Alone at Sea
WILLIAM EATON, TOWING along his fifteen-year-old stepson, Eli E. Danielson, shook off the dust of the Baltimore stagecoach and alighted in Washington City, ready to gather supplies and go on his mission. With Congress not in session, the nation’s capital on May 10, 1804, appeared even emptier and odder than usual. The deep brown of springtime mud defined the place far more than marble white.
Eaton headed away from the few half-built government buildings and over to the navy yard on the eastern branch of the Potomac to drop off his stepson. Thanks to the renewed war effort, the navy yard was the one business thriving in Washington besides politics.
Although Eaton had passed more than a month visiting his family, the squadron still remained nowhere near ready to embark. This lag time allowed reports—troubling reports about Hamet—to flow to President Jefferson, who was now having serious misgivings about Eaton’s mission.
Again it was a case of important news traveling fitfully. This time the slowness was due to a sleazy agent in Malta, who had hoarded letters for months. Commodore Preble, when visiting Malta in February, had discovered that the U.S. Navy agent there, Joseph Pulis—who spoke no English and who had previously served as consul for Tripoli—was stashing all the U.S. mail and not delivering it. Among three sacks, Preble found dozens of letters written by loved ones in the United States to the men imprisoned in Tripoli that Pulis, probably bribed, had refused to deliver.
Among the letters that Preble forwarded to Washington City was one written in November by a man named Richard Farquhar, a somewhat shadowy figure, a conniving Scotsman who wanted to act as point man for the United States in delivering money and supplies to the older brother, Hamet. He was volunteering to be a business agent for America. In the long letter he wrote to Jefferson, he mentioned in passing that Hamet, since “finding his Brother’s troops arrive daily from Tripoli & no assistance from America,” had been forced to flee from his army base in Derne in eastern Tripoli to neighboring Egypt.
Also, around this time, a report dated January 17, 1804, arrived from Commodore Preble to the secretary of the navy. He confirmed that Hamet had fled to Alexandria, but Preble tried to put a positive spin on the developments. “He has all the Arabs & a number of Mamelukes at his command, and wishes to march to the siege of Tripoly.” Preble met at Malta with one of Hamet’s representatives. “[Hamet] wants 50 barrels of powder Six Brass 4 & 6 pounders and Eighty or Ninety Thousand dollars. This he thinks with our assistance by sea would put him in possession of Tripoly; and I am very certain that it would in less than two months.” Hamet, through his representative, promised perpetual peace with the United States, the freeing of the American hostages, and the option for the United States to hold as security the main fort in Tripoli harbor. “I wish earlier notice had been taken of this man,” stated Preble.
But Jefferson reacted differently from Preble. The president interpreted both letters, according to Eaton, to mean that Hamet’s chances were considerably poorer and that the aid effort would cost far more than previously thought.
“On the first symptoms of a reverse in his affairs, discouragement superceded resolution with our executive [Jefferson], and economy supplanted good faith and honesty.” Jefferson decided that it was no longer a viable risk to spend $100,000 in cash and weapons (pistols, muskets, artillery, and gunpowder) to aid a fugitive in Egypt. For Eaton, it was déjà vu betrayal. Just as Captain Murray had abandoned Eaton’s Hamet scheme in 1802, now Jefferson was preparing to do so in 1804.
“The auxillary supplies, now supposed in readiness, are withheld,” Eaton later wrote in a long sardonic letter to a Federalist friend in Springfield, Massachusetts, also describing his meeting with top officials. “The President becomes reserved. The Secretary of War believes we had better pay tribute. He said this to me in his own office. Gallatin, like a cowardly Jew, shrinks behind the counter. Mr. Madison leaves everything to the Secretary of the navy department.”
On May 26, 1804, President Jefferson met with his Cabinet (secretary of war, secretary of the navy, secretary of treasury, secretary of state, and attorney general). Very little evidence has survived of that meeting except for a scrap of paper of the president’s notes that Jefferson, in his seventies, saved while organizing his papers for posterity.
The snippet is a sort of Rosetta stone to decipher the meeting and Jefferson’s policy. The first part of the four-sentence note states: “What terms of peace with Tripoli shall be agreed to? If successful, insist on their deliverg. up men without ransom, and reestablishing old treaty without paying anything.”
