XIII
Malta, November 18, 1804
I cannot but flatter myself that we may realize the success of our calculations on this coalition; and that you will have the glory of carrying the usurper a prisoner in Your Squadron to the United States....
—William Eaton, in a letter to Commodore Samuel Barron
The Argus cast off from Malta’s quarantine ground and slipped into the Mediterranean, headed to Levantine ports that never before had seen U.S. warships. Lieutenant Isaac Hull and his crew traveled under two sets of orders. The written orders described a routine convoy of American merchantmen from Alexandria or Smyrna to Malta; the oral ones promised adventure, and they were the operational ones, having come directly from Commodore Samuel Barron. Hull was to proceed to Egypt, as the cover orders stipulated, but with a special passenger, the versatile William Eaton, whom he was to lend every assistance on a top-secret mission: helping Hamet Karamanli assemble an insurgent army to overthrow his brother Yusuf. It was a quixotic assignment befitting Eaton’s unique gifts and his metamorphosis from consul to Tunis to “Navy agent for the Barbary Regencies.”
Eaton had lobbied furiously to return to Barbary with troops after his expulsion from Tunis in 1803. Upon his return to the United States, Eaton had gone straight to Washington, even before going home to his wife Eliza after a four-year absence. There he had complained loudly about Morris’s passivity while urging the Jefferson administration to commit troops against Tripoli. He made a special plea to the skeptical Cabinet, with only Navy Secretary Smith willing to give his unconditional support. “The Secretary of War [Henry Dearborn] believes it would be too great an effort and expense to send troops to Barbary, and thinks it both easier and cheaper to pay tribute to the savages, even if it should become necessary to double or treble our tribute payments,” Eaton noted disgustedly before finally going home to Brimfield, Massachusetts. He soon was back in Washington. While the government would not commit troops, it would support an insurgency by Hamet Karamanli, the legitimate ruler of Tripoli.
This proposal was first suggested to Eaton in June 1801 by Richard Cathcart, the former consul to Tripoli. By September, Eaton was pitching it to Madison: “The subjects in general of the reigning bashaw are very discontented and ripe for revolt; they want nothing but confidence in the prospect of success.” While tacitly approving the plan at the time, the secretary of state was squeamish about its underhandedness, possibly recalling the scheming of Spain, France, and England during America’s colonial days. Such a conspiracy, he said, “does not accord with the general sentiments or views of the United States, to intermeddle in the domestic contests of other countries.” But three years of war with Tripoli with no end in sight had made the scheme look appealing to Jefferson. He met privately with Eaton in June 1804, presumably to discuss the plan; there is no record of the meeting. However, Eaton afterward came into 1,000 War Department muskets and his new position in the Navy Department.
The administration’s secretiveness and Smith’s prudent instructions to Barron reeked of ambivalence: “We have no objection to you availing yourself of his co-operation with you against Tripoli—if you shall upon a full view of the subject after your arrival upon the Station, consider his co-operation expedient. The subject is committed entirely to your discretion.” Should Barron decide to use Hamet, he would find “Mr. Eaton extremely useful to you.” Similarly cautious were Madison’s words to Consul General Lear. Madison permitted up to $20,000 to be spent on the Hamet project, but confessed to preferring continued attacks and blockading to the proposed joint operation with the former bashaw, “as the force under the orders of the Commodore is deemed sufficient for any exercise of coercion which the obstinacy of the Bashaw may demand.”
The problem was the flaccid Hamet; he inspired confidence in no one. Thin, pale, and dull-eyed, with pockmarked cheeks, he lacked any personal charisma, and was inclined to every sort of self-indulgence, abetted by the dozens of sycophants in his traveling retinue. He had been an exile for nearly ten years, and few Tripolitans clamored for his return, remembering his singular ineffectiveness as bashaw and cognizant of the fact that in all that time he had been unable even to effect the release of his wife and children from his brother’s custody. Among the many disaffected people in the countryside who complained of Yusuf’s stiff tax levies to finance his war against America, scarcely anyone mentioned Hamet as a plausible alternative to his brother. Eaton had worked hard to build up Hamet’s credibility, which Hamet had just as steadily undermined with his poor judgment. Most notably, he had moved to Tripoli’s eastern provincial capital, Derna, at Yusuf’s invitation, despite Eaton’s warnings that the bashaw intended to have him killed. In July 1803 Hamet had to flee Derna into Egypt when Yusuf sent troops to kill him.
