XVI
If War is his object, I shall be obliged to meet it.
—Commodore John Rodgers, referring to Bey Hamouda Pacha of Tunis, in a letter to George Davis, U.S. charge d‘affaires in Tunis
I fear we stopped too short.
—William Eaton, in a letter to Thomas Dwight
Hamouda Pacha was threatening war. He wanted back the xebec and two Neapolitan prizes that Rodgers had caught as they tried to run the American blockade of Tripoli in early May. Commodore John Rodgers had landed the Barbary crews back in Tunis, but refused to return the vessels. Charge d’Affaires George Davis had done his best to deflect the bey’s litany of demands while Rodgers and Lear ended the Tripolitan war. The impatient bey even had written directly to Jefferson, warning that only the president’s previous assurances that he wanted peace with Tunis were preventing war now. Then, for weeks, the bey and Rodgers had exchanged demands, refusals, and threats.
Finally Rodgers had had enough. His natural combativeness was aroused over the prospect of hostilities after all the tedious months of cruising off Tripoli. “If War is his object, I shall be obliged to meet it.” He sent the Congress, commanded by Decatur, to Tunis Bay to defend U.S. shipping. The bey responded by announcing he would not grant Lear an audience; Rodgers retorted that the bey would have no choice but to receive Lear, and sent more warships to Tunis. Tensions reached the breaking point when the Vixen boarded and searched a polacre and a gunboat in Tunis Bay. Rodgers gathered his formidable squadron for a display of power.
In America, the controversial Tripoli treaty was making waves. Navy Secretary Smith boasted that it was better than any treaty negotiated with Tripoli in 100 years. Certainly it was that. “All Europe is giving us national reputation for this,” he crowed to Preble. But Smith was enough of a realist to foresee the bitter fight looming in Congress over treaty ratification, sarcastically noting, “Our own good folk [critics of the treaty] will be busy in telling the world that we are, in fact, a very contemptible people.” Preble publicly held his tongue, but was among the many who were disappointed with the treaty; privately he lamented “the sacrifice of National honor which has been made by an ignominious negotiation.” The $60,000 ransom stuck fast in the craws of treaty opponents, who asked: Need any ransom have been paid, with Eaton occupying Derna and a large U.S. squadron just a day’s sail from Tripoli? Anticipating this argument in his letter to Preble, Smith asserted that the Philadelphia prisoners’ safety alone justified the treaty. Smith said all the returning former captive officers—this wasn’t altogether true—were convinced that Yusuf would have massacred them if Lear had not paid their ransom and Rodgers instead had attacked Tripoli. “The Bashaw said again & again that having killed a father & brother he would not have any scruples in killing a few infidels.” Smith was rehearsing for the donnybrook ahead.
Eighteen U.S. Navy vessels crewed by 2,500 men entered Tunis Bay on July 30, 1805. The United States had never before gathered in one place such a naval force. The forest of masts and crowd of canvas presented a menacing sight. Tunisians watched with awe and fear, expecting a devastating bombardment to commence any hour. The vessels deployed in a long line spanning the harbor mouth, boarding and inspecting the papers of all departing and arriving vessels.
Every U.S. warship in the Mediterranean was present: the frigates Constitution, Constellation, Essex, and John Adams; the brigs Siren, Vixen, and Franklin; the schooners Nautilus and Enterprise; the sloop Hornet; and eight U.S.-built gunboats, which weeks before had arrived in the Mediterranean. Ten gunboats in all had recently been completed at shipyards along the East Coast, but Gunboat 1 had to turn back to Charleston with structural problems, and Gunboat 7 vanished during the Atlantic crossing and was never seen again.
After letting the Tunisians absorb the sight of his formidable battle group, Rodgers sent Hamouda Pacha a letter reminding him that he had once said if a U.S. squadron entered his harbor, it would mean war. Did he still mean that? he asked provocatively. He gave the Tunisian leader thirty-six hours to decide: peace or war. If there was no reply, Rodgers would assume the bey meant war and offensive and defensive operations would commence.
Hamouda was in a quandary. He fervently wished to avoid a shooting war he undoubtedly would lose. But if he gave in, he would lose face with the other Christian powers paying him tribute, and that could jeopardize the entire Barbary States’ system of terror, robbery, and extortion. He tried to buy time by reminding Rodgers that he had sent an appeal to Jefferson. Until he received an answer, he planned no warlike actions and intended to honor his treaty with the United States.
