A Call to Arms (34 page)

“I hear tell,” Agreen Crabtree remarked one day in early January as he and Eric Meyers stood watching the activity in the compound outside the village of Marabout, two miles west of Alexandria, “that our Arab friends use those
barracan
things as a blanket at night and they wear nothin' beneath—no shirt, no underwear, no nothin'. Is that a fact, d' you think?” Certainly the long robes, which looped around the body and fastened at the left shoulder, looked more like blankets than military uniforms.

“I don't know,” Meyers commented dryly, “and I have no wish to find out.”

Agreen raised his eyebrows and leered. “I could pull rank and order you t' find out.”

Meyers didn't blink. “I'd rather face a firing squad,” he replied.

Matters changed dramatically a week later when the brig of war
Argus
sailed into Alexandria Harbor bearing Capt. William Eaton, Lt. Presley O'Bannon, the seven Marines under his command, and the two midshipmen attached to the expedition. That evening, Richard invited Eaton and O'Bannon to dine with him aboard
Portsmouth
along with Isaac Hull, the captain of
Argus
and a personal friend with whom Richard had served briefly aboard
Constitution
during the war with France. Earlier in the afternoon, amid all the hustle and bustle generated by the long-expected arrival of
Argus,
he managed to squeeze in a few minutes alone with his son in
Portsmouth's
after cabin.

After the usual exchanges between a father and son who had not seen each other in almost seven months, Richard asked the inevitable question: “Jamie, what happened to
Intrepid
?”

Jamie pursed his lips. “What do you already know, Father?”

“Only what Captain Preble wrote in his last dispatch, that
Intrepid
blew up before reaching her target, with the apparent loss of all hands.”

Jamie paused for a moment, the weight of sad remembrance still heavy on his mind. “I'm afraid I can't add much to that. Nobody knows for certain what happened. She may have been struck by a chance shot from a shore battery. Or a stray spark may have set off the explosives prematurely.”

“What do
you
think happened?”

Jamie looked hard at his father seated across from him. “I believe she was approached by enemy vessels as she entered the harbor and that
Captain Somers blew her up himself to deny the enemy her powder. He had said he would do that. In any event, he and his crew are dead. There is no possibility that any man was taken alive.”

“No,” his father agreed, saddened by the sorrow in Jamie's voice and the pain sketched vividly on his face; nevertheless, the parent in him compelled him to make one final comment before changing the subject. “Thank God you were not on that mission, Jamie.”

Jamie said nothing in reply.

In a less somber tone Richard asked, “What is your impression of the new commodore? Permission to speak freely, of course.”

Jamie shrugged his shoulders. “He's no Captain Preble, Father. My impression, and the impression of nearly everyone I talk to, is that he got where he is today by doing what he was told, avoiding controversy, and relying on seniority to eventually bob him to the top. He's ill much of the time. Of what, I'm not certain. Rumor has it that he will step down soon and be replaced by Commodore Rodgers.”

Richard was not surprised by such speculation. He and John Rodgers had served together aboard
Constellation
during the war with France, Rodgers as her first lieutenant and Richard as her second. Until Barron's arrival, Rodgers had been the senior Navy officer in the Mediterranean, senior even to Edward Preble. That had contributed to a serious rift between him and Preble. Secretary Smith resolved the issue by giving Rodgers command of a three-ship squadron based in Gibraltar and bestowing on him the rank of commodore. Rodgers' orders were to keep a sharp eye on Morocco, always a threat to the United States, and to hamper enemy shipping in the western Mediterranean. The two co-commodores had rarely communicated.

“Does Barron support Eaton's expedition?”

“From what I hear, Commodore Barron supports whatever his superiors in Washington support. Therein lies the problem, you see. No one seems to know to what extent President Jefferson and his cabinet will support Captain Eaton. Secretary Smith apparently favors the expedition, although the American consul general in North Africa, Colonel Lear, considers it a waste of time and money. And since Mr. Lear now has authority to open negotiations with Tripoli if and when conditions warrant, I suspect he is already hard at work trying to create those conditions.”

