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

Dey was irritated and grew impatient and menacing but Barlow knew it all:
there was not much the Dey could do. In the spring of 1797, Barlow went to
see the Dey. On the occasion, he drew up this portrait of the Dey:
He had been waiting with the impatience of a petulant child all winter;
and after the beginning of April it became impossible to speak to him
with safety on any subject. He had become so furious that I went to him
on 20 of May to try to soften him.… I told him that the vessel [he
pretended that a vessel was bound for Algiers with the stores] must
either be lost at sea or stopped by some of the belligerent powers. Says
he “You are a liar and your government is a liar. 130
As the Dey reiterated his threat to repudiate the treaty, Barlow wrote: “it has
been too often repeated to excite alarm.” 131 At the end, what comes out of this
chronology of financial aspects pertaining to the treaty is that the United States
respected neither the periods prescribed for payment nor the amounts due for
payment as fixed by the agreement of September 1795. Yet, the treaty has ever
since been decried as having cost a million dollars; not a single American
would deviate from the ‘one million’ argument. 132 As one may probably notice
from the tables below, the cost also included the ransom of captives,
commissions to the Jew broker, presents, payments made to Humphreys and
O’Brien, freight, and a frigate and stores that were overestimated. Moreover,
the frigate was handed over with a delay of over a year. As for the stores, they
were always in arrears and the first shipment did not arrive until January 1798.
Finally, the agreed on payment of $585,000 was not fully honored, let alone the
$200,000 treacherously obtained from the treasury of the regency.
130 NDBW, 1:209, Barlow to U.S. Minister to Paris, Sept. 6, 1797. For more see Kitzen, Tripoli and the
United States, p. 22.
131 Ibid.
132 See as an example London, Victory in Tripoli, p. 43.
331