Matthew Perry Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Matthew Perry

American naval officer Matthew Calbraith Perry was the commander of the expedition of "black ships" that opened Japan to the West in 1854 after more than two hundred years of isolation. Often confused with his eldest brother, Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie, the younger Perry served in the War of 1812 early in his distinguished career and was active in the cause against the slave trade. During the Mexican War he was commodore of the Gulf Squadron, winning a decisive victory at Veracruz. He was also a naval reformer who advocated a steam navy and the establishment of a naval academy for officers and the better training of crews. Perry was fifty-eight years old when he was selected to lead the naval mission to Japan. His account of that expedition, the massive three-volume Narrative of an Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (1856), ranks with Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Elisha Kent Kane's Arctic Explorations (1856) as a classic narrative of nineteenth-century American sea adventure and exploration and is a key document in the history of American expansion in the Pacific.

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