Jefferson was evidently hoping that the United States would defeat Tripoli, and thereby not pay any ransom or tribute. From his other writings, it’s clear he also aspired to the higher purpose of teaching the Barbary pirates and all of Europe a lesson by defying extortion. (The phrase “state-sponsored terrorism” didn’t exist yet.) The president might have had another, subtler motive for wanting a military victory. The Federalist press had been needling him for years over what his critics called a moment of personal cowardice.
During the Revolutionary War, when he was governor of Virginia, Jefferson learned that an entire troop of British cavalry was headed for Monticello. With no American forces nearby, he retreated with his family via horse and carriage. “Would it be believed . . . ,” Jefferson acidly wrote years later, “it has been sung in verse and said in humble prose, that forgetting the noble example of the hero of La Mancha and his windmills, I declined a combat singly against a troop, in which victory would have been so glorious?” Maybe he did crave a military victory to erase the slander.
The next part of Jefferson’s cryptic little note deals with what to do in the event of defeat.
“If unsuccessful, rather than have to continue the war, agree to give 500 D[ollars] a man (having first deducted for the prisoners we have taken) and the sum in gross and tribute before agreed on.”
That meant that the Cabinet was setting $500 a man as the maximum ransom—in the event of military loss—and the United States would also pay a one-time sum and an annual tribute agreed to at an earlier Cabinet meeting. Back on April 8 of 1803, reeling from ineffective efforts by the U.S. Navy, the Cabinet had set a secret price for buying peace. They had agreed that Madison should write a letter giving the then U.S. consul James Leander Cathcart the go-ahead to offer Tripoli $20,000 for peace and $8,000 to $10,000 a year after that. Madison, however, also emphasized: “The arrangement of the presents is to form NO PART of the PUBLIC TREATY, if a private promise and understanding can be substituted.” In addition, Madison’s letter to Cathcart was to be kept secret.
The administration was trumpeting its war effort while secretly being willing to pay off Tripoli. Clearly, if the United States ever paid tribute, the Jefferson administration preferred that no one know anything about it. That dreaded word tribute hit some raw nerve with the nation and with Jefferson. The wildly popular slogan “Millions for Defense, Not a Cent for Tribute” had originated a half decade earlier when the United States had refused to pay bribes to government officials in France; the very origin of the United States was inextricably bound to the colonists’ fight against paying excessive taxes to England. Yet Jefferson—determined to avoid open-ended war expenses—was willing to pay a small amount of tribute, preferably in secret. In Jefferson’s internal tug-of-war, “Economy” might yet win out over the desire to crush “lawless pirates.”
The last snippet of Jefferson’s note on the meeting dealt with Hamet.
“Shall anything be furnished to the Ex-Bashaw to engage cooperation? Unanimously 20,000 D[ollars].”
The Cabinet was voting—somewhat stingily—to earmark $20,000 for aid to brother Hamet. This represented a steep drop from a month earlier. To further tighten the purse strings, the navy’s new commodore, Samuel Barron, would have total discretion to decide whether Hamet would receive any money or aid. And it still wasn’t confirmed that Eaton would even be sent. The Cabinet passed along that decision to the navy.
Eaton’s last hope to go on the mission rested with his new friend, Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith. Despite apparent pressure from within his own party against Eaton, Smith decided to allow him to go. Later that same day of May 26, 1804, Eaton officially received his nebulous title as “Navy Agent for the Several Barbary Regencies.” He was told he would report to and receive orders from Commodore Samuel Barron, and that his salary would be $1,200 a year, with rations of a lieutenant. Despite being on the verge of financial ruin if the government ruled against his Tunis expense account, Eaton turned down his salary. With typical bravado, he stated it would be his privilege to fulfill this mission. (Mrs. Eaton’s reaction to all this is unfortunately lost.)
Now comes a twist that could be mere oversight or could be the workings of the master puppeteer Jefferson. When the secretary of the navy relayed orders to Commodore Barron on June 6, he failed to mention the $20,000 that Barron was allowed to spend on Hamet. He stated the Hamet plan vaguely with little apparent enthusiasm: “With respect to the ex-Bashaw of Tripoli, we have no objection to you availing yourself of his co-operation with you against Tripoli—if you shall upon a full view of the subject after your arrival upon the Station, consider his co-operation expedient. The subject is committed entirely to your discretion. In such an event you will, it is believed, find Mr. Eaton extremely useful to you.”
