WILLIAM EATON SLEPT in his homemade general’s uniform. He later wrote that he didn’t take the uniform off for the next ninety-five days except to change his “linen.”
The Desert
WILLIAM EATON SLEPT in his homemade general’s uniform. He later wrote that he didn’t take the uniform off for the next ninety-five days except to change his “linen.”
At Eaton’s side that first morning and throughout much of the trek was Lieutenant O’Bannon in his blue coat with two long vertical rows of brass buttons. (He and Eaton would soon discover that the officers’ bounty of brass buttons would prove enticing to the Bedouin women.) The seven U.S. Marines in their blue-with-scarlet-trim uniforms stood nearby, looking unnaturally tall in their high brimless hats.
These uniformed Americans—clustered together—seemed like an honor guard for this sea of irregular troops; they were a handful of men lost in a multitude of robes and turbans.
William Eaton, contrary to myth, did not ride a camel; he was mounted on a Barbary horse, as was Lieutenant O’Bannon and Midshipman Peck—and all three hundred or so Moslem troops. The Christian recruits marched on foot with the camel drivers. The baggage train of camels brought up the rear.
About an hour after dawn, one of the Arab guides found some fetid water within a mile of camp, and the men headed there for a drink. Eaton, meanwhile, was forced to wait for the camel caravan to catch up and reach Arab’s Tower.
Besides a brief letter by Midshipman Pascal Peck, William Eaton’s journal provides the only source for this extraordinary journey. His prejudices color the account; neither Hamet nor Sheik Tayyib would leave any words in their defense.
Eaton, unlike Lawrence of Arabia a century later, did not try to assimilate the ways of the Bedouins or any of the Moslems; Eaton tried to impose his American will upon them, to remold them. Mutual disenchantments would detonate deep hatreds. Mutual enchantments would spark brief exaltations. When World War I ended, T. E. Lawrence had written: “Pray God that men reading the story will not, for the love of the glamour of strangeness, go out to prostitute themselves and their talents in serving another race.” Eaton was never seduced by strangeness but rather was irritated by it; his quest was to re-establish the honor of the United States, and to defy a strange time-honored custom of state-sponsored piracy and tribute.
Eaton’s army was a deeply divided troop of distrustful mercenaries. The fault lines were obvious: hats and turbans, clean-shaven and beards; uncircumcised Christians and circumcised Moslems. Eaton at one point counted a dozen distinct nationalities: American, English, French, Maltese, Greek, Arab, Turk, Tyrolean, Neapolitan, Tripolitan, and others unspecified.
The merest glance at the encampment near the walls of the fortress on that morning of March 7, 1805, revealed the fissures. Europeans peacocked in tight pants and coats while town Moslems wore baggy pants and bright-colored vests and turbans. And desert Arabs wore the long-flowing barracan, a single brown or white wool garment, six yards long and two yards wide, fastened at the left shoulder and looped around the body. No shirt beneath, no underwear; it afforded both privacy and freedom; by night, it served as a blanket.
Eaton devoted the entire day to getting the various troops organized for the trek ahead. They were all about to embark together to cross a desert, but it wasn’t the “sea of sands” of Lawrence of Arabia or the Sahara of the French Foreign Legion.
Geographers classify this coastal tract as the fringe of the deserts of Cyrenaica or as “desert steppe”: consisting of parched ridges and gullies and vast dry plains. It is inhospitable terrain but not endless dunes. The distance between wells—each claimed by various Bedouin tribes—could be fifty miles or more, which might require two or three or even four days of travel. A dry well might mean death. All food must be carried, since the few animals that lived in the region were mostly hard-to-catch jerboa (desert rats) and lizards. Banditti, who would slit a throat for a saddlebag, also flourished in this no-man’s-land between Egypt and the eastern region of Tripoli. Although hajj pilgrims and couriers from Morocco and Algiers used this route to head to Egypt, very few Christians for a thousand years since the conquest of Islam had ever passed this way.
One condition, however, aided the enterprise, and that was the time of year. The month of March meant that summer heat hadn’t yet arrived; it also meant that the winter rains had given some of the valleys a baby’s down of pale green, of grasswort or kali herbiage. Camels would eat even the thornier varieties, and maybe horses would also, if desperate enough.
Eaton expected the entire 520-mile run from Marabout (near Alexandria) to Derne to take approximately fifteen days. As quartermaster, Eaton had loaded more than enough food and animal fodder for a journey of that duration. He made his estimates based on the fact that a camel, carrying a thousand pounds, moves at three miles an hour and can walk from sunup to sundown.
On that Thursday, March 7, as the men prepared, Midshipman Peck learned from his mistake about not carrying water. Peck drank at the well, and this time he bartered for a couple of water skins and filled them. Bedouins over the centuries had perfected the art of skinning the entire goat to create a huge water sack. The goatskins were often greased inside and out with camel lard to prevent them from cracking in the heat. One Christian traveler found the taste of the water, after long marinating in these skins, exceptionally vile.
While Eaton continued to wait for the camel caravan, he used the day to try to strike some order in his troops, which he had not once drilled. The would-be conquerors barely knew one another.
In theory, according to a signed piece of paper, the Convention, Eaton ruled this disparate army. Eaton, perched atop the chain of command, gave orders to Lieutenant O’Bannon for his seven marines, to Selim Comb and Lieutenant Connant for the motley European artillery crew, and to Captain Luco Ulovix and Lieutenant Constantine for the Greek company. To direct the Arab cavalry, he would relay his orders to Hamet and two sheiks: Tayyib and Muhammed; and for the camel caravan, wily Sheik Tayyib acted as intermediary. That was on paper.
Since the first day’s march of forty miles had proven too ambitious, Eaton led the troops on a fifteen-mile march the next day to a place with good water on an elevated bluff by the sea. The Europeans drank wine and brandy under the stars. Each nationality cocooned into a distinct camp.
From his first taste of the dry coastal landscape, Eaton regarded the trek as hard but manageable if they kept moving forward at a steady pace. His years of military training made him accustomed to giving orders and seeing them obeyed. None of it prepared him for the tricks of the caravan leaders. (Their delay tactics would exhaust his food supply.) On March 9, only the fourth day of the trek, the camel drivers refused to work. The trick was as old as the Bible: Wait till the caravan is out on the desolate road, then demand more wages. Eaton figured if they received too much of the total amount promised them, they might vanish. “It was not safe to do it,” he wrote. “They became mutinous.”
Sheik Tayyib had riled up the camel drivers and footmen by telling them that once the march was over, the Christians would cheat them out of the balance of their wages. Eaton indignantly denied the charge and looked in vain to Hamet for help. “The Bashaw seemed irresolute and despondent,” wrote Eaton.
The morning was spent bickering. “Money, more money was the only stimulus which could give motion to the camp.” Eaton, whose Barbary mission was about stopping extortion, refused to give in. At noon, he ordered all the Christians to march back toward Alexandria. Obviously Sheik Tayyib could not get any more money if the mission was aborted.
The Christians began to retrace their steps; Eaton caught the glimpse he hoped for . . . an Arab messenger galloping to catch up with him. Sheik Tayyib agreed that the camel caravan would resume. The army—despite their afternoon start—accomplished twelve miles in the right direction that day, passing through low sand valleys and then twenty miles the next day through rocky desert plains. They glimpsed the ruins of a castle, an odd reminder that the region had once thrived under earlier rulers. No one knew the name of the castle. Eaton guessed by the architecture that it was ancient Greek.
In the middle of the following afternoon, a courier coming from the opposite direction, that is, from Derne, sought out the Bashaw to deliver startling news: The province was arming to join Hamet and to overthrow the government and, he added, the current governor had locked himself inside the walls of the palace. When word spread, some of the Arab riders at the head of the army performed feats of horsemanship and many of them fired off feu de joie into the sky. When the camel drivers at the back of the caravan heard the firing, they thought it meant that Bedouins were attacking. “[They] attempted to disarm and put to death the Christians who escorted the caravan,” wrote Eaton. In a crisis, religion trumped all other loyalties.
