Chapter VIII: When We Fought the Japanese 277 (7)

All the companies were now pressing forward and pouring over the intrenchments, the Mexicans sullenly giving way before them. Meanwhile the left wing, under Major Gilpin, had scaled the heights, swarmed over the breastworks, and driven out the enemy, while a company under Captain Hughes had burst into a battery defended by trenches filled with Mexican infantry, which they had literally cut to pieces, and had killed or captured the artillerymen as they were endeavoring to set off the guns. Though the Mexican commander, General Heredia, made a desperate attempt to rally his panic-stricken troops under cover of repeated gallant charges by the cavalry under Condé, the men were too far gone with terror to pay any heed to the frantic appeals of their officers. With the American cavalry clinging to its flanks and dealing it blow upon savage blow, the retreat of the Mexican army quickly turned into a rout, the splendid force that had marched out of Chihuahua a few days before returning to it a beaten, cowed, and bleeding rabble. The battle of the Sacramento lasted three hours and a half, and in that time an American force of nine hundred and twenty-four effective men--the rest were teamsters--utterly routed a Mexican army of four thousand two hundred and twenty men fighting from behind supposedly impregnable intrenchments. In killed, wounded, and prisoners the Mexicans lost upward of nine hundred men; the Americans had four killed and seven wounded. The battle of the Sacramento was in many respects the most wonderful ever fought by American arms. For sheer audacity, disproportionate numbers, and sweeping success the battle of Manila Bay may be set down as its only rival. The only land battle at all approaching it was that of New Orleans, but there the Americans fought at home, on their own soil, behind fortifications. At Sacramento Doniphan’s men attacked a fortified position held by troops outnumbering them more than four to one. They were in a strange land, thousands of miles from home. They were in rags, suffering from lack of food. They believed that they had been abandoned by their own government and left to their fate. In case of defeat there was no hope of succor, no help--nothing but inevitable destruction. That is why I say that the exploit of these Missourians has never been surpassed, if, indeed, it has ever been equalled in the annals of the world’s warfare.

There is little more to tell. The following day, with the regimental bands playing “Hail Columbia” and “Yankee Doodle,” Colonel Doniphan and his men entered the city of Chihuahua in triumph. For two months they held undisputed possession of the metropolis of northern Mexico; the city was cleaned and policed; law and order were rigidly enforced and the rights of the citizens strictly respected. On the 28th of April, 1847, in pursuance of orders received from General Wool, the expedition evacuated Chihuahua and set out across an arid and desolate country for Saltillo, covering the six hundred and seventy-five miles in twenty-five days. After being reviewed and publicly thanked by General Taylor, the Missourians started on the last stage of their wonderful march. Reaching Matamoros, at the mouth of the Rio Grande, they took ship for New Orleans, whose citizens went mad with enthusiasm. Their journey by steamboat up the Mississippi was one continuous ovation; at every town they passed the whistles shrieked, the bells rang, and the townspeople cheered themselves hoarse at sight of the sun-browned veterans in their faded and tattered uniforms. On July 1, after an absence of a little more than a year, to the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” and “Home, Sweet Home,” Doniphan and his One Thousand once again set foot on the soil of old Missouri. Going out from the western border of their State, they re-entered it from the east, having made a circuit equal to a fourth of the circumference of the globe, providing for themselves as they went, driving before them forces many times the strength of their own, leaving law and order and justice in their wake, and returning with trophies taken on battle-fields whose names few Americans had ever heard before. It is a sad commentary on the gratitude of republics that the government never acknowledged, either by promotion, decoration, or the thanks of Congress, the invaluable services of Alexander Doniphan; there is no statue to him in any town or city of his State; not even a mention of his immortal expedition can be found in the school histories of the nation he served so well. He lived for forty years after his great march and lies buried under a granite shaft in the cemetery at Liberty, Mo. Though forgotten by his countrymen, the brown-faced folk below the Rio Grande still tell of the days when the great captain came riding down from the north to invade a nation at the head of a thousand men.

WHEN WE FOUGHT THE JAPANESE

WHEN WE FOUGHT THE JAPANESE

“... 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.”