In other words, fact-find carefully before doling out a penny.
In contrast, Secretary of State Madison relayed the $20,000 budget for the Hamet project to the new consul general, Tobias Lear, a man who despised the Hamet plans from the start and who would never encourage Commodore Barron to spend a penny on it. That means that either Madison was paying more attention during the Cabinet meeting or Secretary Smith rates as a sloppy writer—or this is exactly how Jefferson wanted it handled.
William Eaton, a man perhaps on a mission, left Washington on May 31, and proceeded to travel ten days to cover the 250 miles to Hampton, Virginia, staging station for the U.S. Navy. Eaton’s succinct observation on Virginia: “multitudes of black skins and black coats, [that is] negroes and methodist preachers.” His trek was enlivened by a stay at the Merry Oaks tavern in Hanover where “a charming accomplished young lady sang with excellent taste and judgement and a very agreeable voice.” But soon after he arrived in Hampton and had booked himself into Jones Tavern, he discovered that his stepson Eli had fallen extremely ill aboard ship.
Eaton immediately gained permission to take Eli ashore to stay with him. “He lodged in the same chamber with myself,” Eaton later wrote to his wife, “and I confess it moved my sensibility to hear him repeatedly call on ‘Ma’ in the melancholy reveries of sleep, nature thus confessing in its dreams what his manly soul disdained to acknowledge while waking.” Ashore under care, the boy soon rallied and repeated his desire to go fight the Barbary pirates. “I believe you must be reconciled to give this son to his country and to the achievements of war.” (Eli would not live to see his twentieth birthday.)
Eaton stayed in bustling Hampton and watched this magnificent fleet arrive. Hardly an armada, nonetheless this squadron of five ships would eventually link up with the six Mediterranean ships under Preble to represent the largest U.S. Navy fleet assembled under Thomas Jefferson. The State Department issued a circular to all American consuls in Europe, stating: Congress has appropriated “a million of dollars . . . to enable the President to impart such vigor to the conduct of war, as might at once change the exultation of the enemy in his casual fortune into a more proper sentiment of fear and prepare the way for a speedy and lasting peace with Barbary.”
Eaton watched the barrel makers and canvas stitchers and beef salters at work; he glimpsed a seemingly endless parade of supplies readied to be loaded to feed two thousand men for several months: salt pork, peas, butter, cheese, biscuits. (On board ship, the salt meats would be delivered to the cook at sunset, he’d soak them in clean water, changing the water every four hours to cut down the salt, then boil and serve them the following noon.) In theory, each man could expect almost a pound of meat a day. Barrels of beer, rum, and water were rolled to the docks. Closer to Eaton’s heart, he saw the careful hoisting of barrels of gunpowder and stacks of muskets, pistols, and hatchets.
Eaton watched the Congress, under the command of Captain John Rodgers, arrive carrying thirty-six guns. A large three-masted frigate, built at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with a crew of 340 men, the ship measured 165 feet long and 39 feet wide. On Thursday, June 13, the largest frigate, the flagship, the President, arrived. Its mainmast towered 100 feet, and when fitted with topmast, topgallants, and royals, the whole extended a heroic 230 feet, a fine perch for the commodore’s 120-foot-long red-white-and-blue pennant. Commodore Samuel Barron’s ship would carry 400 men. Next came the Essex, built at Salem, Massachusetts, a frigate about twenty feet shorter than the Congress, carrying twenty-six twelve-pound guns and ten six-pound guns. Next sailed in John Adams, built at Charleston, South Carolina, a bit smaller than the Essex. Finally the Constellation, similar to the Congress. Even in an age accustomed to the sight of fighting sail, the array of five tall three-masted ships, with their dozen-plus sails each, aroused admiration onshore.
But all was not well with this fleet, so hastily convened. Besides some shoddy supplies and even rotted woodwork, the men were more restless than your average underpaid overworked sailors. Blame the spirit of the times—American Revolution, French Revolution, the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789, the more bloody one on the Hermione in 1797—or blame one man, Robert Quinn. The word mutiny was whispered on the flagship President.
