On the evening of April 25 the vanguard sighted the walls of Derna. A feat that veteran soldiers had jeered at as impossible had been accomplished, and Eaton, without the loss of a man, had brought his army across six hundred miles of desert, in the heat of an African spring, and in the remarkable time, when the scantiness of the rations and the many delays are considered, of fifty-two days. With their goal actually in sight, still another mutiny took place, the craven Arabs claiming that they were too few in number to attempt the capture of a walled and heavily garrisoned city, and it was not until Eaton promised them a bonus of two thousand dollars if they succeeded in taking it that they could be induced to advance. The more one learns of this man the more one must admire his unfailing resource, his tenacity of purpose, and his bull-dog courage; for, in addition to the appalling natural obstacles which he overcame, he was constantly harried by intrigue, treachery, and cowardice.
On the morning of the 26th a message was sent to the governor of Derna, under a flag of truce, offering him full amnesty if he would surrender and declare his allegiance to his rightful sovereign, Ahmet. The answer that came back was as curt as it was conclusive: "My head or yours," it read. Just as the sun was rising above the sand-dunes the following morning the Argus, the Nautilus, and the Hornet swept grandly into the harbor, their crews at quarters, their decks cleared for action, and the red-white-and-blue ensign of the oversea republic floating defiantly from their main trucks. Under cover of a terrific bombardment by the war-ships, Eaton's force advanced upon the city, planning, with their single field-piece, to effect a breach in the walls and carry the place by storm. So murderous was the fire that the Tripolitan riflemen poured into them from the walls and housetops, however, that they were thrown into confusion, their single piece of artillery was put out of action by a well-directed cannon-shot, and Eaton himself was severely wounded. Seeing that his raw troops were on the verge of panic, and knowing that his only chance of holding them together lay in a charge, Eaton ordered his buglers to sound the advance, and with a cheer like the roar of a storm his whole line—Americans, Greeks, and Arabs—swept forward on a run. "Come on, boys!" shouted Eaton, as he raced ahead, sword in one hand, pistol in the other. "At the double! Follow me! Follow me!" And follow him they did. Cheering like madmen they crossed a field swept by a withering rifle-fire. They clambered over the ramparts, and by the very fury of their assault drove back the defenders, who outnumbered them twenty to one. They fought with them hand to hand, sabre against cimiter, bayonet against clubbed matchlock. Swarming into the batteries, they cut down the gunners and turned their guns upon the town. The defences of the city once in his possession, Eaton directed an assault upon the palace, where the governor had taken refuge, utilizing his Arab cavalry meanwhile to cut off the retreat of the flying garrison. Before the sun had disappeared into the Mediterranean, Eaton, at a cost of only fourteen killed and wounded (all of whom, by the way, were Americans and Greeks), had made himself master of Derna. His moment of triumph came when, still begrimed with dirt and powder, his arm in a blood-stained sling, he stood with drawn sword before the line formed by his ragged soldiers and the trim bluejackets from the fleet, and, watching a ball of bunting creep up that palace flagstaff from which so recently had flaunted the banner of Tripoli, saw it suddenly break out into the Stars and Stripes. Our flag, for the first and only time, flew above a fortification on that side of the Atlantic.
Reinforced by a party of bluejackets from the fleet, Eaton wasted not a moment in preparing the city for defence. He was none too soon, either, for the Bashaw, learning of the loss of his richest province, despatched an overwhelming force for its recapture. This army arrived before the walls of Derna on May 13, and immediately made an assault, which Eaton repulsed, as he did a second one a few weeks later. By this time the news of Eaton's victory had spread across North Africa as fire spreads in dry grass, and thousands of natives, many of them deserters from the Bashaw's forces, hastened to assert their undying loyalty and to offer their services to Ahmet, for your Arab is far-seeing and takes good care to be found on the side which he believes to be the winning one. With his army thus largely augmented, with ample supplies, with Derna as a base of operations, and with his own prestige equivalent to an additional regiment, Eaton had completed the preparations for continuing his victorious advance along the African coast-line. There is little doubt, indeed, that with the co-operation of the fleet he could have marched on to Benghazi, taken that city as easily as he did Derna, and in due time planted the American flag on the castle of Tripoli itself.
