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.”
Emboldened by success, they formed organized companies of buccaneers and extended their depredations over the whole north Atlantic. Our southern commerce was particularly exposed. The accounts of piracy continually reaching our cities on the Atlantic coast, were accompanied with details of wanton cruelties inflicted on American seamen. The pirate craft were swift sailing schooners of from fifty to ninety tons burthen manned by crews of from twenty-five to one hundred men who knew every cove, crevice, nook and sinuous passage in the West India Archipelago. Watching like hawks for their prey, they would swoop down on the helpless quarry—British and American merchantmen—and rob, beat, burn and kill.
The squadron fitted out to exterminate these heroes of our yellow-covered novels consisted of the frigates, Macedonian and Congress, the sloops Adams and Peacock, with five brigs, the steam galliot Sea-gull, and several schooners; among which was Lieutenant Perry’s twelve-gun vessel the Shark. The whole was under the command of Commodore David Porter, the father of the present illustrious Admiral of the American navy.
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,
