Matthew Calbraith Perry: A Typical American Naval Officer. William Elliot Griffis

      The duty of ferreting out these pests was a laborious one in a trying climate. The commodore divided the whole West Indian coast into sections, each of which was thoroughly scoured by the cruisers and barges. The boat service was continuous, relieved by occasional hand-to-hand fights. Often the tasks were perplexing. Though belted and decorated with the universal knife, the quiet farmers in the fields, or salt makers on the coast, seemed innocent enough. As soon as inquiries were answered, and the visiting boat’s crew out of sight, they hied to a secluded cove. On the deck of a swift sailing light-draft barque or even open boat, these same men would stand transformed into blood-thirsty pirates, under black flags inscribed with the symbols of skull and bones, axe and hour glass.

      To the dangers of intricate navigation in unsurveyed and rarely visited channels, for even the Florida Keys were then unknown land, and their water ways unexplored labyrinths, and the fatigue of constant service at the oars, was added keen jealousy of the United States, felt by the Cubans, and shown by the Spanish authorities in many annoying ways.

      The acquisition of Cuba had even then been hinted at by Southern fire-eaters bent on keeping the area of African slavery intact, and even of extending it in order to balance the increasing area of freedom. This feeling, then confined to a section of a sectional party, and not yet shaped, as it afterwards was, into a settled policy and determination, roused the defiant jealousy of the Spaniards in authority, even though they might be personally anxious to see piracy exterminated. The Mexican war, waged in slavery’s behalf in the next generation, showed how well-grounded this jealousy was.

      The smaller craft sent to cope with the pirates of the Spanish Main were so different in bulk and appearance from the heavy frigates and ships of the line that they were dubbed, “The Mosquito Fleet.” The swift barges were named in accordance with this idea, after such tropical vermin as Mosquito, Midge, Sand-fly, Gnat and Gallinipper. The Sea-gull, an altered Brooklyn ferry-boat from the East river, and but half the size of those now in use, was equipped with masts. Under steam and sail she did good service.

      The Shark got off in the spring, and by May 4, 1822, she was at Vera Cruz. Perry had an opportunity to see the castle of Juan d’Ulloa and the Rich City of the Real Cross, which were afterwards to become so familiar to him.

      The pirates were soon in the clutch of men resolutely bent on their destruction. When, in June, Commodore Biddle obtained permission of the Captain General of Cuba to land boat’s crews on Spanish soil to pursue the pirates to the death, the end of the system was not far off. Still the ports of the Spanish Main were crowded with American ships waiting for convoy by our men-of-war, their crews fearing the cut-throats as they would Pawnees.

      In June, Perry with the Shark, in company with the Grampus, captured a notorious ship sailing under the black flag—the Bandara D’Sangare, and another of lesser fame. Meeting Commodore Biddle in the flag-ship, at sea, July 24, he put his prisoners, all of whom had Spanish names, on board the Congress. They were sent to Norfolk for trial. The sad news of the death of Lieutenant William Howard Allen of the Alligator, who had been killed by pirates, was also learned. The friend of Fitz-Greene Halleck, his memory has been embalmed in verse.

      By order of the commodore, Perry turned his prow again toward Africa. His visit, however, was of short duration, for on the 12th of December 1822, we find him in Norfolk, Virginia, finishing a cruise in which he had been two hundred and thirty-six days under sail, during which time he had boarded one hundred and sixty-six vessels, convoyed thirty, given relief to five in actual distress, and captured five pirates.

      Although the pirates no longer called for a whole squadron to police the Spanish Main, yet our commerce in the Gulf was now in danger from a new source. In 1822, Mexico entered upon another of her long series of revolutions. The native Mexican, Iturbide, abandoning the rôle of pliant military captain of the Spanish despot, assumed that of an American usurper.

      Suddenly exalted, May 18, 1822, from the barrack-room to the throne, he set the native battalions in motion against the Spanish garrisons then holding only the castle of San Juan d’Ulloa and a few minor fortresses. Santa Anna was then governor of Vera Cruz. Hostilities between the royalists and the citizens having already begun, our commerce was in danger of embarrassment.

      Perry with his old ship and crew left New York for Mexico. Before he arrived, the Spanish yoke had been totally overthrown and the National Representative Assembly proclaimed. Iturbide abdicated in March, 1823, and danger to our commerce was removed. Perry, relieved of further duty returned to New York, July 9, 1823, and enjoyed a whole summer quietly with his family.

      Perceiving the advantage of a knowledge of Spanish, Perry began to study the tongue of Cervantes. Though not a born linguist, he mastered the language so as to be during all his later life conversant with the standard literature, and fluent in the reading of its modern forms in speech, script and print. This knowledge was afterward, in the Mediterranean, in Africa, and in Mexico, of great value to him.

      Commodore Porter’s work in suppressing the West Indian free-booters was so well done, that piracy, on the Atlantic coast, has ever since been but a memory. Unknown to current history, it has become the theme only of the cheap novelist and now has, even in fiction, the flavor of antiquity.

      The Shark, the first war-ship under Perry’s sole command, mounted twelve guns, measured one hundred and seventy-seven tons, cost $23,267, and had a complement of one hundred men. Her term of life was twenty-five years. She began her honorable record under Lieutenant Perry, was the first United States vessel of war to pass through the Straits of Magellan, from east to west, and was lost in the Columbia river in 1846.

CHAPTER IX.

       THE AMERICAN LINE-OF-BATTLE SHIP.

       Table of Contents

      The line-of-battle ship, which figured so largely in the navies of a half century or more ago, was a man-of-war carrying seventy-four or more guns. It was the class of ships in which the British took especial pride, and the American colonists, imitating the mother country, began the construction of one, as early as the Revolution. Built at Portsmouth, this first American “ship-of-the-line” was, when finished, presented to France. Humpreys, our great naval contractor in 1797 carried out the true national idea, by condensing the line-of-battle ship into a frigate, and “line ships” proper were not built until after 1820. One of the first of these was the North Carolina, commanded by the veteran John Rodgers.

      The first visit of an American line-of-battle ship to Europe, in 1825, under Commodore Rodgers, was, in its effect, like that of the iron-clad Monitor Miantonomah under Farragut in 1865. It showed that the United States led the world in ships and guns. The North Carolina was then the largest, the most efficient and most formidable vessel that ever crossed the Atlantic.

      Rodgers was justly proud of his flag-ship and fleet, for this was the golden era of American ship-building, and no finer craft ever floated than those launched from our shipyards.

      The old hulk of the North Carolina now laid up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and used as a magazine, receiving-ship, barracks, prison, and guard-house, gives little idea of the vision of life and beauty which the “seventy-four” of our fathers was.

      The great ship, which then stirred the hearts of the nation moved under a mighty cloud of canvas, and mounted in three tiers one-hundred and two guns, which threw a mass of iron outweighing that fired by any vessel then afloat. Her battery exceeded by three hundred and four pounds that of the Lord Nelson—the heaviest British ship afloat and in commission. The weight of broadside shot thrown by the one larger craft before her—that of the Spanish Admiral St. Astraella Trinidad,^[5] which Nelson sunk at Trafalgar—fell short of that of the North Carolina. Our “wooden walls” were then high, and the stately vessel under her mass of snowy canvas was a sight that filled a true sailor with profound emotion. Mackenzie in his “Year in Spain” has fitly described his feelings as that sight burst upon him.

      So perfect were the proportions, that her size was under-valued until men noticed carefully the great mass moving