The U.S. Navy prided itself on being more humane, more fair than the British Royal Navy. Quinn disagreed. He secretly wrote a note, which he signed “UNHAPPY SLAVES,” and had it delivered anonymously to Commodore Barron. Quinn stated,
The horrid usage that has been carried on in this Ship of late by the principal officers is enough to turn every Mans heart to wickedness, we are Kept on Deck from 3 O’Clock in the morning till 8 at Night [seventeen hours]. There is no regulations in any one thing, we have been on deck several days without one bit of Victuals, and durst not look for it, we cannot wash a single article for fear of being cut in two. You expect everything done at a word, there is no allowance made for our friging [moving about] day & night, but the time will come, when you will drive all thoughts of fear out of our minds. Tyranny is the beginning of mischief . . . any Commander or Captain that had the least feeling or thought, would not suffer this horrid usage, it is almost impossible for us to live. The President is arrived to such a pitch as to exceed the Hermione, some of our friends in America & other parts shall know of this shortly and in time we hope to get redress. Death is always superior to slavery.
This rousing speech—unfortunately not Patrick Henry to King George III—roused Commodore Barron to action, no small feat. He demanded that John Rodgers find out the identity of the letter writer and then convene a court-martial and ask William Eaton to serve as judge advocate. Four efficient days later, on June 23, the court passed sentence on Quinn: “to have his Head & Eye brows shaved, branded in the forehead with the Word MUTINUS—to receive three hundred & twenty lashes, equally apportioned along side of the different ships of the Squadron, with the label MUTINEY in large capital letters inserted on its front, & to be Drum’d on shore under a Gallows in a Boat tow’d stern foremost by a boat from each ship in the Squadron as unworthy of serving under the Flag of the United States.”
On Monday, June 25, at 8 A.M., a scant week from writing the letter, Quinn received the horrific punishment. In that era, punishment was always performed in public so as to deliver a cautionary spectacle, a deterrence. Sailors neatly dressed in blue and white pulled at the oars of five boats, from the stern of which five ropes extended to the stern of one boat. The tow lines like arrows pointed to Quinn and to the boatswain’s mates, there to swing the cat-o’-nine-tails. A doctor and a chaplain also attended.
Aboard each of the U.S. warships, the men, with black neckerchiefs tied at their necks and long hair neatly pulled back in ponytails, stood rigidly as the whipping boat hove alongside. It is not recorded whether Quinn screamed much or little. Few men could survive such a savage beating without becoming crippled for life. Three hundred and twenty blows would have created puddles of blood when, at the end, to the sound of drums, Quinn’s barely conscious body was towed ashore under the gallows.
This extended loud bloody spectacle delivered perhaps an even sterner warning to the various crews than a simple hanging.
Amid all this drum beating and misery, amid all this spread of canvas and lethalness of exposed cannon, Eaton could not help but dwell on what had happened to his mission. He stood there in civilian clothes in the middle of this sea of epauleted, gold-buttoned naval officers and blue-jacketed marines and sailors. Though allowed to board the ship heading to the Mediterranean, he had received absolutely no commitment of men, weapons, ammunition, supplies, or money. His orders to coordinate with Hamet in the overthrow of the Bashaw of Tripoli were never put into writing. The president and the Department of State had even refused to give Eaton letters of introduction to any allies; they had written nothing to Hamet.
As the flagship President headed out to sea on July 4, 1804, Eaton found himself almost shaking with anger. The administration, he believed, was close to turning his effort for Hamet into a rogue mission, or an afterthought. In a long letter to a Federalist friend, Colonel Thomas Dwight, Eaton characterized Jefferson’s actions as supremely devious. He explained: If Eaton succeeded, Jefferson could draw to himself the praise for this “miracle.” However, if Eaton failed, no documents existed to show the United States ever supported a mission to overthrow a foreign government. “[The president] evades the imputation of having embarked in a speculative, theoretical, chimerical project.” And Eaton added: “This [blame] will fix on me.”
Jefferson was in effect demanding deniability (before the term existed), and he was nullifying the reputation of the operative as irrelevant. That’s standard procedure for covert ops nowadays. Eaton was outraged that Jefferson wanted both deniability and moral high ground, and so have all the presidents ever since.
In his letter, Eaton recapped his situation of going on a solo mission, with almost no support, to find an outcast in Alexandria named Hamet and then to overthrow the government of Tripoli and thereby cripple Barbary piracy. “Though the adventure . . . be as forlorn, and, perhaps, as hazardous as any one ever successfully undertaken by an individual, I will carry it into execution or perish in the endeavour. I am convinced that our captives cannot [by any other means] be released without ransom; and, as an individual, I would rather yield my person to the danger of war in almost any shape, than my pride to the humiliation of [negotiating] with a wretched pirate for the ransom of men who are the rightful heirs of freedom.”