Eaton was aware of Hamet’s failings and the good reasons for the government’s tepidness toward the operation. But like Bainbridge, Eaton believed that only a ground campaign would force Yusuf to make an honorable peace. With Dearborn opposed to committing U.S. troops, Hamet represented the one hope of attacking Tripoli with a land force and America’s winning peace on its terms. Because of his brief tenure as bashaw a decade earlier, Hamet still was familiar to Tripolitans, although not especially beloved. More importantly, Eaton believed Hamet would be loyal to the United States if it helped him snatch the throne from his brother Yusuf. Eaton said that organizing an expedition around Hamet was the difference between “taking a vicious horse by the heels” and having one with a bridle already in its mouth, its reins ready to seize. The expedition would be the capstone of Eaton’s life.
After obtaining Jefferson’s blessing for the Hamet alliance, Eaton dispatched his stepson, Eli Danielson, to Philadelphia and New York to withdraw money that Eaton had made in land speculation to augment whatever government funds he would get. Danielson purchased tents, saddles, and cooking gear, and Eaton ordered a scimitar from a New York smith, to be made of Toledo steel.
Eaton knew the Navy neither supported his plan nor him personally. Some of the Navy’s antipathy toward him dated to Morris’s detention in Tunis, for which Eaton still was blamed by naval officers. They also had closed ranks against Eaton because of his complaints about Captain Alexander Murray. Bainbridge, Murray, Morris, and Barron all disparaged Eaton’s project at various times, although Murray came around after meeting Hamet on Malta. He even transported Hamet to his short-lived government position at Derna. Significantly, Preble, the most aggressive commodore to command the Mediterranean squadron, supported the plan, but he had now been superseded by Barron.
Eaton worked hard to win over Barron during their long Atlantic crossing on the President. The trouble wasn’t just Eaton, it was Hamet’s unsuitability, and it also was the Navy’s secondary role. Barron initially refused to advance Eaton cash, arms, or ammunition, and turned Eaton down when he tried to raise money by seeking reimbursement for the ransom he had paid for Anna Maria Porcile. Eaton argued that he was owed the ransom money because the U.S. government had made him release her before he was able to collect from her father. Eaton complained to Smith that he had to get an advance on his salary—$1,000, nearly a full year’s pay—so that he could hire mercenaries and buy provisions. “If my project succeed, the government will take the benefit of a miracle,” he wrote exasperatedly to Smith, in a letter asking that a $50,000 fund be established at Malta for the operation. (It never was.) He vowed to personally fulfill the promises made to Hamet, even if his government did not. “If it fail, government sacrifices nothing; though my family may feel a sacrifice.” While Barron eventually loosened the purse strings, it would never be enough to satisfy Eaton.
Yet Barron followed Smith’s orders dutifully, although choosing to interpret them in the narrowest sense that obligated him to commit the fewest resources. Hull’s verbal orders, which the lieutenant later recited in a sworn statement, stated that Hamet would receive the squadron’s support at Derna or Benghazi, “and I will take the most effectual measures with the forces under my Command for co-operating with him against the usurper, his brother; and for reestablishing him in the regency of Tripoli.” But this was before Barron was laid low by a liver infection that nearly killed him and, consequently, fell under the spell of advisers such as Lear who opposed the government’s support of Hamet and favored a quick, negotiated settlement with the bashaw.
Eaton, however, was determined to overcome all obstacles, formidable though they would be. To Preble, whom he admired for his bold attacks on Tripoli and whom he considered a friend, he described the result he hoped to effect through his alliance with Hamet. “How Glorious would be the exhibition to see our fellow citizens, in captivity at Tripoli, march in triumph from a dungeon to their tyrant’s palace and display there the flag of the United States.”
