Hunting Hamet in Egypt
ON NOVEMBER 25 around noon, an American sailor aloft aboard the Argus spotted far off a faint vertical line, a kind of reddish finger extending skyward. He was pretty certain that he was looking at “Pompey’s Pillar,” the first Egyptian landmark visible from sea. He called down to the officers on deck. William Eaton, hearing the words, was eager to get onshore.
Captain Hull, however, approached this coastline near Alexandria very gingerly. The nearby silty outpourings of the Nile create hard-to-read inbound currents and shifting shoals. Perhaps no other supremely successful trading mecca, certainly not one that once brokered goods from Africa, Asia, and Europe, was ever saddled with such a rotten approach. The famed Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Pharos, which has received centuries of favorable press for its mechanical ingenuity and architecture, served a supremely utilitarian function: It helped guide ships in on this dangerous low-lying coast.
Circa 1804, lookouts had to make do with Pompey’s Pillar, which stands 70 feet tall and 8 feet thick, a solid piece of polished red granite. (This column, despite its snappy nickname, was built in the fourth century A.D. and has nothing to do with the Roman general Pompey.)
At 4:30 P.M., Hull ordered a salute gun fired and flags hoisted to call for a pilot to sail out to help navigate the Argus into the harbor. No one ashore noticed, or no one cared. The sun set, and the Argus, taking no chances, tacked offshore, at times hauling up the mainsail. William Eaton waited.
At dawn Hull eased shoreward; this time he hoisted an English flag after firing his salute. An Arab pilot, at the bidding of the English consul, sailed out. That afternoon the man guided the Argus westward through the tricky opening of the Old Harbor of Alexandria. Sea-savvy travelers routinely complained that the casual dumping of ballast by lazy crews threatened to choke off access. The challenging entry, in any case, allowed harbor pilots to increase their fees. A Turkish man-of-war and six frigates were anchored there, dwarfing the brig Argus.
The pilot, at the bidding of the British consul, informed Captain Hull that the Turks, then nominal masters of Egypt, would answer any salute, gun for gun. So the Americans reeled off the steady, very respectful seventeen-gun salute, which was reciprocated by the Ottoman admiral. (Eaton, ever ready to perceive a slight, counted thirteen in response; Captain Hull counted seventeen.) The sailors of the Argus dropped anchors fore and aft in six and a half fathoms of water. Soon after, the English consul, Samuel Briggs, and a handful of Turkish port officials were rowed out and they climbed aboard.
Pleasantries completed, Eaton presented his letter of introduction from British governor Ball of Malta to Mr. Briggs. This single piece of paper pried open entrée into Egypt, a country then wracked by civil war and paralyzed in many locales by conflicting factions. Before leaving the ship, Briggs, an energetic merchant in addition to being British consul, promised to provide any assistance within his power.
All the foreign consulates raised a polite flag of welcome to greet the Americans, except for the houses of France and Spain, then at war with England. (In fact, the French consul, a Piedmontese named Signore Drovetti, would soon start spreading rumors about Eaton that would endanger Eaton’s life . . . and then later Drovetti’s, once Eaton learned about it.)
That night, Consul Briggs sent a letter to the Americans, informing Eaton and Captain Hull that at 9:30 A.M. the following morning both the governor of Alexandria and the Turkish admiral would receive visits from them. Briggs and his interpreter would meet them at Admiral’s Wharf and accompany them.
The standard means of ground transportation in Alexandria in 1805 was by short ass. “They make use of asses to go from one part of town to another, of so small a size, that the legs of the rider nearly touch the ground,” noted Ali Bey, a seasoned traveler. Ali Bey measured several at thirty-nine inches tall to the crown of head, and he suggested this beast, which ate one quarter as much as a horse, might revolutionize the daily commute to work in Europe. He added that the animals stepped very lively and that bystanders enjoyed the pratfall comedy of the slipper-wearing overseers, skiddering around trying to keep up with their asses.
William Eaton did not want to be a tourist; he wanted to pursue his mission, but even he couldn’t help but notice the decline of one of the greatest countries in the history of mankind.
Egypt lay in ruins. Egypt’s ruins lay in ruins. The latest conquerors—French, British, Turkish, Albanian, Mameluke—cherry-picked the antiquities; their unpaid troops vandalized and pillaged; the local elite still borrowed Roman columns for their summer homes. The magnificent baths of Cleopatra have disappeared under the rubble. Caliph Omar burned the Library long ago. The desert sands encroach the remaining gardens. A gorgeous metropolis that once housed one million people and dictated fashion and literature to the world has disappeared. Now, a mongrel town of 5,000 Arabs, Copts, Italians, Turks, Albanians, Jews remains on the same geographical spot; the inhabitants bark out a bastardized version of Arabic and Lingua Franca. It is said most Alexandrines speak four languages—badly. And to think that Cleopatra once defined a “barbarian” as an uncouth person who could not speak a neat version of Greek.
