AFTER MY SEVENTH VIEWING of Lawrence of Arabia, I decided to study Arabic, and at age eighteen won a fellowship to Cairo. But my romanticized version of the Middle East quickly collided with the chaos and poverty of the Egyptian metropolis. I was appalled to see beggar women training their babies to sleep with a tiny hand thrust out, palm upward.
Impetuously, I dropped out of the Cairo language program to play blackjack in the casinos of the Mediterranean. The sum total of my knowledge of Arabic today is a handful of phrases from the Koran—which I can pronounce with precision—and that have on more than one occasion saved my life, or at least my shoulder bag.
But my fascination with the bygone Moslem world remained simmering somewhere, and I am thrilled to have traveled with General Eaton and hopefully taken the reader beyond the souks, into the slave quarters, the Bedouin camps, and onto the Barbary pirate ships.
This book required two years to research, one year to write. Eaton left more than three thousand pages of papers, almost all of which are carefully preserved at the magnificent Huntington Library and Gardens in San Marino, California.
I have never met Mieke van Leeuwen; I don’t even know whether Mieke is a he or a she, but I do know that Mieke helped me immensely. As an afterthought, seduced by the ease of e-mail, I contacted the National Archives in Holland, asking for any reports circa 1800 from Tripoli. I had never heard the name of Antoine Zuchet because this diplomat had never been quoted anywhere. Mieke van Leeuwen sent me more than a hundred pages of Zuchet’s very candid letters, which reveal surprising details about Tripoli and about the lives of the three hundred Americans held hostage. Zuchet’s words change our view of the Barbary war. Thomas Jefferson never knew the pitiful weakness of Tripoli at the moment Tobias Lear signed the treaty; American naval officers never knew the Philadelphia floated free a mere ten hours after Bainbridge beached it. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you, Mieke.
The story over at the Danish Archives played out dead opposite. A fellow by the name of Henrik Stissing Jensen e-mailed me that he had found a misfiled trove of material on Tripoli, and then Jensen tortured me for a full year by never sending it. I even brought in the Danish embassy in London, to no avail. Jensen, wherever you are, may your coffee always be a bit colder than you like it. My guess is that the Danish Archives was hoping to suppress Consul Nissen’s double cross of the United States in 1805. (I found it out despite you, Jensen.)
The staff at Dartmouth Library Special Collections, especially Sarah Hartwell, was cheerful and refreshingly unpretentious.
I hired Nelly Malouf to translate Arabic, and she would be an asset to any research project in English, French, or Arabic. At a shop near my office in New York, Riad of Lebanon (who doesn’t want his last name in the book) double-checked the Arabic treaty translations. You are a kind and gracious man.
At the eleventh hour, I tried to beef up the section on covert ops, and author Hank Schlesinger put me in touch with H. K. Melton, the scholar and collector extraordinaire. Thank you for your painstaking explanations. Thanks, too, to Jim Morris, Green Beret and author. You untangled the human aspect of Eaton, the arrogant outsider ready to do what three thousand sailors with all their cannons could not do. That insight helped frame him for me.
Gareth Thomas, you taught me about cutlass warfare. It will have to go in the next book. Every time I wrote some slash-and-pivot, duck-and-thrust, it sounded like pulp fiction; my fault, not yours.
The Naval Historical Center photo room needs a new photocopy machine. Is there some wealthy vet ready to donate one? Rob Hanshew was very helpful, as was Glenn Helm, a friendly, funny man who runs the Navy Department Library. Thanks for slipping me the ZB files. Over at the Marine Photo Department, a graceful bow to Lena Kaljot, and at the National Archives, to Katherine Vollen and Regina Davis. The gentlemen at the Manuscript Room at the Library of Congress were appropriately eccentric and helpful.
Once again, author Bill Prochnau read the manuscript and barked suggestions. He ordered me to amp up the verbs, avoid lazy phrases, shorten the quotations, and, above all, vivify the scenes without straying from documented details. We will all be fortunate if he writes another book.
Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook) bought the movie rights to my last book, The Pirate Hunter; that cash infusion helped tide me over. I’m rooting for you to make the film. So are my wife and my unborn grandchildren.
Thanks also go to my editor at Hyperion, Bill Strachan, gracious and supportive, and to Bob Miller, who has given me encouragement from the first day forward, and to Will Schwalbe and Judd Laghi and to fearless Esther Newberg.
As always, I want to thank my smart, perceptive mother, who now goes by the name of “Sister Gordon.” My family tolerated all. Georgia, since you’re sixteen, my absences probably didn’t bother you much, but I missed you. Ziggy, pal, work on that jump shot, and Kris, you are more beautiful today than when I married you, and more clever, amusing, and perceptive. How is that possible?
Finally, I want to thank all readers of any of my books. You can reach me at rzacks@forbiddenknowledge.com.
—Richard Zacks, New York City