 It is difficult for students, I think, to understand the language. And I find if you can have students read it out loud, that they can often make sense of it. And it is meant to be a public document, so it's being sent to the Secretary of State that Cathcart is well aware that this is going to be a document that's going to circulate. It might be published in part in the newspaper. It might be something that's going to end up in collections for the government. It might be in Congress. So he's definitely writing in a way that he thinks will look good for other people to read, which can be difficult for us to interpret. He's also using terms that may be unfamiliar, like the Imperials, the Danes, Ragozians, which was a very small trading state on the Dalmatian coast. And those powers that he's listing there are not very strong powers. So the British, the French had very, very strong navies. But these people do not, and they're involved in the carrying trade because they, like the Americans, are neutral states. And there's so much war on the continent at that time period that the neutral states are making a lot of money in the carrying trade as long as they can pay off the Barbary pirates. Well, there's actually a humongous subtext. And if you're going to do further research, there are two ways I think that you could have students approach this. One is the issue of trade and how trade was carried out at that time period. And increase in violence as well between the 1780s and the early 1800s. There's an incredible increase in violence and trade in general. The French Navy, for instance, grows something like 40 or 60 percent. And that's fairly standard a lot of European and Russian navies. The Algerian Navy, for that matter, grows at this time period. There are European powers and including the Neapolitan who are seizing American ships. One historian estimated that between about 1800 and about 1810, other powers seized about 1600 American ships, all told. And North Africans take 13 of those ships. So the North Africans are the least of our problems in many ways. And I think Cathcart, it's the second way you could approach this, Cathcart himself is a really interesting case. He's very concerned about the issue in Tripoli and he's concerned in a really personal way. Because in 1785, as a young man in his early 20s, he was captured by Algerian pirates and he was enslaved in Algiers for 11 years. So in 1796, he is finally redeemed by the United States with a bunch of other Americans and returns home and he's appointed then to be the counsel in Tripoli. So he has a really unique insider viewpoint. He knows North African politics. Most Americans don't. You can tell that he's trying to pitch this idea to the Secretary of State that you might have to make payments or force. And that's really clear and it's been clear to Europeans since like the 12th century. You're either going to make these payments or you're going to get a big enough navy to do something about it. America is kind of in a bind. It doesn't have a lot of money to do either. And Cathcart is trying to convince them, I think, to use force. I think there are two things. One is that he says if we make this payment, it's only going to delay things for about a year. And the other place is where he talks about pretenses, that they're going to attack us no matter what. They're going to come up with excuses no matter what to attack us. So we might as well put a stop to it forever. And the only way to do that is force. And that's what I'm seeing in between those lines where he's talking about pretenses and delaying. And it's only going to be a year and then we're going to have to do something else. Well, I think, in fact, these tripolitan pirates are privateers. But everybody else's privateers look like pirates to you. And privateers, what that means is that it's a government-arranged, government-sponsored program of piracy. And the tripolitans were very clear about it. If you make arrangements with them, if you sign a treaty with them, they're not going to capture your ships. If you don't, they will capture your ships. They know to capture your ships because you're carrying what's called a Mediterranean pass. So if you're trading legitimately and you're trading legitimate American goods on an American ship, you're going to have one of these Mediterranean passes. And tripolitans are going to board your ship, and they're going to check out your pass and see if things are in order. And if things are in order, they won't capture your ship. If things are not in order, if you don't have your pass, if you are not actually a legitimate American ship, you're just claiming to be an American ship, they're going to capture you. And they're going to take your goods, and they're going to sell your ship, and possibly enslave the people that you have on the ship. Every ship that's not convoyed, so sometimes Americans were able to get French or British or Portuguese ships to convoy their ships. So if you don't have the force to keep them from stopping your ship, yes, they're going to stop those ships. And in part, they have that power because in 1785, the Spanish made a treaty with them, which the Spanish then stopped keeping them out of going through the Straits of Gibraltar. So they could actually get out into the Atlantic after 1785. You didn't have to come into the Mediterranean. In other words, you could be trading on the coast of Portugal, and they could still stop your ships. So this is very much an organized state endeavor. The pirates are organized by the state, they're supported by their state. It's part of the taxation system of the money that the state is bringing in in Tripoli and the government in Tripoli is telling the privateers which countries are appropriate for them to attack. They're really using terms that indicate they're seeing themselves as more of a Navy. So that Murad Reyes that's mentioned, Reyes is their term for captain. So that just means he's a captain and the Navy. And this is his job, basically. He's told by the state, the Americans aren't paying us enough, we want them to pay us more, you should stop their ships. And if it looks like they have a lot of booty on board, then we need to capture them and make things difficult for the Americans so they will negotiate with us. They'd sell the ship, they'd sell the goods. Sometimes the Tripolitans are less likely to do this, but Algiers in particular would enslave the men. By the early 1800s, Tripolitans are less likely to do that. And to be fair, Europeans are doing this as well. I think it's 1790, there's something like 800 Muslims held in Malta. So privateering was going on on both sides. And they're both sides are calling the other people's Navy pirates and they're all privateers, they're licensed by the state.