Alexandria was no longer a Grande Dame.
The governor and admiral, the two most powerful Turks in Alexandria, welcomed the Americans—Hull in a naval uniform and Eaton in civilian clothes. Slaves sprinkled them with rose water and served them coffee. The elaborate ceremony dragged on. The instant that Eaton was able to corner Briggs for a moment of privacy, he asked him about the location of Hamet, the exiled prince of Tripoli. Briggs replied that he had heard vague reports that Hamet was somewhere far to the south, hundreds of miles below Cairo, and that to see him, Eaton would need to pass through battlefields filled with fierce Mamelukes and other armies waging war there.
The news gut-punched Eaton. It was one tiny step short of Hamet being dead or in prison. Egypt lay in tatters, checkerboarded by rival factions. Some of the Turkish troops had disintegrated into roving bands of Albanian deserters; several large armies of Mamelukes and rival Mamelukes and Turkish mercenaries under Muhammad Ali each claimed huge swaths of territory; predatory Bedouin tribes preyed on any stragglers, while French and English soldiers—stranded from preceding wars—joined up here and there. To reach Hamet, Eaton must sidestep the warring camps, survive the outlaws, and do so with a force of a dozen men. It would be days before he would even understand the loyalties of all the various groups.
Everyone—from Consul Briggs to the governor of Alexandria—strongly advised against going south at this time. Eaton decided to leave immediately.
He also decided that to facilitate this excursion south, his small group would masquerade as American officers on vacation, eager to see the wonders of Egypt. As for Eaton himself, he would impersonate an American general on holiday. (Indeed, a week later, he would allow himself to be introduced as “General” to a high-ranking Turkish official.)
To complete his charade, he donned a military uniform of some sort, perhaps his old U.S. Army captain’s uniform.
Eaton prepared to head out the following morning.
Since no soldiers had been assigned to him in advance, he now had to ask permission of Captain Hull to borrow a few able-bodied recruits. Eaton convinced Hull to loan him four officers: Lieutenant Joshua Blake of the navy, Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon of the marines, Midshipman George Washington Mann, and Eli E. Danielson, Eaton’s own stepson. The choice of Lieutenant O’Bannon proved especially fortunate; O’Bannon was a high-spirited brave Kentuckian who carried his fiddle everywhere and had been known to lighten things up with “Hogs in the Cornfield.” Eaton also took Richard Farquhar, the wily entrepreneur who was trying to hitch his fortune to Hamet, and Seid Selim, a Janissary. A man named Ali would serve as the group’s dragoman, a kind of all-purpose tour guide, a fixer.
Eaton rushed to borrow some weapons and ammunition from the Argus and to purchase supplies on credit in Alexandria and have them all toted aboard the boat he hired to go to Rosetta. With typical energy, Eaton was ready to leave that same day, November 28, but the winds conspired against him. To increase his odds of finding Hamet, he sent a messenger ahead by camel to look for the ex-Bashaw. Finally, on November 30, Eaton with seventeen men playacting as a tourist party headed east along the coast in moderately favorable wind.
The trip from Alexandria upriver to Cairo, a famed route along the Nile, is a surprisingly difficult journey. First, Eaton would need to weather thirty miles east along the African coast to reach the dangerous waters where the inbound Mediterranean batters against the outbound Nile. Past there, he would head south a ways then change from a coastal vessel to a boat more suited to upriver Nile travel, which sometimes required sailors to hop ashore and haul them forward. These were the natural dangers and difficulties; add to this that the area south of Rosetta was a lawless zone infested by Bedouins and by bands of Albanian deserters from the Turkish Army.
That first afternoon, they reached Aboukir Bay (Abu Qir) on the coast, the site of one of the world’s most famous naval battles. On August 1, 1798, Admiral Nelson had wiped out the entire French fleet there, stranding Napoleon and his conquering army amid the pyramids.
The Americans skirted to the far end of Aboukir around 4 P.M., and the ship’s captain decided that too little daylight remained to risk crossing the bar of the Nile. While the sailors fished for mullet, Eaton, acting the tourist, decided to go ashore to visit the fields where the French had fought a land battle against the British invading army. “The battlegrounds there,” wrote Eaton, “we found still covered with human Skeletons.” He walked amid the bones and later called them “ghastly monuments of the savage influence of avarice and ambition.”
He returned to his vessel and, with the American flag flying, embarked early in the morning for the Nile. Around midday, they reached the rough Boghase, the entrance bar of the Nile. “The billows are generally very strong,” wrote one traveler. “For it is a bank of sand, against which the waters of the Nile beat with prodigious force. Ships find very little water; and the straits which are passable shift constantly, so that there is a boat stationed upon the bar to indicate the passage. It requires ten minutes to cross it and boats hardly ever pass over it without touching the sand three or four times.”
