THE TERM “MIDDLE EAST” WAS COINED BY AN AMERICAN admiral in 1902. Before that time, Americans (and Europeans) spoke of the area as simply “the East” or, more commonly, “the Orient.” The term vaguely referred to the landmass that stretched between Morocco and Egypt and curved scimitar-like through Arabia and the Levant before tapering, finally, in Turkey. But the designation was never entirely geographical—Casablanca, in fact, lies far to the west of Madrid, Marseille, and Rome. The Orient, rather, described a region unified by a distinct civilization, typified by unique modes of government, social structure, architecture, and dress. Its inhabitants, known to Westerners by an assortment of interchangeable names—Arabs, Levantines, Algerines, Moors, and Turks—were presumed to be hostile to foreigners and spoke languages grating to the American ear. More than by its political, artistic, or linguistic qualities, though, the Orient was distinguished by its religion, Islam. The followers of this faith, generally called Musselmen, were perceived by eighteenth-century Americans as the ultimate Other, a colorfully garbed but amorphous mass, the descendants of once venerable but long decayed civilizations, primitive, sordid, and cruel.
An Object That Promiseth and Deceiveth
Inimical images of the East passed to the New World in the minds of the first Europeans to probe it. “As…enemies of the sect of Mahomet,” Christopher Columbus set out discover a new route to the Holy Land in 1492—he even took along an Arabic interpreter for the purpose—and so that “all the gain of this my Enterprise should be spent in the conquest of Jerusalem.” Little more than a century later, George Sandys, soon to become treasurer of the Virginia colony, traveled to the Middle East and found a region rife with bloodthirstiness. “I think there is not in the world an object that promiseth so much…[yet] so deceiveth the expectation.” The shield of Virginia governor John Smith bore the likeness of the Turkish heads he severed while serving as a mercenary against the Turks. Along with incipient notions of equality, the idea of Western superiority over the Orient landed with the Pilgrims at Plymouth. A rock near the colony reportedly bore the inscription: “The Eastern nations sink, their glory ends, And empire rises where the sun descends.”
Though early America prided itself on religious tolerance, that forbearance rarely extended to Islam, which was scarcely considered a religion at all. Prominent colonial theologians such as Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards regularly denounced Islam as a false and morally degenerate faith. Muhammad, according to the Harvard president Samuel Langdon, was a counterfeit prophet and, worse, “an emissary of Satan.” The jaundiced impression of Islam was reinforced by tendentious translations of the Quran. The “newly Englished” Alcoran of Alexander Ross, published in 1649, set out to expose the “contradictions, blasphemies, obscene speeches and ridiculous fables” in the book, so that the Christian “so viewing thine enemies in their full body…maist the better…overcome them.” Similarly, the 1734 version by the lawyer George Sales, a copy of which was found in Thomas Jefferson’s library, aimed at enabling Protestants to “attack the Koran with success” and hoped that “for them…Providence has reserved the glory of its overthrow.” The purpose of the most popular colonial-era book on Muhammad, written by Humphrey Prideaux in 1697, was unambiguously announced by its title, The True Nature of the Imposture Fully Displayed.1
The farrago of fact and misinformation about the Middle East to which colonial Americans were exposed is reflected in the first short story written in the New World, a farce titled “Father Bombo’s Pilgrimage to Mecca.” Authored in 1770 by Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge—classmates of James Madison at Princeton and his fellow Jeffersonian Whigs—the story describes how the Prophet Muhammad appears before a plagiarizing student named Bombo and orders him “to change thy religion and profess Mahometanism and become a zealous musselman.” Donning “Turkish habit,” Bombo dutifully embarks on a six-week trip to the Meccan mosque that contains the Prophet’s body. There the pilgrim washes his hands and feet and removes the rest of his garments. “I prostrated myself on the bare pavement, naked, with my face towards the East, begging the prophet to pardon my crimes.” The text shows that Brackenridge and Freneau clearly knew something about Islamic rituals, but they also misconceived of Muhammad as a Jesus-like figure who, though interred in a sacred sepulcher, occasionally materializes to penitents and dispenses personal salvation. Muhammad indeed responds to Bombo’s prayers and forgives his sins so that he can finally return to New Jersey.
