The forgotten story of Andrew Jackson’s first military campaign in Asia.
by | July 27, 2026
In the winter of 1832, a merchantman flying a Danish flag pulled into a port in Quallah Battoo in the Aceh Sultanate of what is now known as Indonesia. The vessel had set out from New York City half a year ago, had circumnavigated the Cape of Good Hope, and had finally arrived here.
That the vessel was named for a river in America did not strike the locals as strange and when its officers left the ship after rubbing themselves with tar to look like disreputable sailors, claiming to trade opium for pepper, the locals were eager to waylay their boat and kill them, pleading, “what for you no come ashore?” even as the robbers brandished their weapons.
This was the fate that had befallen the Friendship, an American merchantman, last year.
The boat full of ragged sailors in red and blue shirts with dirty hands asked to meet with Po Mahomet, the local Muslim ruler, “He no come down, he be one so great man,” they were told.
But the ship was under the command of a far greater man thousands of miles away.
Some fishermen followed the ship and got close enough to see that her guns had been run in or covered with tarps and that she was no merchantman, but a disguised warship, and they had to be brought aboard, as they “cried aloud, Allah, in an imploring tone of voice.”
The disguised sailors had seen enough to know where the forts were and that further negotiations with the robber region would be futile. The attack began at dawn and soon the American flag was not only flying over the USS Potomac, but over the fort where Po Mahomet, too great a man to come down, met his death at the hands of the United States Marines.
By battle’s end, two Americans had fallen and so had three forts and the enemy. America’s first military engagement in Asia, as in Africa, fought against Muslim pirates, was done.
A year earlier, President Andrew Jackson had sent the USS Potomac on a mission of retribution for the attack on the Friendship and the killing of some members of her crew. “A daring outrage having been committed in those seas,” he had declared, “and the piratical perpetrators belonging to tribes in such a state of society that the usual course of proceedings between civilized nations could not be pursued, I forthwith dispatched a frigate with orders to require immediate satisfaction for the injury and indemnity to the sufferers.”
The USS Potomac had been commanded to “vindicate our wrongs in that savage outrage.”
And it had fulfilled its mission. The Battle of Quallah Battoo of what would become known as the First Sumatran Expedition ended in an unambiguous American victory with hundreds of enemy dead and as one participant put it, “heaping the heathen pile upon pile at every discharge and staining the green sward with the blood of the victories of our ungovernable fury.”
The ship left, after seizing the forts, defeating the Muslim enemy force, killing its leader and shelling their town to rubble with a warning that any future attack would lead to severe consequences against the perpetrators. But the real political battle would be fought at home.
The merchants who had urged the administration to dispatch the USS Potomac had wanted restitution for their losses, and President Andrew Jackson had been looking to expand American trade in the region and expected the USS Potomac to use its presence to leverage a treaty.
But Captain John Downes, who had served in the previous wars against Muslim pirates in Tripoli and Algeria, had a more realistic assessment of the problem and pointed out to the Secretary of the Navy and his boss that the Muslim pirates were treacherous and cruel, that showing off a warship without using it would be a futile show of weakness, and that besieging them was useless because they would simply disappear into the jungle or scatter to islands.
“The character of the people against whom I had to operate left me no room to doubt that a movement prompt and efficient in its character could alone carry with it the least possible hopes of success,” Downes wrote. The scouting expedition followed by a surprise attack against an enemy which had 500 armed men and fanatical beliefs proved efficient and successful.
The enemy “were never known to spare man, woman or child which had unfortunately fallen into their hands”, and could never be trusted to negotiate in good faith. But Congress was not happy.
Captain Downes was ordered by Jackson to preserve documents involving the expedition as Congress launched an investigation into his actions. Even though Downes had given the order to “not fire a gun upon the Malays, unless the attack first came from them”, seeking to capture their leaders and hold them hostage to extract compensation for the Friendship’s losses, and even though he had specifically ordered that women and children be spared, partisan newspapers accused Jackson and Downes of orchestrating a massacre of innocent people.