So well had Perry performed his exacting duties that when the _Concord_, of eighteen guns, was completed, two years later, he was given command of her and instructed to carry our envoy, John Randolph, of Roanoke, to Russia. While lying in the harbor of Cronstadt the _Concord_ was visited by Czar Nicholas I--the first Russian sovereign to set foot on the deck-planks of an American war-ship. He was so pleased with what he saw that he invited Perry to a private audience, during which the young American naval officer and the Great White Czar chatted and smoked with all the informality of old friends. Before the interview was over the ruler of all the Russias offered Perry an admiral’s commission in the Russian service, but the latter, recalling, no doubt, the unfortunate experience of his great countryman, John Paul Jones, while admiral in the navy of Czar Nicholas’s grandmother, the Empress Catherine, declined the flattering offer. The Yankee sailorman’s next experience with the Lord’s anointed was on the other side of Europe. Acting under instructions to leave the visiting cards of the United States at every port of importance in the Old World--for nations are just as punctilious about paying and returning calls as society women--Perry dropped anchor one fine spring morning in the harbor of Alexandria. Invited to dine at Ras-el-Tin Palace with Mohammed Ali, the founder of the Khedival dynasty, the brilliancy and efficiency of the young American impressed the conqueror of the Sudan as much as they had the conqueror of Poland, and when Perry and his officers left they took with them, as presents from the Khedive, thirteen gold-mounted, jewel-incrusted swords, from which, by the way, was adopted the “Mameluke grip” now used in our navy.

When Andrew Jackson sat himself down in the White House, in 1829, he promptly inaugurated the same straight-from-the-shoulder-smash-bang foreign policy which had characterized him as a soldier and used the navy to back up his policy. During the period from 1809 to 1812 the Neapolitan Government, first under Joseph Bonaparte and then under Joachim Murat, had, under the terms of Napoleon’s universal embargo, confiscated numerous American ships and cargoes, the claims filed with the State Department in Washington aggregating upward of one million seven hundred thousand dollars. No sooner had Jackson taken his oath of office, therefore, than he appointed John Nelson minister to the kingdom of Naples and ordered him to collect these claims. And in order that the Neapolitans, who were an evasive lot and kissed every coin good-by before parting with it, might be convinced that the United States meant business, Commodore John Patterson--the same who had aided Jackson in the defense of New Orleans--was given a squadron of half a dozen war-ships and instructed to back up the minister’s demands by the menace of his guns. The force at Patterson’s disposal consisted of three fifty-gun frigates and three twenty-gun corvettes, which sufficed, according to the plan evolved by the commodore, for a naval drama in six acts. Almost at the moment of sailing the commander of the _Brandywine_ was taken ill, and our friend Perry was ordered to replace him. (Did you ever hear of such a persistent run of luck?) Now, of all the Americans who visit Naples each year, I very much doubt if there is one in a hundred thousand who is aware that an American war fleet once lay in that lovely harbor and threatened--in diplomatic language, of course--to blow that charming city off the map if a little account which it had come to collect was not paid then and there. When Minister Nelson went ashore in the _Brandywine’s_ gig, called upon the Neapolitan minister of state, Count Cassaro, and intimated that the United States would appreciate an immediate settlement of its account, which was long overdue, the wily Neapolitan almost laughed in his face. Why should the government of Ferdinand II, notorious for its corruption at home, pay any attention to the demands of an almost unknown republic five thousand miles away? The very idea was laughable, preposterous, absurd. No! the Yankee envoy, with but a solitary war-ship to back him up, would not get a single _soldo_. Very well, said Minister Nelson, the climate was pleasant and the Neapolitan Government might shortly change its mind--in fact he thought that it undoubtedly would--and he would hang around. So Perry dropped the _Brandywine’s_ anchor under the shadow of Capadimonte, and he and Minister Nelson smoked and chatted contentedly enough in the pleasant shade of the awnings. Three days later another floating fortress, black guns peering from her ports and a flag of stripes and stars trailing from her stern, sailed majestically up the bay. It was the frigate _United States_. Again Minister Nelson called on Count Cassaro, and again his request was refused, but this time a shade less curtly. Nor did King Bomba, in his palace on the hill, laugh quite so loudly. Four days slipped away and _splash_ went the anchor of the _Concord_ alongside her sisters. King Bomba began to look anxious, and his minister was plainly worried, but still the money remained unpaid. Two days later the _John Adams_ came sweeping into the harbor under a cloud of snowy canvas and hove to so as to bring her broadside to bear upon the city--whereupon Count Cassaro sent hurriedly for some local bankers. When the fifth ship sailed in, the city was agog with excitement, and the Neapolitans had almost reached the point of being honest--but not quite. But the report that a sixth ship was entering the harbor brought the desired result, for Count Cassaro called for his carriage, hastened to the American envoy, and asked him whether he would prefer the money in drafts or cash.