As the two religions squared off, a Moslem leader intervened, shouting that the Arabs should not kill anyone until they found out the cause of the shots. Both groups waited in an uneasy truce with weapons pointed at one another until the good news arrived. After that incident, both Christian and Moslem continued the march, but their mutual animosities now lay out in the open. Four hundred heavily armed distrustful men must continue to coexist and someday fight together on the same side.
The divided army camped on a rocky ridge overlooking the Mediterranean, at a spot where a half dozen deep wells, cut centuries earlier through solid rock, provided good water. The men slung long ropes down into the hundred-foot-deep dark shafts and hauled up heavy full goatskins. At eight pounds a gallon, quenching an army’s thirst worked up quite a thirst.
The next day, the three hundred horsemen and hundred or so on foot trekked onward around twenty-six miles across a “barren rocky plain” past more ancient ruins. Eaton reported that night they encamped “upon the dividing ridge between Egypt and Tripoli, near a cistern of excellent water.” What is staggering is that Eaton was nowhere near the border between Egypt and Tripoli, which lies at least a hundred miles farther west at the edge of the fertile plain of Cyrenaica. The man on the now-not-so-secret mission clearly did not have a remotely accurate map of this region through which he was passing.
The army marched twenty-five miles off the ridge of Aqabet Ageiba and down into a ravine, with abundant rainwater stored in natural reservoirs carved by winter cascades into the solid rock. At evening the U.S. Marines gathered firewood and boiled water to cook rice in cauldrons balanced on stones. The meat had run out, and now their entire rations consisted of two biscuits handed out in the morning and a bowl of rice per man in the evening. That night of Friday, March 15, the tenth day, clouds gathered and a chill hung in the air. A sudden downpour filled the ravine and flooded the camp, soaking everyone.
During the chaos, someone stole from the marines’ tent a musket, a bayonet, and cartridges in a cartouche box. Eaton immediately assumed “Arabs” did it. “We had heretofore experienced daily losses of provisions and barley, which they stole and concealed.” The thefts drove yet another wedge between the camps.
On Saturday, the eleventh day, the sodden men huddled together in the ravine as the storm grew more intense and strong winds blew in from the northwest. Zigzags of lightning lit up dripping faces. The soggy army couldn’t head out in the morning, and by 3 P.M. the entire camp was flooded again. Despite spooked horses, jittery camels, drenched hungry men, they had to tramp to higher ground. At the start of the mission, the men worried about dying of thirst; now they feared drowning, getting swept along this ravine by a flash flood.
Sunday morning, day twelve, the army marched a dozen miles, then set up camp in another deep ravine. Looking up the steep banks, everyone prayed for no more rain. They found enough small brush to make fires, to try to dry out. Hundreds of men skulked around near naked, trying to wring the last drops out of their sodden garments. The Bedouin tied barracans to tent poles.
On Monday, the army marched fifteen miles to a valley near the coast, which the Arabs called “Masrocah.” High sand dunes blocked the view of the sea. Eaton saw the ruins of Roman mansions and garden walls. A stone castle, 150-foot square, still stood there, with 11-foot-high walls intact. Eaton marched up to the castle and found a sheik living there with a handful of Bedouins camped in tents. After almost two weeks on the road, this marked the first permanent dwelling they had encountered. He found for sale cattle, sheep, goats, fowls, butter, dates, and milk, but the prices—thanks to the sheik’s lack of competition—were “very dear.”
The camel drivers suddenly went on strike again. This time, however, no matter how much Eaton promised, threatened, cajoled, they adamantly refused to go another mile. “I now learned, for the first time, that our caravan was freighted by the Bashaw only to this place,” wrote Eaton, “and that the owners had received no part of their pay.” This was startling news. What had the Bashaw done with funds given him by Eaton? Why would he negotiate a trek of only two hundred miles of a five-hundred-mile journey and not tell his general? Eaton would never learn the answers.
The camel drivers began packing to return to their families in Egypt; Sheik Tayyib advanced their claims to Eaton.
The New Englander had spent years negotiating with the Bey of Tunis, and months with Jefferson; he had experienced long hard arguments full of feint and counterthrust. But he also knew when “no” meant “no.”
Eaton offered to try to find some money to pay them if they would agree to march two more days to where Hamet and Eaton expected to find a very powerful Bedouin tribe, the Eu ed Alli, who in Egypt had vowed they wanted to join Hamet’s revolution. (Since Eaton had misplaced the border by one hundred miles, it was anybody’s guess whether he was identifying the correct location for this Bedouin tribe.)
The camel drivers, through Sheik Tayyib, agreed to the deal.
Eaton was carrying a little more than $540; he gave it all except for three Venetian sequins. (Since a Venetian sequin traded for about $2.25, Eaton’s cash worth now totaled $6.75 to last him three hundred miles to Bomba.) Eaton, explaining the direness, convinced the Christian officers and men to chip in another $140 of their own money. Eaton, with a vast show of empty pockets, turned over $673 to the Bashaw, who supplemented it with an unspecified amount and handed it over on Tuesday, March 19, to the leaders of the camel drivers.
With many salaams, they thanked Hamet and Eaton for the payments. That same night, the drivers of about seventy camels sneaked off to return to Egypt, and the next morning the drivers of the remaining forty camels refused to budge. General Eaton, besides being furious, looked outmaneuvered. He described their situation as “perplexing and embarrassed” since it was “impossible to move without the caravan and uncertain whether we could procure them to start from this place.”
Hamet suggested to Eaton that they leave their supplies with a small guard inside the castle and proceed ahead to look for the Eu ed Alli Bedouins. Eaton, with three sequins to his name, judged the risk too great.
That night, the remaining drivers disappeared with the rest of the camels. The following morning, Sheik Tayyib and the other sheiks controlling the Arab cavalry announced that they too refused to proceed. Tayyib claimed that a pilgrim on his way from Morocco to Mecca had told them that at least 800 enemy horsemen and even more foot soldiers, en route from Tripoli city, had already passed Bengazi, 175 miles from Derne. “I thought this an argument that urged acceleration rather than delay,” wrote Eaton.
No camels, no money, now the report of a superior force advancing. The fodder of barley and beans for the horses was almost gone; the food supplies other than rice and biscuit were exhausted. All conspired to disjoint the factions further. Eaton was not allowed to attend the Moslem council as the bearded men in turbans and robes debated loudly. They invited Eaton into the tent at midnight and informed him that they would not budge until a “runner” had rushed the three hundred miles to Bomba and returned with news as to whether the American ships had arrived. That meant a ten-day wait, at minimum. Ten days in which the army would be consuming Eaton’s precious supplies.
General Eaton stood in their tent, oil lamps transforming the faces into ghastly caricatures; the tired officer was surrounded by the sheiks and the Bashaw. Although his Christian forces were outnumbered by four to one, he announced that rice rations would be immediately stopped for anyone not planning on traveling forward. He made his announcement and abruptly left the tent.
After midnight, he vented some of his anger, railing in his journal against Islam. He referred to Mohammed as “one of the most hypocritical fanatics” who incited “wretched victims [on] a tedious pilgrimage to pay their devotion at his shrine.” But he did find a saving grace to the fanaticism: that Moslem pilgrims had dug wells there in the desert that now gave water to soldiers fighting for “the liberation of three hundred Americans from the chains of Barbarism, and [for] a manly peace.”
Eaton began that night to work out secret plans to try to take the castle so that his Christian troops could hole up there with the rice and the ammunition until a messenger could reach Bomba and bring back U.S. Marines.
