“... I met ’im all over the world, a-doin’ all kinds of things,
Like landin’ ’isself with a Gatlin’ gun to talk to them ’eathen kings.
For there isn’t a job on the top o’ the earth the beggar don’t know, nor do—
You can leave ’im at night on a bald man’s ’ead to paddle ’is own canoe.”
THERE you have a four-line epitome of the career and character of the burly, tousle-headed, gruff-voiced old sea-dog who is the hero of this narrative. His name? Matthew Calbraith Perry, one time commodore in the navy of the United States and younger brother of that other Yankee sea-fighter, Oliver Hazard Perry, without whose picture, wrapped in the Chesapeake’s flag and standing in a dramatic attitude in the stern-sheets of a small boat, no school history of the United States would be complete. Though Matthew did not have to depend upon the reflected glory of his famous brother, for he won glory enough of his own, his extraordinary exploits have never received the attention of which they are deserving, partly, no doubt, because they were obscured by the smoke of his brother’s guns on Lake Erie and partly because they were performed at a period in our national history when the public mind was occupied with happenings nearer home.
His father, a Yankee privateersman of the up-boys-and-at-’em school, was captured by a British cruiser during the Revolution and sent as a prisoner of war to Ireland, where his captivity was made considerably more than endurable by a peaches-and-cream beauty from the County Down. After the war was over he returned to Ireland and gave a typical story-book ending to the romance by hunting up the girl who had cheered his prison hours and making her his wife. The dashing young skipper and his sixteen-year-old bride built themselves a house within sight of the shipping along the Newport wharfs, and there, when the eighteenth century lacked but half a dozen years of having run its course and when our flag bore but fifteen stars, Matthew was born. How many of the neighbors who came flocking in to admire the lusty youngster dreamed that he would live to command the largest fleet which, in his lifetime, ever gathered under the folds of that flag and that his exploits on the remotest seaboards of the world would make the wildest fiction seem probable and tame?
Young Perry was helping to make history at an age when most boys are still in school, for, as a midshipman of seventeen, he stood beside Commodore Rodgers when he lighted the fuse of the “Long Tom” in the forecastle battery of the frigate President and sent a ball crashing into the British war-ship Belvidera—the first shot fired in the War of 1812. In the same ship and under the same commander he scoured the seas of northern Europe in a commerce-destroying raid which extended from the English Channel to the Arctic, during which the daring American was hunted by twenty British men-of-war, sailing, for safety’s sake, in pairs. As a young lieutenant in command of the Cyane he convoyed the first party of American negroes sent to West Africa to establish, under the name of Liberia, a country of their own. It was on this voyage that the character of the man who, in later years, was to revolutionize the commerce of the world first evidenced itself. Putting into Teneriffe, in the Canaries, for water and provisions, Perry, resplendent in “whites” and gold lace, went ashore to pay the Portuguese governor the customary call of ceremony. As he was taking leave of the governor he casually remarked that the Cyane, on leaving the harbor, would, of course, fire the usual salute. Whereupon the Portuguese official, a pompous royalist who had a deep-seated aversion to republican institutions and went out of his way to show his contempt for them, told the young commander that the shore batteries would return the salute less one gun, for, as he impudently remarked, Portugal considered herself superior to republics and could not treat them as equals. Perry, white with anger, told the governor that the nation which he had the honor to serve was the equal of any monarchy on earth, and that unless he received an assurance that his salute would be returned gun for gun, he would fire no salute at all. That afternoon the Cyane sailed past the batteries, over which flew the Portuguese flag, in a silence which unmistakably spelled contempt. Though personally Perry was the most peaceable of men, as the representative of the United States in distant oceans he perpetually carried a chip on his shoulder and defied any one to knock it off. A cannibal king tried it once, and—but of that you shall hear a little later.
A year or so after he had landed his party of negro colonists he visited the coast of cannibals and fevers again and at the mouth of the Mesurado River chose the site of the future capital of Liberia, which was named Monrovia in honor of President Monroe, thus establishing the first and only colony ever founded by the United States. His next commission was to wipe out the pirates who, shielding themselves under the flags of the new South American republics and assuming the thin disguise of privateersmen, were terrorizing commerce upon the Spanish main. Under Commodore David Porter he spent eight months under sail upon the Gulf, and when he at last turned his bowsprit toward the north, he had put an end to the depredations of the “dago robbers,” as his seamen called them. It was here, in fact, that the term “dago” as applied by Americans to foreigners of the Latin race began. The name of James, the Spaniards’ patron saint, has been indiscriminately bestowed, in its Spanish form, Iago, upon provinces, islands, towns, and rivers from one end of Spanish America to the other, Santiago, San Diego, Iago, and Diego being such constantly recurring names that the American sailors early fell into the custom of calling the natives of these parts “Diegos” or “dago men,” whence the slang term so universally used to-day.
About the time that the United States was celebrating its fiftieth birthday the government at Washington, thinking it high time to give the Europeans an object-lesson in the naval power of the oversea republic, ordered a squadron of war-ships to the Mediterranean, in many of whose ports the American flag was as unfamiliar as China’s dragon banner. The command of the expedition was given to Commodore Rodgers, who hoisted his pennant on the North Carolina, the finest and most formidable craft that had yet been launched from an American shipyard, and Perry went along as executive officer to his old chief. When the great ship, with the grim muzzles of her one hundred and two guns peering from her three tiers of port-holes, majestically entered the European harbors under her cloud of snowy canvas, the natives were goggle-eyed with admiration and amazement, for in those days most Europeans thought of America—when they gave it any thought at all—as a land of Indians, grizzly bears, and buckskin-clad frontiersmen. As executive officer, Perry’s duties comprised pretty much everything which needed to be done on deck. Whether in cocked hat and gold epaulets by day or in oilskins and sou’wester at night, he was regent of the ship and crew. The duties of the squadron were not confined to visits of ceremony, either, for one of the objects for which it had been sent was to teach the pirates who infested Levantine waters that it was as dangerous to molest vessels flying the American flag as to tamper with a stick of dynamite. During the Greek struggle for independence, which was then in progress, the Greek privateers had on more than one occasion been a trifle careless in differentiating between the vessels of neutral nations and those of their Turkish oppressors, and in May, 1825, they committed a particularly bad error of judgment by seizing a merchant ship from Boston. In those days the administration at Washington was as quick to resent such affronts as it is tardy nowadays, and no sooner had the American squadron arrived in Levantine waters than it sought an opportunity to teach the Greeks a lesson. An opportunity soon presented itself. Learning that a British merchantman, the Comet, had been seized by the Greeks, Rodgers ordered her to be recaptured and sent a boarding party of bluejackets and marines to do the business. Swarming up the bow-chains, the Americans gained the deck before the pirates realized just what was happening, though the ship was not taken without a desperate hand-to-hand struggle, in which Lieutenant Carr, singling out the pirate chief, killed him with his own hand. Thenceforward the Greeks, whenever they saw a vessel flying the stars and stripes, touched their hats, figuratively speaking. The North Carolina’s mission thus having been accomplished, in the spring of 1827 Perry ordered the boatswain to sound the welcome call: “All hands up anchor for home.”