In crossing the bar, Eaton experienced one of the most amazing transformations of landscape on the face of the earth, going from the sandy brininess of the coast to the lushness of the Nile. Travelers have compared this transit to moving into a kind of dream world. The water shifts color from Mediterranean blue to Nile red. The voyager begins to see verdant fields, rice plantations, palm trees, orange groves. The air hangs heavy with scent; suddenly dozens of vibrant-hued species of birds wheel above. Eaton entered the Nile at 1 P.M.
Around 2:30 P.M. a large Union Jack came into view. The barge of the British Rosetta consulate with Union Jack awnings approached. Word had already reached them via foot messenger of Eaton’s impending visit, and they came to greet him. Eaton and Lieutenant Blake boarded the large British vessel for the half hour remaining to reach Rosetta.
Each minute heading south, Eaton became more impressed by the fertileness of the Nile delta. Rosetta served as the stopover point for travelers switching from a seacoast vessel to a Nile boat. The Arabs called the town “Rashid,” and it was one of the more beautiful and prosperous places in all Egypt, with ambitious gardens, groves of orange and lemon trees, and smart five-story brick houses. An Albanian governor, with a force of three hundred Albanians, kept the town safe for the Turks.
Major Missett, the British resident agent at Cairo, greeted Eaton at the Rosetta landing. (Missett had abandoned Cairo to avoid the conflict raging there.) Eaton handed him a letter of introduction. The two men quickly found they enjoyed each other’s company. “You will find in Major Missett all that can be comprized in the term of a Gentleman, with the frankness of an old soldier,” wrote Eaton to Captain Hull.
Also greeting him was Doctor Mendrici, whom Eaton had met in Tunis. Mendrici, family physician to the Bey, had often shared secrets with Eaton, and Mendrici, like Eaton, had been eventually banished from Tunis. Mendrici’s offense, Eaton described somewhat cryptically, was “possessing dispositions congenial to the interests of the Bey’s wife.” The good doctor had thrived since, and was now chief physician to the highest ranking man in Egypt—Viceroy Ahmet Pacha—and also on call to the British consulate. Eaton was thrilled to see Mendrici, who spoke Lingua Franca and Arabic and knew Hamet from Tunis.
The Americans stayed in the British consular house in Rosetta. Although Eaton found the surroundings magnificent, he wanted to head south immediately to Cairo and continue his hunt for Hamet. Unfortunately, the fast of Ramadan began that night, and a religious sheik traveling with a huge entourage had commandeered all the Nile boats in Rosetta. Eaton found himself with two days to kill before another boat would arrive. He spent the time with Major Missett, both lamenting the lack of port and Madeira. Missett filled Eaton in on the warring factions and complex political situation roiling Egypt. If attacked, Eaton might at least have a glimmer of understanding of the adversaries involved.
The Turks and Mamelukes had uneasily shared control of Egypt for almost three hundred years, from 1517 to the French invasion of 1798. Despite being fellow Moslems, the Turks amounted also to foreign invaders. To Westerners, the Mamelukes were an odd class of warrior-slaves to comprehend. They originated when the Turks bought Greek Orthodox Christian slaves, often fair-skinned, from regions of Georgia or Circassia, trained them in military arts, then freed them and converted them to Islam to act as an elite corps of Mamelukes. Over time, these warriors tired of their subservient role and seized control of Egypt, and developed great houses of Mameluke beys. Since generations of Mamelukes were handpicking the slaves that would refill their ranks, the Mamelukes were often strikingly handsome and athletic. They wore extremely baggy trousers (which would reach the chin if pulled up), a large sash, and yellow stockings and slippers. They always went about heavily armed with at least a curved scimitar and two pistols, and roamed the country, exacting taxes and inflicting justice.
Napoleon changed all that; he invaded in 1798, claiming he had the blessing of the Ottoman Empire to free Egypt from the oppression of the Mamelukes. His victory crumbled when Nelson left him ship-less, but the French ruled for a couple of years before British forces teamed up with the Turks to drive them out. (On December 2, while Eaton was chatting with Major Missett, Napoleon was crowning himself emperor in Notre Dame in Paris.)
