CHAPTER IV
THE ITALIAN “WHITE MAN'S BURDEN”
SINCE the world began the arm of Italy has reached out into the Mediterranean toward Africa, its finger pointing straight at Tripoli. Phœnicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards, and Turks followed the suggestion of that finger in their turn, but of them all only the Arab and the Turk remain. In every case a colonial empire was the mirage which beckoned to those land-hungry peoples from behind the golden haze which hangs over the African coast-line, and in every case their African adventures ended in disappointment and disaster. After an interim of centuries, in which the roads and ramparts and reservoirs built along that shore by those primeval pioneers have crumbled into dust, the troop-laden transports of a regenerated Italy have followed in the wake of those Greek galleys, those Roman triremes, and those Spanish caravels. Undeterred by the recollection of her disastrous Abyssinian adventure, Italy is imbued with the idea, just as were her powerful predecessors, that her commercial and political interests demand the extension of her dominion across the Middle Sea.
Ever since the purple sails of Phœnicia first flaunted along its coasts the history of Tripolitania has been one of invasion and conquest. In the very dawn of history the galleys of Greece dropped anchor off this shore, in the belief that it was the Garden of the Hesperides, and the vestiges of their colony of Cyrenaica lure the archæologists to-day. The Greeks, who, because of its three leagued cities of Oëa, Sabrata, and Leptis, named their new possession Tripolis, just as Decapolis signified the region of ten cities and Pentapolis of five, retreated before Carthage's colonial expansion, and the Carthaginians gave way in turn to the conquering Romans, who included the captured territory within their province of Africa and called it Regio Tripolitana—whence the name it bears to-day. Christianity was scarcely four centuries old when the hordes of fierce-faced, skin-clad Vandals, sweeping down from their Germanic forests, burst into Gaul, poured through the passes of the Pyrenees, overran Spain, and, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, carried fire and sword and torture from end to end of the Mediterranean. Before another century had rolled around, however, Belisarius, the great captain of Byzantium, had broken the Vandal power forever, and the troubled land of Tripolitania once again came under the shadow of the cross. Then the wave of Arab conquest came, rolling across North Africa, breaking upon the coasts of Spain, and not subsiding until it reached the marches of France, supplanting the feeble Christianity of the natives of all this region with the vigorous and fanatical faith of Islam. Though Ferdinand the Catholic, not content with expelling the Moors from Spain, continued his crusade against the infidel by capturing the Tripolitan capital, the Knights of Saint John, to whom he turned the city over, surrendered to the beleaguering Turks just as the sixteenth century had reached its turning-point, and Turkish it has remained, at least in name, ever since.
We of the West can never be wholly indifferent to the fate and fortunes of this much-harassed land, for our flag has fluttered from its ramparts and the bayonets of our soldiers and the cutlasses of our sailors have served to write some of the most stirring chapters of its history. So feeble and nominal did the Turkish rule become that the beginning of the last century found Tripolitania little more than a pirate stronghold, ruled by a pasha who had not only successfully defied, but had actually levied systematic tribute upon, every sea-faring nation in the world. It was not, however, until the Pasha of Tripoli overstepped the bounds of our national complaisance by demanding an increase in the annual tribute of eighty-odd thousand dollars which the United States had been paying as the price of its maritime exemption that the American consul handed him an ultimatum and an American war-ship backed it up with the menace of its guns. Standing forth in picturesque and striking relief from the tedium of the four years' war which ensued was the capture by the Tripolitans in 1803 of the frigate Philadelphia, which had run aground in the harbour of Tripoli, and the enslavement of her crew; her subsequent recapture and destruction by a handful of blue-jackets under the intrepid Decatur; and the heroic march across the desert to Derna of General William Eaton and his motley army.
Eaton's exploit, like that of Reid and the General Armstrong at Fayal, seems to have been all but lost in the mazes of our national history. With the object of placing upon the Tripolitan throne the reigning Pasha's exiled elder brother, who had agreed to satisfy all the demands of the United States, William Eaton, soldier of fortune, frontiersman, and former American consul at Tunis, recruited at Alexandria what was thought to be a ridiculously insufficient expeditionary force for the taking of Derna, a strongly fortified coast town six hundred miles due west across the Libyan desert. With a handful of adventurous Americans, some two-score Greeks, who fought the Turk whenever opportunity offered, and a few squadrons of Arab mercenaries—less than five hundred men in all—he set out under the blazing sun of an African spring. Though his Arabs mutinied, his food and water gave out, and his animals died from starvation and exhaustion, Eaton pushed indomitably on, covering the six hundred miles of burning sand in fifty days, carrying the city by storm, and raising the American flag over its citadel—the first and only time it has ever floated over a fortification on that side of the Atlantic.
A territory larger than all the Atlantic States, from Florida to Maine, put together; a dry climate as hot in summer and as cold in winter as that of New Mexico; a surface which varies between the aridity of the Staked Plains and the fertility of the San Joaquin Valley of California; so sparsely populated that its fanatic, turbulent, poverty-stricken population averages but two inhabitants to the square mile—that is Tripolitania. Bounded on the west by Tunisia and the French and on the east by Egypt and the English, the hinterland of the regency stretches into the Sahara as far as the Tropic of Cancer. Its eleven hundred miles of coast-line set squarely in the middle of the north African littoral; its capital almost equidistant from the Straits, the Dardanelles, and the Suez Canal; and half the great ports of the Mediterranean not twelve hours' steam away, the strategical, political, and commercial position of Tripolitania is one of great importance.