Negative depictions of the Middle East also reached America through the memoirs of European diplomats and travelers, over a hundred of which had been published by the late eighteenth century. Though most of these books were in French, a few, including James Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, were available to English readers. These depicted the Middle East as an alien realm, at once romantic and threatening. The women of the region were often portrayed as lustful and the men as free-ranging and noble. The sixteenth-century geographer Leo Africanus, a Muslim convert to Catholicism, described the area’s inhabitants as “savage” plunderers who “pluck out the eyes and cut off the hands and feet” of their prisoners. The Ottomans, according to Oxford’s Richard Knolles in his General History of the Turks (1603), were “the present terror of the world.” The French voyagers Savory and Volney conveyed more equitable impressions of the Orient, as did the classical writers Herodotus, Thucydides, and Homer. Nevertheless, apart from the snippets gleaned from returning merchants or from Arabic-speaking slaves, Americans of Ledyard’s time had scant access to information about the Middle East, and the little they possessed was exceedingly unreliable and biased.2
This near-total absence of any real knowledge about the Middle East left a vacuum that was easily occupied by rumors about the region, regarding not only its alleged enmity toward anything Western but also its immeasurable marvels. The image of the area as an ambit of visual and sensual delights derived from many sources, the richest of which were available on the colonial American bookshelf. The Bible, a text that almost all early Americans knew intimately and regarded as immutable truth, was the principal source of Middle Eastern fantasies. The Old and New Testaments presented a panorama of lofty towers and temples, of hanging gardens and shimmering oases and, most majestically, the desert. The passages describing such spectacles, when recited in drab Pennsylvania meetinghouses or in wind-pierced frontier cabins, could induce Middle Eastern reveries even in the most puritanical parishioners. Many dreamed of witnessing those wonders firsthand.
After the Bible, one of the most widely read books among early Americans was A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. It too served as a fertile source of Middle Eastern illusions, although illusions of a most unscriptural kind. An anthology of medieval Persian romances, A Thousand and One Arabian Nights first appeared in English in 1708 and instantly achieved popularity throughout the British Empire, especially in the American colonies. The reasons were not difficult to gauge. The escapades of Ali Baba, Sindbad, and Aladdin, and the pathos of Scheherezade storytelling for her life, transported Americans from their arduous lives to a tantalizing world of hidden treasures and minaret-orbiting rugs, of veiled but available odalisques. One might only imagine the sensory swoon produced in the prim New England cleric or stately southern prig by this excerpt from the book’s introduction:
A secret gate of the Sultan’s palace opened all of a sudden, and there came out of it twenty women, in the midst of whom marched the Sultaness…. [They] threw off their veils and long robes, that they might be more at freedom, before ten black servants…and each of them took his mistress. The Sultaness, was not long without her gallant, she clapped her hands…and immediately a black came down…and ran to her in all haste. This amorous company continued together till midnight and, having bathed altogether in a great pond…they dressed themselves, and reentered the palace.3
Biblical marvels and carnal allure together endowed the Middle East with a dreamlike aura. But would the image of an ethereal Orient suffice to attract Westerners to visit the region and to risk encountering its less splendorous qualities? The answer, for Americans more than for Europeans, was straightforward: the Middle East represented an opportunity for movement. As citizens of a nation already famous for its individualism and energy, a people so restless that, as one foreigner remarked, even their chairs had rockers, Americans craved movement. Pioneers by the thousands pressed inland, in search of untrammeled space. For some, though, not even the vastness of the North American continent could satisfy their wanderlust. They looked not only to the wilderness west of the Ohio River and beyond the Mississippi, but also in the opposite direction, eastward. For them, the Orient meant more than a mere phantasmagoria; it was an uncharted horizon, ripe for penetration and discovery. For Americans like John Ledyard, romantic and peripatetic, the Middle East was the ultimate frontier.4
A Connecticut Yankee in Egypt
Ledyard crossed into that frontier in the first week of July 1788, when his ship docked in Alexandria, Egypt. A congested, dusty warren into which six thousand residents were packed, stagnant and chaotic at once, the city bore no vestige of its ancient grandeur and no resemblance to the Middle Eastern myths Ledyard had imbibed. “Alexandria at large presents a sight more wretched than I have witnessed,” he began in a harrowed letter to Jefferson. The local afflictions were almost too numerous to list: “Poverty, rapine, murder, tumult, blind bigotry, cruel persecution, pestilence!”
The dissolution Ledyard encountered was symptomatic of the Ottoman Empire, to which Egypt, at the end of the eighteenth century, still belonged. Often called Turkey or the Sublime Porte (a reference to the door of the grand vizier’s palace) by Westerners, the empire had arisen in the fourteenth century and steadily expanded to dominate the Middle East and huge swaths of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. The fierce Ottoman army launched repeated forays against Christian Europe, culminating in the 1683 siege of Vienna. That offensive proved to be a high-water mark, however, and thereafter the empire’s fortunes declined. By the 1780s, the Ottomans seemed less like frightful specters to the West than incorrigible has-beens. The Viennese who once quaked at the thought of the “Moorish hordes” and the “terrible Turk” at their gates now regaled in “Turkish” fashions and thrilled to The Abduction from the Seraglio, a Mozart opera about a Spanish woman’s rescue from an Ottoman harem, a comedy.