The British Army eventually departed also, and by 1804 Egypt was a lawless mess. The Sultan in Istanbul appointed a pacha who in theory ruled all of Egypt but in reality controlled mainly the north near Alexandria. The Turks had used Albanian troops under a commander named Muhammad Ali, but he had branched out and claimed Cairo for himself. Bands of Albanian deserters raped and pillaged outside the main cities. And the Mameluke beys, having hired all the local Arab tribes, controlled Upper Egypt (i.e., south of Cairo), where Hamet had taken refuge. Further complicating matters, there were twenty-four Mameluke beys, and many of them hated one another. At that moment, the Turkish forces of mostly Albanian troops (with a few leftover Frenchmen) were attacking the Mamelukes south of Cairo. Further stirring the pot, diehard enemies England and France were sending spies to various camps, trying to align themselves with the eventual winner . . . whoever that might be.
As Eaton understated it in a later report to the secretary of the navy: “The interior of this country being in a state of general revolt renders traveling somewhat dangerous.” The current main threats: Albanian deserters “who restrained by no discipline ravage and murder” and Bedouin tribes “who prey on the defenseless.”
After two days together, Eaton decided to reveal his entire Hamet mission to Major Missett, and the British officer insisted that the consulate’s heavily armed boat accompany Eaton to Cairo. Missett also found a trusty courier to try to deliver another message to Hamet.
Eaton hired a marche, a smallish boat with triangular sails and a small cabin built onto the deck. The larger British vessel, with its canopy flags, had two swivel guns mounted. Each craft carried about a dozen men armed with muskets, pistols, and sabers.
Cairo lies 115 miles upstream from Rosetta. They embarked at 3 P.M. on December 4, passing innumerable little villages, watching a timeless agrarian scene unfold along the shores. Egyptian women toiled in the fields guiding plows pulled by donkeys. Their faces were covered, but suprisingly their breasts were sometimes exposed, as their head-to-toe garment featured long side slits allowing free arm movement for farmwork and easy access for nursing. (Exposing the face was considered more scandalous: A traveler once observed a group of women, when surprised by marauders, flinging their dresses up over their heads to remain modest.)
The following day, headwinds caused the parties to disembark. Eaton succinctly noted “inhabitants oppressed and miserable.” He dined in a garden near a village called Fuor. The villagers along the Nile sometimes supplemented their incomes nicely from boats delayed heading upriver. “In many of the villages are women for the convenience of strangers, a part of whose profits is paid to the government,” wrote William Browne, who passed that way about a decade earlier. He added somewhat oddly: “I didn’t notice that the nature of their calling created any external levity or indecency of behavior.”
While Eaton made no mention of visiting any brothels, he did find time during his stay at Fuor to put on a shooting exhibition for the locals. Consul O’Brien’s nickname for Eaton had been “Captain Rifle.” Eaton placed an orange in front of a large tree and paced off a hundred feet. A crowd of peasants gathered. With their rusty muskets, they knew they’d be lucky even to hit the tree. Eaton raised his rifle to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger. His shot smacked the orange, which spun in the dust. He reloaded and hit the pulpy target again. His third shot split the orange in half and “astonished the inhabitants.”
Thanks to tow ropes and some decent wind, Eaton and company made some progress up the Nile, but again on the following day they were forced to go ashore. Eaton walked around the village of Sabour, which resembled a ghost town. Two days earlier, a troop of five hundred Albanian deserters had consumed or destroyed nearly everything of value. Torched buildings teetered next to piles of rotten food. The villagers told the Americans that the Albanian banditti appeared headed eastward toward the Damian branch of the Nile, but they warned that a Bedouin tribe was still prowling the area, lingering about four miles to the south. They said they prayed for the return of the English to bring some law and order.
Eaton, his stepson, and the others reboarded their vessels and headed south. From the vantage point of the midriver railing, they saw a group of mounted Arabs swoop down upon a village’s herd of camels, buffalo, and cattle and drive off a half dozen animals. The terrified villagers did nothing but shriek and offered no resistance. “The Arab camp were within half a league [of our boats] but the fire we raised from our fowling pieces upon the vast numbers of pigeons and other small fowl in its environs must have deterred them from attempting to examine our baggage,” Eaton wrote. The expression “examine our baggage” shows his dry wit returning; it’s as though each moment of danger revives him, draining away some of the bile of inaction.
At 6 P.M. the British and American vessels reached Bulac, the port town serving Cairo. They had successfully avoided the Albanian banditti and the Bedouin marauders, but as they came to anchor, a Turkish boat full of armed men and officers approached. Eaton’s dragoman and his Maltese servant, nicknamed “Lewis,” began the parley for permission to pass into the harbor. The loud gutturals, commonplace in Arabic, grew louder and more guttural. Lewis, a wily, resourceful man but hotheaded, grew more agitated. The Turks insulted this servant of a Christian. Lewis fired his musket into the water just ahead of the Turkish boat. Would the Turks open fire? Eaton and the British Captain Vincent made elaborate gestures for calm. The irate Turks, swords in hand, boarded. Eaton and Captain Vincent offered apologies and, with some coins backing their words, placated the Turks.
