Lynch William Francis - Clash of eagles : Americas forgotten expedition to Ottoman Palestine

CLASH of EAGLES

Whereer we tread tis haunted, holy ground.

LORD BYRON,

CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE

I

Arrival

The USS Supply battled strong winds and stronger waves in the eastern Mediterranean as it sailed past the ports of Sidon, Tyre, and Acre. At midnight, the ships white canvases shivered in the faint moonlight as the crew shortened sails on the three masts. Then the helmsman turned the ship into the wind, and the crew dropped anchor below Mount Carmel at Haifa, a walled village in Ottoman Palestine.

The Supply , a square-rigged vessel of 556 metric tons, had been commissioned in 1846 for the Mexican-American War. Her name reveals her original mission: to replenish American warships wherever need arose around the world. Rather than an ungainly workhorse of a store ship, though, the Supply was sleek, capable of 11.5 knotsswift for a square-rigged vessel. She would have been a pleasure to maneuver.

The USS Supply, which Lynch sailed from New York Harbor to Acre to deliver the men and supplies for the Palestine expedition. Painting by W. R. May, possibly in the 1870s. Courtesy of the Naval War College Museum.

Under the command of Lieutenant William Francis Lynch, she had begun her journey four months before in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Friday, November 20, 1847, dropping down near the Battery in New York Harbor to await a west-northwest wind favorable for an Atlantic crossing. For the Supply headed not to enemy waters off Mexico but east to the Mediterranean. She made landfall first at Gibraltar, then stopped at Port Mahon on Minorca in the Balearics to replenish Americas Mediterranean fleet. Lynch headed east again, stopping at Smyrna, Constantinople, and Beirut. By the time it reached Haifa, the Supply had sailed a quarter of the way around the world to bring Lynch, three other officers, two volunteersincluding Lynchs son, Francisa physician-naturalist, and a complement of nine sailors on the official American naval expedition to map the Dead Sea.

At first light, the masthead lookout could see pale purple hills rising from the water in the east, then the curved shoreline of the bay, and finally the fishing boats swinging fitfully at anchor. After full daylight, irresistibly drawn by the prospect of setting foot on the sacred soil of Palestine, Lynch ignored his own weakened health from a case of smallpox he had contracted in Gibraltar only weeks before. He also disregarded the strong wind and heavy surf and attempted to land a small boat on the beach near Haifa. As he later wrote, he experienced great difficulty getting the ships boat to shore. It was a laughable understatement, for storm waves off the coast of Palestine can reach heights in excess of fifteen feet for as long as fifteen seconds, and even shorter waves herald longer-than-normal swellshardly suitable conditions for landing a small boat.

Lynch, along with a US vice consul to the Ottoman Empire, who had accompanied him from Beirut, almost died before the expedition could begin. The boat taking them ashore capsized. Wearing his bulky wool uniform, boots, and sword, Lynch suffered baptism by salt water in the heavy surf. He would have wondered, floundering underwaterfighting the current and the waves, clawing for the light and the air aboveif he was going to die so close to the Promised Land. Local Arab fishermen spotted the two men slip beneath the waves and dived into the water to pull them, dripping and gasping, to safety. Lynch gratefully described the fishermen as bold, lithe swimmers, as much at home in the water as Lynch had observed the natives of the Sandwich Islands to be. Which Lynch, like many Navy men oddly enough, was not.

But this was hardly his first brush with death. When he was a midshipman, a shortage of water forced his ship to anchor off cholera-infested Manila. Lynch and his shipmates felt helpless in the face of the disease, which people then believed was transmitted through the air. He wrote, The pestilence [was] stealthily gliding on the water... born by sickly airs from the land, and enveloped us in its folds, one by one garnered its victims. As soon as they could, they sailed, taking the disease with them, and the pestilence festered until no one was able to man the ship and the cries begging for water had no one healthy to respond. Lynch awoke in his shipboard hammock from a stupor to find that the six men around him had died during the night. The ship lost more than seventy men to the disease.

Moreover, he suffered from a mysterious illness himself that may have been tuberculosis; earlier, it had forced him to take a two-year leave of absence from his duties for treatment and compelled him to avoid winter postings altogether. Lynchs close acquaintance with death caused him, very much a man of his age, not to crave safety but to rush forward into danger. He sought command of the perilous Palestine expedition that might cause his death far from home, bringing him both everlasting peace and everlasting glory. The expedition might also save his eternal soul, a concern of deep significance in fire-and-brimstone antebellum America. Walking where Christ had walked would bring him closer to a blessed afterlife. If nothing else, it would help him understand the contrasts of the violent and vengeful Old Testament God of his childhood and the forgiving love of the New Testament Jesus that soon would become the prevailing belief in late nineteenth-century America. Likewise, the mission could leave a lasting legacy by fostering closer ties with the Holy Land.