The news gut-punched Eaton. It was one tiny step short of Hamet being dead or in prison. Egypt lay in tatters, checkerboarded by rival factions. Some of the Turkish troops had disintegrated into roving bands of Albanian deserters; several large armies of Mamelukes and rival Mamelukes and Turkish mercenaries under Muhammad Ali each claimed huge swaths of territory; predatory Bedouin tribes preyed on any stragglers, while French and English soldiers—stranded from preceding wars—joined up here and there. To reach Hamet, Eaton must sidestep the warring camps, survive the outlaws, and do so with a force of a dozen men. It would be days before he would even understand the loyalties of all the various groups.
Everyone—from Consul Briggs to the governor of Alexandria—strongly advised against going south at this time. Eaton decided to leave immediately.
He also decided that to facilitate this excursion south, his small group would masquerade as American officers on vacation, eager to see the wonders of Egypt. As for Eaton himself, he would impersonate an American general on holiday. (Indeed, a week later, he would allow himself to be introduced as “General” to a high-ranking Turkish official.)
To complete his charade, he donned a military uniform of some sort, perhaps his old U.S. Army captain’s uniform.
Eaton prepared to head out the following morning.
Since no soldiers had been assigned to him in advance, he now had to ask permission of Captain Hull to borrow a few able-bodied recruits. Eaton convinced Hull to loan him four officers: Lieutenant Joshua Blake of the navy, Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon of the marines, Midshipman George Washington Mann, and Eli E. Danielson, Eaton’s own stepson. The choice of Lieutenant O’Bannon proved especially fortunate; O’Bannon was a high-spirited brave Kentuckian who carried his fiddle everywhere and had been known to lighten things up with “Hogs in the Cornfield.” Eaton also took Richard Farquhar, the wily entrepreneur who was trying to hitch his fortune to Hamet, and Seid Selim, a Janissary. A man named Ali would serve as the group’s dragoman, a kind of all-purpose tour guide, a fixer.
Eaton rushed to borrow some weapons and ammunition from the Argus and to purchase supplies on credit in Alexandria and have them all toted aboard the boat he hired to go to Rosetta. With typical energy, Eaton was ready to leave that same day, November 28, but the winds conspired against him. To increase his odds of finding Hamet, he sent a messenger ahead by camel to look for the ex-Bashaw. Finally, on November 30, Eaton with seventeen men playacting as a tourist party headed east along the coast in moderately favorable wind.
The trip from Alexandria upriver to Cairo, a famed route along the Nile, is a surprisingly difficult journey. First, Eaton would need to weather thirty miles east along the African coast to reach the dangerous waters where the inbound Mediterranean batters against the outbound Nile. Past there, he would head south a ways then change from a coastal vessel to a boat more suited to upriver Nile travel, which sometimes required sailors to hop ashore and haul them forward. These were the natural dangers and difficulties; add to this that the area south of Rosetta was a lawless zone infested by Bedouins and by bands of Albanian deserters from the Turkish Army.
That first afternoon, they reached Aboukir Bay (Abu Qir) on the coast, the site of one of the world’s most famous naval battles. On August 1, 1798, Admiral Nelson had wiped out the entire French fleet there, stranding Napoleon and his conquering army amid the pyramids.
The Americans skirted to the far end of Aboukir around 4 P.M., and the ship’s captain decided that too little daylight remained to risk crossing the bar of the Nile. While the sailors fished for mullet, Eaton, acting the tourist, decided to go ashore to visit the fields where the French had fought a land battle against the British invading army. “The battlegrounds there,” wrote Eaton, “we found still covered with human Skeletons.” He walked amid the bones and later called them “ghastly monuments of the savage influence of avarice and ambition.”
He returned to his vessel and, with the American flag flying, embarked early in the morning for the Nile. Around midday, they reached the rough Boghase, the entrance bar of the Nile. “The billows are generally very strong,” wrote one traveler. “For it is a bank of sand, against which the waters of the Nile beat with prodigious force. Ships find very little water; and the straits which are passable shift constantly, so that there is a boat stationed upon the bar to indicate the passage. It requires ten minutes to cross it and boats hardly ever pass over it without touching the sand three or four times.”
In crossing the bar, Eaton experienced one of the most amazing transformations of landscape on the face of the earth, going from the sandy brininess of the coast to the lushness of the Nile. Travelers have compared this transit to moving into a kind of dream world. The water shifts color from Mediterranean blue to Nile red. The voyager begins to see verdant fields, rice plantations, palm trees, orange groves. The air hangs heavy with scent; suddenly dozens of vibrant-hued species of birds wheel above. Eaton entered the Nile at 1 P.M.