The Pirate Coast(53)
The viceroy agreed to send couriers to search for Hamet, and Eaton sent couriers as well, adding to the two messengers he had already sent from Alexandria and Rosetta. Eaton in all his messages suggested that Hamet hurry to Rosetta to contact Major Missett at the British House. He signed his notes “Agent General of the United States.”
The day after leaving the meeting at the palace, Eaton was optimistic that the viceroy would help. Then an unexpected difficulty arose. The French consul, Signore Drovetti, informed the viceroy that the American party were actually spies working for the British. Drovetti explained that the Hamet tale was a smoke screen to allow the Americans to reach the Mamelukes and help cement an alliance with Great Britain. In crazy- quilt Egypt, anything made sense. “I found the means however (the means that move every thing in his quarter of the globe) to remove this difficulty,” Eaton wrote. The “means” are easily explained: Dr. Mendrici approached the viceroy’s interpreter to offer him a bribe. Whether the money reached the viceroy didn’t concern the Americans.
Eaton needed cash right away for the bribe, so he borrowed it from the British, promising them that the United States would repay the loan. By simply not asking in advance, Eaton thus avoided the risk that the U.S. Navy would turn him down. Then, the following week after the fact, Eaton wrote Captain Hull that he had borrowed $2,000 on the Briggs Brothers credit and that Hull should reimburse them in Alexandria. Eaton secured Dr. Mendrici by appointing him “Commercial Agent” for the United States at Cairo. Of course, Eaton had absolutely no authority to make the appointment, but he did add the proviso that Mendrici would remain “until the pleasure of the President shall be expressed on the subject.”
On December 16, Eaton confirmed from a reliable source that 8,000 Albanian and Levant troops serving the Turks had indeed surrounded the 3,000 soldiers of the Mameluke beys at Minyeh. Both sides were digging in for a long seige, which didn’t bode well for Eaton passing through the lines.
That evening after sunset, Eaton once again had an audience with the viceroy. After the usual ceremonies, Ahmet Pacha gave Eaton an earful on the errors of Hamet’s ways in joining the Mamelukes. However, thanks to the bribe, he granted Hamet “a letter of amnesty and permission to him to pass the Turkish army and leave Egypt unmolested.” Eaton added: “It now remains to detach him from the rebel Beys.”
The following morning, Eaton sent four separate couriers, each carrying a copy of the viceroy’s amnesty and safe-passage. Three of the messengers were Maltese, disguised as Arabs. “God has ordained that you should see trouble,” Eaton added in an accompanying note to Hamet. “We believe he hath ordained also that your troubles shall now have an end.” It was crucial that Hamet learn about the pardon before the Mamelukes did, who might kill him. The couriers had orders that, if captured, they should destroy the pardons.
Now all Eaton could do was wait for an answer. The New Englander, however, was not adept at wasting time; he decided to go with his stepson and his fiddle-playing marine and do some actual sightseeing. He hoped for an answer from war-ravaged Minyeh, 140 miles upriver, within ten days.
Next morning, Eaton and friends visited the famed Nilometer on Rhoda Island in the Nile at Cairo. The Nilometer, built in 861 A.D., was more than just a large ornate carved column for measuring the water level of the Nile. The annual reading there during a vast public festival delivered a thumbs-up or thumbs-down for the country’s future. If the river level reached 16 cubits (about 24 feet), a fine harvest would be guaranteed, but 18 cubits heralded flood, and a mere 12 cubits drought.
Eaton crossed from the island to the western shore and continued into the ruined city of Giza, which had a decade earlier housed the magnificent Mameluke palace of Murad Bey. “I had been told that it was a delightful spot,” wrote a traveler, “on account of its country houses and gardens . . . it is now a miserable abode filled with Arnaut [Albanian] soldiers who conduct themselves like banditti.” From Giza, the pyramids and the Sphinx loomed in the distance. However, Bedouin marauders had taken over the turf in between, swaying Eaton to skip taking a closer look.
From his vantage point, the pyramids would have appeared like God’s discarded playthings, casually tossed in front of the Mokattam mountains. Eaton remained unimpressed. “Ruined temples, pyramids, and catacombs, monuments of superstition, pride and folly of their founders disgust my sight; for with their magnificence I cannot but couple the idea of the slaves who must have groaned under the oppressive folly of their fabrication.”