Though the next ten years of Perry’s life were spent on shore duty, as the result of the extraordinary work he performed during that comparatively brief time, he came to be known as “the educator of the navy.” In those ten years he founded the Brooklyn Naval Lyceum; commanded the _Fulton_, the first American war vessel independent of wind and tide; discovered the value of the ram as a weapon of offense and thereby changed the tactics of sea-fights from “broadside to broadside” to “prow on”; revolutionized the naval architecture of the world; modernized the lighthouse system along our coasts; substituted the use of shells for solid shot in our navy; and established the School of Gun Practice at Sandy Hook. Any one of these was an achievement of which a man would have good reason to be proud. Any one of them was a service which merited the appreciation of the nation. In 1840 he was rewarded with the rank of commodore, and thenceforward the vessel that carried him flew the “broad pennant.” Yet all of his later illustrious services under the red, the white, and the blue pennants added nothing to his pay, permanent rank, or government reward, for until the year 1862 there was no office in the American navy carrying higher pay than that of captain.

As a result of the Webster-Ashburton treaty, whereby England and the United States bound themselves to suppress the slave-trade, Perry was given command of an eighty-gun squadron, and in 1842 was ordered to the west coast of Africa for the purpose of stamping out the traffic in “black ivory” and, incidentally, to protect the negro colony he had established in Liberia a quarter of a century before from the aggressions of the native rulers. Though the framers of the treaty were unquestionably sincere in their desire to stamp out the traffic in human beings, and though both the British and American navies made every effort to enforce it, these efforts were nullified by the fact that for a number of years the courts of England and the United States refused to convict a slaver unless captured with the slaves actually on board. The absurdity--and tragedy--of this ruling was emphasized by the case of the slaver _Brilliante_. On one of her dashes from the west coast of Africa to the Gulf coast of the United States her captain found himself becalmed and surrounded by four war-ships. Aware that he would certainly be boarded unless the wind quickly rose, he stretched his entire cable chain on deck, suspended it clear of everything, and shackled to it his anchor, which hung on the bow ready to drop. To this chain he lashed the six hundred slaves he had aboard. He waited until he could hear the oars of the boarding parties close at hand--then he cut the anchor. As it fell it dragged overboard the cable with its human freight, and though the men-of-war’s men heard the shrieks of the victims and found their fetters lying on the deck, the fact remained that there were no slaves aboard; so, in conformity with the rulings of the learned judges in Washington and London, there was nothing left for the boarders but to depart amid the jeers of the slaver’s captain and crew.

Upon reaching the west coast, known then, as now, as “the white man’s graveyard,” the first thing to which Perry turned his attention was the settlement of an outstanding score with the tribesmen of Berribee, who inhabited that region which now comprises the French Ivory Coast. A few months prior to his visit the untutored savages of this coast of death had enticed ashore the captain and crew of the American schooner _Mary Carver_ and, after unspeakable tortures, had murdered them. For three hours Captain Carver was subjected to torments almost incredible in the fiendish ingenuity they displayed, finally, when all but dead, being bound and turned over to the women and children of the tribe, who amused themselves by sticking thorns into his flesh until he was a human pincushion. Then they cooked and ate him. It was with uneasy consciences, therefore, that the natives saw four great black ships, flying the same strange flag that they had taken from the _Mary Carver_, drop anchor off Berribee one red-hot November morning.

