Ottoman Algeria in Western Diplomatic History with ... - Bibliothèque

proper in a matter of bargain.” 33 However, as time passed and information
accumulated about his passing here and there borrowing money and leaving
unpaid bills behind him, the American ministers grew increasingly uneasy
about him. 34
They sent reports to Congress notifying about delays in his arrival
and intentions of replacing him as negotiator, especially after the captures of
July 1785 when negotiations became more pressing. They even doubted his
competence and could not understand how Congress recommended him:
This gentleman’s motions are slow; what can have detained him so long
I know not; I can say nothing of his character or conduct. Mr. Jefferson
understood him to be recommended by Congress; and he was certainly
the bearer of their orders …. Since the appointment, I heard such
opinions and reports of him as have astonished me. 35
His incompetence was revealed shortly afterwards when redemption of
American captives reached a deadlock. While O’Brien, a witness to that fiasco,
wished “never to see Captain Lamb in Barbary again except to buy horses and
mules,” 36 Cathcart noted that he “was extremely illiterate and as vulgar as can
well be imagined, which did not create the most favourable opinion of the
government which he said had sent him.” 37
The ministers acknowledged
Lamb’s incompetence and the debacle he was causing but they preferred to put
the blame on Algiers and take another course of action. Jefferson suggested
replacing him to “shut the mouths of those who might impute our failure at
33 Jefferson, Memoir, p. 350.
34 One’s experience has shown that throughout the three-year period during which Lamb was a point of
focus in this work, time was lost just for locating him as it was indeed the case for all those of his time.
At the end, it turned out that he made only one consistent report about Algiers before disappearing
again.
35 USDC, 2:566, From John Adams to John Jay, February 16, 1786.
36 As cited in Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, p. 25.
37 Cathcart, The Captives, p. 41.
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