The Pirate Coast(54)
Even the Nile didn’t move him. “When I contrast the pure currents, healthful margins, and delightsome landscapes of our Susquehannah, Delaware, Hudson and Connecticut [Rivers] with the muddy waters, miry or parched banks and eternal deserts of the [Nile]; and the intelligence, freedom and felicity of the citizens [in America], with the stupid ignorance, rivited vassalage and hopeless misery of the peasants here, I almost lose sensibility of pity in the glad reflection that I am a citizen of the United States.”
The irritated tourist returned to his lodgings at the British House and to his preferred pastime: the mission. There he found two more men who had been close followers of Hamet, and both promised Eaton that it would be possible to recruit a troop of three hundred to five hundred men to march from Egypt. Eaton, upbeat, wrote to Hull to inform him that provisions should be gathered in Alexandria for at least one hundred men. He also warned him that he would need more money: about $4,000 or $5,000. “If Government should reprove our arrangements, we will reimburse them from the spoils of Bengazi [a large port city in Tripoli], which I already calculate upon as ours, nothing will hinder but unforeseen disaster.” (Eaton’s life sometimes seemed like a string of unforeseen disasters.) Eaton eagerly awaited Hull’s reply, since Hull controlled the purse strings.
Perhaps the French consul was not so far off in describing Eaton and friends as spies for the British. Eaton did indeed write a detailed note to Major Missett, in Rosetta, but apologized that he couldn’t find any fresh reliable news about the Mameluke-Turkish war in Upper Egypt. “We are more perplexed with contradictory reports, than were there free presses for the parties,” he added, no doubt thinking of the severely biased accounts in rival Republican and Federalist papers back in America.
Once again Eaton was forced to wait. So, on Thursday, December 20, instead of viewing more pagan artifacts, Eaton sought out a Christian shrine. New Testament lore places the Holy Family with the baby Jesus wandering to Cairo. On the way, Jesus is said to have miraculously caused a spring to appear in a Jewish community called Ain Shams. (Mary took advantage of the sudden water to wash Jesus’ clothes.) True believers are convinced that the balsam plant took on healing properties by being nourished at the Jesus spring. (Copts for centuries have been peddling balsam-laced consecrated oil, called “chrism.”)
The Holy Family then trudged into Old Cairo where, legend has it, Jesus’ arrival caused all the idols to topple and prompted the Roman governor to order the Christ child killed. The Holy Family fled.
So did Eaton after a morning in Old Cairo. He had seen pagan and Christian; now he visited an Islamic site. He traveled to the nearby village of Daerteen and was allowed into the Mosque Atarenabee. He and his party must have seemed less than enthused because a guide offered to let them “view all the ladies of the village.” Though Eaton doesn’t specify what exactly their “view” entailed, he closed this diary entry: “Omnia vincit argent,” as in “Money conquers all.”
And Eaton waited. On the agenda for this Friday night was dancing girls. Egypt was world famous for its belly dancers, and someone in the American group hired a few to perform. William Browne, a decade earlier in Cairo, had witnessed a similar spectacle. “They are always attended by an old man and an old woman who play on musical instruments, and look to the conduct of the girls that they may not bestow their favors for an inadequate reward; for though not chaste, they are by no means common.”
French traveler Charles Sonnini de Manoncourt offered more details on the entertainment. The dances “consist chiefly of very quick and truly astonishing movements of the loins, which they agitate with equal suppleness and indecency, while the rest of their body remains motionless.” The women sometimes danced in gyrating pairs and sometimes wore little metal cups on their fingers, which they clacked like castanets.
Eaton, with his patriotic blinders, was less impressed. “At evening an exhibition at the English house of the almee, dancing women: Haggard prostitutes, disgustful, obscene monsters who exhibit savage nature in jestures of studied and practised depravity: something resembling the Spanish balario [bolero], from which the latter probably originated.”
Up north in Alexandria harbor just before Christmas Eve aboard the Argus Captain Isaac Hull found time to write a reply to William Eaton, down in Grand Cairo. The note was meant to douse the fire of Eaton’s optimism.
“I have made arrangements for paying Mess.rs Briggs the Thousand Dollars, which you inform me you had drawn for, but as for the four or five Thousand you say you shall want—God Knows how we are to obtain that, unless you have the means at Cairo, for I know of none here.—I am already pennyless.” He mentions not even having enough money to pay off the debts incurred for the Argus. Then he wonders what exactly Eaton means by asking him to provide provisions for one hundred men, and warns that he cannot possibly carry them to Rosetta at this time of year.