At sunup, European soldiers guarded the food supply. No Moslems, including Hamet, had access to the food. Eaton waited; he banked on hunger in this showdown; the Moslem leaders blinked first.
The sheiks brought fifty camels back to the encampment and agreed to march two days farther. At 11 A.M., with the usual camel snorting and snuffling, the caravan recommenced. The bedraggled army proceeded thirteen miles, to “an elevated stony plain” with good cistern water. The following day at 3 P.M. Eaton along with Hamet in the fore led their horses up a ridge and at the top peeked over into a vast fertile plain stretching to the sea. There, Eaton saw a scene from the Bible: the tents of the wandering tribe of the Eu ed Alli Bedouin, almost 4,000 men, women, and children, along with their grazing horses, camels, sheep, goats. Midshipman Peck, perhaps no expert in counting livestock, estimated about 10,000 camels and 50,000 sheep. After so many disappointments, Eaton had caught a break. These were Hamet’s strongest allies, a tribe with deep animosity against Bashaw Yussef and his tax collectors.
Eaton allowed the men to rest and recuperate. The mission appeared again on solid footing. These Bedouin greeted Hamet like a hero and were surprisingly open and friendly to the foreigners.
“Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them,” wrote T. E. Lawrence, “and for strangers terrible: a death in life.” He was not referring to the Eu ed Alli tribe, who for much of the year lived a fairly pleasant nomadic existence on the verdant Cyrenaica Plateau. The men and women wore the long barracan draped over their shoulders; extended family groups pitched their tents in clusters, each ruled by a sheik. Their fiercest moments came in protecting their grazing lands or water holes. Most of the tribe had never ventured farther than a couple hundred miles toward Egypt or south to the desert oases.
“We were the first Christians ever seen by these wild people,” wrote Eaton. “We were viewed by them as curiosities. They laughed at the oddity of our dress; gazed at our polished arms with astonishment; at the same time they observed the greatest deference towards such of us as bore any distinctive marks of office.” The brass buttons and gold epaulets dazzled them. The Bedouin women, though Moslem, did not veil their faces.
The downtrodden army had stumbled into paradise. “They brought us for sale everything their camps afforded, and as rarities offered us young gazelles and ostriches.” Rather, they had stumbled into a pay-as-you-go paradise, and they had three Venetian sequins. Luckily for Eaton and company, these Bedouin adored rice and coveted brass buttons and other trinkets. The Christians bartered for succulent dates, recently delivered by caravan from Siwa, the oasis of Jupiter Ammon, visited by Alexander the Great.
The next morning, 80 mounted tribesmen, each carrying a long musket, a dagger, and a pair of pistols, offered to join Hamet. Eaton was thrilled until he realized they required money in advance. “Cash, we find, is the only deity of Arabs, as well as Turks,” he sourly noted. The fiercely territorial Eu ed Alli allowed the camels and horses of the Hamet-Eaton army to graze, an especially important privilege, since the sacks of barley were empty. While the warriors wouldn’t ride without money, Eaton succeeded in striking a bargain for Eu ed Alli to freight a camel caravan of 90 beasts at $11 a head to Bomba, payable at Bomba. And Eaton sent a courier ahead to look for Captain Hull’s ships.
Sunday was a day of rest for all. On Monday, forty-seven Bedouin families moved to the Hamet camp and agreed to march forward with the army to Bomba. Included among the families were about 150 warriors on foot, willing to fight. Eaton’s army was growing.
The Bedouin displayed a natural curiosity toward the foreigners. Being accustomed to fried flat bread, they had never seen ship biscuit. “They examined it carefully; and after breaking it with their shepherd’s club or hatchet, tasted it with symptoms of hesitation; finding it palatable they sought every means to obtain it.”
Eaton also discovered just how much the Bedouin appreciated the taste of rice. “A woman offered her daughter to my interpreter for a sack of it: and the girl consented to the traffic. She was a well proportioned, handsome brunette of about thirteen or fourteen years, with an expressive hazel eye . . . black, arched eyebrows, perfect teeth and lips formed for voluptuousness.”
Eaton weighed the deal. “Prudence forbid it,” he wrote. (It would turn out that that final sack of rice, a day’s rations for 90 men, would help save their lives.)
On Tuesday, March 26, as the refreshed army prepared to resume its march, a courier on horseback suddenly arrived. He was bearing bad news, and he claimed his information was not hearsay but fact. He reported that Bashaw Yussef’s army of at least 500 cavalrymen, along with a great number of Bedouins from various tribes, “were a few days march from [Derne] and would certainly arrive before . . . we could.”
Yet again, the Moslem portion of the army lost hope. The camel caravan fled backward. Some of Hamet’s closest advisers conspired with the cavalry tribes to return to the Fayyum region near Cairo. Eaton once again ordered all rice rations stopped until everyone returned and agreed to proceed.
The Moslem leaders held a council. At 11 A.M. Sheik Tayyib, his jeweled dagger bobbing at his hip, announced that he would not proceed with his horsemen until unimpeachable news arrived of the American ships waiting in Bomba.
Eaton snapped, unleashing the full hurricane of his temper. He accused Tayyib of being a liar and a coward. “You have promised much and fulfilled nothing,” Eaton shouted, barely waiting for the translator to catch up. He said he regretted ever having met Tayyib, and that he would be delighted if Tayyib would execute his threat to return to Egypt.
Tayyib, the second most powerful leader on the mission, stormed out of the camp “in a rage, swearing by all the force of his religion to join us no more.” Hamet suggested sending an officer after Tayyib, but Eaton refused.
Tayyib galloped straight to the tents of the tribe of the Eu ed Alli and convinced half the families who had decided to accompany Eaton to travel instead to Egypt with him. At dawn on the following day, Hamet asked Eaton yet again to send an officer to request in Eaton’s name that Tayyib return. Eaton did indeed send a message to Tayyib, but it stated that if he now became their enemy, then Eaton would have the right to punish him and that only respect for Hamet had restrained him so far. “I have a rifle and a sabre true to their distance,” Eaton threatened. The general had no doubt already demonstrated his prowess at fifty paces blowing the head off some desert rat.
When Tayyib received the note, he “swore vengeance against the Bashaw and his Christian sovereigns, as he styled us.”
Eaton ordered the remaining men to march. Three hours later, a messenger arrived to tell them that Tayyib had begun leading his caravan back to Egypt. Eaton sent the courier back with a simple message to the sheik. “I have nothing further to do with you but to take steps for the recovery of the cash and property you have fraudulently drawn from me.”
Two hours later, at noon, the messenger reappeared. Tayyib would rejoin the army if Eaton would halt the march. Hamet convinced Eaton to stop. At 1:30 P.M., Sheik Tayyib came to Eaton’s tent. “You see the influence I have among these people,” said Tayyib. “Yes, and I also see the disgraceful use you make of it,” replied Eaton.
At dawn on the following day, the twenty-second of the expedition, Eaton, having temporarily outflanked Tayyib, gave orders to prepare for a good day’s march. He saw no reason why twenty miles could not be achieved. He ordered his officers to go saddle up. They approached the area where the horses were grazing. Armed guards stopped them, telling them that Hamet, who had agreed to provide horses for the top foreign officers, had changed his mind. His minions informed Eaton that the horses for officers such as Lieutenant O’Bannon and Midshipman Peck would now be given to Hamet’s footmen instead.
In addition, the Moslems were not ready to head out on the trail.
Eaton had the drummer beat for marching formation. The Christians lined up . . . the robed Moslems with Hamet in command stood off to one side. With no preamble or diplomacy, Eaton demanded the horses. Yet again, he snapped. In front of everyone, he accused Hamet of being weak and capricious. He spit out piles of angry words.