Commodore Perry sent a message to the King, who bore the pleasing name of Crack-O, that it would be better for his health as well as for that of the white men trading along the coast if he moved his capital a considerable distance inland. The ebony monarch sent back the suggestion that the matter be thrashed out at a palaver to be held in the royal kraal two days later. On the morning appointed Commodore Perry, with twelve boatloads of sailors and marines, landed with considerable difficulty through the booming surf and, escorted by fifty natives armed with rusty muskets of an obsolete pattern, marched through the jungle to the palaver house. As he entered the town it did not escape the keen eye of the American commander that there was a noticeable absence of natives to greet him; he guessed, and rightly, that the warriors were in ambush and that the women and children had taken to the bush. So, before entering the palaver house, he took the precaution of posting sentries at the gates of the stockade and of drawing up his men close by with orders to break into the kraal if they heard a disturbance. Then he strode into the presence of King Crack-O, and two strong men stood face to face. The African ruler was a gigantic negro with a face as ugly as sin and the frame of a prize-fighter, his tremendous muscles playing like snakes under a skin made shiny with cocoanut oil. Flung over his massive shoulders was the royal robe of red and yellow, and tilted rakishly on his fuzzy skull was a dilapidated top-hat--the emblem of royalty throughout native Africa. Behind him, leaning against the wall and within easy reach, was his trowel-bladed spear, a vicious weapon with a six-foot shaft which, in the hands of a man who knew how to use it, could be driven through a three-inch plank. Twelve notches on its haft told their own grim story. Taking him by and large, he was a mighty formidable figure, was his Majesty King Crack-O of Berribee, though the American commodore, who stood six feet two in his stockings and was built in proportion, was not exactly puny himself. As the Berribee tongue was not included in the remarkable list of languages of which Perry had made himself master, and as King Crack-O’s knowledge of English was confined to such odds and ends of profanity as he had picked up from seamen and traders, a voluble African named Yellow Will, who proved himself a most impudent and barefaced liar, did the interpreting. It was the interpreter, in fact, who precipitated the shindy, for his attitude quickly became so insolent that Perry, who was a short-tempered man under the best of circumstances, shook his fist under his nose and thundered that he would either speak the truth or get a flogging. Terrified by the violence of the explosion, the interpreter bolted for the gate, and the sentry, who believed in acting first and inquiring afterward, levelled his rifle and shot him dead. Instantly the royal enclosure was in an uproar. King Crack-O snatched at his spear, but, quick as the big black was, the American commodore was quicker. Perry, who, despite his size, was as quick on his feet as a professional boxer, hurled himself upon Crack-O before he could get to his weapon and caught him by the throat, while a sergeant of marines, who had burst in at sound of the scuffle, shot the King through the body. Though mortally wounded, the negro ruler fought with the ferocity of a gorilla, again and again hurling off the half dozen sailors who attempted to make him prisoner, being subdued only when a marine brought a rifle barrel down on his head and stretched him senseless. The forest encircling the royal kraal was by this time vomiting armed and yelling warriors, who opened fire with their antiquated muskets, a compliment which the bluejackets and marines returned with deadly effect. Bound hand and foot, the wounded King was taken out to the flag-ship, where he died the next morning. Before departing, the sailors touched a match to his mud-and-wattle capital, though not before they had recovered the flag taken from the ill-fated _Mary Carver_, and in twenty minutes the town was a heap of smoking ashes. Moving slowly down the coast, Perry landed punitive expeditions at every village of importance, drove back the tribesmen, destroyed their crops, confiscated their cattle, and burned their towns. News travels in Africa by the “underground railway” as though by wireless, and the effect of this powder-and-ball policy was quickly felt along a thousand miles of coast, the tribal chieftains hastening in, under flags of truce, “to talk one big palaver, to pay plenty bullock, to no more fight white man.” Thus was concluded one of those “little wars” which have done so much to make the red-white-and-blue flag respected at the uttermost ends of the earth, but of which our people seldom hear.

In 1846 came the war with Mexico and with it still another opportunity for Perry to add to his reputation. Opportunity seemed, indeed, to be forever hammering at his door--and he never let the elusive jade escape him. When Scott found that his artillery was unable to effect a breach in the walls of Vera Cruz, he asked Perry, who was in charge of the naval operations in the Gulf, for the loan of some heavy ordnance from the fleet, saying that his soldiers would do the handling. “Where the guns go the men go, too,” responded Perry--and they did. Landing the great guns from his war-ships, he manned them with his own crews, pushed them up to within eight hundred yards of the Mexican fortifications, and hammered them to pieces with an efficiency and despatch which amazed the army officers, who had never taken the sailor into consideration as a fighting factor on land. It was Perry’s guns, served by the bluejackets he had trained and aimed by officers who had learned their business at the School of Gun Practice he had founded, which opened a gate through the walls of Vera Cruz for Scott’s triumphant advance on the Mexican capital.

