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successfully with the Bey, or ruler, of Tunis, that he made a very
satisfactory arrangement with him, and then returned home: but the other
agents did not manage so well, and at last war was declared, for the
United States had no idea of being cowed and threatened by these
pirates and murderers--far otherwise! The memory of her recent
successful struggle with the greatest nation of the earth was too fresh
to make it possible that an American ship should voluntarily lower its
flag before a Moorish marauder. But what we would not do voluntarily we
had to do by compulsion. The frigate _Philadelphia_, sailing in African
waters, under Captain Bainbridge, was captured by the Bey of Tripoli,
and towed into the harbor of that town. Her crew was carried off into
slavery by the pirates, some languishing in hopeless imprisonment,
others toiling their lives away under the burning sun of Africa.

Captain Decatur soon after sailed into the harbor in a vessel that he
had captured from the Tripolitans, and retook and burned the
_Philadelphia_; but, alas! hero as he was, he could not rescue his
unfortunate countrymen. A few months later, in 1805, Eaton was sent back
to the Barbary States as Naval Agent, and first stopped in Egypt. Here
he made up his mind that he would bend all his energies toward rescuing
the captives at Tripoli. He found that the rightful ruler of Tripoli,
named Hamet Caramelli, had been driven away from his dominions by his
brother Yusef, and was in Alexandria. Eaton offered to assist him to
recover his throne, and collected a little army of five hundred men,
most of them Mussulmans, a few Greek Christians, and nine Americans.
With these followers he and Hamet marched across the desert toward
Derne, in the kingdom of Tripoli. Eaton had not lost his boyish love of
adventure yet, you see. This was just one of the bold, daring
undertakings that he may have dreamed of in those early days when he
stole away from his work to read with eager delight stories of wild
venture and perilous escape in the peaceful shades of the forest around
Woodstock. Doubtless these desert marches now entered upon far exceeded
all his young imagination had pictured them.

It was a perilous journey, for the Arab sheiks and their followers, who
made up most of his army, sometimes behaved in a very mutinous manner,
and it took all Eaton's force of will and strict discipline to keep them
in any sort of order, for Hamet showed very little decisi