The Argus arrived at Alexandria on November 25, 1804, firing a 17-gun salute—the world’s newest republic paying its first official visit to one of the oldest cities still extant. Founded in 332 B.C. by Alexander the Great, Alexandria had been ruled at various times by Greeks, Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, and Ottomans. The Americans gazed in wonder at the ancient and medieval buildings, mosques and homes ranged on the hills to the south of the harbor, and the city’s 6,000 residents gazed back at the Americans with intense curiosity.
In the backwash of the Napoleonic wars, Egypt’s 4 million inhabitants were convulsed in 1804 by civil war and anarchy. Napoleon’s lightning invasion in 1798 was launched with the intent of adding a colony and providing a forward base for a campaign against British India. French troops quickly captured Alexandria and moved on to Cairo, defended by the Mamelukes, former Ottoman slaves of Kurdish, Turkish, and Circassian descent whose power in Egypt now rivaled the Ottomans. The Mamelukes fielded a formidable cavalry—“Let the Franks come; we shall crush them beneath our horses’ hooves!” a Mameluke prince reportedly exclaimed—but they were overmatched against the French, whose artillery and firepower were decisive at the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798. The French took control of all of Egypt.
Then disaster struck on August 1, 1798, when the French fleet, anchored in Abukir Bay at Alexandria, was annihilated by Lord Horatio Nelson. With Napoleon and his army stranded and blockaded by the British fleet, the Turks readied invasion armies to reclaim Egypt. But the shrewd Napoleon thwarted them by launching a preemptive strike against Turkish forces massing in Syria and later wiping out a Turk army landed at Abukir Bay. Then, in 1799, he slipped away to France, leaving his army behind. The British and Turks regrouped. In 1801 they attacked and defeated the French. Turkey’s sultan reasserted his sovereignty over Egypt, but in reality this only marked the commencement of a death struggle for supremacy between the Mamelukes and Ottomans that would last a decade. In the lawless countryside, rival armies and ragged bands of deserters and highwaymen pillaged and murdered without check. The only guarantors of safety were arms and numbers.
Into this chaotic mix waded Eaton and a handful of able men—Marine Lieutenant Presley O‘Bannon, Richard Farquhar, Lieutenant Joshua Blake, Midshipman George Mann, Eaton’s stepson, Eli Danielson, two seamen, and a Marine enlisted man. They had to find Hamet before there could be any march into the Tripoli regency 300 miles to the west, and they did not know where Hamet was. The search party boarded a cutter at Alexandria and sailed to the mouth of the Nile River at Rosetta, about 20 miles northeast of Alexandria. While waiting for the tide to carry them into the Nile, they walked on a beach where French and British troops had fought in 1801. It was “covered with human Skeletons, ghastly monuments of the Savage influence of avarice and ambition on the human mind,” observed Eaton.
They started up the Nile for Cairo, a river journey of more than 100 miles, hoping to learn from the Ottoman viceroy, Ahmed Pasha Khorshid, where Hamet might be. By this time, Eaton had seventeen well-armed men with him, thanks to the kindness of the British agent at Cairo, Major E. Misset, who had loaned Eaton his secretary and several men for the journey.
William Eaton arguably was America’s first modern intelligence operative, as the appellation later would apply to agents who gathered information in hostile territory and then analyzed and acted on it. A striking blue-eyed man of slightly above average height, Eaton was both a thinking man and a man of action. Above all, he possessed the ability to concentrate his force on a single object. Well-educated and articulate, he was fluent in at least four Arabic dialects, all learned during his Barbary consulship. He also could speak four American Indian languages, and at Dartmouth had studied French, Latin, and Greek. His prodigious daily output of letters and journal entries rivaled any diplomat’s. He also happened to be a crack rifle shot, could hit a target with a knife thrown from 80 feet, and was an expert with the scimitar, a weapon that had captivated him during his early days in Tunis; he had mastered the art of twirling it over his head—a trick few besides the janissaries of Constantinople could perform proficiently.
