Part 4

Aware that the dethroned Bashaw had fled to Cairo, Eaton landed at Alexandria, and, hastening to the Egyptian capital by camel, succeeded in locating the exiled Ahmet, whom he found in the depths of poverty and despair. Seated cross-legged beside him in a native coffee-house, Eaton outlined his plan and proposition. He told Ahmet that the United States would undertake to restore him to the Tripolitan throne upon his agreeing to repay the expenses of the expedition immediately upon his restoration, and upon the condition that Eaton should be commander-in-chief of the land forces throughout the campaign, Ahmet and his followers to promise him implicit obedience. Ahmet snapped at the chance, slim though it was, to regain his kingdom, as a starving dog snaps at a proffered bone. Eaton's plan of campaign was as simple as it was reckless. He proposed to recruit a force of Greek and Arab mercenaries, officered by Americans, in Alexandria, and, following the North African coast-line westward across the Libyan Desert, to surprise and capture Derna (or, as it was spelled in those days, Derne), the capital of the easternmost and richest province of Tripoli. With Derna as a base of operations, and with the co-operation of the American fleet, he held that it would be a comparatively simple matter to push on along the coast, taking in turn Benghazi, Tobruk, and the city of Tripoli itself. The chief merit of the scheme lay in its sheer audacity, for of all the leaders who have invaded Africa, this unknown American was the only one who had the courage to face the perils of a march across a waterless, trackless, sun-scorched, and uninhabited desert. But there was in Eaton the stuff of which great conquerors are made, and instead of letting his mind dwell on the dangers which the desert had to offer, he dreamed of the triumphs which awaited him beyond it.

To raise the men for so hazardous an expedition, Eaton had need of all the energy and magnetism at his command, alternately employing the specious promises of a recruiting sergeant and the persuasive arguments of a campaign orator. On March 3, 1805, Eaton and the man to whom he had promised a kingdom reviewed their forlorn hope--and it was very forlorn indeed--at a spot called the Arab's Tower, some forty miles southwest of Alexandria. I doubt if so strangely assorted a force ever marched and fought under the shadow of our flag. The army, if army it could be called, consisted of eight Americans besides Eaton: Lieutenant O'Barron, Sergeant Peck, and six marines borrowed from the American fleet; thirty-four Greeks, who went along professedly because they wanted to fight the Moslem, but really because they needed the money; twenty-five Egyptian Copts, Christians at least in name, who claimed to be trained artillerymen, and to lend color to their assertion brought with them a small brass field-gun; those of Ahmet's personal adherents who had fled with him into exile, numbering about ninety men; and a squadron of Arab mercenaries, whose services had been obtained by the promise of unlimited opportunities for loot--these with the drivers of the baggage-camels bringing the total strength of the "Army of North Africa" to less than four hundred men. With this motley and ill-disciplined force behind him, and six hundred miles of yellow sand in front, Eaton turned his horse's nose Tripoliward, so that at about the time President Jefferson was delivering his second inaugural address the adventurous American was leading his little army across the desert, with the courage of an Alexander the Great, to conquer an African kingdom.

The task which lay before him was one which great military leaders, all down the ages, had declared impossible. For a distance equal to that from Philadelphia to Chicago stretched an unbroken expanse of pitiless, sun-scorched desert, boasting no single living thing save an occasional band of nomad Arabs or a herd of gazelles. Midway between Alexandria and Derna was the insignificant port of Bomba, where, according to a prearranged plan, the _Argus_, under Captain Isaac Hull--the same who became famous a few years later for his victories over the British in the War of 1812--was to meet the expedition with supplies. Unless you have seen the desert it will be difficult for you to appreciate how hazardous this adventure really was. Imagine a sea of yellow sand with billow after billow stretching in every direction as far as the eye can see; without a tree, a shrub, a plant, a blade of grass; without a river, a brook, a drop of water except, at long intervals, a stagnant, green-scummed pool; the air like a blast from an open furnace-door and overhead a sky pitiless as molten brass! During the seven weeks of the march the thermometer never dropped during the day below 120 degrees.