At some point Eaton abruptly stopped haranguing Hamet and ordered the march to proceed. Eaton’s uniformed troops with fixed bayonets forced the camel drivers to lead the camels carrying the food and supplies to the forefront of the troops. Eaton had learned his lesson and would never again let the camels trail behind. Hamet’s forces lingered off to the side, watching the sacks of rice disappear down the road.
About two hours later, Hamet and a few horsemen caught up with Eaton’s marchers and camels. Hamet praised Eaton for his “firmness” and claimed that he had merely been pretending to stall, to pay lip service to the “wishes of his people” and “to render them more manageable.”
The divided army achieved twelve and a half dusty miles and reached a beautiful castle at “Shemees” (modern-day Zawia el-Shammas), an “enchanting” spot set in a fertile plain, with excellent well water and some gardens of fig and palm trees. They rested there that afternoon, waiting for the Eu ed Alli foot warriors and families to catch up. They never arrived. Eaton learned that his nemesis Sheik Tayyib “had discouraged and dissuaded them,” and they had once again set off for the borders of Egypt. Both Eaton and Hamet realized that the Eu ed Alli were key allies and would be a great help in rallying other Bedouin tribes. Hamet sent his right-hand man, Ahmet Gurgies, to try to lure them back with promises of plunder at Derne.
Eaton and his troops found themselves holed up in another little paradise, though once again without the cash to enjoy themselves. The cattle, sheep, butter, fowls, eggs, and dates were offered but at outrageous prices.
Sometime that afternoon, the local sheik of the castle at el-Shammas, as a special mark of respect, invited Eaton within the walls. “Curiosity brought every Arab about me who belonged to the tribe. They examined the lace of my hat, epaulettes, buttons, spurs, and mounting of my arms. These they took to be all gold and silver. They were astonished that God should permit people to possess such riches who followed the religion of the devil!”
Eaton through his interpreter explained that the religion of the United States was different “from that of all other nations who wore hats, that we made no distinction in our respect to people of different creeds . . . that all honest men were equally respected in America.”
The Bedouin were skeptical that such a Christian nation really existed.
The interpreter pointed to Eaton and said that he was a good man and great friend to Moslems. “They lamented that so good a man should go to hell.” They offered to save Eaton and gain him entrance to the paradise of Mohammed if he would repeat: “Allah Allah Muhammed Benallah.” The tawny-skinned Bedouins gathered around him, again and again begging Eaton to repeat after them.
Eaton told them that Americans believe that all good men after death will be allowed “to make parties of pleasure” into the paradises of the Moslems and of the Catholics. The Bedouin smiled at his far-fetched story but added they would be pleased to see him in their paradise, although they doubted Mohammed would let him in even for a visit.
Late that night, this New England Protestant, who rarely attended church, reiterated his bafflement over other people’s deep faith. “How frail is human reason! How absurd is the pride of bigotry! Yet how happy are these ignorant Arabs in their faith and intolerance! A desert [is] their patrimony; a wretched hut their dwelling; a blanket their bed and wardrobe; a wooden bowl and spoon their furniture; and milk and roots their food. Like the patriarchs of old, ‘They seek a country.’ Their hope is in heaven. Of arriving there they have the faith of assurance. They are contented.”
Apparently, that encounter with the friendly Moslem faithful and their confusion about America and its religion inspired Eaton to spend the following day working with his French aide-de-camp, composing a “Proclamation” in French to deliver to the people of Tripoli. The cadence makes it sound like the sermon of a prophet, explaining America.
To the inhabitants of the kingdom of Tripoli . . . Brothers, sons of Abraham, faithful believers of the faithful messengers of Truth . . .
At the uttermost limits of the West, beyond the great and deep Atlantic Ocean, we have for several centuries possessed a country larger than the whole [Ottoman] empire of the Grand Signior. . . . We put [our enemies] to flight . . . Soon, the United States of America became a sanctuary for all men who fled from oppression and sought asylum there, and a refuge for those who had no other country. People of every nation, every tongue and every faith could come to us and dwell in safety, because our religion teaches us to fear and worship God and be kind to all creatures.
. . . We cultivated our soil and we sent products to all nations. . . . but although we endeavored to maintain in good faith friendly relations with all the powers of the earth, Yussef, the traitor, the usurper of the throne of Tripoli, a bloodthirsty scoundrel, having learned of our success . . . sent out his armed pirate ships against our commerce and even brought some of our ships into the port of Tripoli, and without provocation had their crews put in chains and reduced to slavery.
He would not listen to our offers of peace, or at least only on such humiliating terms as paying him an enormous sum of money and making ourselves and even our posterity his tributaries; which we disdained to concede to him for we are not accustomed to humiliate ourselves before men, nations, nor the powers of the earth, much less before this base and perjured traitor, whose naval commander [Murad Rais] is a drunken renegade, and whose principal counselor is a grasping Jew.
. . . If you [a citizen of Tripoli] were to fall into the hands of his enemies, would he pay one piastre to ransom you? No . . . he scoffs at your sufferings, saying: Of what value are these Moors and these Arabs? They are just beasts which belong to me, worth a great deal less than my camels and my asses. . . . The voice of God and the voice of justice should inspire you with a desire for vengeance, even the blood of his father and of his brother . . . cries . . . to you for vengeance.
. . . Come on, Moors, Arabs, Americans, brothers, come along from every corner of Barbary where the truth of the prophet has been received. Be assured that the God of the Americans and of the Mahometans is the same; the one true and omnipotent God. Be assured, therefore, that there was no thought of any difference in religion which could have induced us to make war on the city of Tripoli and on its piratical ruler; on the contrary, we do not wish to harm any of the inhabitants of that city, unless it be those who stubbornly adhere to the party of Yussef; we are joined and united with Sidi Hamet Pasha, and thus with the loyal children of his country, and we are resolved to re-establish him in the realm of his ancestors, by this means being able to offer peace to his kingdom and to his city of Tripoli. . . . We shall furnish you with war supplies and with food supplies, with money and, in case of need, with regular soldiers to aid you in vanquishing . . . your oppressor. And I shall be always with you until the end of the war and even until you have achieved your glorious mission, in proof of our fidelity and our goodwill.
William Eaton signed his name, with a customary flourish of long loops and curlicues underneath. He datelined it “Desert de Lybia, 29.eme Mars 1805.” At the time, he meant every word of his promise “to be always with you until the end of the war.”
That signature, that covenant in the desert, that promise, would haunt Eaton to his grave. Eaton handed the document off to be translated into Arabic and distributed to influential Arabs.
The same afternoon, Ahmet Gurgies returned, bringing with him the Bedouin families and warriors back from the trail to Egypt.
The drummer beat reveille before dawn on Saturday, and by 6 A.M., Eaton had the Christians and the baggage on the march. As he exited the camp, he saw Hamet’s forces mounted and apparently preparing to leave. By 2 P.M., with men on foot and plodding camels, Eaton’s troops had gone twelve miles and were resting. Hamet and a small troop of men galloped up. And Hamet informed Eaton of yet another snafu. The influential cavalry leader Sheik Muhammed accused Sheik Tayyib of cheating him and the others by not equally dividing the $1,500 given to him by Hamet. The other sheiks including the Eu ed Alli agreed that Tayyib had cheated, and they once again set off to march toward Egypt.
Eaton, irritated beyond measure, decided it was best to march his caravan three miles back along the trail to the nearest water to await the outcome. Hamet and his dozen men, along with Eaton’s interpreter, rode back to the castle at El-Shammas and from there would chase after the departing sheiks.
On the next day, Sunday, March 31, the twenty-fifth day of the adventure, the weather turned cold. Winds off the coast picked up. Chill rain fell, soaking the general and the tents; the precious rice was carefully protected. The army sat around, trying to stay dry, waiting for Hamet.