This only irritated Rodgers. He imposed a new deadline for Hamouda to decide how matters stood between Tunis and America. Davis piped up unexpectedly that he thought the ultimatum unreasonable. Rodgers slapped him down, “much astonished” that Davis had failed to understand his intentions. The commodore ordered Davis to prepare to leave Tunis. As the clock ticked down to the new deadline, Rodgers added a new condition and threat: The bey must pledge himself to peace in the presence of both the British and French consuls—so he couldn’t later deny having done so—or Rodgers would send his ships to capture Tunisian cruisers at sea.
Hamouda refused.
The Constitution fired on a brig attempting to leave Tunis, compelling it to turn back. The Vixen, Nautilus, and Enterprise began cruising the waters outside the harbor, stopping every vessel in sight. In an extemporaneous demonstration of U.S. destructiveness, the Vixen’s officers, during an afternoon of relaxation on an island in Tunis Bay, shot several seals and fowl, and then started a fire that got away from them and burned the entire island.
Lear threw the besieged bey a lifeline so that he could extricate himself from his predicament. It perplexed him, Lear noted, that the bey claimed to value the president’s friendship, yet refused to meet with Lear, the president’s designated representative. The bey grabbed the line and held fast to it. He hadn’t realized Lear represented the president; knowing that now, of course he would receive Lear. Rodgers moved back the deadline two days, but it may as well have been two years, for it was clear there would be no shooting war now.
Hamouda now had an inspiration: He would send an ambassador to Washington to personally argue Tunis’s reparations claims for the xebec and the prize vessels. The appeal to higher authority accomplished two things: It automatically imposed a cooling-off period, and it tied the hands of Rodgers, who, as a naval officer bound to the chain of command, couldn’t very well deny the bey the right to petition higher-ups. He graciously offered passage to the Tunisian ambassador on one of his frigates. Hamouda responded by granting the United States “most favored nation” trade status, meaning it no longer would have to pay the higher duties Tunis imposed on the lesser nations such as Denmark and Naples, but not on the major powers such as Britain and France. Hamouda also asked Rogers to name a new charge d‘affaires, after coolly observing Davis’s distress over his countrymen’s aggressiveness and Rodgers’s displeasure with him. Davis, still smarting from his treatment by Rodgers and Lear, didn’t mind leaving. “After such a degradation, I could not return to the duties of my office,” he sniffed. Rodgers appointed another ship’s surgeon, Dr. James Dodge of the Constitution. naval surgeons, because of their learning, evidently were regarded as competent substitutediplomats; Dodge was the third named in Barbary since the war began. The Tunisian crisis sputtered to an end.
Rodgers was justifiably proud of the diplomatic victory achieved with his show of naval force: “... I feel satisfied this lesson has not only changed his [the bey‘s] opinion of our Maritime strength, but has caused him to discover more distinctly his own weakness in every sense.” It was the first time the Mediterranean squadron had followed to the letter the instructions written in 1802 by Smith and Madison of “holding out the olive Branch in one hand & displaying in the other the means of offensive operations.” Hamouda later insisted in his correspondence with Jefferson that the confrontation was due solely to “the too martial temper” of Rodgers and to Davis’s “equivocal conduct.”
Fuming over Lear and Barron’s abandonment of his expedition, Eaton sailed to Gibraltar to await a berth on a ship bound for America. Before leaving Syracuse, he had paid off his European troops and said good-bye to Hamet, whom he would never see again. Now Eaton began to brood over the war’s disappointing outcome, believing that he and Hamet could have marched to Tripoli and forced Yusuf to free the captives. “I fear we stopped too short,” he wrote to Thomas Dwight, a friend in Massachusetts, in June. “I hoped to have stood on to see the temerity of Joseph Bashaw chastized and his perfidy punished. The lesson would have been awful to Barbary—Perhaps another such occasion will never offer.”
As Eaton pondered what had happened, his disappointment metastasized into a black anger directed at one villain: Tobias Lear. He began putting his thoughts on paper. He carefully documented the promises made by Jefferson administration officials before he left Washington, and how they had proved chimerical. This web of broken promises was the framework for a letter to Smith, written during Eaton’s Gibraltar layover. Page after accusatory page piled up, each sharper in tone than the one before, until he had composed a 5,000-word screed.
