Matthew Calbraith Perry: A Typical American Naval Officer. William Elliot Griffis
“yawed” again and fired two broadsides. These, to the chagrin of the gallant commodore, fell short or took slight effect. At seven o’clock, the Belvidera was beyond range and, near midnight, the chase was given up.
The escaping vessel got safely to Halifax carrying thither the news that war had been declared and the Yankee cruisers were loose on the main. Instead of the electric cable which flashes the news in seconds, the schooner Mackerel took dispatches, arriving at Portsmouth July 25th.
Following the trail left in the “pathless ocean” by the crumbs that fell from the British table—fruit rinds, orange skins and cocoa-nut shells, the American frigate followed the game until within twenty-four hours of the British channel. It was now time to be off. The West India prize was lost.
Turning prow to Maderia, Funchal was passed July 27th. Sail was then made for the Azores. Few ships were seen, but fogs were frequent. Baffled in his desire to meet an enemy having teeth to bite, Rodgers would have still kept his course, but for a fire in the rear. An enemy, feared more than British guns, had captured the ship.
It was the scurvy. It broke out so alarmingly that he was obliged to hurry home at full speed. Passing Nantasket roads August 31st decks were cleared for action. A strange ship was in sight. It was the Constitution which a few days before had met and sunk their old enemy the Guerriere, two of whose prizes the President had recaptured.
In this, his first foreign cruise in a man-of-war, full as it was of exciting incidents, Perry had taken part in one battle, and the capture of seven British Merchant vessels. Driven home ingloriously by the chronic enemy of the naval household, he learned well a new lesson. He gained an experience, by which not only himself but all his crew down to the humblest sailor under his command, profited during the half century of his service. In those ante-canning days, more lives were lost in the navy by this one disease than by all other causes, sickness, battle, tempest or shipwreck. “From scurvy” might well have been a prayer of deliverance in the nautical litany.
Perry was one of the first among American officers to search into the underlying causes of the malady. He was ever a rigid disciplinarian in diet, albeit a generous provider. To the ignorant he seemed almost fanatical in his “anti-scorbutic” notions, though he was rather pleased than otherwise at the nick-name savoring of the green-grocer’s stall which Jack Tar with grateful facetiousness lavished on him.
Across sea, the American frigates were described by the English newspapers as “disguised seventy-fours;” and, forthwith, English writers on naval warfare began explaining how the incredible thing happened that British frigates had lowered their flag to apparent equals. These explanations have been diligently kept up and copied for the past seventy-five years. As late as the international rifle match of 1877 the words of the naval writer, James, learned by heart by Britons in their youth, came to the front in the staple of English editorials written to clear up the mystery of American excellence with the rifle—“The young peasant or back-woodsman carries a rifle barrel from the moment he can lift one to his shoulder.”
On the eighteenth of October, Rodgers left Boston with the President, Constitution, United States and Argus. Perry, unable to be idle, while the ships lay in Boston harbor, had opened a recruiting office in the city enlisting sailors for the President. Each vessel of the squadron was in perfect order. On the 10th, without knowing it, they passed near five British men-of-war. They chased a thirty-eight gun ship but lost her, but, on the 18th off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland captured the British packet Swallow, having on board eighty-one boxes of gold and silver to the value of $200,000. On the 30th they chased the Galatea and lost her. During the whole of November, they met with few vessels.
Nine prizes of little value were taken. They cruised eastward to Longitude 22 degrees west and southward to 17 degrees north latitude. They re-entered Boston on the last month of the year, 1812. It is no fault of Rodgers that he did not meet an armed ship at sea, and win glory like that gained by Hull, Bainbridge and Decatur. For Perry, fortune was yet reserving her favor and Providence a noble work.