April 1 brought more miserable rainy weather. To the ping of raindrops on the sides of his tent, Eaton sat stewing over delays and lost opportunities. Writing in his journal, he tried to force himself to dwell on the Arab characteristics he admired: “a savage independence of soul, . . . discipline [of the body], a sacred adherence to the laws of hospitality.” His tent flap opened suddenly and six Arab sheiks bustled in out of the rain. These men, with Tayyib as their leader, ran the camel caravan. Spokesman Tayyib, addressing the general, demanded an increase in the rice ration, which was set at a half pint (an eight-ounce cup) per day per man. (Midshipman Peck pegged it at a “handful” a day.) Eaton refused. Tayyib threatened.
The two men had squabbled from day one, with Hamet playing diplomat between them. Eaton, cloistered in the crowded tent, with wild-eyed angry men making demands and gesticulating at him, did what he often did when threatened.
He exploded with an in-your-face tirade. It didn’t matter that he was outnumbered or that he had no map of the wells. He called Tayyib “the cause of all our delays” and a double-crosser in all agreements. He said Tayyib had promised to take the army to Derne in fourteen days; after twenty-six days, they had reached only half the distance. Tayyib blamed Hamet and the other sheiks.
Eaton said the others were all better men than Tayyib. “I can place no reliance on anything you say or undertake,” shouted Eaton. Tayyib claimed indifference to Eaton’s opinion of him so long as he raised the rice ration. He warned that without more rice for the troops an insurrection might be brewing. He added that for his own meals, he would now expect biscuits in addition to rice. “Remember you are in a desert, and a country not your own,” Tayyib said, with undisguised menace. “I am a greater man here than you or the Bashaw.”
Eaton replied: “I have found you at the head of every commotion which has happened since we left Alexandria. You are the instigator of the present one among the chiefs. Leave my tent! But mark, if I find a mutiny in camp during the absence of the Bashaw, I will put you to instant death.”
Tayyib left the tent, mounted his horse in the rain, and rode off. All Eaton could do was wait.
Four hours later, after weighing Eaton’s threat, Tayyib returned and, instead of confronting Eaton, entered the tent of the foreign officers. He approached young Scot Farquhar and Midshipman Peck and informed them that he would follow the general anywhere. He asked them to relay the message to Eaton.
At 5 P.M., Tayyib entered Eaton’s tent. He made a show of loyalty and swore that at the battles of Derne he would prove to Eaton that he was a great man. Eaton said all he wanted was that he stop trying to stir up trouble among the sheiks. Tayyib held out his hand, and Eaton grasped it. The rain kept coming down as the sky darkened. By nightfall, Hamet had still not returned with the other sheiks and it was feared they might have been captured or killed.
After a long anxious day cooped up in his tent, Eaton decided he needed some kind of diversion, something to take his mind off everything. He tramped over the slick terrain to the Bedouin camp. His first observation, as curious teenagers surrounded him, was how handsome and healthy so many of them were; he was even more impressed when they opened their mouths. “Never saw teeth so universally sound and white, even and well set.”
One of the wives of the principal sheik greeted him, and invited him into the family tent, serving him dates out of a thatched basket. She seemed elated by his visit, and Eaton, in turn, complimented her “on her elegant proportion and symmetry.” (Didn’t he have enough troubles without flirting with a sheik’s wife?)
The woman coquettishly replied that in the camp there were some young women far more beautiful than she. Eaton said he doubted that could be true. To prove her point, she escorted in more than a dozen “fine girls and young married women.” Eaton noted in his journal that Bedouin women “have nothing of affected reserved and bigoted pride” of the city women.
Eaton, brass buttons glinting in the tent’s firelight, admitted the women were “handsome” but he refused to give up his original opinion as to who was the tribe’s most beautiful. As he walked back in the puddles to his tent, with a parade of kohl-eyed beauties lingering in his mind’s eye, maybe he was freed for a few moments from his obsessive quest.
At 3 P.M. Tuesday, April 2, the missing Bashaw finally returned, and he brought with him the other sheiks and the missing Eu ed Alli. Hamet had ridden all night on March 31 and the following day through the rain, his party living on the charity of dates and milk given to them by Bedouins they happened to encounter. They had caught up to the departing sheiks almost sixty miles away and had convinced them to return. That night at 7 P.M. inside Eaton’s large tent, by firelight, Eaton implored all the sheiks and Hamet for the umpteenth time to rally together; they yet again swore oaths of honor to the mission.
Querying each of the sheiks as to their numbers, Eaton discovered that their united force now totaled between 600 and 700 fighting men, not counting the Eu ed Alli families and some camp followers. Altogether, he estimated their entire horde at 1,200 people. General Eaton gave the order that the drummer would beat reveille before first light and they would be on the road by six o’clock.
That morning, along with the foreign soldiers on foot and camels carrying the rice, Eaton rode at the front, and they traveled ten miles. Then word reached him that the Bedouin had pitched camp a ways back on an elevated plain with fine cistern water. General Eaton wheeled his horse and rode back to confront the laggards, but he found out that the tribes had a legitimate reason for stopping. (Why they didn’t tell him the day before at the council is unclear.) They didn’t have enough food to last them much beyond reaching Bomba, and they couldn’t risk so many lives on the assumption of victories in battle. They needed more supplies and had sent a caravan south to Siwa to bring back dates from the oasis there.
Eaton blustered—he knew his own rice supply was running short, and he couldn’t afford to wait for the caravan; finally the Bedouin agreed to go forward on the following morning, while their dispatched caravan would be told to bring the dates directly to Bomba.
Eaton was returning to the Christian encampment when he heard the sound of musket fire. He rushed back to the Bedouin tents and discovered that what he had heard was celebratory gunfire accompanying a wedding. The march’s delay afforded the Bedouin the chance to hold festivities and gave Eaton the rare opportunity to witness a Bedouin wedding up close.
Within minutes, the Protestant New Englander seemed agog at the gaudy desert display, mesmerized by it. For once, his journal sounds more like Sir Richard Burton than Lawrence of Arabia.
A pair of festooned camels loped at the head of the procession; one carried the bride completely concealed amid swaths of swaying colored silks, the other toted the hidden groom.
“The women had their places near the camels, chanting a savage kind of epithalamium,” wrote Eaton, “the men performing feats of horsemanship, and an incessant feu de joie. In this manner they took a circuit quite round their own encampment, and then proceeded to ours, and made the same circuit.”
Eaton and several other officers followed the procession. “We were treated with marks of peculiar distinction; and great exertions were taken to give us a place near the carriages. During the procession the camels were frequently halted, and dances were performed by young men and girls, exhibiting the most lascivious gestures.”
The cavalcade returned to two tents set apart, “where the camel which carried the bride was driven seven times round the tent assigned for her by the singing women.”
The bride’s camel was then made to kneel, and she was “precipitated head first” into the tent.
After the ceremonies were over it was signified to me that a present would be expected on the occasion. I asked a chief who would be the proper person to receive it? He pointed out a middle aged woman: whom I observed to have been very officious during the ceremony of marriage, and whom I supposed to be the mother of the bride, [and] to whom I presented two half rupees of two dollars each. And [I] invited an old man of about fifty five, who . . . seemed deeply concerned in the affair, and whom I supposed to be the father of one of the married couple, to accompany me to my tent, and ordered him a small present of extra provisions. He was followed by sundry other Arabs of distinction. Being seated in the tent, conversation turned to the marriage ceremony, which led to questions of the parentage and ages of the married pair: when, what was my surprise to find the old man to whom we had exhibited our civilities to be himself the groom; his bride, a girl of thirteen years, and the officious middle aged woman, whom I took to be the mother, another wife of this newly married dotard. It appeared that the old man was a Sheik; his new bride a daughter of a family of the same rank whom he had bought of the parents, according to custom, before marriage. We were told that the bride must remain three days in the hands of matrons before consummation.