In few areas was the empire’s downslide more pronounced than in its Arabic-speaking provinces. Once the seat of rich and enlightened kingdoms, global leaders in science and mathematics, these lands were, by the end of the eighteenth century, reduced to semifeudal backwaters. Life for the vast bulk of their inhabitants had changed little since the Middle Ages. There were no printing presses, no clocks, no modern academic institutions. Roads were scarce and, in the absence of a strong central authority, travelers were exceedingly vulnerable to attack. Few Europeans dared to penetrate this inhospitable region, confining their presence to port cities, where they cowered under consular protection. The local population had no such recourse. As Ottoman hegemony weakened, the peasants were exposed to the whims of provincial satraps and the scourge of brig-and bands.
Conditions were especially dim in Egypt. Some three to four million natives lived in subsistent conditions and were annually ravaged by famine and disease. Rather than relieve this misery, the country’s Ottoman governors engaged in a relentless power struggle with the local Mamluk dynasty, devastating the countryside and trampling over its hapless peasantry. In 1788, with Mozart about to compose another opera set in an imaginary Middle East, The Magic Flute, and shortly after the United States placed a pyramid on the reverse side of its Great Seal, the genuine Egypt, civilization’s cradle, had fallen to an unprecedented nadir.5
This was the abysmal Egypt that Ledyard encountered in Alexandria. Yet he refused to believe that the city’s decay was endemic to the entire country and, in search of the mythic Middle East, he departed for Cairo. The journey required five days’ sailing on the Nile, an experience he had cheerfully anticipated, but that, too, disappointed him. “This is the mighty, the sovereign of rivers, the vast Nile, that has been metamorphosed into one of the wonders of the world?” The river, he reckoned, was little bigger than the Connecticut.
In Cairo, Ledyard presented his royal letter of introduction to a Signore Rosetti, the Venetian consul who represented British interests in the city. Ledyard learned that, much as Westerners referred to all Middle Eastern peoples as Orientals, Middle Eastern Muslims regarded Europeans and Americans alike as “Franks,” a pejorative term left over from the time of the Crusades. For his own safety, the consul warned, Ledyard should keep a low profile and travel in native dress. The suggestion that a Christian should have to dissemble his identity just to please Muslims was, to Ledyard’s mind, “very, very humiliating, ignominious, and distressing.” He complained to Jefferson of “the shame to the sons of Europe, that they should suffer such arrogance at the hands of a banditti of ignorant fanatics,” and yet Ledyard ultimately accepted the consul’s advice. Trading in his breeches and three-cornered hat for pantaloons and a turban, he succeeded in spending three productive months, unmolested, probing the Nile.
Throughout these excursions, Ledyard proved himself a careful observer of Egypt’s landscape. He noted the height of pyramids, the extent of urban sprawl, and speculated on the length of caravans. He bemoaned the common people’s squalor, ranking it “infinitely below any Savages” he had ever seen. Ledyard’s curiosity also lured him onto the field of battle, where the Mamluk and Ottoman armies were indecisively locked. Flustered by the stalemate, the Mamluk commander finally asked Ledyard to lead his troops. “This was about as far as a Connecticut Yankee could get from home,” the American noted, “being offered a post in Egypt’s civil war.”
The extent of Egypt’s disintegration deeply saddened Ledyard. He blamed Russia for Egypt’s predicament, for weakening Turkey with war—a residue, perhaps, of his lingering bitterness toward Catherine. Yet he also faulted the “Mahometans” for being “a superstitious, warlike set of vagabonds,” and Islam, which “does more mischief than all other things.” On the other hand, he admired the Muslims’ ability to combine piety and commerce as well as their “invincible attachment to liberty.” The image of the camel-borne nomad who roams the desert unencumbered by governments or borders—an image akin to that the colonial frontiersman and, later, the Western cowboy—would become a recurrent theme in American writing on the Middle East, and a persistent influence on U.S. policy toward the region.
Apart from the myth of the liberty-loving nomad, however, Ledyard found little romance in the Middle East, certainly none of the strand spun by A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. “Nothing merits more the whole force of burlesque, than both the poetic and prosaic legends of this country,” he complained to Jefferson. He contrasted the lustrous trees with the “dust, hot and fainting winds, bugs, mosquitoes, spiders, flies, leprosy, fevers, and almost universal blindness” seething in their branches. Like Jefferson, Ledyard viewed Middle Eastern society as a mirror image of America’s, raising a left hand of darkness and hate to the right hand of American enlightenment. “Sweet are the songs of Egypt,” he concluded, “on paper.”
