O’Brien told Eaton that over the past year the Jefferson administration had authorized him to offer $8,000 annual tribute to Tunis and, more important, to shell out $110,000 for peace and prisoner ransom to Tripoli. Both offers had been rejected. Eaton, in character, was appalled at the dangling of cash to extortionate sea robbers.
O’Brien passed to Eaton a sheaf of documents regarding U.S. policy in Barbary, and Eaton, as though compiling a case against Jefferson for offering to pay “tribute,” copied out twelve pages. The conversation eventually shifted to Eaton’s mission. The New England zealot complained that he was having a hard time securing supplies from the commodore, and he mentioned that he pinned his hopes on Anna Porcile’s ransom debt to provide seed money for the mission. O’Brien said he had heard that the U.S. Navy agent Joseph Pulis had some documents involving Anna. He would look into it. The next day, the harbor rats rowed O’Brien under the President’s stern, where Eaton could lean out and talk to him. O’Brien handed up to Eaton a letter dated “22 Juillet, 1804” from Chevalier Antonio Porcile to His Excellency, the President of the United States.
Eaton had been chasing his money for years. When banished from Tunis, he had given last-minute instructions to the next American consul, Dr. George Davis, to refuse to allow Anna to leave the country until the debt was paid. Since that time, Eaton had learned that the French government had intervened and negotiated a $100-a-person ransom to free close to a thousand slaves from San Pietro. He didn’t know whether Anna had been allowed to return last June to her homeland with the others.
Eaton, quarantined in Malta harbor, opened the copy of the letter from Count Porcile, and from the first obsequious sentence he smelled problems.
The count conveyed to Jefferson “sentiments of perfect gratitude” for the “liberation of my daughter” and for the “kindness which preserved the honor of a young lady, exposed among a ferocious people insensible to all feelings but those of violence and brutality.” He thanked him for “the kind offices of this illustrious nation of the New World which excites the admiration of all Europe.”
Sifting through the high-flown language, Eaton discovered that Anna had departed Tunis and was now reunited with her family in Cagliari in Sardinia. The count praised the United States for granting him “unmerited favors as great as they were unexpected.” Chevalier Porcile added that he hoped that Jefferson might try to force the Bey of Tunis to restore $2,000 worth of jewels, confiscated from Anna before she departed. “The embarrassed state to which the pillage of my house has reduced my fortune compels me to be careful even of trifles.”
How could a beautiful teenage girl amass those jewels while in Tunis? Very few scenarios—besides manipulating the lust of Moorish suitors— sprang to Eaton’s mind. The count then offered to act as the American business agent for Sardinia.
Eaton was flabbergasted. He scribbled in his notebook: “The foregoing letter, written in barbarous French, was handed to me as an equivalent for seventeen thousand piasters of Tunis which I disbursed years ago. . . . —It is to me altogether enigmatical—I never spoke [with] the President on the subject. Yet it would seem he must have forgiven Porcile the debt and made the transaction a matter of national generosity.”
Eaton thus added another perceived outrage to his list of complaints against the Jefferson administration. (Eaton would later learn that Consul George Davis had written to the Department of State asking advice on what to do with Eaton’s beautiful young Italian prisoner-slave . . . should he keep her? Sell her? Let her go? Madison had replied in December of 1803: “Whatever may be Mr. Eaton’s individual claims upon the Sardinian lady he ransomed, you will carefully abstain from representing either to the Regency of Tunis . . . that the United States possess any right or claim to hold her in the condition of a slave.”)
Eaton had yet again been disappointed in trying to secure financing for his mission. He didn’t even have time to dash off a reply (in French) to Count Porcile before Commodore Barron ordered the President as well as the Constellation to head immediately to Tripoli. Barron was taking over command of the squadron. Very soon he would have the President, Constellation, Constitution, Argus, and Vixen standing before Tripoli. Another six navy ships, the Congress, Essex, Siren, Nautilus, Enterprize, and the John Adams, roamed elsewhere in the Mediterranean and would also come under his command. “With this force,” Barron’s original orders stated, “it is conceived that no doubt whatever can exist of your coercing Tripoli to a Treaty upon our own Terms.”