Perry had long advocated the value of sailors trained as infantry, and this campaign gave him an opportunity to show his critics that he knew what he was talking about. Forming the first American naval brigade ever organized, he moved slowly down the Gulf coast, landing and capturing every town he came to, until the whole littoral from the Rio Grande to Yucatan was in his possession. At the taking of Tabasco--now known as San Juan Bautista--the novel sight was presented of the commander-in-chief of the American naval forces leading the landing parties in person. The capital of the state of Tabasco lies in the heart of the rubber country, some seventy miles up the Tabasco River, and only eighteen degrees above the equator. The expedition against it consisted of forty boats, conveying eleven hundred men. This was new work for American sailors, for up to that time our naval traditions consisted of squadron fights in line, ship-to-ship duels and boarding parties. In this case, however, a flotilla was to ascend a narrow and tortuous river for seventy miles through a densely wooded region, which afforded continuous cover for riflemen, and then to disembark and attack heavy shore batteries defended by a force many times the strength of their own. As the long line of boats reached the hairpin turn in the river known as the Devil’s Bend, the dense jungle which lined both sides of the stream suddenly blazed with musketry and the boats were swept with a rain of lead. Perry, who was standing in an exposed position under the awnings of the leading boat, his field-glasses glued to his eyes, escaped death by the breadth of a hair. As the spurts of flame and smoke leaped from the wall of shrubbery he roared the order, “Fire at will!” and the fusillade of small arms that ensued riddled the jungle and effectually put to flight the Mexicans.

When within a few miles of the town it was found that the Mexicans had placed obstructions in the channel in such a manner that they would have to be blown up before the boats could pass. And for this Perry would not wait. Directing the gunners to sweep the beach with grape, he gave the order: “Prepare to land!” He himself took the tiller of the leading boat. Reaching the line of obstructions in the river, he suddenly steered straight for the shore and, rising in his boat, called in a voice which echoed over river and jungle: “Three cheers, my lads, and give way all!” Responding with three thunderous hurrahs, the sailors bent to their oars and raced toward the shore as the college eights race down the river at Poughkeepsie. Perry was the first to land. Followed by his flag-captain and his aides, he dashed up the almost perpendicular bank in the face of a scattering rifle fire and unfurled his broad pennant in sight of the whole line of boats. Quickly the marines and sailors landed and cleared the underbrush of snipers. Then, with a cloud of skirmishers thrown out on either flank, a company of pioneers in advance to clear the road, and squads of bluejackets marching fan-fashion, dragging their field-pieces behind them, the column moved on Tabasco with the burly commodore tramping at its head. The thermometer--for it was in June--stood at 130 degrees in the shade--and there was no shade. Man after man fainted from heat and exhaustion. Miasma rose in clouds from the jungle. The pitiless sun beat down from a sky of brass. The country was so swampy that the pioneers had to fell trees and build bridges before the column could advance. Every few minutes a gun would sink to the hubs in quicksand and a whole company would have to man the drag-ropes and haul it out. This overland march, through a roadless and pestilential jungle, was one of the most remarkable exploits and certainly one of the least known of the entire war.

The flotilla left in the river had, meanwhile, succeeded in blowing up the obstructions and, moving up the stream, shelled the Mexican fortifications from the rear while Perry and his sweating men prepared to carry them by storm. Waiting until the straggling column closed up and the men had a few moments in which to rest, Perry formed his command into “company front,” and signalled to his bugler. As the brazen strains of the “charge” pealed out the line of sweating, panting, cheering men, led by the grizzled commodore himself, pistol in one hand and cutlass in the other, swept at a run up the steep main street of the city with the ships’ bands playing them into action with “Yankee Doodle.” In five minutes it was all over but the shouting. The Mexican garrison had fled, and our flag waved in triumph over the city which gave the sauce its name. The capture of Tabasco, whose commercial importance was second only to that of Vera Cruz, was the last important naval operation of the war. Since the fall of Vera Cruz, Perry and his jack-tars had captured six fortress-defended cities, had taken ninety-three pieces of artillery, had forced neutrality on the great, rich province of Yucatan, had established an American customs service at each of the captured ports, and had found time in between to build a naval hospital on the island of Salmadina, which saved hundreds of lives. And yet but few of our people are aware that Matthew Perry even took part in the war with Mexico.

