The secretary’s clerk wrote January 14, 1852, “Commodore Perry will proceed to Washington and report to the Secretary of the Navy without delay.” The head of the Department added in autograph, “Report in person at the Department.” This time the trip to the Capital was made with something definite in view.
On the 6th of March, he received orders from the Department detaching him from the superintendence of United States Mail Steamers and transferring the command to Commodore Reany. He had, since January 9, 1849, been in active connection with steamship owners, manufacturers and inventors, and been engaged in testing the newest inventions and improvements in steam navigation. The transfer was duly made on the 8th, and on the 23d, we find Perry again in Washington holding long conversation with the Secretary of the Navy, Hon. W. A. Graham, on the outfit and personnel of the proposed Japan expedition. On the 24th, he received formal orders to command the East India squadron.
One of the first officers detailed to assist the Commodore was Lieut. Silas Bent who had been with Glynn on the Preble at Nagasaki. He was ordered to report on board the Mississippi. Perry’s “Fidus Achates,” Captain Henry A. Adams, and his special friends, Captains Franklin Buchanan, Sidney Smith Lee, were invited and gladly accepted. His exceeding care in the selection of the personnel[[24]] of the expedition is shown in a letter from the “Moorings” dated February 2, 1852, to Captain Franklin Buchanan. He expected them to embark by the first of April, and sent his ships ahead laden with coal for the war steamers to the Cape of Good Hope, and Mauritius. He congratulates his old friend on a new arrival in his household, “You certainly bid fair to have a great many grandchildren in the course of time. I already have eight.”
“In selecting your officers, pray be careful in choosing them of a subordinate and gentlemanlike character. We shall be obliged to govern in some measure, as McKeever says, by moral suasion. McIntosh, I see by the papers, has changed with Commander Pearson and leaves the Congress, and is now on his way home in the Falmouth. We shall now learn how the philanthropic principle of moral suasion answers.”
The reference is to the state of things consequent upon the abolition of flogging. Perry was to gather and lead to peaceful victory, the first American fleet governed without the lash.
| [24] | See complete list, vol. II. of his official Report. |
CHAPTER XXIX.
PREPARATIONS FOR JAPAN. AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE.
The charts used in the Japan expedition came mostly from Holland, and cost our government thirty thousand dollars. Perry does not seem to have been aware that Captain Mercator Cooper of Sag Harbor, Long Island, had brought home fairly good Japanese charts of the Bay of Yedo, more accurate probably than any which he was able to purchase. Captain Beechey of the B. M. S. Blossom, had surveyed carefully the seas around Riu Kiu. The large coast-line map of Japan, in four sheets, made on modern scientific principles by a wealthy Japanese who had expended his fortune and suffered imprisonment for his work, which was published posthumously, was not then accessible.
Intelligent Japanese have been eager to know, and more than one has asked the writer: “How did Perry get his knowledge of our country and people?” We answer that he made diligent study of books and men. He had asked for permission to purchase all necessary books at a reasonable price. Von Siebold’s colossal work was a mine of information from which European book-makers were beginning to quarry, as they had long done from Engelbert Kaempfer, but the importer’s price of Von Siebold’s Archiv was $503. The interest excited in England by the expedition caused the publication in London of a cheap reprint of Kaempfer.