Clash of Eagles: America's Forgotten Expedition To Ottoman Palestine

by Carol Clark

Overview

In the middle of the Mexican-American War, the secretary of the Navy authorized Lt. William Francis Lynch to command an unusual expedition, not south to the war zone, but east to Ottoman Palestine, now Israel and Jordan, to map the Dead Sea. Traversing this backwater of a dying empire, Lynch forged life-saving alliances with a Bedouin sheik and a Hashemite Sharif. Horses weren’t strong enough, so he improvised with foul-tempered camels to haul metal boats overland from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee. He navigated the treacherous, uncharted rapids of the Jordan and braved near starvation before reaching Jerusalem. But why? The expedition followed a long tradition of quasi-scientific expeditions as it attempted to establish that the Dead Sea lay below sea level—but it didn’t generate enough knowledge to justify the expense or the suffering of the fifteen Americans who joined Lynch’s obsessive quest. Was it a publicity stunt? Or the first step in returning Muslim Palestine to its former glory as a Judeo-Christian land of milk and honey? In vivid, absorbing detail, CLASH OF EAGLES masterfully recounts this seemingly foolhardy mission that the Civil War soon derailed. Another hundred years would pass before America again involved itself in the Middle East. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780762778423
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	09/18/2012
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Carol Clark is an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso and has written more than fifty magazine articles, a book about nineteenth-century newspapers, and nine textbooks. The winner of a Fulbright Award to Jordan in 2008 to 2009, she discovered William Lynch's story while at the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman.

Read an Excerpt

Clash of Eagles

America's Forgotten Expedition to Ottoman Palestine

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By Carol Lea Clark

Lyons Press

Copyright © 2012 Carol Lea Clark
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780762778423

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The caravan of two small boats mounted on carriages, American sailors, and a few Arabs including a dragoman and Mustafa, the cook, turned their backs on the bay at Acre and headed east, moving at the slow rhythm set by the swaying, disagreeable camels. Following what might be better described as a camel track or horse trail than a proper road, they left the coastal plain and headed into the sparsely settled low hills and valleys. Soon they would reach the Galilee mountains, a rugged barrier between the sea on the east, and the Jordan Rift Valley, a fault line bordered on the west by high plateaus. Through the Jordan Rift Valley, often called the Ghor, flowed the Jordan River, which would lead them through lands of unknown and perhaps hostile Bedouin tribes, followed by the desolation of the Dead Sea. Their circuitous route would take them to Jerusalem, fulfilling a dream of a lifetime for Lynch and the sailors. Much was uncertain, but in Galilee, its hills tinted purple and gray at sunset, all knew that adventure lay ahead. —From Clash of Eagles 

Continues...

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Excerpted from Clash of Eagles by Carol Lea Clark Copyright © 2012 by Carol Lea Clark. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

I Arrival 1

II The Great Age of Exploration 24

III Challenges Ashore 38

IV Cross-country with Bedouin 67

V Down the Jordan 83

VI More Rapids 106

VII Pilgrims by Torchlight 117

VIII The Dead Sea 133

IX Deeper into the Sea 152

X Challenges Continue 170

XI Leaving the Dead Sea 199

XII Jerusalem Again 214

Epilogue 230

Acknowledgments 238

Endnotes 239

Bibliography 251

Index 259

Editorial Reviews

Lynch’s expedition—and he was the driving force—is a story worth telling and sharing. Clark’s book chronicles well their considerable travails on land and sea. She also puts the expedition into the wider context of American history and provides information on previous attempts to study the Dead Sea and figure out the sea level. Given that the Dead Sea is currently disappearing at the rate of one meter per year, the documentation of Lynch and his team provides important benchmarks and data to stand as witness to the sea’s conditions before this depletion began.”

—Barbara A. Porter, director of the American Center of Oriental Research, Amman, Jordan

From the Publisher