Jason Koivu's Reviews > The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines & the Secret Mission of 1805

What a relatively unknown and quite fascinating real-life adventure!

An ambitious U.S. general/diplomat turns guerilla warlord and takes a troop of the newly-minted U.S. Marines with Arab mercenaries into North Africa to wage a private war with the local tribal rulers in an effort to rescue captured American sailors in a very Lawrence of Arabia way.

The U.S. government's spy-game secretive backing and simultaneous denying of this mission is intriguing to see in its CIA-esque infancy. The cover-ups and casting adrift of the ambiguously valiant hero, William Eaton, doing what he thought was morally right is like something out of Hollywood. But it happened, and Richard Zacks does well to squeeze what he can out of a minor and little-known footnote in the greater book of U.S. history.

For more clarification on this mission, here is a section lifted from a Wiki page...

"The Marines' most famous action of this period occurred in the First Barbary War (1801–1805) against the Barbary pirates, when General William Eaton, the Naval Special Agent and appointed commander-in-chief of the multi-national expedition, and First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon led a group of eight Marines and 300 Arab and European mercenaries in an attempt to capture Tripoli and free the crew of the captured USS Philadelphia. Though they only made it as far as Derne, Tripoli has been immortalized in the Marines' Hymn. The deposed Pasha, Prince Hamet Karamanli was so impressed with the Marines that he presented a Mameluke sword to O'Bannon inscribed in memory of the The Battle of Derne, a tradition continued today by the swords worn by Marine officers."

Richard Zacks may not be Simon Winchester or Nathaniel Philbrick, but he does a decent job in the "new historian" genre, bringing the people and places in his book back to life with great descriptives that put you into the scene and setting. I even felt like I knew Eaton as a person. His motivations came through quite clear and that human connection is important, even for readers of non-fiction.