Everything changed, he wrote to Smith, when Lear, “a man who had no authorized agency in the war ... intruded himself” into Barron’s confidence. Thus began Eaton’s censorious letter. Barron, he wrote, had initially supported his expedition and was aware that “an understanding Subsisted Between the Commander in Chief and myself that I should go forward And exercise Discretionary measures for bringing Hamet Bashaw forward with all his influence in order To Intercept Supplies to the Enemy from the country and to cut off his escape in the rear.” Eaton, Rodgers, and Preble had agreed that after Eaton and Hamet captured Derna and Benghazi, the squadron would transport their army across the Gulf of Sidra to Cape Mensurat, where they would assault Tripoli from the rear while warships attacked from the harbor.
But Barron’s illness had left him helplessly under the spell of the “Machiavellian Commissioner.” Lear viewed Hamet as only a lever for obtaining a quick negotiated peace. Lear had ordered Eaton’s withdrawal from Derna even before he left Malta to begin negotiations. It was Lear who had withheld supplies and reinforcements from Eaton, while Barron’s squadron passively cruised off Tripoli, never attacking or planning offensive action. Eaton complained about being denied the 100 Marines he had requested: “... it did not require a greater latitude of discretion to indulge them the permission to fight at Derne than to furlough them on parties of pleasure at Catania—and they must have subsisted cheaper on the coast than at any port in Italy.” With Derna in American hands, two to three months might have been spent in planning and coordinating a crushing land—sea attack that would have resulted in Tripoli’s capture. But Lear instead made a hasty treaty while claiming that offensive operations would have jeopardized the Philadelphia captives’ lives—a claim Eaton disputed. “Man seldom mediates vengeance when disolution glares him in the face....” He pointed out that awful threats also had been made against the captives before Preble bombarded Tripoli in 1804—and were never carried out. “The terrible bashaw’s first care was to provide for his own safety and he uniformly took refuge in his gardens or in his Bomb-proof and all experience has taught us that the more rougly he was handled and the nearer danger approached him the more tractable he has been rendered.” He wondered whether Lear had even considered exchanging Derna and its 12,000—15,000 Tripolitan citizens for the 300 Philadelphia captives. “Tripoli was in our power and with no verry extraordinary effort it might have been also in our hands.”
He derided Lear’s professed preference for Yusuf over Hamet. “Was Mr. Lear sent out to co-operate with Joseph Bashaw?” If parricide, fratricide, piracy, and broken treaties are hallmarks of an able ruler, “Mr. Lear has chosen the fittest of the two brothers for his man of confidence.” He acidly criticized the Arabs’ abandonment at Derna. “This is the first instance I ever heard of a religious test being required to entitle a soldier to his rations.” And, in a burst of caustic verse, he sneered at Lear’s praise for the Americans’ bravery at Derna, “a military compliment from the provisional colonel Lear. A colonel/Who never set a squadron in the field/Nor the division of a battle Knows/More than a spinster.” Lear’s peace treaty was “a wound on our national dignity” that cried for an official inquiry; from it, honor “recoils and humanity Bleeds,” he wrote.
During his weeks-long Atlantic crossing on the Constellation, Eaton touched up his fiery, rambling letter. Normally convivial, Eaton spent much of the trip alone in his cabin, or on deck, gazing at the sea.
Eaton and the Philadelphia captives received heroes’ welcomes in America. Bainbridge had returned on September 10 with 117 fellow crewmen after a court of inquiry presided over by Eaton on the President at Syracuse found him blameless for the loss of the Philadelphia. Yet, some still hadn’t forgiven him for surrendering his ship without firing a shot.
Eaton, however, was embraced without reservations by one and all. Dinner invitations arrived in a flood for the man of the hour, from everyone from President Jefferson to congressmen to old War Department friends. At a testimonial dinner in Richmond attended by Chief Justice John Marshall, Eaton was honored for leading “the Spartan band who spread the glory of the American arms where the American name was not known.” Newspapers referred to him as “the modern Africanus,” and as a latter-day Alexander or Belisarius. “General Eaton is the inheritor of the mantle of Alexander of Great!” gushed Dr. Francisco Mendrici, who had aided Eaton in Egypt, in a widely quoted panegyric. “The sands of the desert part before him, and the mountains melt away. He conquers all that lies in his path!” Addressing Eaton, Preble warmly added that he had “astonished not only your country but the world.” Had he received the money, supplies, and naval support that he requested, “what would you not have done!”