As the coastal breezes pushed the broad canvas and the woven ropes stretched and the frigate crested eastward, Eaton also found time to write a letter to his wife, one that was warmer than his previous ones, which had been harsh and businesslike. “We are now standing to sea before a beautiful breeze and under a full crowd of sail. And in about four hours I shall lose sight of the American shore. When I shall see again this land of freedom, or whether ever, is an event yet concealed in the bosom of infinite wisdom. You may rest assured that I shall use all my exertions to render my absence as short as possible.” He closed a bit more affectionately than had been his recent custom. “I wish you the smiles of Heaven, and am, Madam, with suitable consideration, yours, William Eaton.”
With not a cloud in the sky, steady breezes propelled the squadron of four U.S. frigates eastward for an uneventful two weeks. Restless William Eaton was confined to the hundred or so feet of deck space on the President, careful never to enter the windward side of the quarterdeck unless invited by Captain Barron. Eaton channeled his excess of energy into writing vitriolic letters to Federalist comrades, critiquing Jefferson as a loather of the military. With so much time to pass, Eaton copied passages out of his various books and into his notebooks. Under “Patriotism” he wrote: “Piristratides, going with some others [as] ambassador to the King of Persia’s lieutenants, was asked whether he came with a public commission or on their own to court? He answered, ‘If successful, for the public; if unsuccessful, for ourselves.’ ” And Eaton wrote just below the quotation: “Such, I think, may be my commission to the Barbary Coast.”
At 6:30 P.M., on July 11, aboard the Congress under Captain Rodgers, six men stood on the rope behind the main topsail yardarm, about 150 feet above the deck; they untied the points (plaited ropes) that held the topsail, when a gust of wind suddenly filled that sail. The men couldn’t hold their grip; three fell into the sea and drowned, though an instantly dispatched cutter searched for them. Three crashed onto the deck, two of them died. Many of the sailors now suspected that this voyage might be jinxed.
The extraordinary run of fair weather snapped abruptly on July 21 as the ships reached Pico in the Azore Islands; for the next forty-one days—except for a dozen hours near Gibraltar—contrary winds stymied their race to join Preble at Tripoli for a combined summer campaign.
Not only did headwinds force them to tack hundreds of miles off direct course, but a dead calm set in. The surface of the Mediterranean turned to glass; the ship did not rock. On August 20, off Cape De Gat, while some men fished, William Eaton performed an experiment. He took a “Queen’s Ware” plate, tied it to a log line, and lowered it into the water. He reported that the plate was clearly visible at a depth of 148 feet.
In this heat and calm on this stalled ship, William Eaton finally succeeded in gaining a private audience with Commodore Barron to advance his Hamet project. Barron, at forty-one, was Eaton’s contemporary in age, but Barron hailed from Jefferson country, Hampton, Virginia. And his military career, unlike Eaton’s, showed no disciplinary spikes, no major victories, just a steady climb through seniority. A calm demeanor, a demand for protocol, and a cautiousness seemed his dominant traits. He, like many fellow naval officers, showed a preoccupation with reputation.
For six shipboard weeks Eaton had refined his pitch, and he now came prepared with one dozen crisp reasons: half showing the benefits of backing Hamet and the other half showing the disadvantages of not backing him.
Eaton, in civilian clothes, addressed the commodore. In essence, this veteran of the United States Army was contrasting the benefits of a land attack to that of a naval bombardment. Eaton, though polite, was clearly impolitic in framing the argument that way and pitching it to a lifelong navy man.