Eaton’s affinity for indigenous people and knack for adapting to their environment would prove indispensable during the rigorous months ahead. These traits had made him a gifted scout and spy under General “Mad Anthony” Wayne in the Ohio country, when he donned buckskins and infiltrated the Miami Indian villages, and on the Spanish frontier in southeast Georgia—places where he had become adept at living off the land, engaging in guerrilla warfare and rapid movement. When Jefferson, Madison, and Smith approved Eaton’s plan to restore Hamet to Tripoli’s throne, it is unlikely that they realized to what extent success would depend on Eaton’s abilities.
On the Nile, the Eaton party passed scenes worthy of Dante’s pen—indiscriminate killings, villages ransacked so many times that nothing of the slightest value remained, and starving refugees. Bandits and armed deserters from the warring armies robbed one and all. “Egypt has no master,” Eaton wrote to Sir Alexander Ball, the governor of Malta. “The Turkish soldiery, restrained by no discipline sieze with the hand of rapine, everything for which passion creates a desire,” and the Mamelukes were no better. “Wild Arabs” roved the banks of the Nile, ready to pounce on the defenseless. They carefully avoided the well-armed Americans and British in Eaton’s two boats, each equipped with a swivel-mounted gun. Along the way, Eaton’s party hunted pigeons and fowl; if the sight of their arms didn’t discourage the Arabs, the loud reports of gunfire certainly did. They reached Sabour as Arabs were driving off the villagers’ herds; the day before, the same village had been plundered by 500 Albanian deserters from the Turkish army.
At Sabour, the people welcomed the sight of the Americans’ redand-blue uniforms and round hats. (The French wore triangular hats.) “They kissed our hands; and with prostrations to the ground and eyes inflamed with anguish implored English succor,” Eaton wrote to Ball, suggesting the time for an English reoccupation might be at hand. In fact, everywhere they went, the people wanted to know if they were English and when they planned to return and restore order. Egyptians, Eaton said, preferred the English because they “pay for every thing; the French pay nothing and take everything—They don’t like this kind of deliverers.” Eaton impressed the natives with his rifle marksmanship by splitting an orange twice with three shots at 32 yards.
In Turkish-ruled Cairo, Eaton learned Hamet had joined the other side, the Mamelukes. No one knew exactly where he was. Moreover, his alliance with the rebels made a rendezvous awkward, with Turkish troops controlling the countryside between Cairo and the Mamelukes’ strongholds to the south, and the Mameluke redoubts themselves under attack.
Cairo’s viceroy, Khorshid, politely overlooked the fact that their ally had joined the enemy, and made the Americans welcome. Cairo, more populous (260,000) than anyplace most of the Americans had ever seen, put on a show for the visitors. They were escorted to the palace in a torchlight parade through the city. Spectators lined the road for a mile and a half, eager to see the men from the New World, who were accompanied by some of Khorshid’s attendants and six splendidly liveried Arabian horses.
At the palace, Khorshid rose from an embroidered purple sofa with damask cushions to greet them ceremoniously. They drank coffee, smoked pipes, and ate sherbet while the viceroy peppered them with questions about the United States, its geography, government, and people. Eaton made the most of the situation, describing at length the customs of the American people and explaining that the Barbary War was being fought to vindicate U.S. rights. He compared the Barbary pirates and the Ottomans in a manner flattering to the Turks. Eaton said Americans and Turks were alike, and drew startling—but not necessarily accurate—parallels between Islam and the peculiar offshoot of Christianity he claimed Americans practiced: the worship of one God, with no unnecessary bloodshed.
