MS Audio Book Review: The Pirate Coast - Richard Zacks

The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805, by Richard Zacks (2005) - Audiobook narrated by Raymond Todd.

State-sponsored terrorists! Kidnappers! Extortion! Human rights violations! Wishy-washy US and European response! US covert military intervention to enact a regime change! Meddling by self-aggrandizing diplomats! Peace treaties that solve nothing! Betrayed allies! Disgruntled war heroes! Vengeful, dissent-crushing presidents!

If the above sounds like one of those "ripped from the headlines" stories, well, one could certainly draw parallels to US foreign interventions since ... well, since this one. This tale of the Pirate Coast — the Barbary Pirates, to be exact — recounts the first honest-to-gosh military conflict and covert ops on foreign soil ever pursued by the US.

Ongoing piracy, enslavement, and ransom/tribute demands from the Barbary Coast — the NW African coast from modern Libya to Algeria — had plagued European and American shipping for decades leading up to 1805. In response, a former diplomat and army colonel, William Eaton, wangles a commission from Thomas Jefferson to try and displace the reigning pasha of Tripoli, Yussef, with his deposed and exiled brother, Hamet. The actual trigger for this action is the capture and enslavement of 300 men of a US warship that absurdly runs aground in Tripoli harbor and is captured.

The ensuing military campaign is, on one level, trivial. Eaton, with a handful of US Marines, a hundred foreign mercenaries dredged up from around Egypt, Hamet's entourage, and as many Arab and Bedouin troops as he could manage to bribe from day to day, managed to take the Tripolitan port city of Durna from a vastly larger force and hold it for a month. It was the first time the US flag had been raised on foreign soil (outside of North America), and the campaign still echoes in the Marine Corps' hymn, "... to the shores of Tripoli ..."

Article Author: Dave Hill

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