“A covert mission? To force his agenda?”

“Something like that.”

“Even if that means compromising Eaton's expedition?”

Jamie nodded.

“Do
you
consider the expedition a waste of time and money?” Richard asked.

Jamie shook his head. “No, Father, I don't. I believe that if we are to realize long-term benefits from fighting this war, the solution to it must be a military solution. I well remember the day several years ago when you told Will and me about the raid on Whitehaven during the war with England. Many of your shipmates, including
Ranger's
two senior lieutenants, thought that a one-ship invasion force was a ridiculous idea. But you, as a midshipman, supported it. Why? Because as you told Captain Jones, the raid didn't rely on success. American Marines landing on English soil would have its effect whatever the outcome. Well, we have the same situation here, don't we? An assault on Derne will have its effect, whatever the outcome. The mere threat of a follow-up attack on Benghazi and Tripoli may be enough to convince the bashaw to sue for peace.”

As Richard Cutler listened to his son, it was all he could do to refrain from walking over and embracing him. Instead, he maintained a poker face. When Jamie had finished, he asked, “And you believe Captain Eaton is up to the task?”

“I believe he is, Father.”

A
N INFLUX
of more than one hundred Christian mercenaries from Europe, in addition to an encouraging number of Muslim warriors riding in from Cyrenaica, the easternmost province of Tripoli, swelled the ranks of the allied army in Marabout to five hundred strong. Richard Cutler had ample opportunity to assess the character and skill-sets of William Eaton as he waited for the operation to begin. The more he observed, the more impressed he became. Eaton had all the markings of a born leader: courage, discipline, and protocol; his enthusiasm for the project was matched only by his resolve to see it succeed. Among his first actions after disembarking in Egypt was to fashion a formal agreement with Hamet Karamanli in which he pledged the blood and treasure of the United States to restore Hamet to the throne of Tripoli. In return, Hamet pledged to repay the United States by consigning to it the annual tributes of Sweden, Denmark, and the Batavian Republic once he was restored to the throne. In that same document Eaton designated himself “general and commander-in-chief” of the expedition. After Hamet signed his agreement, Eaton countersigned it, using his self-proclaimed rank, and sent it off to Secretary of State James Madison in Washington.

“Is that legal, Richard?” Agreen asked that evening in the privacy of
Portsmouth's
dining alcove. “Is Eaton authorized t' do such a thing?”

Richard chuckled. “Your guess is as good as mine, Agee. But from what I've observed of the man, it doesn't matter. If either the president or Congress has the gall to challenge him, I daresay Eaton will convince Mr. Marshall,” referring to John Marshall, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, “to declare it a legally binding document, at the point of a sword if necessary.”

Agreen chuckled in turn. “Hand me a piece of paper, would you, Richard? I've a mind t' declare myself an admiral. From here on, you're takin' orders from me.”

On the morning of March 6, the expedition was prepared to march. George Farquhar, son of Richard Farquhar and quartermaster of the expedition, announced that a four-week supply of provisions had been secured on the baggage train, which consisted of 107 camels. Hamet similarly confirmed that his 350 Arab horsemen were mounted and assembled behind Sheik Mahomet and Sheik el Tahib, who were resplendent in baggy pants, turbans, and brightly colored vests. In lock formation nearby, 70 well-groomed Christian mercenaries presented a curious blend of French, Neapolitan, Maltese, and Tyrolean soldiers-for-hire beside a separate group of 38 brightly uniformed Greeks led by two Greek officers. Standing at stiff attention in front of them all were Lieutenant O'Bannon, a Marine sergeant named Campbell, five Marine privates, and a Marine drummer boy. Each Marine was dressed in a blue uniform with scarlet facings—except for O'Bannon, whose uniform coat with two long, vertical rows of polished brass buttons identified him as an officer.