With the ice broken by Eaton’s flattery, the viceroy brought up the ticklish subject of Hamet. He had intended to honor his predecessor’s promises to aid Hamet until his unfortunate alliance with the Mamelukes. Eaton, who knew that everything depended on the viceroy’s support, interjected that “it was more like God to pardon than to punish a repenting enemy.” His homage to the viceroy’s godlike powers and his other flattery utterly disarmed Khorshid; he promised to send emissaries to locate Hamet and to permit Hamet to join Eaton and leave Egypt unmolested. It was a supreme diplomatic victory for Eaton. He cemented their relationship by announcing that he wished to name Dr. Francesco Mendrici, formerly the Tunis bey’s doctor, to be the agent for the United States in Cairo. Khorshid certainly raised no objections; Mendrici happened to be his chief physician.
The viceroy’s envoy traced Hamet to the Upper Egypt city of Miniet, where 3,000 besieged Mamelukes recently had thrown back 8,000 attacking Albanians and Turks. Eaton sent a letter suggesting that they meet in Rosetta, where Hamet could seek British protection.
Eaton impatiently awaited a response in Cairo, acutely aware that all of his hopes for driving Yusuf from power with a land expedition hinged on Hamet’s reply. Would he join Eaton? Had he abandoned hopes of regaining his throne? Eaton knew that without his cooperation, there could be no insurgency, no invasion.
The reply, which came quickly, was all that Eaton had hoped for. After mildly rebuking Eaton for delaying, Hamet said he was leaving Miniet for the home of a sheik friend to begin preparing for the expedition. “Thus you must assist from the sea and I from the land, and God will aid us in establishing peace and tranquility.”
A few days later brought another letter from Hamet: “I cannot but congratulate you and felicitate myself after so much apprehension doubt and solicitude, that we now calculate with certainty on the success of our expedition....” He already was headed down the Nile to meet Eaton. Bring plenty of money, he said unnecessarily—Eaton well knew that money was everything in North Africa. “Do not think about money because the occasion demands heavy expenditure. It is a matter of making war, and war calls for money and men.”
They agreed to rendezvous near Lake Fiaume, 190 miles from the Mediterranean coast and on the edge of Egypt’s Western Desert. Eaton embarked from Alexandria at the head of a troop of mounted men consisting of Lieutenant Blake, Midshipman Mann, and twenty-three others. Less than halfway to Lake Fiaume, Turkish troops stopped them at their lines, the outermost frontier of Turk-controlled territory, and would not permit them to go on. Eaton and his men had no choice but to settle into Demanhour, governed tyrannically by the local Turkish army commander known as the Kerchief. Eaton went to work trying to win over the harsh, dour leader, flattering him for his troops’ military bearing, and stating that he was undoubtedly a man of valor. Few could resist Eaton’s charm for very long. Soon the Kerchief and Eaton were on excellent terms, and the Kerchief had no problem with Eaton’s notifying Hamet that he was in Demanhour and inviting him to join him there.
While he waited, Eaton watched the Turkish troops drill, visited the Kerchief, and reconnoitered the village, whose inhabitants were as intensely curious about the Americans as they were about the villagers. Eaton began to notice a mournful-looking boy lurking around his lodgings. The boy shied away whenever Eaton invited him inside. Eaton made inquiries about him, and learned that the boy’s father, a prominent, wealthy villager, had owned the house where Eaton was staying. But when the Turks came, they beheaded him and appropriated all of his property, including his home. The boy, five brothers and sisters, and their mother lived only a few doors down from Eaton. Softhearted when it came to women and children, Eaton gave the family all of the pocket money that he had. “The child kissed my hand; and wept! God, I thank thee that my children are Americans!” To his wife Eliza, he wrote: “There is more pleasure in being generous than rich ... Man wants but little, and not that little long.”
Unaccountably, the Kerchief cooled toward the Americans. Turkish guards suddenly appeared outside the Americans’ quarters and accompanied them on their walks. Eaton tried to learn from the Kerchief the reason for the chill, but the leader was closed and suspicious. Finally, Eaton teased out the problem: The French consul was spreading it about Egypt that Eaton and his men were British spies who were using Hamet to aid the Mameluke rebels. It was believable enough, given the rumors already abroad that the British were secretly subsidizing the Mamelukes. Once again, the Americans had been caught in England and France’s crossfire.