Benefits of cooperation:
1. A land attack from the rear will cut off the Bashaw’s retreat and his supply lines.
2. Dread of retaliation from more land attacks will deter the enemy from hurting the American prisoners.
3. Oppressed residents of Tripoli, seeing themselves besieged, will open the gates to their liberator.
4. Perpetual peace with no ransom is already agreed to by Hamet.
5. Aiding Hamet is a relatively inexpensive experiment.
6. The United States, through Eaton in 1802, pledged aid to Hamet and must not break its word.
The corpulent commodore, weary in the heat on the listless ship, nodded as implacable Eaton continued to make his case. Disadvantages of not cooperating:
1. Batter down the town (with naval cannon), but Yussef can always retreat.
2. U.S. prisoners can be placed on the castle walls.
3. Even in naval victory, U.S. prisoners can be carried south to the mountains.
4. Even with a new peace treaty, no guarantee Yussef will honor it.
5. Expensive in both blood and money.
6. To abandon Hamet would harm the reputation of the United States.
Commodore Barron listened intently; he was unfailingly polite and seemed sympathetic. However, he did not show his hand; he did not explicitly promise any aid. Eaton, jotting in his notebook, tried to write positively of his prospects. A slip of the pen, however, probably exposed his truer feelings. He wrote after his meeting: “If this plan succeeds (which will certainly have the full coincidence of the Commodore) and treaty should follow . . .” He no doubt intended to write “have the full confidence of the Commodore.” But his quill slip would prove prophetic. About all he would gain was the “coincidence” of Barron.
Two days later, on Thursday at 3:30 P.M., while the commodore and the Constellation’s captain Hugh Campbell and Navy Agent Eaton were still dining on the President in the commodore’s cabin, the ship, then traveling at a dull three knots, suddenly lurched hard, as if it had struck a reef. Glasses and plates clattered to the floor. The ship then seemed to jolt upward about a foot in the air, then drop back down. Several times over the next forty seconds, this unnerving foot-high jump recurred. The officers raced to the ladders to climb on deck, ordered plumb lines heaved. The odd part was that the President stood about seventeen miles west of Cape De Gat, well out in the Mediterranean. No one saw rocks or shoals anywhere.
The Constellation, about a mile away, sent over a boat to inform its captain that it had hit a rock. About a league away was a Spanish merchantman. The U.S. ships approached it and asked how she sailed. She too said she had felt a “shock.” Comparing stories, they discovered that all three ships had felt the jolt at the same time, and the officers reasoned that it must have been an earthquake. At about 5 P.M., they felt a one-minute aftershock and then a milder one the next day. “The effect . . . on the ship’s people was also remarkable,” wrote Commodore Barron to a British diplomat at Malta. “The alarm, agitation and amazement appeared much greater than . . . had the ship been actually aground.” Sailors sensed more trouble ahead.
The squadron reached the vicinity of Sardinia on September 2, 1804. For William Eaton, this island provoked in him the memory of Anna Porcile, the Italian slave girl whom he had rescued in Tunis in 1799; more germanely, he thought of her father’s debt to him of $5,000. Chevalier Antonio Porcile had owed him the large sum of money for four years. Eaton could only stare longingly as they glided by; the squadron was late for its rendezvous with Preble. Summer was the best season to fight in Tripoli harbor—no dawdling for debts.
It is never easy to pin down a commodore; he is god upon the seas and indeed for a while answers to no one but God. Eaton, a very direct man, tried to pin Commodore Barron down on the issue of supplies and money. Barron, when he responded at all, tantalized Eaton with polite vagueness.
The fleet reached Malta on the evening of September 5, 1804. Malta, now under British rule, was a tiny outpost of sophisticated Europe, a strategically located oasis just far enough away from the Barbary Coast and Sicily. Gone were the days of the Catholic Knights of Malta, who, needing a mission after the Crusades, had terrorized Moslem ships and enslaved Moslems from 1530 up until 1798 when Napoleon had captured the island on his way to Egypt. The main port, La Valetta, combined the seaside charm of white sandstone houses with the cosmopolitan allure of theaters, restaurants, and gardens.
On September 6, 1804, Eaton wrote to the secretary of the navy, describing how he was confident he could succeed with Hamet, if given supplies. “The Commodore is not decided whether any construction of the President’s instructions extends to a discretion of procuring and furnishing [supplies].” Then Eaton added: “He will probably express himself on the subject after having fixed on his plan of operation.”
It was finally dawning on Eaton that Commodore Barron was not fully aboard on the Hamet project, and that, even if sympathetic, the commodore might choose a narrow interpretation of his orders and refuse to hand over any money. So, at its simplest, Eaton needed money, a solid sum to buy field artillery, muskets, pistols, and food, to pay mercenaries, and to rent camels. And Eaton’s best shot, really his only shot, at that moment was the $5,000 owed him by Anna’s father, the painfully courteous and constantly penniless chevalier of Sant-Antioco.
