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make New England Congregationalists of the region’s inhabitants—Jews, Moslems, and Orthodox Greeks. The two young men, Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, in whose hearts the missionary spirit of America burned bright, stopped first at Smyrna on their way to Jerusalem. They intended to reclaim Jerusalem for the Jews by converting them to Christianity, a necessary precondition (as they understood theBible) for the second coming of Christ and a reordering of the world according to God’s plan.
    Their pilgrimage gripped America’s religious imagination. From its beginnings, America had seen itself as a New Jerusalem. (The wilderness of the New World had sprouted innumerable Canaans, Salems, Goshens, Jerichos, and Bethels. Maine even had a Land of Nod, Indiana a Nineveh, and New York a Babylon.) Pliny and Fisk sent letters home for publication, and they were read in small towns all over America. Every rock, spring, cave, and dry riverbed of the Holy Land held a fascination for Americans. A powerful bond was conjured between America and the Near East. The Pliny-and-Fisk journey shaped American attitudes toward the Near East for a century—and it played an important part in forming American foreign policy. No American president—not even the personification of isolationism, Warren G. Harding—could ignore it.
    Pliny and Fisk were the vanguard, though in time the mission altered from conversion to service through schools, orphanages, and hospitals. Many men, and eventually many women, some of them single and traveling with other women, would follow, at great risk and personal sacrifice. Jennings was planted firmly in that tradition.
    AS JENNINGS DREW CLOSER to the city, his eyes swept along the Quay, from north to south, taking in the grand homes, hotels, and theaters down to the big Custom House Pier and its swarm of small boats and barges. There, he saw a long row of redbrick warehouses, trading depots, and banks and export offices. Behind these buildings, and slightly south, minarets appeared like white candles climbing a steep slope. They marked the city’s Turkish Quarter, a dense neighborhood of narrow half-pipe streets and alleys, a bazaar shaded from the sun by cloths stretched between poles and buildings, and stacked stucco homes with second-story bow windows.
    Jennings and his family came ashore at the Passport Pier, about the midpoint on the long Quay.
    The new arrivals found themselves pressed among Turkish porters, piles of shipping crates, and hundreds of other passengers, some, likethe Jennings family, just arriving, and others departing for Constantinople, Salonika, Alexandria, or Beirut. The Turkish stevedores— hamals, in Turkish—carried enormous loads on their backs, pianos or a dozen chairs. The waterfront was busy with men pushing, lifting, loading, or just loitering, and all about them there were animals—cats, donkeys, horses, and camels. The camels, seeming a little drunk in the loose-jointed swing of their legs, regularly came into the city, threaded nose to tail, led by a tiny donkey and loaded with cargo, from carpets to spices, from the high arid interior of Anatolia.
    Greek soldiers stood guard at the pier and important buildings. Other soldiers were walking along the waterfront or sitting in chairs around tin-topped tables outside the numerous cafés. Despite the military presence, the atmosphere was casual, genial, and seemingly carefree. The city sparkled in Jennings’s eyes, and it seemed both secure and calm.
    Ernest Otto Jacob, who was running the Smyrna YMCA, met Jennings at the pier. (The Smyrna Y’s nominal director was in Constantinople on vacation.) Jacob was thirty-six years old; he had a serious look and close-set eyes, and his receding hairline gave him a high smooth brow. His career was on a fast track at the Y, though recently one of its leaders had spotted in him a tendency toward being difficult to work with—maybe through a worrisome streak of narcissism. The YMCA had sent