Hepburn was a practical officer, and as the fire spread rapidly toward the place where he was standing with his men, he did not have the luxury to contemplate the end of empires or the ways in which history suddenly changes course, crushing old orders of things in order to create new nations. He had a mission to accomplish and had already somewhat messed things up, deciding to delay the evacuation. He had ordered two Navy boats and a motorized schooner to take positions near the cape to transfer the Americans to the destroyer, and now he was faced with another serious obstacle. The process was dangerous, as the colossal fiery wall was rapidly spreading toward the sea. The fire had trapped a huge and continuously growing human mass at the cape. The crowd was densely packed over an area of half a kilometer or more in every direction – it was almost the entire population of a city, trapped in a narrow, cobbled pedestrian street between the fiery wall and the sea. Hepburn had to find a way to get the Americans through the dense crowd and lead them to the waiting ships.

This movement would be dangerous, if not impossible. The people at the cape were in despair – they saw the flames and felt the blaze, just like Hepburn and his men – and they sought ways to escape the fire, hoping that the American officer would take some of them onto his ship. The Americans could not abandon them there. After all, America was a country trusted by everyone in the Near East – Arabs, Muslims, Turks, Christians, and Jews – and at that moment Hepburn was a symbol of America. Hepburn decided to deploy a detachment of American sailors in a double line, forming a corridor through the crowd. Twenty young sailors, dressed in their white uniforms and landing gear, armed with pistols and clubs, took their positions, elbow to elbow, creating a passage from the theater door to the quay, amidst the frantic crowd.