A Senate resolution, never implemented, established a sixsquare-mile township named Derne in an unspecified location, “as a memorial of the conquest of that city forever”—to be parceled among Eaton, Midshipman Mann, Lieutenant O‘Bannon, and the five surviving Marine enlisted men. Massachusetts awarded Eaton 10,000 acres in Maine for his “undaunted courage and brilliant services.” Odes were written to him. One, by Federalist poet Robert Treat Paine, was sung at Boston’s General Eaton Fire Society gathering to the tune “God Save the King,” later famous on this side of the Atlantic as the patriotic hymn ’America“:
Eaton, a glorious name!
Struck from the flint of fame
A spark whose chymick [chemical] flame
Dissolved their chains.
Eaton reveled in the celebratory dinners and the admiring strangers who bought him drinks in Washington’s taverns. It was a welcome release after the long, abstentious months in the desert and at Derna. Eaton made the most of it. In his barroom perorations on the war, he vilified Lear for having denied America a resounding military triumph, and for agreeing to a demeaning ransom when the captives’ release might have been obtained without any ransom paid.
Federalist congressmen were listening carefully to Eaton’s denunciations, seeing a prime opportunity to strike a blow at the Republicans, ascendant for five years now. They flattered and cultivated “the general,” pumping him for information that would help them argue against the Tripoli treaty and give the Republicans a black eye. It promised to be a battle royal. Federalist newspapers already were pillorying the treaty, while the Republican press spun its own tapestry, depicting Hamet as a debauchee “addicted to sordid propensities,” and Yusuf as his antithesis, a man inclined to “elevated centiments .”
Eaton’s staunchest allies were Senator Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, the former war secretary who had supported Eaton when he was stationed in Georgia, and Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire. Pickering deplored Lear’s treachery; he had “acted contrary to his instructions” and “shamefully betrayed” Hamet. Recalling the mysterious disappearance of the Washington-Jefferson letters six years earlier, Pickering suggested that circumstance alone “will warrant any surmise unfavourable to Lear; while it will account for J’s [Jefferson‘s] solicitudes to vindicate Lear from reproach.”
Between consorting with Federalists and deprecating Lear at every opportunity, Eaton swiftly transformed himself into an enemy of the Jefferson administration. He burned the last bridge to his former benefactors when he distributed copies of his diatribe to Smith to newspapers in Boston and Hartford and put it in a pamphlet circulated in Washington. “The effect has been that the Executive has been probed to the core, every syllable of document drawn from him which could throw light on the subject; and, you have the result—Lear will be impeached,” he crowed. Eaton also continued to harangue Smith, who was trying to ascertain the United States’s obligations to Hamet. There were none, Eaton said, but reminded him that America had deceived Hamet—as well as Eaton himself—by pledging to cooperate with him, then using him as “an instrument” and discarding him. “On entering the ground of war with Hamet Bashaw, Mr. O‘Bannon and myself united in a resolution to perish with him before the walls of Tripoli, or to triumph with him within those walls.” It was the same bitter story Eaton was telling anyone who would listen in the taverns where he held court nearly every day.
Federalist senators went on the attack over the Tripoli treaty in January 1806, requesting that Jefferson turn over all of his administration’s correspondence with Barron, Rodgers, and Eaton, along with Eaton’s and Lear’s instructions. At the same time, the House examined Eaton’s convention with Hamet. Jefferson personally supervised the collection of the letters and papers, listing all official correspondence, instructions, and commissions pertaining to Tripoli and noting cryptically that only $20,000 was to have been spent on Hamet’s expedition and that it wasn’t known whether he had been reunited yet with his family. He composed a message to Congress that in a disinterested, lawyerly way explained that Eaton’s convention with Hamet was intended to “produce effects favorable to both, without binding either to guaranty the objects of the other,” with Hamet attacking by land and Barron by sea. The convention never committed the United States to restoring Hamet to Tripoli’s throne, argued Jefferson. Thus, when Hamet was unable to carry on alone from Derna, the United States was not obligated to land its own troops or to hire Arab soldiers to fight for him.