William Eaton now found himself one step closer to Hamet, having reached the great metropolis of Cairo, the jumping-off point for travelers heading farther south on the Nile. Eaton noted in letters that he expected to remain ten days at most in Cairo; he instead would find himself stranded there a bit longer.
Cairo—with a ployglot population of 400,000 Egyptians, Turks, Albanians, Syrians, Copts, Jews—once thrived as the hub for commerce from two continents. Twice yearly from time immemorial, massive African caravans of thousands of slaves, spices, and ivory arrived from the desert. In earlier centuries the wealth of the Indies, which by Eaton’s time passed by ship around the tip of Africa, used to go through Red Sea ports and then be siphoned through Cairo. To Turks and Egyptians, Cairo was “Misr el Kahira,” “Misr, without an equal, Misr, the mother of the World.” To monomaniacal Eaton, it was the gateway to Hamet.
Cairo was nominally under the control of Ahmet Pacha, a viceroy appointed by the grand sultan. Actually, Muhammad Ali, a cunning thirty-five-year-old Albanian warlord with an army, controlled the city; however, it suited Ali’s interests for the time being to allow the Pacha to rule in grand style. (By the following year, Muhammad Ali would crush the Mamelukes and have himself appointed by the Sultan to replace this viceroy; he would found a dynasty that would rule Egypt for a century and a half until lust-crazed King Farouk and his ninety-five offspring would kill it off.)
At that moment, Muhammad Ali was bivouacked to the south, fighting the Mamelukes. The Pacha sent horses and an armed guard to escort Eaton and his party into the city. A huge crowd gathered along the route. “We passed as American officers of the Army and Navy whom curiosity had brought from Malta to Egypt during the winter’s suspense of operations.”
Major Missett had kindly offered to allow the Americans to stay at the British House. Dr. Mendrici paid a quick personal visit to the Pacha, his patient, and put in a good word for the Americans. In the late afternoon, the Pacha’s interpreter came to welcome the Americans and told them the Pacha would be pleased to entertain them at the palace at nine o’clock the following night. He explained that the late hour was chosen because the fast of Ramadan had begun.
During Ramadan, the ninth and holiest month of the Moslem lunar calendar, Moslems must refrain from eating or drinking or having sexual intercourse from sunrise to sunset. Some theologians call the daylight hours a time for atonement for sins; all state that the fasting shows obediance to Allah’s command.
The Americans, though only masquerading as tourists, were fortunate to be in Cairo during Ramadan because the requirements of following Islamic law created a beguiling nocturnal spectacle.
Endless torches and bonfires illuminated the streets, mosques, and courtyards far into the night as turbaned men and veiled women celebrated outdoors. “Hundreds and thousands of lights may be seen in the great salons of the rich,” wrote traveler Ali Bey, “which consist of plain crystal or coloured [oil] lamps suspended from the ceiling. They produce a charming effect and no unpleasant smell, for the smoke passes out of ventilators.”
He added: “It is well known that the rich observe [Ramadan] by living in a manner completely opposite to their general mode, that is, by sleeping all day and amusing themselves during the night.”
William Browne, a British traveler who visited Cairo during Ramadan a decade earlier, chronicled the routine for the postsunset festivities. A long prayer was first recited, followed by a sumptuous feast. After that, oiled Egyptian wrestlers grappled for prizes, then came storytellers, many reciting tales from A Thousand and One Nights. Next came the comic wits who “wrestled in similes”; their performance often degenerated into insult contests: “You are like the city ass; you look sleek and carry dung.” Then, deeper in the night, appeared the female singers, sometimes to the accompaniment of stringed instruments; finally, the main attraction, the female dancers, notorious for their belly dancing.
While the lure of such entertainment would have thrilled a true tourist, Eaton looked forward to breaking fast with the Pacha only to learn about Hamet; indeed, he spent his first day in Cairo inquiring of the servants at the British House if any knew of Hamet supporters in Cairo. And Eaton succeeded in meeting with three former officials of Hamet’s exiled government: a secretary of state and two ministers. He described them as “destitute of everything but resentment, for even hope had abandoned them.”
Eaton discovered from them that the rumors were indeed true: Hamet, “after a series of vicissitudes and disasters,” had joined the Mamelukes; that he commanded a few loyal Tripolitan soldiers and some Arab mercenaries; and that Hamet was besieged with the Mamelukes inside Minyeh in Upper Egypt. Besieged meant that the city in which Hamet stayed was ringed by 8,000 Turkish and Albanian troops. Minyeh lay 140 miles south, upriver, a five-day journey from Cairo. Eaton later wrote a letter to the secretary of the navy, detailing the obstacles: the near impossibility of a small Christian force passing through a war zone to reach Hamet, the difficulty of even sending a Moslem messenger to him, the unlikelihood of obtaining a letter of safe conduct from the viceroy for Hamet to travel, and finally, the fatal risk of Hamet appearing a traitor to the Mamelukes if he tried to flee Minyeh.