The arrangements for the transport had been left to Ahmet Pasha, and it was not until the expedition was two hundred miles into the desert, and the camel-drivers abruptly halted and announced that they were going back to Egypt, that Eaton learned that they had been engaged only to that point. As the desertion of the camel-drivers and the consequent inability to transport the tents, ammunition, and supplies would wreck the expedition, Eaton pleaded with the men to stick by him two or three days longer, until he could reach an encampment of Arabs with whom he could make another contract. This they consented to do on condition that they were paid in advance. By borrowing every piaster which his Americans and Greeks had to lend, Eaton succeeded in raising six hundred and seventy-three dollars, and with this the camel-drivers were apparently content. Nothing shows more strikingly the shoe-string on which the enterprise was being run than the fact that this unexpected disbursement reduced Eaton's war-chest to three Venetian sequins--equivalent to six dollars and fifty-four cents! Despite this payment, all but four of the camel-drivers deserted the very next night, and the four that remained sullenly refused to go any farther. In the darkness of the following night they, too, quietly untethered their camels and slipped silently away. Here, then, were three hundred and fifty men, with a rapidly diminishing supply of food and water and absolutely no means of transport, as completely marooned as though they were on a desert island.

To make matters worse, if such a thing were possible, Eaton learned that Ahmet had induced his Tripolitans and the Arabs to refuse to advance until they had news of the arrival of the _Argus_ at Bomba. Eaton, striding across to Ahmet's tent, shook his fist menacingly in the face of the cringing Tripolitan. "I know you're a coward," said he, "and I suspect that you're a traitor and I've a damned good mind to have you shot." The Pasha, now thoroughly frightened, replied that his men were too tired to march any farther. "You can take your choice between marching and starving," Eaton retorted, turning on his heel, and placing a guard of American marines around the tent containing the provisions, he ordered them to shoot the first Arab who approached it. This resolute action had an immediate effect, for the Pasha and his men lost their tired feeling with amazing quickness, fifty of the camel-drivers returned, and the desperate march was resumed. It was but a day or two, however, before the Arabs became as turbulent and unruly as ever. Then another mutiny broke out, Ahmet and his people announcing that they preferred to be well-fed cowards rather than starved heroes, and that they were going back to the flesh-pots of Egypt forthwith. Just as they were on the point of departure, however, a messenger who had been despatched to Bomba reached camp with the news that the _Argus_ was awaiting them in the harbor. These unexpected delays had wholly exhausted the supplies, which were slim enough, goodness knows, in the beginning, so that during the remainder of the march to Bomba they were compelled to kill some of the camels for food, living upon them and upon such roots as they could gather on the way.

It was a half-starved and utterly exhausted expedition that plodded up the sand dunes which overlook the little port of Bomba, so what must their despair have been when they found no vessel awaiting them in the harbor, and that the town itself had been deserted. Captain Hull, apparently having given them up as lost, had departed. This time a more serious mutiny occurred, the Arabs, desperate with hunger and furious from disappointment, preparing to attack Eaton and his handful of Europeans. Appreciating the peril of his position, Eaton hastily formed his men into a hollow square. Just as the Arabs were preparing to charge down upon them the musket of one of the marines was prematurely discharged, the bullet whistling in uncomfortable proximity to the Pasha's ear. So terror-stricken was that worthy that he called off his men and attempted to parley with Eaton, who, standing alone well in front of his command, relieved his mind by telling Ahmet his opinion of him in what, according to the accounts of those who heard it, must have been an epic in objurgation. While the two factions were growling at each other like angry bull-dogs one of the Americans, happening to glance seaward, suddenly broke the dangerous tension by shouting: "A sail! A sail!" Hull, true to his promise, was returning, and the expedition was saved. Supplies were quickly landed from the _Argus_ for the starving men; with full stomachs the courage of the Arabs returned, and Eaton and his little band once more turned their faces toward the setting sun.