Eaton needed to pursue his money quest, but that was easier said than done. He couldn’t lift a telephone or tap a telegraph key; even worse, the British medical authorities in Malta refused to let the Americans go ashore, since the U.S. frigates, in transit, had stopped a Tunisian vessel, a possible carrier of disease. They were placed in quarantine for at least seven days. (The very word quarantine derives from the Latin/Italian quaranta or forty as in “forty days” to make sure the ship isn’t carrying some still-aborning disease.) However, letters could be exchanged and harbor boats could row nearby for some full-throated conversations.
One such boat that visited the President carried Richard O’Brien, the former consul to Algiers. When captain of the Dauphin, he had been captured by Algerian corsairs in 1785 and was kept a prisoner for ten years before being ransomed. He had courageously returned as consul, but his diplomatic style was far more pragmatic (i.e., pay something) than Eaton’s fierce patriotism (pay nothing). In a comic-opera quirk, O’Brien’s love life had accidentally undermined U.S. diplomacy in the region and led, albeit indirectly, to Tripoli declaring war on the United States. James L. Cathcart—the U.S. consul to Tripoli, a testy, arrogant man—had hired a young Englishwoman to be a traveling companion for his fifteen-year-old pregnant wife. A fellow traveler described the companion as “of good appearance . . . about 20 years old.” Cathcart referred to her as his wife’s “humble friend” and allowed her to dine at their table. The young woman, Betsy Robinson, had fled a vicious stepmother in England to come to Philadelphia to search for her only brother. Said brother, however, was gone to China, so she had taken a job. Now, after thirty-six days of sharing cabin space with the husband and wife on the trip to Tripoli, the young woman, Miss Robinson, decided that Cathcart was no gentleman, and she resolved to leave the ship at the next port, which happened to be Algiers. There, the American consul, O’Brien, knowing none of this intrigue, invited them all to dinner. In the drawing room, O’Brien asked Cathcart to escort the young lady to the table. Cathcart, furious at Betsy, declined and called her “his maid.” An eyewitness reported: “The confusion, mortification and indeed distress” caused Betsy to burst out crying. The next day, she informed Cathcart that she would not proceed with them to Tripoli. “A storm arose . . . of thunder and smut,” recalled this eyewitness. Cathcart called her “choice names.” She said that his words proved indeed that he was not a gentleman. He called her more choice names.
When all was calm, Consul O’Brien, a forty-seven-year-old bachelor, agreed to allow her to stay in Algiers to catch a ship back to America. Cathcart, enraged, swore he would send a report to the Department of State, stating that “O’Brien had seduced his maid from him.”
On March 25, 1799, about six weeks after meeting her, Richard O’Brien married Betsy Robinson. “The Lord give you many days and nights of happiness,” Eaton had written, congratulating him. O’Brien’s good fortune further angered Cathcart against O’Brien, who was then consul general for the Barbary Coast and Cathcart’s superior. O’Brien soon refused to respond to any of Cathcart’s letters. All mail between the two men had to be filtered through Eaton in Tunis, a very time-consuming detour sometimes involving desert foot messengers; ultimately, Cathcart, an abrasive diplomat, took no guidance from O’Brien and little from Eaton. With little diplomatic coordination, Cathcart botched relations with the Bashaw and war with Tripoli ensued.
(For O’Brien, two daughters ensued as well, followed by a son in February 1804.)
On September 6, 1804, O’Brien sat in the boat, yelling up to Eaton. The naval agent, whose first three children were girls, joked to merchant captain O’Brien about their wives always giving birth “to a transport, not a frigate.” Now he congratulated O’Brien on the recent arrival of a frigate, i.e., a fighting vessel, a son.
These two veterans of the Barbary Coast discussed many topics for an hour. O’Brien had resigned his post as consul general, and he described to Eaton his replacement, Tobias Lear, a forty-two-year-old former personal secretary to George Washington. Both men had met Lear, and neither Eaton nor O’Brien especially liked the man and his affected courtly manners. Lear had made a bad first impression on O’Brien by telling him the unlikely story that he had once turned down the position of secretary of state under Jefferson.