Leaving Boston, April 30, the President crossed the Atlantic to the Azores, and thence moved up toward North Cape. In these icy seas, Rodgers hoped to intercept a fleet of thirty merchant vessels sailing from Archangel, July 15. Escaping after being chased eighty-four hours by a British frigate and a seventy-four, Rodgers returned from his Arctic adventures, and after a five months’ cruise cast anchor at Newport, September 27. Twelve vessels, with two hundred and seventy-one prisoners, had been taken; and the ships he disposed of by cartel, ransom, sinking, or despatch to France or the United States as prizes. No less than twenty British men-of-war, sailing in couples for safety, scoured the seas for half a year, searching in vain for the saucy Yankee.
Three years of service, under his own eye, had so impressed Commodore Rodgers with his midshipman, that, on the 3d of February, 1813, he wrote to the Department asking that Perry be promoted. This was granted February 27, and, at eighteen, Matthew Perry became an acting lieutenant. “Heroes are made early.”
Four of the Perry brothers served their country in the navy in 1813; two in the Lawrence on Lake Erie, and two on the President at sea. An item of news that concerned them all, and brought them to her bedside, was their mother’s illness. This, fortunately, was not of long duration. At home, Matthew Perry found his commission as lieutenant, dated July 24. Of the forty-four promotions, made on that date, he ranked number fourteen. Requesting a change to another ship, he was ordered to the United States, under Commodore Decatur. Chased into the harbor of New London, by a British squadron, this frigate, with the Wasp and Macedonian, was kept in the Thames until the end of the war. Perry’s five months’ service on board of her was one of galling inaction. Left inactive in the affairs of war, the young lieutenant improved his time in affairs of the heart; and on Christmas eve, 1814, was married to Miss Jane Slidell, then but seventeen years of age. The Reverend, afterwards Bishop, Nathaniel Bowen, united the pair according to the ritual of the Episcopal church, at the house of the bride’s father, a wealthy New York merchant. Perry’s brothers-in-law, John Slidell, Alexander Slidell (MacKenzie), and their neighbor and playmate, Charles Wilkes, as well as himself, were afterwards heard from.
Soon after his marriage, Lieutenant Perry was invited by Commodore Decatur to join him on the President. In this ship, nearly rebuilt, with a crew of over four hundred picked sailors, most of them tall and robust native Americans, the “Bayard of the seas” expected to make a voyage to the East Indies. Unfortunately, seized with a severe fit of sickness, Perry was obliged to leave the ship, and in eager anticipation of speedy departure, Decatur appointed another lieutenant in his place. The bitter pill of disappointment proved, for Perry, good medicine. Owing to the vigor of the blockade, the President did not get away until January 15, 1815, and then only to be captured by superior force. In answer to an application for service, Matthew Perry was ordered to Warren, R. I., to recruit for the brig Chippewa.
Meanwhile, negotiations for ending the war had begun, starting from offers of mediation by Russia. With the allies occupying Paris, and Napoleon exiled to Elba, there was little chance of “peace with honor” for the United States. The war party in England were even inquiring for some Elba in which to banish Madison. “The British government was free to settle accounts with the upstart people whose ships had won more flags from her navy, in two years, than all her European rivals had done in a century.” One of the first moves was to dispatch Packenham, with Wellington’s veterans, to lay siege to New Orleans, with the idea of gaining nine points of the law. From Patterson and Jackson, they received what they least expected.
Before Perry’s work at Warren fairly began, the British ship Favorite, bearing the olive branch, arrived at New York, February 11, 1815. It was too late to save the bloody battle of New Orleans, or the capture of the Cyane and Levant. The treaty of Ghent had been signed December 3, 1813; but neither steam nor electricity were then at hand to forefend ninety days of war.
The navy, from the year 1815, was kept up on a war footing; and, for three years, the sum of two millions of dollars was appropriated to this arm of the service. Commodore Porter, eager to improve and expand our commerce, conceived the project of a voyage of exploration around the world. The plan embraced an extended visit to the islands of the Pacific, the north-west coast of America, Japan and China. The