But the Federalists interpreted the correspondence to mean that there had been an alliance, and it was supposed to have culminated in a land—sea operation before the bashaw’s castle. A Senate committee began studying the treaty and the events leading to it. Federalists hoped the panel would take the Republicans down a peg, but it needed Eaton’s help. “The present moment were you on the spot would undoubtedly be the most propitious to your obtaining that justice which you have so richly merited from your Country and the World,” the committee chairman, Senator Stephen Row Bradley of Vermont, wrote Eaton. Eaton obliged him, as did the former Philadelphia captives, whose testimony didn’t always jibe with Smith’s assertions that they believed their lives were imperiled by American military operations against the bashaw.
The committee’s 472-page report, made public in April 1806, came down hard on Lear. The Tripoli treaty was an “inglorious deed,” and ran counter to the advice of squadron officers. Hamet could have been placed on Tripoli’s throne for a fraction of the $60,000 ransom, and the captives freed without any payment made. Derna never should have been evacuated. Lear was blamed for everything. The consul general, the committee concluded, appears “to have dictated every measure; to have paralised every military operation by sea and land....” The committee didn’t blame Barron, ill as he was and, it believed, under Lear’s malign influence. The report cited the testimony of Lieutenant John Dent, who said that during the winter of 1804—5 Barron could scarcely “recollect any thing that transpired from one day to another.... It was generally believed by the officers in the Mediterranean that Mr. Lear had a great ascendancy over the commodore in all his measures relative to the squadron.”
The report rejected Lear’s claims that the squadron was unfit for action, and that he had acted to protect the Philadelphia prisoners’ safety. It included Marine Second Lieutenant Wallace W. Wormeley’s testimony that in May 1805 Tripoli was “in the most distressed situation,” and Eaton and Hamet, “almost without firing a shot,” might have marched from Derna and captured Tripoli without harm to any prisoner. Wormeley said he believed he still would be locked in the bashaw’s castle if Eaton hadn’t captured Derna.
Despite all the sound and fury, the report didn’t stop the Senate from ratifying the treaty on April 12, nor did it damage Lear’s employment; he remained North African consul general through 1812. The Jefferson administration shrugged off the indictment of its North African diplomacy as other events crowded in, one upon the other: trouble with Spain over Florida and western Louisiana in the wake of the momentous Louisiana Purchase; violations of American neutrality by England, France, and Spain. Because of the distance-imposed time lag between America and the Mediterranean, the treaty controversy was rapidly receding from public consciousness just when Rodgers and Lear were hearing the worst of it. The withering criticism burnished their long friendship from Santo Domingo days, although their reactions diverged, with Lear more pained than angry, and the feistier Rodgers vowing to defend his character against “base scoundrels.”
The Tunisian ambassador, Sidi Soliman Melli Melli, arrived in the United States in November 1805 on the Congress with four Arabian horses that he presented to the president as gifts. His seriocomic diplomatic visit began with a quick triumph, when Jefferson agreed to pay restitution for the xebec and two prizes. Melli Melli then spent several months enjoying Washington and being gawked at by the public, who had never seen a Mediterranean Moslem in full regalia. His relaxed morals offended the more Puritan-minded congressmen, but the government, wishing to keep him happy, quietly supplied him with women and a $200-a-week allowance, selling the gift horses to defray the cost. Partly to get him out of town and also to impress upon him America’s size and strength, Madison sent Melli Melli on a tour of the Eastern cities, with James Cathcart, the former consul in Tripoli, as his guide and escort. Melli Melli caused a sensation wherever he went, with his flowing robes and entourage. In the meantime, Madison and Smith looked around for suitable restitution for the xebec and two prizes, all liquidated in prize court months earlier. They decided upon the brig Franklin, which had brought Eaton home from Gibraltar, and to add cash and gifts totaling $10,000 for the bey, sapitapa, Melli Melli, and his entourage.
The Franklin turned out to be a poor choice. As Melli Melli correctly pointed out, it had been Tripoli’s only U.S. wartime prize, captured in 1802. By coincidence, the bey had come into ownership of it briefly before selling it to some Americans in Trieste. Melli Melli said Hamouda never liked the Franklin and would consider it a grave insult to be presented with it again as restitution for the three captured vessels. He refused to accept it, or to sail home on it, which had been the American expectation. He would rather hire a ship instead.
