THE FIRST AMERICANS IN NORTH AFRICA Louis B. Wright & Julia H. MacLeod Princeton University Press ($3).
"Can any man believe that this elevated brute... sitting on his rump on a cushion of embroidered velvet ... has seven kings of Europe, two republics, and a continent tributary to him when his whole naval force is not equal to two line-of-battle ships?"
The elevated brute was the Dey of Algiers and the man who asked this stictly rhetorical quextion was William Eaton, first U.S. Consul to Tunis. Rarely in history has any man been so frustrated as that...
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