“There seems indeed something peculiarly ingrained in the Portuguese race, which makes them take to slave-dealing and slave-hunting, as naturally as greyhounds take to chasing hares; and this observation applies not to one section of the race alone, but to Portuguese wherever they are to be found beyond the reach of European law. No modern race can be as slave-hunters within measurable distance of the Portuguese. Their exploits in this respect are written in the annals not only of the whole coast of Brazil, from Para, Uruguay, and along the Missiones of Paraguay, not only on the coast of Angola but throughout the interior of Africa. You may take up the journals of one traveller after another, of Burton, Livingstone, of Stanley, or of Cameron, and in what ever respects their accounts and opinions may differ, one point they are one and all entirely agreed on, namely, as to the pestilent and remorseless activity of the ubiquitous Portuguese slave-catcher.”
“Having examined the northern part of the coast from the Bessagoes shoals to Cape Mount,” writes Perry. “I took my departure for West Indies following the track of Homeward Bound Guinea-men.”
A run across the Atlantic brought the Shark to the West Indies. There diligent search was begun for Picaroons or pirates. American merchant vessels were convoyed beyond the coast of Cuba. The run northward brought the Shark to New York, January 17, 1822. In the violent change from the equator to our rugged climate, many of the Shark’s crew suffered from frost-bites.
A short but very active cruise in African waters had been finished. Despite the long calms, occasional tempests and the deadly land miasma, not a single man had died on the Shark. This unusual exemption from the disease was imputed by Perry under Providence, to the many precautions observed by him and to the skilful attentions of Dr. Wiley.
Matthew Perry was among the first to discover the underlying cause of the sailor’s malady—sea-scurvy. He believed it to be primarily due to mal-nutrition. He found the soil in which the disease grew was a compost of bad water, alcoholism, exposure, too exclusively salt diet, lack of vegetables, of ventilation, and of cleanliness on ship. The canning epoch inaugurated later by Americans, who, it is said, got their notions from air-tight fruit jars dug up from Pompeii, had not yet dawned, but Perry already put faith in succulents and the entire class of crucifiers, seeing in them the cross of health in his crusade against the scorbutic taint. Though not yet familiar with the marvelous power of the onion, and the juice of limes, he endeavored at all times to secure supplies of sauer-kraut, cabbages, radishes, and fruits rich in acids and sub-acids. He was emulous of the success of captains Cook and Parry who had succeeded so well in their voyages. He knew that in war, more men perished by disease than in battle. He lived to see the day when a ship was made a more healthy dwelling place than the average house, and when, through perfected dietic knowledge, and the skill of the preserver and hermetic sealer, sea-scurvy became so rare that a naval surgeon might pass a lifetime without meeting a case save in a hospital.
| [4] | See the Maryland Colonization Journal, vol. 2, p. 328 and the December number of the Liberia Herald 1845, for Perry’s Journal when Lieutenant of the Cyane. |
CHAPTER VIII.
FIGHTING PIRATES IN THE SPANISH MAIN.
James, the Spaniard’s patron saint, has been compelled to lend his name as “Iago” to innumerable towns, cities and villages. From Mexico to Patagonia in Spanish America, “Santiago,” “San Diego,” “Iago” and “Diego” are such frequently recurring vocables that the Yankee sailor calls natives of these countries “Dago men,” or “Diegos.” It is his slang name for foreigners of the Latin race. It is a relic of the old days when he knew them chiefly as pirates.
Perry’s next duty was to lend a hand against the “Diego” ship robbers of the Gulf, who had become an intolerable nuisance. The unsettled condition of the Central and South American colonies had set afloat thousands of starving and ragged patriots. Their prime object was the destruction of Spanish commerce, but tempted by the rich prizes of other nations, and speedily developing communistic ideas, they became truly catholic in their treatment of other peoples’ property, while the names which these cut-throats gave their craft were borrowed from holy writ and the calendar of the saints. Under the black flag, they degenerated into murderous pirates. Their own name was “Brethren of the coast.”