O’Brien told Eaton that over the past year the Jefferson administration had authorized him to offer $8,000 annual tribute to Tunis and, more important, to shell out $110,000 for peace and prisoner ransom to Tripoli. Both offers had been rejected. Eaton, in character, was appalled at the dangling of cash to extortionate sea robbers.
O’Brien passed to Eaton a sheaf of documents regarding U.S. policy in Barbary, and Eaton, as though compiling a case against Jefferson for offering to pay “tribute,” copied out twelve pages. The conversation eventually shifted to Eaton’s mission. The New England zealot complained that he was having a hard time securing supplies from the commodore, and he mentioned that he pinned his hopes on Anna Porcile’s ransom debt to provide seed money for the mission. O’Brien said he had heard that the U.S. Navy agent Joseph Pulis had some documents involving Anna. He would look into it. The next day, the harbor rats rowed O’Brien under the President’s stern, where Eaton could lean out and talk to him. O’Brien handed up to Eaton a letter dated “22 Juillet, 1804” from Chevalier Antonio Porcile to His Excellency, the President of the United States.
Eaton had been chasing his money for years. When banished from Tunis, he had given last-minute instructions to the next American consul, Dr. George Davis, to refuse to allow Anna to leave the country until the debt was paid. Since that time, Eaton had learned that the French government had intervened and negotiated a $100-a-person ransom to free close to a thousand slaves from San Pietro. He didn’t know whether Anna had been allowed to return last June to her homeland with the others.
Eaton, quarantined in Malta harbor, opened the copy of the letter from Count Porcile, and from the first obsequious sentence he smelled problems.
The count conveyed to Jefferson “sentiments of perfect gratitude” for the “liberation of my daughter” and for the “kindness which preserved the honor of a young lady, exposed among a ferocious people insensible to all feelings but those of violence and brutality.” He thanked him for “the kind offices of this illustrious nation of the New World which excites the admiration of all Europe.”
Sifting through the high-flown language, Eaton discovered that Anna had departed Tunis and was now reunited with her family in Cagliari in Sardinia. The count praised the United States for granting him “unmerited favors as great as they were unexpected.” Chevalier Porcile added that he hoped that Jefferson might try to force the Bey of Tunis to restore $2,000 worth of jewels, confiscated from Anna before she departed. “The embarrassed state to which the pillage of my house has reduced my fortune compels me to be careful even of trifles.”
How could a beautiful teenage girl amass those jewels while in Tunis? Very few scenarios—besides manipulating the lust of Moorish suitors— sprang to Eaton’s mind. The count then offered to act as the American business agent for Sardinia.
Eaton was flabbergasted. He scribbled in his notebook: “The foregoing letter, written in barbarous French, was handed to me as an equivalent for seventeen thousand piasters of Tunis which I disbursed years ago. . . . —It is to me altogether enigmatical—I never spoke [with] the President on the subject. Yet it would seem he must have forgiven Porcile the debt and made the transaction a matter of national generosity.”
Eaton thus added another perceived outrage to his list of complaints against the Jefferson administration. (Eaton would later learn that Consul George Davis had written to the Department of State asking advice on what to do with Eaton’s beautiful young Italian prisoner-slave . . . should he keep her? Sell her? Let her go? Madison had replied in December of 1803: “Whatever may be Mr. Eaton’s individual claims upon the Sardinian lady he ransomed, you will carefully abstain from representing either to the Regency of Tunis . . . that the United States possess any right or claim to hold her in the condition of a slave.”)
Eaton had yet again been disappointed in trying to secure financing for his mission. He didn’t even have time to dash off a reply (in French) to Count Porcile before Commodore Barron ordered the President as well as the Constellation to head immediately to Tripoli. Barron was taking over command of the squadron. Very soon he would have the President, Constellation, Constitution, Argus, and Vixen standing before Tripoli. Another six navy ships, the Congress, Essex, Siren, Nautilus, Enterprize, and the John Adams, roamed elsewhere in the Mediterranean and would also come under his command. “With this force,” Barron’s original orders stated, “it is conceived that no doubt whatever can exist of your coercing Tripoli to a Treaty upon our own Terms.”
The government of the United States expected a military victory.
As Eaton and Barron were finally heading to the scene of combat, Commodore Preble was making a last-ditch effort at Tripoli to end the war. Preble’s final risky gambit would sear a horrific image on the minds of some of the enslaved Philadelphia crew. They would see American corpses gnawed at by stray dogs.