His plan, apparently, was only to wound Barron; Barron had bitterness on his side, however, and he shot Decatur in the abdomen. Decatur soon died, only forty-one years old.

My coming novel The White Sail's Shaking takes place during the First Barbary War, and while it doesn't follow Decatur, the main character serves aboard his ship, the Enterprize.

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What is "Christian" Fiction?

I don't read many contemporary novels, Christian or secular. It's difficult to find ones of any worth amid the muddle of copycat authors, immorality, and skeleton-strewn covers, so I primarily stick to those whose authors have been dead for, oh, at least forty or fifty years. But I also run a review site and I wanted to get it set up to receive free copies of books to review, and, of course, those books are contemporary - hot off the press, actually; so, since I received a copy from a publishing house, I recently read a contemporary Christian novel.

I'm not going to go into rant-mode about the atrocities of modern writing, etc. I was more shocked by the realization (I had known it before, but, sticking to the classics as I do, I had never witnessed it) of how the word "Christian" is used as a label, on books, on music, even on churches. The book I read was basically a romance, sprinkled with prayer and a few moral revelations, such as "Oh, lying isn't a good thing!" and "What do you know! God is sovereign!" This, apparently, makes a book "Christian," despite the fact there was no hint of the Gospel message in the pages.

Now, I can very easily appreciate a novel without its depicting a clearly Christian worldview. Most classic novels take a moral stance in looking at the world, like Dickens and Austen, but not one that is founded on the heart of Scripture - the complete depravity of man and the need for the gift of redemption through Christ's sacrifice; rather, they are built on the basic moral code set in every man. Not that these writers were utterly godless, for Dickens often speaks reverently of God in his works; Jane Austen wrote some very stirring prayers and defends the Church in some of her novels; Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre had many facets that seemed to be more than just moral; and Louisa May Alcott's stories are extremely moral and works-based. But are they Christian? No; they merely reflect the emerging deistic or theistic philosophies of their time.

So how do contemporary novels of the same brand gain the right to be labeled "Christian"? There are several different possible answers that spring to mind immediately. The first is what I already posited - they get called "Christian" because they're moral and they have God as a fairly central figure (even if He does seem like a bit of an afterthought crowded in there). But does that really count as Christian? If an unbeliever picked up a book after seeing that it was labeled "Christian" and read it, might he not come away with the misunderstanding that the God we claim to worship is really nothing more than a sort of appendage stuck on our lives, or a prayer machine, or perhaps that it is mere morality that we are celebrating? And even if we say that unbelievers aren't likely to be reading it anyway, and that it is for believers, I can't help thinking that the result isn't going to be much better for Christians, either. These sorts of novels with a bit of God shoved in cultivate an attitude of regarding the Sovereign, Almighty God - the One who "holds all things together by the word of His power" and "in [whom] we live and move and have our being" - of regarding Him as something less than the focus of our lives.

The second possible reason is that the books are called Christian because their authors profess to be Christian, and perhaps they feel guilty writing something that doesn't at least have some Christian teaching clearly tacked on. I don't believe that this is a valid argument, for two reasons. One is essentially what I talked about above: if you paste that label of "Christian" onto a book, you have to remember the possible readers and consider what they will take away from that novel about what Christianity is. And the second is that, generally speaking, not every story that comes to mind is going to deal with the Gospel itself, and it is not necessary to try to wedge it in where it doesn't fit. I do believe that no story a Christian writes ought to be written for shock value, defy the truths of Scripture, or go against the principles of our faith in any way, and I think that this cleanliness of our literature ought to stand as a light amid the general darkness of secular books. This is our witness: not our stuffing the Gospel where it really doesn't fit and showing ourselves awkward through the awkwardness of our writing, but keeping our works pure, letting the themes come as they will, and boldly allowing our faith to show itself in the pages when and where it fits.