There was even less knowledge of the cultural differences in a Muslim society thousands of miles away back then than there is today and so there was very little understanding of the circumstances that the United States Marines had been operating under once they made contact with the enemy. Muslim attackers had opened fire from houses, making it all but impossible to avoid civilian casualties, and in at least two cases, women attacked Marines.
Captain Downes had done his best to uphold an impossible set of instructions which, had he followed them, would have led to either the failure of his mission or the massacre of his men.
Now, even before they returned home, the Marines who had attacked a numerically superior enemy on his own territory, were denounced as having attacked “a settlement filled with a mixed population” and were condemned as the “savage murderers of women and children.”
The debate followed lines familiar to anti-war arguments today. President Andrew Jackson was accused of illegally starting a war without congressional authorization even though he was following the precedent set by Jefferson’s campaign against Muslim pirates in North Africa.
Opponents of the attack argued that it had been a violation of American values which considers “a strict regard to the rights of others as the brightest jewel which adorns its character” which apparently included the Muslim pirates of Indonesia. The USS Potomac should have negotiated. It should not have flown a false flag even though Stephen Decatur, under whom Downes had served, had set the precedent for this by entering Tripoli flying British colors in the campaign that served as the first action of the Marine Corps during the Barbary War with Muslim pirates.
Jackson had wanted a direct settlement of the kind he had been securing from Europe to Asia, but he was also enough of a military man to understand the value of making a good point.
“The president wishes me to express his highest commendation for the coolness, firmness and skill evidenced by yourself, officers and men in the whole attack; and hopes that the best consequences to our trade and national character with result from it in that region of the world,” the Navy Secretary dispatched to Downes.
The attacks on American ships did not end, resulting in a Second Sumatra Expedition and the USS Columbia and the USS John Adams followed the USS Potomac’s example, shelling Malay Muslim forts until they surrendered and promised not to attack Americans again.
President Andrew Jackson dispatched missions to Asian countries while cautioning them to “accommodate yourself to the peculiar notions and customs of the country, however absurd they may be, whenever you can do so without such acknowledgement of inferiority as would be incompatible with the dignity of your Government.” By the time a successful agreement was reached with a Muslim country, Oman, President Martin Van Buren had replaced Jackson.
The Quallah Battoo Muslim robbers had been undone by the inferior quality of their weapons, old and poorly maintained British models or their own badly manufactured weapons and powder, allowing the Marines to defeat them while taking relatively few casualties from muskets that wouldn’t fire, from wooden bullets and cannons that fired too high overhead.
Sultan Sayyid bin Sultan of Oman, seeking a source of more reliable firearms to use against Europeans in the region, dispatched gifts to Van Buren, including two Arabian stallions and had reportedly considered sending women from his harem of 75 sex slaves, which had included kidnapped slave girls from Circassia and Georgia (a horrifying practice permitted under Islamic Sharia law that licenses Muslims to kidnap and rape non-Muslim women and girls.)
Emily Ruete, the name taken by Sayyida Salma bint Said Al Said, one of the children of the Sultan of Oman, described how her mother, one of the harem slaves, was kidnapped from her parents when she was a 7-year-old girl and sold as a slave while her parents were murdered. Ruete had an affair with a German merchant, fled to Europe and converted to Christianity.
Jokes went around about Van Buren, notorious for his corrupt love of luxury, building an added wing for a White House harem. Van Buren did not actually keep the horses, as that would have violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, and they were sold at auction. (The same went for the two lion cubs from Morocco which have been misattributed as coming from Oman.)
While the Sultan of Oman did not end up sending any slave girls, his ship was crewed by slaves who were lured away by abolitionists who were prevalent in New York City and convinced them that life under Christianity and freedom was better than being a slave of Allah and of a sultan.
The Sultan of Oman may have lost a few slaves, but got what he really wanted, firearms, and the Van Buren administration created a precedent of providing weapons to the enemies of Christendom.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.