Perry’s service in Russia, Egypt, Italy, Africa, the West Indies, and Mexico was, however, but a preparatory course for the great adventure on which he was destined to embark, for, as a result of the extraordinary fund of experience and information he had gained on foreign seaboards, he was selected to command the expedition which the American Government had determined to send to Japan in an attempt to open up that empire to commerce and civilization. Now, you must not lose sight of the fact that the Japan of sixty years ago was quite a different country from the Japan of to-day. The Japanese of 1853 were as ultra-exclusive and as pleased with themselves as are the members of the Newport set. They wanted no outsiders in their country, and they did not have the slightest desire to play in any one else’s back yard. All they asked was to be let alone. But no nation can successfully oppose the march of civilization. It must either welcome progress or go under. For three centuries every maritime power in Europe had attempted to open up Japan, and always they had met with failure. But about the middle of the nineteenth century the United States decided to take a hand in the game. With the conquest and settlement of California; the increase of American commerce with China; the growth of American whale-fisheries in Eastern seas, in which ten thousand Americans were employed; the development of steam traffic and the consequent necessity for coaling stations, it became increasingly evident to the frock-coated gentlemen in Washington that the opening of the empire of the Mikado was a necessity which could not much longer be delayed.

Thus it came about that the morning of July 8, 1853, saw a squadron of black-hulled war-ships--the _Mississippi_, _Susquehanna_, _Plymouth_, and _Saratoga_--sailing into the Straits of Uraga and into Japanese history. And on the bridge of the flag-ship, his telescope glued to his eye, was our old friend, Matthew Calbraith Perry. The Straits of Uraga, I should explain, form the entrance to the Bay of Tokio, whose sacred waters had, up to that time, never been desecrated by the hulls of foreign war-ships. But Perry was never worried about lack of precedent. At five in the afternoon his ships steamed in within musket-shot of Uraga, and, at the shrill signal of the boatswains’ pipes, their anchors went rumbling down. A moment later a string of signal-flags fluttered from the flag-ship in a message which read: “Have no communication with the shore, have none from the shore.” Perry, you see, had spent the three preceding years in preparing for this expedition by learning all that he could of the Japanese character and customs, and he had not spent them for naught. He had determined that, when it came to being really snobbish and exclusive, he would make the Japanese, who had theretofore held the record for that sort of thing, look like amateurs. And he did. For when the captain of the port, in his ceremonial dress of hempen cloth and lacquered hat, put off in a twelve-oared barge to inquire the business of the strangers, a marine sentry at the top of the flag-ship’s ladder brusquely motioned him away as though he were of no more importance than a tramp. Then came the vice-governor, flying the trefoil flag and with an escort of armored spearmen, but he met with no more consideration than the port-captain. The American ships were about as hospitable as so many icebergs. Indeed, it was not until he had explained that the governor was prohibited by law from boarding a foreign vessel that the vice-governor was permitted to set foot on the sacred deck-planks of the flag-ship. Even then he was not permitted to see the mighty and illustrious excellency who was in command of the squadron; no, indeed. As befitted his inferior rank, he was received by a very stiff, very haughty, very condescending young lieutenant who interrupted the flowery address of the dazed official by telling him that the Americans considered themselves affronted by the filthy shore boats which hovered about them, and that if they did not depart instantly they would be fired on. After the vice-governor had gone to the rail and motioned the inquisitive boats away, the lieutenant informed him that the illustrious commander of the mighty squadron bore an autograph letter from his Excellency the President of the United States to the Mikado, and that he proposed to steam up to Tokio and deliver it in person. When the vice-governor heard this he nearly fainted. For a fleet of barbarian war-ships to anchor off the sacred city, the capital of the empire, the residence of the son of heaven, was impossible, unthinkable, sacrilegious. The very thought of it paralyzed him with fear. When he carried the news of what the Americans proposed doing to the governor, that official changed his mind about the illegality of his setting foot on a foreign ship, and the following morning, with a retinue which looked like the chorus of a comic opera, he went in state to the flag-ship to expostulate. But the commodore refused to see the governor, just as he had refused to see his subordinate, and that crestfallen official, his feelings sadly ruffled, was forced to content himself with a brief conversation with Commander Buchanan, who told him that, unless arrangements were made at once for delivering the President’s letter to a direct representative of the Mikado, Commodore Perry was unalterably determined on steaming up to Tokio and delivering the letter to the Emperor himself. From beginning to end of the interview, the American officer, who, I expect, enjoyed the performance hugely, resented the slightest lack of ceremony on the governor’s part and did not hesitate to give evidence of his displeasure when that bedeviled official omitted anything which the American thought he ought to do. At length the now deeply impressed Japanese agreed to despatch a messenger to Tokio for further instructions, and to this the Americans, with feigned reluctance, agreed, adding, however, that if an answer was not received within three days they would move up to the capital and learn the reason why.

