—William Eaton in a letter to Mustifa Bey, governor of Derna My head or yours. —Mustifa Bey Hidden in the sparsely wooded hills overlooking the city, Eaton, Hamet, and their officers studied the white buildings and palm trees fringing the harbor. With upwards of 10,000 inhabitants, Derna was Tripoli’s second-largest city. Bananas, dates, grapes, melons, oranges, and plums flourished in the city’s orchards and irrigated gardens, whose cultivation dated to the 1493 arrival of the Moors exiled from Spain. To the north, the Mediterranean’s sparkling blue waters stretched to the horizon. Mussolini would call Derna “the pearl of the Mediterranean,” but other visitors, immune to its charms, were oppressed by its isolation and the air of desolation bestowed by the endless sea and the nearby hills. Derna was the administrative and military hub of Cyrenaica, Tripoli’s distant eastern province and traditionally its most restive, as a result of its 500-mile remove from the capital across stretches of hostile territory.