So it was with undisguised amazement and indignation that on June 12 he received orders from Commodore Rodgers to evacuate Derna and to withdraw his forces from Tripoli, Colonel Tobias Lear, the American consul at Algiers, having, in the face of Eaton's successes, signed an inglorious treaty of peace with the Bashaw of Tripoli. No more degrading terms were ever assented to by a civilized power. The Bashaw at first demanded two hundred thousand dollars for the release of Bainbridge and the Philadelphia's crew, but as Eaton had captured a large number of Tripolitans in the storming of Derna, an exchange was eventually arranged, the United States agreeing to pay the pirate ruler sixty thousand dollars to boot. The city of Derna and the great province of which it was the capital were surrendered without so much as the mention of an equivalent, not even the relinquishment of the ransom of the American prisoners. The unfortunate Ahmet Pasha, who had been decoyed from his refuge in Egypt on the promise of American assistance in effecting his restoration, was deserted at a moment when success was actually ours, and had to fly for his life to Sicily, his wife and children being held as hostages by his brother and the heads of his adherents being exposed on the walls of the Tripolitan capital. Thus shamefully ended one of the most gallant and romantic exploits in the history of American arms; thus terminated an episode which, more than any other agency, compelled the rulers of the Barbary coast to respect the citizens and fear the wrath of the United States. Though an expedition of scarcely four hundred men may sound insignificant, the humbling of a Barbary power was an achievement which every European nation had attempted and which none of them had accomplished.
Disappointed and disgusted, Eaton returned to the United States in November, 1805, to find himself a national hero. From the moment he set his foot on American soil he was greeted with cheers wherever he appeared; it was "roses, roses all the way." The cities of Washington and Richmond honored him with public dinners; Massachusetts, "desirous to perpetuate the remembrance of an heroic enterprise," granted him ten thousand acres of land in Maine; Boston named a street after the city which he had captured against such fearful odds; President Jefferson lauded him in his annual message; and in recognition of his services in effecting the release of some Danish captives in Tripoli, he was presented by the King of Denmark with a jewelled snuff-box. He was complimented everywhere except at the seat of government, and received every honor except that which he most deserved—a vote of thanks from Congress. Though his expedition had involved an expense of twenty-three thousand dollars, for which he had given his personal notes and the repayment of which exhausted all his means, Congress never reimbursed him. Notwithstanding the astounding indifference and ingratitude of the nation on whose flag he had shed such lustre, he indignantly rejected the advances of Aaron Burr, who tried ineffectually to enlist him in his conspiracy to establish an empire beyond the Mississippi, and died, poverty-stricken and broken-hearted, on June 1, 1811. Though the most modest of monuments marks his resting-place in Brimfield churchyard, and though not one in a hundred thousand of his countrymen have so much as heard his name, his fame still lives in that wild and far-off region where it took an Italian army of forty thousand men to repeat the exploit which he accomplished with four hundred.
THE LAST FIGHT OF THE "GENERAL ARMSTRONG"
We leaned over the rail of the Hamburg, Colonel Roosevelt and I, and watched the olive hills of Fayal rise from the turquoise sea. Houses white as chalk began to peep from among the orange groves; what looked at first sight to be a yellow snake turned into a winding road; then we rounded a headland, and the U-shaped harbor, edged by a sleepy town and commanded by a crumbling fortress, lay before us. "In there," said the ex-President, pointing eagerly as our anchor rumbled down, "was waged one of the most desperate sea-fights ever fought, and one of the least known; in there lies the wreck of the General Armstrong, the privateer that stood off twenty times her strength in British men and guns, and thereby saved Louisiana from invasion. It is a story that should make the thrills of patriotism run up and down the back of every right-thinking American."