Eaton so thoroughly allayed the Kerchief’s suspicions that when Hamet reached Demanhour on February 5 with his suite of 100 attendants, they were greeted by salutes from the Kerchief’s honor guard. “Tents were pitched for the accommodation of his people, and provision made for their refreshment—the Bashaw sleeps tonight at the Kercheifs house, and tomorrow afternoon we depart for Alexandria....” However, the French consul’s slander damaged Hamet in Alexandria. The governor and admiral forbade him to set foot in the city, and refused to let him embark by ship from there.
The restrictions didn’t matter. Hamet had decided to attack by land rather than by sea, wisely reasoning that if he sailed, he would have to depend on his followers making their way cross-country without his leadership. Most of them probably would never reach Derna. The decision resolved a host of problems that Lieutenant Isaac Hull had foreseen, chief among them being space; if even 100 of Hamet’s force sailed to Derna on the Argus, there would have been no room for their provisions.
The expedition’s audacity invested the sojourners’ preparations with an electric quality. They would have to cross 460 miles of rocky, arid wasteland before Hull could resupply them at Bomba. Would they be able to carry enough food and water to last them until then? Would Hamet, as he claimed, be able to marshal support among the desert inhabitants, or would they only encounter hostile Bedouin tribes? Once the invaders reached Bomba, they would be only three days from Derna, Tripoli’s second-largest city. And from Derna, it was but another 100 miles to Benghazi. If an attack on Benghazi succeeded, U.S. warships would carry the army the last 400 miles to Tripoli itself for the climactic assault.
Hamet camped at Arab’s Tower, 30 miles west of Alexandria’s old port, while Eaton and O‘Bannon went into Alexandria to recruit soldiers.
Hull had begun signing up mercenaries in the port city while Eaton was waiting in Demanhour for Hamet, but the jittery Turkish officials ordered him to hand over some Maltese whom he had recruited, then demanded that he stop altogether. Hull discharged everyone he had signed, closed his Alexandria house, and moved aboard the Argus. The French whisperings about Eaton’s party really being British spies were damaging enough, but Yusuf made matters worse by sending an envoy to Alexandria to persuade the governor and admiral to stop Hamet from leaving Egypt. The envoy was remarkably frank with the governor. The bashaw, he said, feared that his people would rally to Hamet’s standard, and he would have to flee or lose his head. Yusuf was weary of the war with America, the envoy said.
Yusuf’s growing concern over his brother’s movements was becoming increasingly evident in Tripoli as well. He “is now very attentive upon your transactions with his brother in Alexandria—a Camp is going against Derne ,” Nissen, the Danish consul in Tripoli, wrote in sympathetic ink to Consul Davis in Tunis. Yusuf’s agent in Malta, Gaetano Schembry, was urging the bashaw to intensify his ill-treatment of the Philadelphia prisoners to force America to agree to peace. Nissen warned in his secret message to Davis: “... you Sacrifice your prisoner’s life here in case of success.”
Even before Eaton’s rendezvous with Hamet, gloom had pervaded the bashaw’s castle over the protracted war. And then the 1804 grain harvest was so poor that in October, Yusuf had halted all grain sales—except to his household. This had precipitated a fierce argument with Murad Reis, his Scottish son-in-law, who had planned to buy barley in the market. Yusuf lost his temper with Murad—the grand admiral was drunk and insolent—and struck him and threw him in prison. Later, when tempers cooled, the bashaw released him and blamed their quarrel on a servant. The servant was punished with 500 bastinados. In November, Yusuf suffered an epileptic seizure. “His people thought he was possessed with the devil,” wrote Cowdery. A marabout, a Moslem holy man, was summoned to drive the devil out; the seizure’s abatement was ascribed to his incantations. In December, Yusuf presided over his son’s marriage to Hamet’s eldest daughter, a “very handsome” twelve-year-old.
