Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805

This is the story of America's first overseas covert operation, one of the strangest, riskiest, most compelling adventures ever undertaken for love of glory and country.

A declaration of war by Tripoli in 1801 marked the first foreign policy test of Thomas Jefferson's administration. Then, on Halloween of 1803, the unthinkable happened: The USS Philadelphia accidentally ran aground in Tripoli harbor, and the Barbary pirates captured three hundred U.S. sailors and marines. The Moslem ruler renamed the frigate "The Gift of Allah" and held the Americans as his slaves, to be auctioned at his whim.

Faced with this hostage crisis and an ongoing war with Tripoli, Jefferson dispatched diplomats and navy squadrons to the Mediterranean, but he also authorized a secret mission to overthrow the government there. Jefferson chose an unlikely man to lead the operation. Forty-year-old William Eaton was a failed diplomat, deeply in debt, who had been court-martialed from the Army. He saw this mission as a last chance to redeem himself and resurrect his career. His assignment was to find an exiled prince named Hamet hiding in Egypt and convince him to mount a civil war in Tripoli. But before Eaton even departed, Jefferson grew wary of intermeddling in the internal affairs of another nation and withdrew Eaton's supplies, weapons, and troops.

Astoundingly, Eaton, who was forced to beg cash from British merchants, persevered and found Hamet up the Nile and lured him to Alexandria, where he rounded up a ragtag force of European mercenaries and Bedouin fighters; Eaton then borrowed eight U.S. Marines, including fiddle-laying Presley O'Bannon, and led them all on a brutal march across five hundred miles of Libyan desert to surprise attack Tripoli.

After surviving sandstorms, treachery, and near-death from thirst, Eaton achieved a remarkable victory on "the shores of Tripoli," commemorated to this day in the U.S. Marine Corps hymn. His triumph led to freedom for the three hundred Americans and newfound respect for the young United States, but for Eaton, the aftermath wasn't so sweet. When he dared to reveal that the president had abandoned him, Thomas Jefferson set out to crush him.

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