Eaton in his private journal revealed himself quite curious about certain Bedouin rituals. “[The older women] perform the office of examining [the bride’s] abilities for this final ceremony [sexual intercourse], and in fact lay the ground for easy access by artificial operations. Meantime, the husband has three other wives for his amusement.” Eaton never clarified what he meant by “artificial operations.” In fact, at a later date, he drew a faint X over the entire paragraph.
The next day, Thursday, April 4, the drummer in his dusty uniform hammered out reveille predawn as usual, and surprisingly, the straggling horde of 1,200 accomplished a good day’s march, achieving a foot pace of two miles per hour. They halted at 4 P.M. after eighteen miles. Somewhere along the route, Eaton’s artillery captain, Selim Comb, saw the tracks of a “wild cat” and chased it down with his greyhound. Selim shot the animal, which Eaton described as mottled black in color, five feet long, two feet high. “It was cooked and it eat [sic] very well,” noted Eaton. The men hadn’t tasted meat in weeks. A Bedouin followed the animal’s tracks and found the wildcat’s brood. “They were too young to be raised,” wrote Eaton regretfully. Raising exotic animals as pets (and future meals) was then considered a fine recreation.
The horde spent the night at what was likely Suani Samaluth, where Eaton was deeply impressed by wells drilled through one hundred feet of solid rock, imagining the sheer labor required. He noted ancient ruins scattered about and evidence of bygone cultivation. With his New England thrift-and-hard-work ethic, he always seemed shocked that any place could ever fall into such disrepair.
The days of rain were now long gone, and their sojourn on the Eu ed Alli’s fertile plateau in the past. They were entering a much drier, sandier region. It takes only one entire thirsty day for water to begin to dominate everyone’s thoughts. Each afternoon’s march now formed a kind of pilgrimage to the next well or cistern or large puddle of water. The horde carried its drinking water and expected to replenish its supply each night. By evening, dry tongues ran over parched lips.
The cavalcade and foot soldiers proceeded twelve miles on Friday to a “remarkable ancient castle of hewn stone” with massive walls—eighteen feet high and five feet thick and 180 feet long; at the corners, V-shaped bastions jutted out. One of Eaton’s officers found two ancient Greek coins lying among the ruins and presented them to Eaton.
The Bedouin guides expected to find water there, but instead, the castle’s huge rainwater cistern was dry, and a nearby deep well offered only vile water, extremely sulphurous and salty. Inside the walls were numerous graves of hajjis who had died there, presumably of thirst, with markers in simple Arabic and Turkish. Barren desert surrounded the walls.
The thirstiest men dropped goatskins down the 150-foot well outside the walls and hoisted up this stinking liquid. They tried to hold their noses to gulp it, but Eaton said it made most of them feel nauseous. Eaton and the guides decided to press on at daybreak to the next well and hopefully there find water to give to the horses and camels and the troops. That night a roving band of Bedouin stole nine of the Bashaw’s horses.
On Saturday, up at sunrise, the thirsty horde moved on. At noon, with the sun directly overhead, a servant’s horse died of thirst and exhaustion. A six-hour march brought them to another well. A goatskin splashed down 70 feet into the well—the sound echoing—and the water pulled up was . . . “fetid and saline.” Men thirsty enough will drink anything that might revive them; a Bedouin will pierce a vein in his camel’s thigh and drink. This well water, though brackish, was more drinkable than the last, and the horses had not drunk in forty-two hours. Most of the men and women and children were down to doling precious sips from their last reserves. One thousand thirsty people converged on the small opening in the rocks. Men and beasts crushed into the area; the surging crowd pushed. Something spooked Eaton’s servant’s horse, and the beast slipped and cracked its head. Everyone drank as much as their bodies could tolerate.
The army lurched forward along this coastal ridge near the Bay of Sollum, with glimpses of the sea; it’s cruel to see so much undrinkable saltwater. An army kicks up dust, which dries out the mouth, eyes, and nostrils. Moslems pulled their head scarves across their faces; Christian mercenaries raised their neckerchiefs. At 3 P.M., Eaton mercifully halted the march. The general, still muscular and fit at forty-one, walked four miles with young George Farquhar down to the deserted port of Sollum. Eaton’s map, a French maritime chart, showed the spot as Cape Luco, and it appeared to be 90 miles from Bomba. On paper, he was five or six days’ march from the first goal. That night at their encampment, they had no fresh water.
The following morning, Sunday, April 7, Eaton and officers on horse led the way, followed by rice-laden baggage camels guarded by foreign soldiers along with a handful of U.S. Marines on foot. They commenced forward at 6 A.M. and by switchbacks ascended a mountain. The Moslems began their staggered start. They all then marched along the summit, achieving eighteen miles total before camping at 4 P.M. in a valley. Again there was no water. Men tossed their packs on the ground and slumped down with fatigue. The U.S. Marines, the lowliest service, were earning six dollars a month to trudge through this hell. Dust billowed everywhere. Men rationed their sips from their goat sacks; lips cracked; bodies ached with exhaustion worsened by dehydration.
The situation was so dire that no one—not even the camel drivers—bickered. They knew better than Eaton what kind of trouble this situation posed. Another day without water and more of the horses would die. Another day after that, fatigued men would want to lie down instead of marching forward.
April 8. Monday, on day thirty-eight of the expedition, the drummer roused the camp. Eaton led the tired troops down the switchbacks on the western side of the mountain. At 9 A.M., they trudged down into a deep ravine, and there at the bottom was a natural cistern of excellent rainwater. Men splashed the precious stuff on their faces, dabbed it on the backs of their necks, and drank like beasts till their bellies ached. “This was a precious repast to our thirsty pilgrims,” wrote Eaton, grandly.
While everyone crowded in to drink before the horses and camels would have their turn, Eaton rode off with a handful of officers to scout the surrounding region. He returned an hour later, the time of day still being late morning, ready to resume the march, only to discover that the Moslems had pitched camp. Eaton sought out the Bashaw to demand an explanation. Hamet blamed exhaustion, but Eaton’s translator, who had become friends with some members of the Bashaw’s suite, discovered the true reason: Hamet once again wanted to send a courier to Bomba to make certain that the American ships had arrived.
Not surprisingly, this cautious man feared turning up in Bomba or Derne without food or naval support; he thought he would be mere prey for his brother’s army. His jitters defined him. Unlike Eaton, Hamet churned his options into perpetual quicksand.
Eaton sought out Hamet and told him that the army had six days’ rations of rice left, and they must hurry, not delay. All other food—biscuits, flour, dried meat, everything—was gone. Hamet blamed the sheiks and other tribal leaders and said they all demanded a chance to rest. “If they prefer famine to fatigue, they might have their choice,” Eaton told Hamet. General Eaton, on the verge of the worst crisis yet, again ordered a stop to the rations of the Moslem troops.
For hours, Hamet and the sheiks and the Moslem cavalry argued among themselves. At 3 P.M., Hamet announced the Moslems would return to Egypt by way of the Oasis of Siwa. Servants began to dismantle tents; cooking pots were loaded on camels. He and other Moslems prepared to head back along the trail up the ravine.
The hats would remain; the turbans would depart, but not before one last parting betrayal.
As Eaton observed the tent poles pulled and the tents flopping to earth, he feigned indifference. He wanted to convey the message loud and clear that his army of one hundred men advancing on foot, without Eu ed Alli’s camels or Hamet’s horses, would reach Bomba. As he watched the servants scatter about their tasks, he noticed some of the Moslems clustering in suspicious groups between the camps. Eaton sent his interpreter to investigate; the man reported back that the Arabs—before heading out—planned to try to steal the rice.
