On March 4, the bodies of two of the Tripolitan soldiers who had been guarding the Philadelphia washed ashore. Bashaw Yussef personally examined the corpses and declared that they were so hacked up, it looked as though they had been “massacred.” He ordered harsher guards assigned to the prison of the American officers. One of them took an especial dislike to Lieutenant David Porter, who set about trying to plan an escape. Captain Bainbridge for the first time tried to write a letter to Commodore Preble with portions concealed in invisible ink. “By writing with lemon juice or milk it cannot be discovered until it has been heated over the fire,” he informed Preble. Bainbridge hoped to be able to give the commodore secret tips on negotiating the best deal with the Bashaw.
On March 26, a frigate with an American flag sailed into the harbor, a white flag flying. A negotiator, Richard O’Brien, former U.S. consul to Algiers, was ready to make an offer.
CHAPTER 6
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.”