So crusty Preble, dashing Decatur, dogged Eaton, along with two other officers and an Italian hotel owner, set out to make a 95-mile overland trip from Syracuse to Messina.
Eaton, who wanted nothing but to train an army, found himself on a weeklong tourist trip on horseback on deeply rutted Sicilian roads. Preble complained about “the torments sufferd from bugs & fleas.” Eaton barely mentioned seeing Mount Etna, Europe’s largest active volcano, and spending a day at Lake Lentina. The edgy patriot made a bad tourist. This New Englander’s longest comments dwell on being appalled by the poverty and ignorance of the deeply religious Catholic peasants. He notes that only a revolution will rid the region of the wealthy priest class. More cheerfully, he mentioned enjoying the company of Edward Preble and Stephen Decatur, and he clearly spent hours asking them about their summer naval exploits off Tripoli. (A month later, Eaton would produce a 10,000-word account of naval operations, complete with a swashbuckling version of Decatur wrestling the huge Turkish captain.) The friendship with Preble, which would continue until Preble’s death, would prove crucial to Eaton’s pursuit of his mission.
With an early morning start on October 5, the group reached Messina, an ancient port on the tip of Sicily, and found that the navy ships had already arrived for repairs.
For a week, the harbor echoed with the sound of hammers striking the flat-bladed caulking irons to drive the tar-laced hemp deeper into the seams. Once the Italian shipworkers had embedded caulk in every seam of the brig, the hull had to be sanded smooth, then painted. No fires were allowed anywhere near the oil-based paints.
Finally, on October 18, the Argus was ready to sail from Messina to Syracuse, where she would spend a few days while Preble handled government business there. Syracuse, an impoverished port full of devout peasants and one glorious opera house, often served as unofficial U.S. Navy headquarters for the region. Eaton, with no ability to order anyone, had no choice but to go along and wait.
Some of the wait was endured by visiting the British consul, Mr. Gould Leckie, who happened to have as a houseguest an odd pudgy entertaining young man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poet had already written “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan,” but there’s no indication that the Americans knew they were in the presence of literary genius. None of the Americans were impressed enough to include Coleridge in their notes or letters; the poet, however, would mine material, especially from Decatur and Eaton.
Coleridge, about to celebrate—morbidly, of course—his thirty-second birthday, had come to Malta and Sicily to escape his dejection back in England over marrying the wrong woman. “He has had no calamities in his life,” once commented Robert Southey, the poet laureate, “so contrives to be miserable over trifles.” Perhaps that assessment was a bit harsh. Coleridge was deeply in love with one Sara Hutchinson, and he was still fighting a constant battle against opium addiction. He arrived in Malta earlier that year in May 1804, eventually took up lodgings in the palace headquarters of the British governor, Sir Alexander Ball, and by October was well into a three-month “working holiday” in Syracuse. He clearly wasn’t winning all his battles with opium. In one Syracuse diary entry, he devotes an entire page to describing how he could squint his eyes while looking through mosquito netting and make the “french grass-like streaks” on the netting multiply and multiply on the walls.
On October 19, Eaton and the Americans chatted with Coleridge, who made notes about a story that Decatur told. A pair of Indians had ambushed an American family, massacring everyone except two boys, aged nine and eleven, whom they hauled toward the Indian camp. They passed the first night on the road, and the Indians drank a bottle of wine and fell asleep. The older brother “put up the musket to the ear of one of the Indians, & placed his little brother there to fire it off.” The eldest stood with a tomahawk over the other Indian. He gave the signal; the little one pulled the trigger, the elder swung the hatchet, and the boys escaped. Orphaned, they went to sea and wound up serving under Decatur, who told Coleridge he would introduce him to his cabin boys.
The following day, Coleridge marked his birthday. “O Sorrow & Shame! I am not worthy to live—Two & thirty years.—& this last year above all others!—I have done nothing.”
Eaton—ever trying to do something—dashed off an angry letter to an old enemy, Captain Alexander Murray, the one who had refused years earlier to aid him in the Hamet scheme. In the United States, Murray had apparently refused to fight a duel with him, so Eaton informed him that he would take his revenge another way. He would write a history of the Tripolitan War that would expose Murray as a coward and a hypocrite.