On the evening of April 25 the vanguard sighted the walls of Derna. A feat that veteran soldiers had jeered at as impossible had been accomplished, and Eaton, without the loss of a man, had brought his army across six hundred miles of desert, in the heat of an African spring, and in the remarkable time, when the scantiness of the rations and the many delays are considered, of fifty-two days. With their goal actually in sight, still another mutiny took place, the craven Arabs claiming that they were too few in number to attempt the capture of a walled and heavily garrisoned city, and it was not until Eaton promised them a bonus of two thousand dollars if they succeeded in taking it that they could be induced to advance. The more one learns of this man the more one must admire his unfailing resource, his tenacity of purpose, and his bull-dog courage; for, in addition to the appalling natural obstacles which he overcame, he was constantly harried by intrigue, treachery, and cowardice.

On the morning of the 26th a message was sent to the governor of Derna, under a flag of truce, offering him full amnesty if he would surrender and declare his allegiance to his rightful sovereign, Ahmet. The answer that came back was as curt as it was conclusive: "My head or yours," it read. Just as the sun was rising above the sand-dunes the following morning the _Argus_, the _Nautilus_, and the _Hornet_ swept grandly into the harbor, their crews at quarters, their decks cleared for action, and the red-white-and-blue ensign of the oversea republic floating defiantly from their main trucks. Under cover of a terrific bombardment by the war-ships, Eaton's force advanced upon the city, planning, with their single field-piece, to effect a breach in the walls and carry the place by storm. So murderous was the fire that the Tripolitan riflemen poured into them from the walls and housetops, however, that they were thrown into confusion, their single piece of artillery was put out of action by a well-directed cannon-shot, and Eaton himself was severely wounded. Seeing that his raw troops were on the verge of panic, and knowing that his only chance of holding them together lay in a charge, Eaton ordered his buglers to sound the advance, and with a cheer like the roar of a storm his whole line--Americans, Greeks, and Arabs--swept forward on a run. "Come on, boys!" shouted Eaton, as he raced ahead, sword in one hand, pistol in the other. "At the double! Follow me! Follow me!" And follow him they did. Cheering like madmen they crossed a field swept by a withering rifle-fire. They clambered over the ramparts, and by the very fury of their assault drove back the defenders, who outnumbered them twenty to one. They fought with them hand to hand, sabre against cimiter, bayonet against clubbed matchlock. Swarming into the batteries, they cut down the gunners and turned their guns upon the town. The defences of the city once in his possession, Eaton directed an assault upon the palace, where the governor had taken refuge, utilizing his Arab cavalry meanwhile to cut off the retreat of the flying garrison. Before the sun had disappeared into the Mediterranean, Eaton, at a cost of only fourteen killed and wounded (all of whom, by the way, were Americans and Greeks), had made himself master of Derna. His moment of triumph came when, still begrimed with dirt and powder, his arm in a blood-stained sling, he stood with drawn sword before the line formed by his ragged soldiers and the trim bluejackets from the fleet, and, watching a ball of bunting creep up that palace flagstaff from which so recently had flaunted the banner of Tripoli, saw it suddenly break out into the Stars and Stripes. Our flag, for the first and only time, flew above a fortification on that side of the Atlantic.

Reinforced by a party of bluejackets from the fleet, Eaton wasted not a moment in preparing the city for defence. He was none too soon, either, for the Bashaw, learning of the loss of his richest province, despatched an overwhelming force for its recapture. This army arrived before the walls of Derna on May 13, and immediately made an assault, which Eaton repulsed, as he did a second one a few weeks later. By this time the news of Eaton's victory had spread across North Africa as fire spreads in dry grass, and thousands of natives, many of them deserters from the Bashaw's forces, hastened to assert their undying loyalty and to offer their services to Ahmet, for your Arab is far-seeing and takes good care to be found on the side which he believes to be the winning one. With his army thus largely augmented, with ample supplies, with Derna as a base of operations, and with his own prestige equivalent to an additional regiment, Eaton had completed the preparations for continuing his victorious advance along the African coast-line. There is little doubt, indeed, that with the co-operation of the fleet he could have marched on to Benghazi, taken that city as easily as he did Derna, and in due time planted the American flag on the castle of Tripoli itself.

