We of the West can never be wholly indifferent to the fate and fortunes of this much-harassed land, for our flag has fluttered from its ramparts and the bayonets of our soldiers and the cutlasses of our sailors have served to write some of the most stirring chapters of its history. So feeble and nominal did the Turkish rule become that the beginning of the last century found Tripolitania little more than a pirate stronghold, ruled by a pasha who had not only successfully defied, but had actually levied systematic tribute upon, every sea-faring nation in the world. It was not, however, until the Pasha of Tripoli overstepped the bounds of our national complaisance by demanding an increase in the annual tribute of eighty-odd thousand dollars which the United States had been paying as the price of its maritime exemption that the American consul handed him an ultimatum and an American war-ship backed it up with the menace of its guns. Standing forth in picturesque and striking relief from the tedium of the four years' war which ensued was the capture by the Tripolitans in 1803 of the frigate _Philadelphia_, which had run aground in the harbour of Tripoli, and the enslavement of her crew; her subsequent recapture and destruction by a handful of blue-jackets under the intrepid Decatur; and the heroic march across the desert to Derna of General William Eaton and his motley army. Eaton's exploit, like that of Reid and the _General Armstrong_ at Fayal, seems to have been all but lost in the mazes of our national history. With the object of placing upon the Tripolitan throne the reigning Pasha's exiled elder brother, who had agreed to satisfy all the demands of the United States, William Eaton, soldier of fortune, frontiersman, and former American consul at Tunis, recruited at Alexandria what was thought to be a ridiculously insufficient expeditionary force for the taking of Derna, a strongly fortified coast town six hundred miles due west across the Libyan desert. With a handful of adventurous Americans, some two-score Greeks, who fought the Turk whenever opportunity offered, and a few squadrons of Arab mercenaries—less than five hundred men in all—he set out under the blazing sun of an African spring. Though his Arabs mutinied, his food and water gave out, and his animals died from starvation and exhaustion, Eaton pushed indomitably on, covering the six hundred miles of burning sand in fifty days, carrying the city by storm, and raising the American flag over its citadel—the first and only time it has ever floated over a fortification on that side of the Atlantic.