Meanwhile, Ledyard prepared for his passage upriver into Africa. He consulted with the Mamluk commander Ismail Bey, who warned him about brigands capable of morphing into wild animals and advised him to travel lightly, without valuables. He then secured a place on the next caravan to Sennar, over a thousand miles to the south. In a last letter, dated November 15, 1788, Ledyard advised Jefferson never to come to Egypt and to take all those wondrous depictions of the East—by Savary, Thucydides, and Homer—and “burn them.” In a scarcely disguised understatement, he confessed, “I have passed my time disagreeably here.” Then, with his trademark drama, Ledyard said good-bye to his most devoted and illustrious American friend: “I go alone…. Do not forget me. I shall not forget you. Indeed, it would be a consolation to think of you in my last moments. Be happy.”6
The farewell was indeed to be final. Perturbed by a delay in his departure, Ledyard launched into a nervous fit that brought on what contemporary accounts called “a bilious complaint.” As a remedy, he swallowed quantities of vitriolic acid and resorted to the “strongest tartar emetic.” The patient consequently began vomiting blood and was then subjected to the “skill of the most approved physicians in Cairo.” Twenty-four hours later, the man who had recently assured his mother that he was in “full and perfect health” and had “trampled the world under his feet, laughed at fear and derided danger,” died.
John Ledyard was buried in the sand dunes lining the Nile, in a modestly marked grave, the location of which is unknown today. He left behind an unpublished manuscript, “A Eulogy to Women,” which lauded the opposite sex as “kind, civil, obliging, humane, tender beings,” but few other personal effects.7 The precedent he set, however, was enormous. For the first time a citizen of the United States had traveled to and meticulously reported on the Middle East, an area then known to his countrymen almost exclusively from the Bible and myths.
The impact of that precedent was already evident in 1792, when Henry Beaufoy recounted Ledyard’s exploits in Ladies’ Magazine, a leading Philadelphia monthly. The article inaugurated a series of mawkish stories on Middle Eastern themes, Arabian Nights–like vignettes about Eastern women who, “although generally tender and timid, become bold and ungovernable when the passion of love takes possession of them.” But there were also informative studies on the customs of the Egyptians, the Circassians, and the Druze, and descriptions of Middle Eastern cities that confirmed John Ledyard’s impressions. “He who is new to all these objects is dazzled with their variety,” an anonymous traveler wrote. “Every idea he has formed to himself vanishes, and he remains absorbed in surprise and astonishment.”
As the century waned and a new one opened, other Americans followed Ledyard’s example and embarked for the Middle East. One such voyager was the Charlestonian Joel Roberts Poinsett, a future war secretary and discoverer of the flower that still bears his name. As a guest of a Persian khan in 1806, Poinsett was entertained with “handsome” dancing girls in “long red pantaloons…their heads covered with a veil,” and shown a pool of petroleum, a “Land of Eternal Fire,” which he speculated might someday be used for fuel. Twelve years later, George Barrell of Boston, “having perused Eastern Tales,” became “beguiled” by “the idea of…listening to the Moorish flute and the enchanting voice of some fair Circassian.” He subsequently journeyed to Anatolia, but discovered that the flute sounded like a “badly played bagpipe” and that fair Circassians could be found only in the slave market. Still, Barrell urged all Americans to cast aside their “unhappy prejudices” and retrace his path to the Orient.
Such accounts, even when demystifying, sustained American fantasies of the Middle East, luring growing numbers of men and women into Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia. Those who remained at home, meanwhile, would continue dreaming of the region. Some thirty travel books on Egypt were published in the United States in the first quarter of the nineteenth century alone. No fewer than four American cities were named for Cairo, and three for Baghdad and Medina. There were also two Meccas, an Aleppo, and an Algiers. Illuminated by Ledyard’s travels, the Middle East remained a source of intense interest for many Americans, adventurers as well as decision makers, including Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson had all along assumed that Ledyard would return from Egypt and proceed with his plan for traversing America by foot in search of the Northwest Passage. That expectation was dashed in March 1789, when Jefferson read of his good friend’s demise in one of the Paris newspapers. He anxiously wrote to Tom Paine, who had since relocated to London, asking him to confirm the reports with the African Society. “Ledyard was a great favourite with the Society,” Paine consoled him. “They…lament him with affectionate sorrow.” Sir Joseph Banks, one of Ledyard’s principal patrons from London, extolled the late explorer’s gifts both as an author and as an enlightened thinker. “That man,” Banks said, “was all Mind.”8
Jefferson would eventually realize his dream of mapping a course across North America, with the help of the explorers Lewis and Clark. For now, though, he was less concerned with exploring his country’s interior than with forging its policy overseas. Among the most pressing and complex issues facing the future president would be America’s relations with the Middle East. Here, certainly, Ledyard’s observations proved valuable. They had enabled Jefferson to view the region through American eyes—incisive, proud, and discriminating—and further disabused him of any lingering romantic notions. As president, Jefferson would deal with the Middle East in a fashion distilled of illusions and focused solely on might.