While Hamet enlisted Arab supporters, Eaton and Lieutenant O‘Bannon tramped the streets of Alexandria looking for European soldiers of fortune. Hull opened a $10,000 line of credit in Alexandria and had given Eaton $3,000 cash for recruitment expenses. Eaton spent it and an additional $3,000 before completing preparations for the expedition. Eaton estimated the expedition would cost at least $20,000, a bargain by any measure. Before parting with Hull, Eaton got another $7,000 advance and instructed Hull to have $7,000 more for him at Bomba. Eaton well knew that in North Africa, where only one’s tribe and Islam commanded absolute loyalty, money was the third-best guarantor. “Cash will do much with the inhabitants of this Country; even those whom it will not engage to fight, will by it be engaged not to fight: With it we can pass generally.”
A more diverse army probably never assembled under U.S. auspices. There were Greeks, Italians, Tripolitans, Egyptians, Frenchmen, Arabs, Americans, and British—eleven nationalities in all. Of the 400 or more expeditioners, just 10 were Americans: Eaton, Lieutenant O‘Bannon, Marine Sergeant Arthur Campbell, 6 Marine privates, and Midshipman Paoli Peck from the Argus. Two Englishmen had signed on—Richard Farquhar and his brother Percival. (But only one Farquhar actually went on the expedition; it is unclear which, for Eaton referred to both as “Richard”; one of the Richards was turned out for embezzling $1,332.) Selim Comb, a Turk, was in charge of the 25 cannoneers, who had no cannons. Captain Luco Ulovix and a Lieutenant Constantine led 38 mixed European and Egyptian infantry, mostly Greeks. The rest consisted of Hamet and his 90 Tripolitan attendants, and up to 300 Arab cavalry and footmen under Sheiks il Taiib and Mahomet. Scores of horses, 107 camels, and some jackasses carried the food, water, and ammunition.
The ragtag army was a patchwork of clothing, uniforms, and military bearing, ranging from the unwavering discipline of the uniformed Marines to the irascible, erratic Arab cavalrymen, who were as apt to mutiny as to charge recklessly. As a former Army combat officer, Eaton clearly saw his little army’s shortcomings and tried to remedy them. He needed 100 Marines, 100 stands of arms, cartridges, and two brass fieldpieces with trains and ammunition, he told Barron.
Of the motley band Eaton and O‘Bannon scraped up in Alexandria, no one had a life story matching that of the incomparable Johan Eugene Leitensdorfer. He was the courier who had handed Hamet Eaton’s message in Miniet urging the rendezvous in Rosetta. Leitensdorfer happened to be between engagements, a rarity for a man who lived on the run, over a lifetime in which he practiced thirty occupations, served in five armies, and married three women without a divorce. Eaton made Leitensdorfer one of his top officers.
Leitensdorfer was born Gervasso Prodasio Santuari near Trent in the Tyrol in October 1772. He studied for the priesthood, but found it wasn’t for him. He quit, married, and went to work as a surveyor. Yet the ordinary workaday life did not suit him either, and he joined the Austrian army, acquiring the taste for adventure and the wanderlust that would dominate his life. He fought the Turks at Belgrade and the French at Mantua, where he deserted rather than be hanged for dueling. Changing his name to Carlo Hossando, he joined Napoleon’s army. The French learned of his previous service in the enemy army and arrested him on suspicion of being a spy. He escaped from prison after drugging his guards with opium and fled to Switzerland, where he became Johan Eugene Leitensdorfer. His family sent him money, which he used to buy watches and jewelry, then peddled his wares throughout Spain and France.
Under his new name, he rejoined the French army in time for the invasion of Egypt in 1798. He assisted the French with their Egyptian agricultural and economic projects. When the British drove out the French three years later, he opened a coffeehouse, bought a home in Alexandria, and married a Coptic woman, while still married to his first wife in the Tyrol. His career as a coffeehouse proprietor lasted only until the British withdrew from Egypt in 1803. Once again feeling the pull of the religious life, he sailed to Messina and became a novice at a Capuchin monastery. But he found that he didn’t want to be a friar, and soon became a street magician in Constantinople. Then he enlisted in the Turkish army and was sent back to Egypt. When the Mamelukes defeated his unit in battle, he deserted, hid among the Bedouins, and made his way back to Constantinople, where he converted to Islam, circumcised himself with his own razor, and became a dervish, adept at sorcery and tricks, with the new name of Murat Aga. He roamed the Black Sea’s south shore, peddling excerpts from the Koran written on small slips of paper, which he sanctified by rubbing them against a shaved spot on top of his head.