Eaton weighed his options and decided his best chance lay in trying to convince the viceroy, that night at the reception, to help Hamet to abandon the rebel Mamelukes and leave the country. Eaton blithely added: “These obstacles overcome, everything else seemed feasible.”
At 8 P.M. a small detachment of mounted uniformed Turkish officers and attendants on foot entered the courtyard of the British House, leading six Arabian horses, richly caparisoned with the finest jeweled saddles. Eaton, in some kind of homemade general’s uniform, Presley O’Bannon, in the blue coat with scarlet collar and lace cuffs of a U.S. Marine lieutenant, and two blue-coated midshipmen with gold lace at their collars mounted up alongside Captain Vincent and Dr. Mendrici. The dozens of men on foot carried large flaming torches; immense crowds lined the mile-and-a-half path. Spectators, wrote Eaton, were curious to see “the men who had come from the New World.” (Presumably, they expected Native American Indians, not officers who resembled Europeans.)
At the gate of the citadel, more servants, grooms, and guards stood ready to help the men down from their horses and guide them inside the courtyard. The Pacha intended an ornate welcome. Albanian soldiers, in full uniform with a kind of chain-mail waistcoat and high leather buskins and red caps, paraded in the courtyard. The grand staircase to the Hall of Audience at the Citadel was lined with young turbaned Turkish officers in dazzling uniforms, carrying jeweled swords.
Eaton described the primary room of the court as surpassing in “magnificence” anything he had ever seen of this kind, that is, more sumptuous than those in Algiers or Tunis. The viceroy invited William Eaton, taking him by the hand, to join him on a large sofa of “embroidered purple and damask cushions.” Also attending were a host of long-bearded advisers comprising the government divan, or council.
First came elaborate hospitality and salutations: coffee, followed by pipes and sherbet. Since Islam forbade liquor, the drink on public occasions must be coffee. Many travelers crowned the Turks—in an age of heavy tobacco use—as the world’s leaders, with a pipe in their mouths most waking hours. As for the pipes used at the palace, these were no hubble-bubbles, but rather six-foot-long delicately carved poles of scented wood. “The tobacco of Turkey is the best and mildest in the world,” wrote one French traveler. “It has not the acrid taste which in our countries provokes a continual spitting; the length of the shanks in which the smoke rises, the odoriferous nature of the wood, the amber tube that is held in the mouth, the aloes wood with which the tobacco is scented, contribute to make it still milder and to render the smoke of it not unpleasant in a room.”
Eaton ate his fruit sherbet in a salle redolent of Arabian coffee beans and Turkish tobacco. An always quick—and often biased—judge of character, Eaton decided that the Turkish viceroy “was a man of much more frankness and liberality than commonly falls to the character of a turk.” Showing a genuine curiosity, the viceroy peppered Eaton with questions about the ongoing British-French war, the history of the United States. Is the United States at war or peace? With whom?
The viceroy decided to dismiss the courtiers and servants, and Eaton found himself alone with the viceroy and his interpreter. Eaton spoke in French, and the interpreter translated to Turkish. The viceroy, with a smile, told Eaton that he doubted that Eaton’s purpose was merely tourism.
Eaton, making a snap decision, decided to confide in the Pacha his true mission, even though Hamet was at that moment fighting along with the rebel Mamelukes.
Eaton labored to explain the entire history of U.S. diplomatic relations with Tripoli and the Barbary war, stressing Yussef’s betrayal of the treaty. Eaton artfully contrasted the duplicity of the Barbary rulers with the honorable conduct of other Turkish princes. (Nominally Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Egypt were all regencies of the Ottoman Empire.) Eaton, laying it on thick, drew parallels between Islam and American Christianity: “Both taught the existence and supremacy of one God,” encouraged charity, and “forbade unnecessary bloodshed.” The viceroy agreed.
Eaton then explained that his mission was to restore Tripoli’s legitimate sovereign to the throne, and in so doing prove to the world “We do not unsheath the sword for conquest nor for spoil but to vindicate our rights.”
The viceroy replied that he had met Hamet and had even helped him out in time of need. (Hamet seemed to teeter from one handout to the next.) He said that he would like to help Eaton on his quest, but he added that if Hamet had indeed joined the Mamelukes, it would greatly complicate the situation. Eaton replied that it was holier to pardon a repenting enemy than to punish him.
The viceroy agreed to send couriers to search for Hamet, and Eaton sent couriers as well, adding to the two messengers he had already sent from Alexandria and Rosetta. Eaton in all his messages suggested that Hamet hurry to Rosetta to contact Major Missett at the British House. He signed his notes “Agent General of the United States.”
