ramanli, the legitimate heir to the
throne, who had been driven into exile by Yusuf the pretender. Eaton
loved intrigue as Preble gloried in war. Why not assist Hamet to recover
his throne? Why not, in frontier parlance, start a back-fire that would
make Tripoli too hot for Yusuf? He laid his plans before his superiors
at Washington, who, while not altogether convinced of his competence to
play the king-maker, were persuaded to make him navy agent, subject
to the orders of the commander of the American squadron in the
Mediterranean. Commodore Samuel Barron, who succeeded Preble, was
instructed to avail himself of the cooperation of the ex-Pasha of
Tripoli if he deemed it prudent. In the fall of 1804 Barron dispatched
Eaton in the Argus, Captain Isaac Hull commander, to Alexandria to find
Hamet and to assure him of the cooperation of the American squadron in
the reconquest of his kingdom. Eaton entered thus upon the coveted role:
twenty centuries looked down upon him as they had upon Napoleon.

A mere outline of what followed reads like the scenario of an opera
bouffe. Eaton ransacked Alexandria in search, of Hamet the unfortunate
but failed to find the truant. Then acting on a rumor that Hamet had
departed up the Nile to join the Mamelukes, who were enjoying one of
their seasonal rebellions against constituted authority, Eaton plunged
into the desert and finally brought back the astonished and somewhat
reluctant heir to the throne. With prodigious energy Eaton then
organized an expedition which was to march overland toward Derne, meet
the squadron at the Bay of Bomba, and descend vi et armis upon the
unsuspecting pretender at Tripoli. He even made a covenant with Hamet
promising with altogether unwarranted explicitness that the United
States would use "their utmost exertions" to reestablish him in his
sovereignty. Eaton was to be "general and commander-in-chief of the land
forces." This aggressive Yankee alarmed Hamet, who clearly did not want
his sovereignty badly enough to fight for it.

The international army which the American generalissimo mustered was
a motley array: twenty-five cannoneers of uncertain nationality,
thirty-eight Greeks, Hamet and his ninety followers, and a party of
Arabian horsemen and camel-drivers--all told about four hundred men. The
story of their march across the desert is a modern Anabasis. When the
Arabs were not quarreling among themselves and plundering the rest of
the caravan, they were