Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 2.djvu/451

432 He felt himself ill-treated, for he was irritable and self-asserting by nature, and was haunted by a fixed idea too unreasonable for the President to adopt; but he chose to act without authority rather than not act at all, for he was born an adventurer, and difficulties which seemed to cooler heads insurmountable were nothing in his eyes. Sept. 5, 1804, he arrived at Malta, and thence sailed to Alexandria; for in the meanwhile Hamet had been driven to take refuge in Egypt, and Eaton on reaching Cairo, Dec. 8, 1804, found that the object of his search was shut up in Minyeh on the Nile with some rebellious Mamelukes, besieged by the viceroy's troops. After infinite exertions and at no little personal danger, Eaton brought Hamet to Alexandria, where they collected some five hundred men, of whom one hundred were Christians recruited on the spot. Eaton made a convention with Hamet, arranged a plan of joint operations with Barron, and then at about the time when President Jefferson was delivering his second Inaugural Address, the navy agent led his little army into the desert with the courage of Alexander the Great, to conquer an African kingdom.

So motley a horde of Americans, Greeks, Tripolitans, and Arab camel-drivers had never before been seen on the soil of Egypt. Without discipline, cohesion, or sources of supply, even without water for days, their march of five hundred miles was a sort of miracle. Eaton's indomitable obstinacy barely escaped ending in his massacre by the by the Arabs, or by their desertion in