Eaton instantly ordered the drummer to beat to arms. The ominous drumroll filled the ravine. The American and European soldiers grabbed their weapons and rushed to join their companies. Eaton ordered his officers to form their men into lines in front of the supply tent. The six U.S. Marine privates, in blue-and-scarlet coats and high brimless hats, blocked the tent’s entrance. The 60 or so other men—Greeks and European castoffs—half-ringed the tent in front of them.
With the sun still high in the west, Eaton’s men stood at attention, guarding the precious sacks of rice. Not a word was said, but the mere aligning of guard troops in the lonely desert ravine acted like an accusation. The men in turbans milled around threateningly as servants packed up tents and other belongings.
The departing Moslems now knew that they would have almost no food to tide them over on the first leg of their journey. The Arab sheiks rode out first, with their men; Hamet mounted and followed. The Christian soldiers remained in formation, sweating in the heat. Eaton waited; he was gambling that yet again the prospect of hunger would bring them back.
In less than an hour, Hamet re-entered the ravine, with the primary sheiks in tow. He said he had convinced them to persevere with the Americans. After dismounting, Hamet ordered his tent pitched off to one side. The sheiks began to do likewise.
Eaton then made a horrible mistake, one that almost scuttled the entire mission. He thought the rebellion over and that the camp would now settle into the late afternoon routine of gathering wood for making fires and boiling water for cooking rice. Wanting to take advantage of the lull, he decided to drill his Christian troops. So he ordered “manual exercize,” that is, drills with presenting arms, shouldering arms. The three troops—the Greeks, the mixed mercenaries, and the U.S. Marines—stood at attention; their officers began calling out orders.
The instant the soldiers began to twirl their rifles, the Arabs, encamped a few hundred feet away, thought they were being attacked. They raced to remount their horses, shouting in Arabic: “The Christians are preparing to fire on us.” The Bashaw climbed on his horse, at the head of the cavalry, and ordered a charge. Two hundred Arab horsemen, most of them expert riders, armed with muskets and scimitars, thundered forward at full gallop toward the eighty or so Christian soldiers, now standing at attention, arms at their sides. No order was given to raise their weapons and none of the men moved, except Eaton’s aide-de-camp, named Davies, and an unnamed troop doctor, who both scurried away to their tents. The others stood still as the dust of two hundred horses enveloped them in a cloud and the sound of pounding hooves mixed with guttural shouts.
The only sound missing was gunfire.
The Arab cavalry wheeled to a halt just in front of the Christian formation—no one had fired on either side. Commands in Arabic apparently directed them to aim at the American officers. Dozens of men swiveled their muskets toward Eaton and Lieutenant O’Bannon and Midshipman Peck. With slow deliberation, they steadied their guns. Someone shouted: “Fire!”
In the stunned silence, the instant before anyone squeezed off a shot, the Bashaw’s officers shrieked a counter order: “W’allahi . . . In the name of Allah, do not fire! The Christians are our friends.”
General Eaton, who had been standing next to Farquhar and O’Bannon and Peck, now strode forward, moving directly toward Hamet. Only a man willing to die very soon steps out between two armies. As he walked, he was yelling to Hamet in broken Italian: Do not allow this stupidity, this act of desperation. At once, “a column of muskets” was pointed at his chest. One flinch and the ground might be spattered with blood, and Eaton’s quest might quickly end in an unmarked grave in a nameless ravine.
Eaton shouted up to the Bashaw in Italian, speaking fast, but the prince looked dazed, paralyzed with indecision. Hamet said nothing, did nothing. Each instant increased the risk of some jittery forefinger pulling a trigger.
The Moslems began shouting commands and counter-commands in Arabic. A turbaned rider danced his mount forward and leaned down and pointed his pistol at the breast of young George Farquhar, the son of the Scottish quartermaster. The man pulled the trigger, but the gun misfired.
Eaton abruptly raised his hand, waving it, demanding silence. The Arabic shouts only grew louder. Another group of horsemen surged forward.
Hamet looked dumbfounded. The officers around him, seeing no hint of an upcoming command, took it upon themselves to rush ahead, sabers drawn, and surround Eaton and separate him from the attackers.
In the brief lull, Eaton barked words of reproach at Hamet. At that moment, Hamet’s casnadar, his treasurer, asked Hamet, “Have you lost your mind?” Hamet snapped out of his stupor and struck the casnadar hard with the flat of his sword. The Arab horsemen, seeing the glint of a blade in the sunlight, began shouting again and closing in to rescue him.
A firefight lurked one trigger-pull away.
Throughout it all, the European soldiers and the U.S. Marines held their ground, fighting their nerves to remain statues of discipline.
Eaton grabbed the reins of Hamet’s horse and guided it to one side a little ways from the crowd; he convinced the prince to dismount. “Do you know your own interests?” Eaton asked. “Do you know who your friends are?”
Like a man awaking from a bad dream, Hamet admitted he had panicked. He called Eaton his “friend and protector.” Heading with Eaton toward the American’s tent, Hamet gave orders for the Arab cavalry to disperse.
Inside the tent, Hamet suggested that Eaton order a ration of rice to calm the situation. The American general replied that he would agree only on the condition that the march would begin promptly the next morning at reveille beating. Hamet consented. Arab chiefs filed in and swore yet more oaths of loyalty.
Lieutenant O’Bannon, a warm Kentucky man who had amused them all with his fiddle, stood nearby. Throughout the armed confrontation, O’Bannon had maintained his cool, smiling, trying to calm everyone. Eaton had been deeply impressed by the courage of both Farquhar and O’Bannon to stand still and dignified in the face of attack. A dozen muskets aimed at their hearts hadn’t spooked them. Hamet now walked over to O’Bannon, and with a surge of emotion, called him “My Brave American” and embraced him. The long beard pressed against the marine’s dusty blue uniform.
That night in the ravine, the “turbans” and “hats” sat around campfires, hundreds of yards apart, eating their small bowls of rice, deeply distrustful of one another.
Writing later in his notebook, William Eaton, still angry, gleaned one overshadowing lesson from this near-death incident: “We find it almost impossible to inspire these wild bigots with confidence in us or to persuade them that, being Christians, we can be otherwise than enemies to Mussulmen,” he wrote.
On Tuesday, April 9, day thirty-nine, Eaton took full advantage of the march-at-reveille agreement. The drummer cut short the men’s dreams at 5 A.M. and the first riders hit the trail at 5:30 A.M. The horde marched ten miles before halting at a water cistern near fine fields for grazing. They approached the cistern; finally a day with an early start had led to fresh water before noon. The ugliness of yesterday was fading. The first man walked over, wanting to drink before the horses and camels. Kneeling down, he tossed his goatskin into the cut-out reservoir. He looked over the clear expanse shining in the high sun; something lurked near the edge beneath the surface. The man jumped into the water and reached down and pulled up an arm, then a leg. “In this cistern, we found two dead men; probably pilgrims murdered by the Arabs,” wrote Eaton, who added matter-of-factly: “We were obliged nevertheless to use the water.”
The next day, the straggly army marched ten miles and at noon camped in a “beautiful valley” with grazing for the horses. On top of one side of the valley was a stone ridge with a good cistern of water. With food running out, Eaton cut the rice rations in half, presumably to four ounces per man a day. The courier had not yet returned from Bomba.
Eaton learned from his Arabic-speaking spies that Hamet’s fears of betrayal had been growing, that he suspected that the Americans were merely using him to strike a better peace with his brother. He told colleagues that “he has been twice deceived by Christian powers, and that the English deceived mameluke leader, Elfi Bey.” Unsettled by these fears, Hamet worried that one day the Americans would hand him over to his brother Yussef.
At 3 P.M. that Wednesday afternoon of April 10, Eaton was invited into a general council of war. Hamet and the sheiks again refused to proceed until word of the American ships arrived. Eaton pressed for two more days’ marching before halting, which would bring them nearer and shorten the messenger’s distance.