The gifts for the bey and sapitapa were unloaded from the Franklin in Boston, the ambassador’s embarkation point, while Melli Melli hunted for a merchantman to take him back to Tunis. The complication made Melli Melli quarrelsome, difficult, and intolerable to Cathcart, who was notoriously shorttempered himself. His irksome companion, Cathcart complained, was “a very mean, suspicious, avaricious character; bias’d by nothing but self interest, devoid of every sense of delicacy, and the sooner we get rid of him entirely the better.” Melli Melli chartered the Two Brothers and, to Cathcart’s relief, sailed home in September 1806. The long voyage mellowed his temper and perhaps gave him time to savor his pleasant memories of America and the profusion of gifts riding in the Two Brothers’ hold: coffee, china, chocolate, furniture, rum, and four brass fieldpieces with cartridges. By the time he reached Tunis, he was full of enthusiasm about his visit to the United States. Satisfied with Melli Melli’s report and visibly pleased with the cash and the gifts, the bey reaffirmed Tunis’s previous treaty with America.
Lear returned to Algiers, which was reeling from a coup, a civil war, and a war with Tunis. The upheaval had begun in the summer of 1805, when rioters in the city of Algiers burned the “Jewish Directory”—the banking house of Bacris and Busnah—and murdered the Jewish proprietor, Naphthali Busnah. At Busnah’s funeral, a mob massacred many of the mourners and wrecked the Jewish quarter. Then, in a continuation of the mayhem, Turkish soldiers assassinated the dey and his prime minister. They made the late dey’s principal secretary the new dey. Some Algerian provinces took advantage of the anarchy and seceded, one of them allying with Tunis. Algiers and Tunis went to war. They fought through the winter of 1805—6, while Algiers also was trying to brutally suppress uprisings in Oran. On Christmas Day 1805, Lear witnessed the arrival of a small vessel from Oran bearing a grisly cargo: the heads of 600 Algerian rebels and “a vast number of Ears of the Insurgents.... They take off the Heads of the Slain and the Ears of the Prisoners, which they send as a proof of their Victory.”
Through all the turmoil, Lear somehow managed to stay on excellent terms with the Algerian government. So highly was Lear regarded by the dey and his officers that when Rodgers paid a last, formal visit to Algiers in May 1806 before leaving for home, the dey permitted Rodgers to wear his sword during his royal audience. The stubborn Rodgers had told the dey’s aide he would not see the dey without his sword. It was unprecedented for a Christian to be granted this privilege.
With all the Barbary States now at peace with the United States, Jefferson thought it no longer necessary for twenty warships to patrol the western Mediterranean. The frigates, brigs, and schooners, and the eight gunboats and two new bomb vessels that had joined the squadron in 1805 were ordered to sail home—all but the Constitution, Siren, and Enterprise.
The Tripolitan war had cost just $3.6 million, but Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin, who kept an iron grip on the federal purse strings, was still harping on Republican frugality, although Jefferson no longer was. For nine straight years, Gallatin diligently cut the federal debt each year by $2 million to $8 million, so that by 1809, when Madison became president, the $83 million debt in 1801 had been pared to $42 million, despite the expense of the Tripoli War and the $15 million Louisiana Purchase. Even with revenues increasing steadily, Gallatin was not seduced into reckless spending by the prospect of surpluses.
But the thrifty Gallatin and Navy Secretary Smith were becoming strikingly out of step with Jefferson, who had made a sharp turn toward a more Federalist-style government. In December 1806, he asked Congress to build a nationwide system of roads and canals, a national university, and coastal fortifications. It was hard to believe this was the same Jefferson who six years earlier had said the federal government should collect taxes, deliver mail, and maintain a navy to protect trade—and leave everything else to the states. Gallatin, however, had remained true to the Republican creed, as had the Southern Republicans, who were caught up in a retrograde movement to recapture the “Spirit of 1800.” They opposed spending money on forts and on more ships. They preferred gunboats because they were cheaper than stone fortifications, and, they wrongly believed, better suited for coastal defense than brigs and schooners.
After protesting that three warships could not possibly protect U.S. Mediterranean trade, Rodgers closed the Syracuse naval hospital, handed command of the shrunken squadron to Captain Hugh Campbell, and embarked for America in May 1806. Aboard Rodgers’s ship was a pair of Barbary broad-tailed sheep. They were for President Jefferson, whose many interests included animal husbandry.