So it was with undisguised amazement and indignation that on June 12 he received orders from Commodore Rodgers to evacuate Derna and to withdraw his forces from Tripoli, Colonel Tobias Lear, the American consul at Algiers, having, in the face of Eaton's successes, signed an inglorious treaty of peace with the Bashaw of Tripoli. No more degrading terms were ever assented to by a civilized power. The Bashaw at first demanded two hundred thousand dollars for the release of Bainbridge and the _Philadelphia's_ crew, but as Eaton had captured a large number of Tripolitans in the storming of Derna, an exchange was eventually arranged, the United States agreeing to pay the pirate ruler sixty thousand dollars to boot. The city of Derna and the great province of which it was the capital were surrendered without so much as the mention of an equivalent, not even the relinquishment of the ransom of the American prisoners. The unfortunate Ahmet Pasha, who had been decoyed from his refuge in Egypt on the promise of American assistance in effecting his restoration, was deserted at a moment when success was actually ours, and had to fly for his life to Sicily, his wife and children being held as hostages by his brother and the heads of his adherents being exposed on the walls of the Tripolitan capital. Thus shamefully ended one of the most gallant and romantic exploits in the history of American arms; thus terminated an episode which, more than any other agency, compelled the rulers of the Barbary coast to respect the citizens and fear the wrath of the United States. Though an expedition of scarcely four hundred men may sound insignificant, the humbling of a Barbary power was an achievement which every European nation had attempted and which none of them had accomplished.

Disappointed and disgusted, Eaton returned to the United States in November, 1805, to find himself a national hero. From the moment he set his foot on American soil he was greeted with cheers wherever he appeared; it was "roses, roses all the way." The cities of Washington and Richmond honored him with public dinners; Massachusetts, "desirous to perpetuate the remembrance of an heroic enterprise," granted him ten thousand acres of land in Maine; Boston named a street after the city which he had captured against such fearful odds; President Jefferson lauded him in his annual message; and in recognition of his services in effecting the release of some Danish captives in Tripoli, he was presented by the King of Denmark with a jewelled snuff-box. He was complimented everywhere except at the seat of government, and received every honor except that which he most deserved--a vote of thanks from Congress. Though his expedition had involved an expense of twenty-three thousand dollars, for which he had given his personal notes and the repayment of which exhausted all his means, Congress never reimbursed him. Notwithstanding the astounding indifference and ingratitude of the nation on whose flag he had shed such lustre, he indignantly rejected the advances of Aaron Burr, who tried ineffectually to enlist him in his conspiracy to establish an empire beyond the Mississippi, and died, poverty-stricken and broken-hearted, on June 1, 1811. Though the most modest of monuments marks his resting-place in Brimfield churchyard, and though not one in a hundred thousand of his countrymen have so much as heard his name, his fame still lives in that wild and far-off region where it took an Italian army of forty thousand men to repeat the exploit which he accomplished with four hundred.

THE LAST FIGHT OF THE "GENERAL ARMSTRONG"

We leaned over the rail of the _Hamburg_, Colonel Roosevelt and I, and watched the olive hills of Fayal rise from the turquoise sea. Houses white as chalk began to peep from among the orange groves; what looked at first sight to be a yellow snake turned into a winding road; then we rounded a headland, and the U-shaped harbor, edged by a sleepy town and commanded by a crumbling fortress, lay before us. "In there," said the ex-President, pointing eagerly as our anchor rumbled down, "was waged one of the most desperate sea-fights ever fought, and one of the least known; in there lies the wreck of the _General Armstrong_, the privateer that stood off twenty times her strength in British men and guns, and thereby saved Louisiana from invasion. It is a story that should make the thrills of patriotism run up and down the back of every right-thinking American."