A drum roll sounded. Jamie Cutler saluted his father and mounted his horse. What needed to be said between father and son had been said the night before.

Under a cloudless sky, the expedition set off westward through the desert for Cyrenaica. Eaton led the procession on a grand white Barbary horse. Hamet, the two sheiks, the two midshipmen, and the Arab cavalry rode behind him. Behind them, afoot, marched the Marines and European mercenaries, with the camel drivers and baggage train bringing up the rear of the caravan. The question probing Richard Cutler's mind as he and Agreen watched the procession file past was whether General Eaton could impose military discipline long enough and effectively enough to see the allied army to the Bay of Bomba 450 miles to the east, the army's first rendezvous point with American naval forces. From there it was less
than 50 miles to their first military objective: the provincial capital city of Derne, where Hamet had once ruled as governor and where it was assumed he retained strong support for his claim to the throne of Tripoli.

T
HE TROUBLES BEGAN
two days later, only forty miles into the journey. At first, it seemed nothing more than a petty nuisance. The camel drivers suddenly stopped in their tracks and demanded more money than their agreed-upon fee, threatening to return to Alexandria if it were not paid immediately. It took some doing, but eventually Hamet Karamanli was able to persuade the camel drivers that they would be paid in full what they had been promised, plus a little extra, once they reached their destination. If they turned back now, they would receive nothing but the curse of Allah.

“It's an old trick,” Hamet explained somewhat sheepishly to the Christian officers as the white-robed, black-bearded camel drivers shuffled back to their stations. “They wait until the caravan is on the march and then demand higher wages.”

Eaton turned away in disgust.

Each day blended depressingly into the next. A drumroll at daybreak, a quick breakfast of biscuits and rice, and march until sunset. An earlier than usual outbreak of hot desert winds from the southern Sahara swept across the region and hampered their progress. The wind whipped up fierce sandstorms that inundated Christians and Muslims alike with stinging grit that played havoc with eyes and mouths and nostrils and just about everything else, including morale.

Slowly, although ever more assuredly as one day dragged into another, the army's food supplies dwindled, augmented only occasionally by the slaughter of a camel, the purchase of sheep and ostriches from local tribesmen, and, on one occasion, the killing of a wildcat by a well-aimed shot from the musket of Marine sergeant Campbell.

Worse, their water supply was running out. The camels could get by with very little, but the blistering desert sun inspired a continuous and voracious thirst among the Europeans. Most days, Eaton called a temporary halt to allow his soldiers to search for cisterns of fresh water amid fissures of rocks carved out by the brute force of Nature or by the skill of Roman engineers who had passed by centuries ago. Occasionally they stumbled on a deep cistern, and when they did, they drank their fill and squirreled away as much as they could. Most days, when they did not, water was rationed. And so on they marched, at the discouragingly slow rate of fifteen to twenty miles per day, less than half the distance General
Eaton had originally predicted and on which the army's food supply was calculated.

Each day, the march ended in the cool of dusk. Each evening, by unspoken agreement, Muslims and Christians pitched their tents apart from each other. Most of the men sat quietly before going to sleep, listening to the dulcet tunes of Lieutenant O'Bannon's fiddle and thinking of hearth and home—and, in Jamie's case, his friend William Lewis in
Constitution,
who possessed similar talents with the violin.

“How far d' you reckon we've come, Jamie?” Pascal Peck, the other midshipman on the expedition, asked one evening in front of the tent they shared. The army had encamped on a high, rocky plain overlooking the Mediterranean near the ruins of a Roman mansion. Behind their tent, their tethered horses grazed on grasswort and wild fennel. A short distance away a Marine private named Owens was stirring a thin gruel of rice, water, and bits of camel flesh in a cauldron hanging from a metal rod set atop a fire between two columns of rocks.

Jamie grinned. “And how far do you reckon we have to go?” he said, voicing the flip side of a question forever at the tip of every man's tongue.

“I dunno,” Peck said quite seriously. “We must be at least halfway.”