The day after leaving the meeting at the palace, Eaton was optimistic that the viceroy would help. Then an unexpected difficulty arose. The French consul, Signore Drovetti, informed the viceroy that the American party were actually spies working for the British. Drovetti explained that the Hamet tale was a smoke screen to allow the Americans to reach the Mamelukes and help cement an alliance with Great Britain. In crazy- quilt Egypt, anything made sense. “I found the means however (the means that move every thing in his quarter of the globe) to remove this difficulty,” Eaton wrote. The “means” are easily explained: Dr. Mendrici approached the viceroy’s interpreter to offer him a bribe. Whether the money reached the viceroy didn’t concern the Americans.
Eaton needed cash right away for the bribe, so he borrowed it from the British, promising them that the United States would repay the loan. By simply not asking in advance, Eaton thus avoided the risk that the U.S. Navy would turn him down. Then, the following week after the fact, Eaton wrote Captain Hull that he had borrowed $2,000 on the Briggs Brothers credit and that Hull should reimburse them in Alexandria. Eaton secured Dr. Mendrici by appointing him “Commercial Agent” for the United States at Cairo. Of course, Eaton had absolutely no authority to make the appointment, but he did add the proviso that Mendrici would remain “until the pleasure of the President shall be expressed on the subject.”
On December 16, Eaton confirmed from a reliable source that 8,000 Albanian and Levant troops serving the Turks had indeed surrounded the 3,000 soldiers of the Mameluke beys at Minyeh. Both sides were digging in for a long seige, which didn’t bode well for Eaton passing through the lines.
That evening after sunset, Eaton once again had an audience with the viceroy. After the usual ceremonies, Ahmet Pacha gave Eaton an earful on the errors of Hamet’s ways in joining the Mamelukes. However, thanks to the bribe, he granted Hamet “a letter of amnesty and permission to him to pass the Turkish army and leave Egypt unmolested.” Eaton added: “It now remains to detach him from the rebel Beys.”
The following morning, Eaton sent four separate couriers, each carrying a copy of the viceroy’s amnesty and safe-passage. Three of the messengers were Maltese, disguised as Arabs. “God has ordained that you should see trouble,” Eaton added in an accompanying note to Hamet. “We believe he hath ordained also that your troubles shall now have an end.” It was crucial that Hamet learn about the pardon before the Mamelukes did, who might kill him. The couriers had orders that, if captured, they should destroy the pardons.
Now all Eaton could do was wait for an answer. The New Englander, however, was not adept at wasting time; he decided to go with his stepson and his fiddle-playing marine and do some actual sightseeing. He hoped for an answer from war-ravaged Minyeh, 140 miles upriver, within ten days.
Next morning, Eaton and friends visited the famed Nilometer on Rhoda Island in the Nile at Cairo. The Nilometer, built in 861 A.D., was more than just a large ornate carved column for measuring the water level of the Nile. The annual reading there during a vast public festival delivered a thumbs-up or thumbs-down for the country’s future. If the river level reached 16 cubits (about 24 feet), a fine harvest would be guaranteed, but 18 cubits heralded flood, and a mere 12 cubits drought.
Eaton crossed from the island to the western shore and continued into the ruined city of Giza, which had a decade earlier housed the magnificent Mameluke palace of Murad Bey. “I had been told that it was a delightful spot,” wrote a traveler, “on account of its country houses and gardens . . . it is now a miserable abode filled with Arnaut [Albanian] soldiers who conduct themselves like banditti.” From Giza, the pyramids and the Sphinx loomed in the distance. However, Bedouin marauders had taken over the turf in between, swaying Eaton to skip taking a closer look.
From his vantage point, the pyramids would have appeared like God’s discarded playthings, casually tossed in front of the Mokattam mountains. Eaton remained unimpressed. “Ruined temples, pyramids, and catacombs, monuments of superstition, pride and folly of their founders disgust my sight; for with their magnificence I cannot but couple the idea of the slaves who must have groaned under the oppressive folly of their fabrication.”
Even the Nile didn’t move him. “When I contrast the pure currents, healthful margins, and delightsome landscapes of our Susquehannah, Delaware, Hudson and Connecticut [Rivers] with the muddy waters, miry or parched banks and eternal deserts of the [Nile]; and the intelligence, freedom and felicity of the citizens [in America], with the stupid ignorance, rivited vassalage and hopeless misery of the peasants here, I almost lose sensibility of pity in the glad reflection that I am a citizen of the United States.”