* * * * *

Everything about her, from the carved and gilded figure-head, past the rakish, slanting masts to the slender stern, indicated the privateer. As she stood into the roadstead of Fayal late in the afternoon of September 26, 1814, black-hulled and white-sparred, carrying an amazing spread of snowy canvas, she made a picture that brought a grunt of approval even from the surly Azorian pilot. Hardly had the red-white-and-blue ensign showing her nationality fluttered to her peak before a harbor skiff bearing the American consul, Dabney, shot out from shore; for these were troublous times on the Atlantic, and letters from the States were few and far between. Rounding her stern, he read, with a thrill of pride, "_General Armstrong, New York_."

The very name stood for romance, valor, hair-breadth escape. For of all the two-hundred-odd privateers that put out from American ports at the outbreak of the War of 1812 to prey on British commerce, none had won so high a place in the popular imagination as this trim-built, black-hulled schooner. Built for speed, and carrying a spread of canvas at which most skippers would have stood aghast, she was the fastest and best-handled privateer afloat, and had always been able to show her heels to the enemy on the rare occasions when the superior range of her seven guns had failed to pound him into submission. Her list of captures had made rich men of her owners, and had caused Lloyd's to raise the insurance on a vessel merely crossing the English Channel to thirteen guineas in the hundred.

The story of her desperate encounter off the mouth of the Surinam River with the British sloop of war _Coquette_, with four times her weight in guns, had fired the popular imagination as had few other events of the war. Although her commander, Samuel Chester Reid, was not long past his thirtieth birthday, no more skilful navigator or daring fighter ever trod a quarter-deck, and his crew of ninety men--Down-East fishermen, old man-o'-war's men, Creole privateersmen who had fought under Lafitte, reckless adventurers of every sort and kind--would have warmed the heart of bluff old John Paul Jones himself.

Just as dusk was falling the officer on watch reported a sail in the offing, and Reid and the consul, hurrying on deck, made out the British brig _Carnation_, of eighteen guns, with two other war-vessels in her wake: the thirty-eight-gun frigate _Rota_, and the _Plantagenet_, of seventy-four. Now, as the privateer lay in the innermost harbor, where a dead calm prevailed, while the three British ships were fast approaching before the brisk breeze which was blowing outside, Reid, who knew the line which marks foolhardiness from courage, appreciating that the chances of his being able to hoist anchor, make sail, and get out of the harbor before the British squadron arrived to block the entrance were almost infinitesimal, decided to stay where he was and trust to the neutrality of the port, a decision that was confirmed by the assurances of Consul Dabney that the British would not dare to attack a vessel lying in a friendly harbor. But therein the consul was mistaken, for throughout the entire duration of the war the British as cynically disregarded the observance of international law and the rights of neutrals as though they did not exist.

The _Carnation_, learning the identity of the American vessel from the pilot, hauled close into the harbor, not letting go her anchor until she was within pistol-shot of the _General Armstrong_. Instantly a string of signal-flags fluttered from her mast, and the message was promptly acknowledged by her approaching consorts, which thereupon proceeded to stand off and on across the mouth of the harbor, thus barring any chance of the privateer making her escape. So great was the commotion which ensued on the _Carnation's_ deck that Reid, becoming suspicious of the Englishman's good faith, warped his ship under the very guns of the Portuguese fort.

About eight o'clock, just as dark had fallen, Captain Reid saw four boats slip silently from the shadow of the _Carnation_ and pull toward him with muffled oars. If anything more were needed to convince him of their hostile intentions, the moon at that moment appeared from behind a cloud and was reflected by the scores of cutlasses and musket-barrels in all four of the approaching boats. As they came within hailing distance Reid swung himself into the shrouds.

"Boats there!" he shouted, making a trumpet of his hands. "Come no nearer! For your own safety I warn you!"