Bomba lay fifty to sixty miles away, and Eaton queried the men working supply duty and found that three days of half rations of rice remained. At the pace they were moving, the army had little or no chance of reaching Bomba with any food left. With more delays, hunger, possibly even starvation, threatened, especially if the Christian troops were ever abandoned en route.
The Bashaw and the sheiks refused to proceed. “Our situation is truly alarming,” Eaton wrote. It instantly got worse.
Some of the European mercenaries were overheard plotting a mutiny to demand full rations of rice. The men whispered about gathering their weapons and confronting Eaton or else storming the supply tent. Walking ten miles in the dusty heat on a handful of nourishment had taken its toll.
Eaton told Lieutenant Rocco to try to quietly explain to the men about the extreme shortages and what was required for survival. If that approach failed, he was to tell them that any man who approached Eaton in arms to make demands risked being shot.
Eaton re-counted the exact number of bags of rice remaining; his diary doesn’t reveal the number, but the tally was grim; he informed only Lieutenant O’Bannon. Men clustered around campfires, very quiet.
At 7:30 P.M., in the tense camp, the courier who had been sent to Bomba rode in amid the fires. He yanked the reins and swung off his horse. He shouted his news: The American ships were seen off the coast of Bomba. As Eaton phrased it, the army was transformed “from pensive gloom to enthusiastic gladness.” The news promised food: salt beef, biscuits, and butter. Hamet and the sheiks now agreed (again) to persevere to Bomba.
That night, with the battle looming perhaps less than a week away, Hamet suffered an attack, perhaps of panic; with “spasms and vomiting” through most of the night. The sight of a retching commander hardly inspires confidence. Very quickly, the whole camp knew of their leader’s illness.
The next day, Thursday, day forty-one, a sunrise start produced five miles, but Hamet fell direly ill. Eaton, fearing he might die, decided it best to halt, although no water happened to be at that spot. The army waited for Hamet to recover. The next-to-last half ration of rice was issued.
Around sundown, Hamet started to feel better. Eaton, per usual, scheduled an early start. On Friday, they continued down along the valley. Knowing the food shortage, Eaton pushed them to trek as far as possible. The straggling army, reinvigorated by hope, achieved twenty-five miles on growling stomachs. That evening, they camped on a ridge that had neither water nor firewood. Eaton gave orders for the last of the rice to be distributed. The men, unable to boil it, were forced to gnaw at their half handful of raw rice. Uncooked rice in dry mouths tasted little better than gravel. The Bedouin families, exhausted from hunger and marching, camped five miles back.
On Saturday, April 13, “Marched seven and a half miles. Hunger and fatigue rendered the foot soldiers and Bedouin families unable to pursue the march.” Hamet ordered one of his camels killed, and he exchanged another camel with the Bedouin for a sheep. (The Bedouin were very reluctant ever to slaughter any animals that provided them with milk or transportation or wool.) The two beasts were slaughtered, and since a camel often weighs as much as 1,500 pounds, there was a lot of meat. Eaton reported enough to feed the entire army, perhaps seven hundred men. Camel meat is considered a delicacy, although Europeans tend to find the meat tough. Obviously, with men starving, nothing was wasted, but many travelers report that whenever the Bedouin slaughter a camel, they utilize every last sinew. “No part of the animal capable of being gnawed by human tooth is suffered to be lost,” wrote Frederick Horneman, who traveled in Northern Africa in 1797. “The very bones pass through various hands and mouths, before they are thrown away . . . they makes sandals of the skins and they weave the hair into twine.”
April 14, day forty-three. “Marched fifteen miles. Camped in a pleasant valley of rich strong land, but totally uncultivated. Good and abundance of feed for our horses, and sundry cisterns excavated in the ridges on the borders of the valley contained excellent rain water; but we were totally destitute of provisions.” Eaton spent the hungry hours looking at the nearby ancient ruins . . . “visible marks of former cultivation but now all is waste.”
Everyone knew that the ships had been sighted and everyone knew that Bomba could be reached sometime the following day. The men scratched at the ground, looking for edible roots, and waited for dawn and the hike to Bomba.
On the forty-fifth day on the road, Eaton—making an uncharacteristic accommodation for human frailty—allowed the exhausted troops a bit more sleep. He ordered the day’s march to begin at 7 A.M. The men fanned out through the plain, scavenging for anything edible to staunch the hunger pangs. Wandering in small ravines nearby, they found some wild fennel and sorrel. During the day’s march, the army ran into three Bedouin coming from Bomba, who reported seeing two vessels at sea; the tribesmen even described a ship that resembled the Argus. At 4 P.M., on a day without water, Hamet, Eaton, and their army reached Bomba, a port city of antiquity, long since abandoned. Eaton, at the forefront, cantered ahead and scanned the horizon, out across the Bay of Bomba. And there he saw . . . not a single ship, not a sail, nothing but the blue waves of the Mediterranean.
He scanned again for the hint of a sail, a paleness on the blue, but nothing. The Arab sheiks rode up and looked, as did Hamet; the marines looked and the mercenaries. Nothing. The straggling army gradually arrived en masse on the crest of the hill. After the recent reports from trustworthy witnesses, this completely unexpected reversal—going from the prospect of food to the prospect of nothing—bewildered them all.
As word spread, the shouts and curses of the five hundred Moslem soldiers resounded louder and louder. “Nothing could prevail on our Arabs to believe that any [ships] had been there,” wrote Eaton. “They abused us as imposters and infidels.” The sheiks and others accused the Christians of luring them into some kind of trap.
With no food and no water and no money, the various groups started to scramble for their own survival. Hamet and the sheiks held a council and decided to leave the next morning, in a direction that would not include the Americans or Christians. Eaton, finding his entire mission crumbling, pushed his way into the council tent and said the army should now try to attack Derne. His plan was quickly dismissed as “impracticable.”
It was all falling apart.
Eaton went off with his 9 Americans and his 75 Europeans; they marched back up the mountain overlooking the harbor. Eaton ordered the men to find anything combustible . . . from a twig, to a stick, to a log, to a sack. They tossed it all in heaps to create as many bonfires as they could. All night, they fed the fires. No wine or whiskey to pass the time, just flames roaring into the night sky. Maybe O’Bannon played the fiddle.
At dawn, Eaton scanned the horizon: nothing.
The Arabs down below began packing up.
Hamet’s casnadar (treasurer), a reasonable man who trusted the Americans, climbed the hillside for a last look and a farewell. The time was 8 A.M., and the sound of camels grunting to stand could be heard.
Zaid, the casnadar, squinted hard, methodically inching his line of sight along the horizon. He saw a fleck of white, he thought. Others looked; it might be a sail approaching. As the speck slowly grew in size over the next three long hours, they came to realize that this was the Argus. “Language is too poor to paint the joy and exultation which this messenger of life excited in every breast,” wrote Eaton.
Midshipman Peck attempted to put his feelings on paper. “When I think on our situation in the desert, where no other Christian ever sat his foot and consider what thieves the arabs are, who would shoot a man for the buttons on his coat, and their religious prejudices, which would have been sufficient to warrant our deaths, as christians and enemies to their religion, I frequently wonder how it was possible for us to succeed in reaching Bomba. Certainly it was one of the most extraordinary expeditions ever set on foot. We were very frequently 24 hours without water, and once 47 hours without a drop. Our horses were sometimes three days without, and for the last 20 days had nothing to eat, except what they picked out of the sand.”
The “hats” and the “turbans,” who had come so close to killing one another, would now prepare for a combined attack on Derne, which would be a mere prelude to conquering Bengazi. From there, they hoped to march to Tripoli city itself to plant Hamet on the throne.