The irritated tourist returned to his lodgings at the British House and to his preferred pastime: the mission. There he found two more men who had been close followers of Hamet, and both promised Eaton that it would be possible to recruit a troop of three hundred to five hundred men to march from Egypt. Eaton, upbeat, wrote to Hull to inform him that provisions should be gathered in Alexandria for at least one hundred men. He also warned him that he would need more money: about $4,000 or $5,000. “If Government should reprove our arrangements, we will reimburse them from the spoils of Bengazi [a large port city in Tripoli], which I already calculate upon as ours, nothing will hinder but unforeseen disaster.” (Eaton’s life sometimes seemed like a string of unforeseen disasters.) Eaton eagerly awaited Hull’s reply, since Hull controlled the purse strings.
Perhaps the French consul was not so far off in describing Eaton and friends as spies for the British. Eaton did indeed write a detailed note to Major Missett, in Rosetta, but apologized that he couldn’t find any fresh reliable news about the Mameluke-Turkish war in Upper Egypt. “We are more perplexed with contradictory reports, than were there free presses for the parties,” he added, no doubt thinking of the severely biased accounts in rival Republican and Federalist papers back in America.
Once again Eaton was forced to wait. So, on Thursday, December 20, instead of viewing more pagan artifacts, Eaton sought out a Christian shrine. New Testament lore places the Holy Family with the baby Jesus wandering to Cairo. On the way, Jesus is said to have miraculously caused a spring to appear in a Jewish community called Ain Shams. (Mary took advantage of the sudden water to wash Jesus’ clothes.) True believers are convinced that the balsam plant took on healing properties by being nourished at the Jesus spring. (Copts for centuries have been peddling balsam-laced consecrated oil, called “chrism.”)
The Holy Family then trudged into Old Cairo where, legend has it, Jesus’ arrival caused all the idols to topple and prompted the Roman governor to order the Christ child killed. The Holy Family fled.
So did Eaton after a morning in Old Cairo. He had seen pagan and Christian; now he visited an Islamic site. He traveled to the nearby village of Daerteen and was allowed into the Mosque Atarenabee. He and his party must have seemed less than enthused because a guide offered to let them “view all the ladies of the village.” Though Eaton doesn’t specify what exactly their “view” entailed, he closed this diary entry: “Omnia vincit argent,” as in “Money conquers all.”
And Eaton waited. On the agenda for this Friday night was dancing girls. Egypt was world famous for its belly dancers, and someone in the American group hired a few to perform. William Browne, a decade earlier in Cairo, had witnessed a similar spectacle. “They are always attended by an old man and an old woman who play on musical instruments, and look to the conduct of the girls that they may not bestow their favors for an inadequate reward; for though not chaste, they are by no means common.”
French traveler Charles Sonnini de Manoncourt offered more details on the entertainment. The dances “consist chiefly of very quick and truly astonishing movements of the loins, which they agitate with equal suppleness and indecency, while the rest of their body remains motionless.” The women sometimes danced in gyrating pairs and sometimes wore little metal cups on their fingers, which they clacked like castanets.
Eaton, with his patriotic blinders, was less impressed. “At evening an exhibition at the English house of the almee, dancing women: Haggard prostitutes, disgustful, obscene monsters who exhibit savage nature in jestures of studied and practised depravity: something resembling the Spanish balario [bolero], from which the latter probably originated.”
Up north in Alexandria harbor just before Christmas Eve aboard the Argus Captain Isaac Hull found time to write a reply to William Eaton, down in Grand Cairo. The note was meant to douse the fire of Eaton’s optimism.
“I have made arrangements for paying Mess.rs Briggs the Thousand Dollars, which you inform me you had drawn for, but as for the four or five Thousand you say you shall want—God Knows how we are to obtain that, unless you have the means at Cairo, for I know of none here.—I am already pennyless.” He mentions not even having enough money to pay off the debts incurred for the Argus. Then he wonders what exactly Eaton means by asking him to provide provisions for one hundred men, and warns that he cannot possibly carry them to Rosetta at this time of year.
“The plan you have formed of taking Derne, I think rather a Hazardous one, unless the Bashaw can bring into the field from Eight Hundred to one Thousand Men, particularly as we are destitute of every article necessary for an expedition of this kind.” He states that “the most we can do” is transport the Bashaw to Syracuse, try to get supplies and troops, and then set off anew for Derne or Bengazi. “You must be satisfied that it is my wish to do everything in my power before we return, but when I look at the situation we are sent here in, I lose all patience.—With a little Vessel, without friends, without authority to act . . . in short without everything that is absolutely necessary to insure success to an Enterprize.”
Hull repeats that it would be best to find Hamet, bring him out of Egypt, then look for a new plan with proper backing. “I say as I have said before that I do not see that anything more than getting the man can be done.”
Eaton would receive this dismal Christmas present within a week. A less stubborn man might have been deterred.