While wandering rugged northern Turkey, Leitensdorfer encountered the bashaw of Trebizond, who had been struck blind. Claiming he could restore the bashaw’s sight, Leitensdorfer blew caustic lime into his eyes and washed it out with milk, then started him on a “sweat cure.” Midway through it, Leitensdorfer himself began to sweat, doubtless imagining what might happen to him if the cure didn’t work. He decided not to wait around to find out and joined a caravan bound for Persia. Bandits overtook and robbed the travelers. While plundering the caravan, the chatty thieves informed them of the bashaw’s miraculous recovery of his eyesight. Leitensdorfer hurried back to Trebizond to claim a rich reward, and then joined a Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca. At Jedda on the Red Sea, he met a Lord Gordon, a gentleman Scot who was on a tour, and became his interpreter. They traveled to Abyssinia and Nubia. Back in Cairo, Leitensdorfer quit Gordon, returned to Alexandria, separated from his second wife, and joined Eaton.
His adventures with Eaton were by no means the final chapter. He drifted to Palermo, married a third time, but couldn’t settle down. So he sailed to the United States. He became a surveyor of public buildings in Washington, D.C., under Benjamin Latrobe. Later, as a watchman at the U.S. Capitol, he lived in a room in the north wing, cooking for himself, making shoes and maps, and catching birds. Congress awarded Leitensdorfer 320 acres in Missouri for his service with Eaton, and paid him a rate for each mile he traveled with the expedition. Later, a Viennese theater production about his incredible life drew large audiences.
Eaton drew up a formal agreement with Hamet titled “Convention between the United States of America and his Highness, Hamet, Caramanly , Bashaw of Tripoli.” The remarkable document, written by Eaton, and signed and witnessed on February 23, 1805, in Alexandria, contained fourteen articles and an additional “secret” one that committed Hamet to handing over Yusuf and Murad Reis to Barron as surety of Hamet’s fulfillment of the other pledges that he made.
In exchange for Eaton’s supplying Hamet with arms and ships to restore him to the throne, Hamet agreed to a host of terms, all contingent on his becoming bashaw: releasing the Philadelphia captives without ransom; repaying the United States for its monetary support with the tribute he would collect from Denmark, Sweden, and the Batavian Republic; granting America most-favored-nation status; and henceforth levying no tribute on the United States. In other words, in gratitude for America’s help, Hamet would end hostilities forever and treat America as an equal. The convention also made Eaton general and commander in chief of the invasion force collecting in Alexandria.
Sanguine about the expedition’s prospects, Eaton boasted to Barron: “I cannot but flatter myself that we may realize the success of our calculations on this coalition; and that you will have the glory of carrying the usurper a prisoner in Your Squadron to the United States; and of releiving our fellow citizens from the chains of slavery without the degrading conditions of a ransom.”
Turkish troops swooped down, snaring Hamet’s servants on March 2 as the last expedition provisions were being loaded onto a boat in Alexandria. Then they began advancing on Hamet’s camp at the Arab’s Tower. Panic broke out among Hamet and his attendants. Only Lieutenant O‘Bannon’s firm intervention prevented mass flight.
The reason for the surprise raid, Eaton noted with relief, was only a neglected bribe. “We found the impediments raised to us were occasioned by influence of the supervisor of the revenue, who had not yet been bought.—The day was spent in accommodating the affair.”
Eaton joined Hamet at Arab’s Tower. At 11:00 A.M. on March 8, 1805, the patchwork army began marching into the wasteland to the west.