The appearance of American war-ships in the Bay of Tokio was a mighty shock to the Japanese. What right had a foreign nation to impose on them a commerce which they did not want; a friendship which they did not seek? The alarm-bells clanged throughout the empire. Messengers on reeking horses tore through every town spreading the astounding news. Spears were sharpened, and ancient armor was dragged from dusty chests. Night and day could be heard the clangor of the smiths forging weapons of war. Away with the barbarians! To arms! _Jhoi! Jhoi!_ Buddhists wore away their rosaries invoking Kartikiya, the god of war, and Shinto priests fasted while they called on the sea and the storm to destroy the impious invaders of the Nipponese motherland. The hidebound formality of untold centuries was swept away in this hour of common danger, and for the first time in Japanese history high and low alike were invited to offer suggestions as to what steps should be taken for the protection of the nation and the preservation of the national honor. It didn’t take the wiseheads long, however, to decide that compliance was better than defiance; so, on the last of the three days of grace granted by the Americans, the governor in his gorgeous robes of office once more boarded the _Susquehanna_ and, with many genuflections, informed the officer designated to meet him that the letter from the President would be received a few days later, with all the pomp and ceremony which the Imperial Government knew how to command, in a pavilion which would be erected on the beach near Uraga for the purpose, by two peers of the empire who had been designated by the Mikado as his personal representatives.

On the morning of July 14 the squadron weighed anchor and moved up so as to command the place where the ceremony was to be held. Carpenters, mat makers, tapestry hangers, and decorators sent from the capital had been working night and day, and under their skilful hands a great pavilion, as though by the wave of a magician’s wand, had sprung up on the beach. When all was in readiness the governor and his suite, their silken costumes ablaze with gold embroidery, pulled out to the flag-ship to escort the commodore to the shore. As the Japanese stepped aboard, a signal called fifteen launches and cutters from the other ships of the squadron to the side of the _Susquehanna_. Officers, bluejackets, and marines in all the glory of full dress piled into them, and, led by Commander Buchanan’s gig, they headed for the shore, the oars of the American sailors rising and falling in beautiful unison. As the procession of boats drew out to its full length, the bright flags, the gorgeous banners, the barbaric costumes of the Japanese, the leather shakoes of the marines, and the scarlet tunics of the bandsmen, with the turquoise sea for a foreground and the great white cone of Fujiyama rising up behind, combined to form a never-to-be-forgotten picture. When the boats were half-way to the landing stage, a flourish of bugles sounded from the flag-ship, the marine guard presented arms, and Commodore Perry, resplendent in cocked hat and gold-laced uniform, attended by side boys and followed by a glittering staff, descended the gangway and entered his barge, while the _Susquehanna’s_ guns roared out a salute. On the shore a guard of honor composed of American sailors and marines was drawn up to receive him. As he set foot on the soil of Japan the troops presented arms, the officers saluted, the drums gave the three ruffles, the band burst into the American anthem, and the colors swept the ground. Nothing had been left undone which would be likely to impress the ceremony-loving Japanese, and the effect produced was spectacular enough to have satisfied P. T. Barnum. The land procession was formed with the same attention to ceremonial and display. First came a hundred marines in the picturesque uniform of the period, marching with mechanical precision; after them came a hundred bluejackets with the roll of the sea in their gait, while at the head of the column was a marine band, ablaze with gold and scarlet. Behind the bluejackets walked Commodore Perry, guarded by two gigantic negroes--veritable Jack Johnsons in physique and stature--preceded by two ship’s boys bearing the mahogany caskets containing Perry’s credentials and the President’s letter, the delivery of which was the reason for all this extraordinary display.

