MS Audio Book Review: The Pirate Coast - Richard Zacks - Page 2

Outside of that, the story takes on aspects of tragedy and farce. Half the US navy in the Mediterranean — a tiny fleet to begin with — wants little to do with the firebrand Eaton, a Shakespearean mix of bravery, bombast, and bull-headedness. Certainly the diplomats and consuls in the area disdain the whole idea of a military intervention and undercut Eaton at every turn, ultimately throwing away his victory with a peace treaty that nearly gives away the store, and certainly betrays all those who had been egged on into action by the US.

And afterwards, an embittered and debt-ridden Eaton returns home to a hero's welcome, but as he undiplomatically expresses his dissatisfaction with the episode's resolution, President Thomas Jefferson takes it as affront to his foreign policy and hand-selected negotiator, Tobias Lear. Jefferson decides Eaton must be crushed, and effectively does so, driving the celebrated hero to an untimely self-destruction.

The tale is a great one, full of detail and recounting from primary records of the time — diaries and letters from diplomats, naval officers and ratings, soldiers on the trail with Eaton, and Eaton himself. While real life rarely has the taut timing of fiction, Zacks does a good job of playing the different threads of the story together, and bringing the various players to life. While the campaign against the Barbary Pirates — which would be resolved far more satisfactorily a decade later — is now more of a footnote in history compared to what else was going on during Jefferson's administration, at the time it was the stuff of headlines, as the barbarous Musselman slavers dragged good Christian men and women — some of them Americans, by God! — into Dantesque hells of slavery and degradation! Zacks captures the tenor of the time, and, most importantly, a sense of William Eaton, a man whose love of liberty and the principles he saw America founded on (plus, to be fair, whose jingoism, bigotry, and self-righteousness) led him to one disastrous adventure after another, ultimately to be defeated by both a surprisingly political President and his own inner demons.

Article Author: Dave Hill

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