As the glittering procession entered the pavilion the two counsellors of the empire who had been designated by the Mikado to receive the letter rose and stood in silence. When the governor of Uraga, acting as master of ceremonies, intimated that all was ready, the two boys advanced and handed their caskets to the negroes. These, opening in succession the rosewood caskets and the envelopes of scarlet cloth, displayed the presidential letter and its accompanying credentials--impressive documents written on vellum, bound in blue velvet, and fringed with seals of gold. Upon the master of ceremonies announcing that the imperial high commissioners were ready to receive the letter, the negroes returned the imposing documents to the boys, who slowly advanced the length of the hall and deposited them in a box of scarlet lacquer which had been brought from Tokio for the purpose. Again a frozen silence pervaded the assemblage. Then Perry, speaking through an interpreter, paid his respects to the immobile functionaries and announced that he would return for an answer to the letter in the following spring. When some of the officials anxiously inquired if he would come with all four ships, he sententiously replied: “With many more.”

Although he had announced that he would not revisit Japan until the spring, when Perry learned that the French and Russians were hastily preparing expeditions to be sent to Tokio for the purpose of counteracting American influence, he decided to advance the date of his return, entering the Bay of Tokio for the second time on February 12, 1854, thus getting ahead of his European rivals. This time he had with him a really imposing armada: the _Susquehanna_, _Mississippi_, _Powhatan_, _Macedonian_, _Southampton_, _Lexington_, _Vandalia_, _Plymouth_, and _Saratoga_. On this occasion he refused to stop at Uraga and, much to the consternation of the Japanese, steamed steadily up the bay and anchored off Yokohama, within sight of the capital itself. The negotiations which ensued occupied several days, during which Perry insisted on the same pomp and ceremony, and took the same high-handed course that characterized his former visit. Noticing that the grounds surrounding the treaty house had been screened in by large mats, he inquired the reason, and upon being informed that it was done so that the Americans might not see the country, he said that he considered that the nation he represented was insulted and ordered that the screens instantly be removed. That was the sort of attitude that the Japanese understood, and thereafter they treated Perry with even more profound respect. The negotiations were brought to a conclusion on the 31st of March, 1854, when the terms of the treaty whereby the empire of Japan was opened to American commerce were finally agreed upon. Thus was recorded one of the greatest diplomatic triumphs in our history. As Washington Irving wrote to Commodore Perry: “You have gained for yourself a lasting name and have done it without shedding a drop of blood or inflicting misery on a human being.”

But Perry’s accomplishment had a sequel, and a bloody one. The treaty which admitted the foreigner precipitated civil war in Japan. Although for two hundred and fifty years the Japanese had been at peace and their sword-blades were rusty from lack of use, the embers of rebellion had long been smouldering, and the act that admitted the alien served to fan them into the flame of open revolt. The trouble was that the tycoon--the viceroy, the mouthpiece of the Mikado, the power behind the throne--had become all-powerful, while the Mikado himself, as the result of a policy of seclusion that had been forced upon him, had become but a puppet, a figurehead. As the treaty with the United States had been signed under the authority of the tycoon, the rebels took up arms in a double-barrelled cause: to restore the Mikado to his old-time authority and to expel the “hairy barbarians,” as the foreigners were pleasantly called. The insurrectionists, who represented the powerful Choshiu and Satsuma clans, induced the Mikado to issue an edict setting June 25, 1863, as a date by which all foreigners should be expelled from the empire. The tycoon, though bound to the United States and the European powers by the most solemn treaties, found himself helpless. He promptly sent in his resignation, but the Mikado, coerced by the rebellious clansmen, refused to accept it and left the unhappy viceroy to wriggle out of the predicament as best he could.

Meanwhile the leaders of the Choshiu clan seized and proceeded to fortify and mine the Straits of Shimonoseki, the great highway of foreign commerce forming the entrance to the inland sea, which at that point narrows down to a channel three miles in length and less than a mile in width, through which the tides run like a mill-race. On June 25, the eventful day fixed for the expulsion of the barbarians from the sacred dominions of the Mikado, the American merchant steamer _Pembroke_, with a pilot furnished by the Tokio government and with the American flag at her peak, was on her way northward through the channel when she was fired on by the clansmen though, as luck would have it, was not hit. But peace which had existed in Japan for nearly two centuries and a half was broken. A few days later a French despatch-boat was hit in seven places, her boat’s crew nearly all killed by a shell, and the vessel saved from sinking only by a lively use of the pumps. On July 11 a Dutch frigate was hit thirty-one times, and nine of its crew were killed or wounded, and a little later a French gunboat was badly hulled as she dashed past the batteries at full speed. It was evident that the Japanese had acquired modern guns in the ten years that had passed since Perry had taught them the blessings of civilization, and it was equally evident that they knew how to use them.