The Japan Expedition
Japan and Around the World An Account of Three Visits to the Japanese Empire Sketches of Madeira, St. Helena, Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, Ceylon, Singapore, China and Loo-Choo
9781465632715
118 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The cruel treatment which had long been practised by that singular and secluded people, the Japanese, toward American whalers who were thrown by the misfortune of shipwreck upon their coasts, the incentive of mercantile cupidity, and the urgency of personal ambition, induced the government of the United States, in 1852, to project an expedition to Japan, to obtain some assurance from the government of the country against a continuance or repetition of the inhospitality and cruelty inflicted upon our unfortunate citizens, and, if possible, to open the sources of trade. The East India squadron was accordingly augmented for this purpose, and Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry was invested with the command, and charged with the performance of the duty. After almost conjugating delay in all its moods and tenses, induced by the failure of the boilers of the unfortunate “Princeton,” and other causes, his flag-ship was ready for sea in November, 1852; and on the 24th of this month and year, with a desire to visit the hermetic empire, whetted by reading the Dutch historians, I found myself, as commander’s clerk, on board of her. At mid-day we had dropped, not below the “kirk or hill,” but below the hospital at Norfolk, and night found us ploughing deeply the ocean in the direction of Madeira; and before a very late hour the gleams from the Cape Henry lighthouse disappeared altogether. The ship was the old steam-frigate “Mississippi,” which, as her name is a synonyme for the “father of waters,” may be termed the father of our war-steamers, having been the consort of the pioneer ship, the Missouri, destroyed by fire on her first cruise, under the rock of Gibraltar. She had been engaged unremittingly since she first slid from her ways. The power of her engines had pulled from a reef in the Gulf a large ship, and saved to the country the fine frigate Cumberland. The shot and shell from one of her sixty-eights, in the naval battery at Vera Cruz, had contributed to the downfall of the castle of San Juan. She had lain at her anchor near the site of once classic Athens, and in full view of what now remains of the once great city of Hannibal. She had once sought shelter from a Levanter near Brundusium that was, with its Appian way. Her paddle-wheels churning up the water of the Black sea, announced the first appearance of an American man-of-war in that stormy water; and on her decks, surrounded by his late fellows in exile, Kossuth, fresh from the damp of his Kutahia prison, addressed the seething populace around in the harbor of Marseilles, with a fervor and eloquence which almost extenuated so indefensible a violation of the national hospitality which our nation was then extending him; and now the old Mississippi was leaving her own country, bound to the other side of the great globe, bearing the hopes of many, and embarked in a mission which might be successful—which might, perhaps, come to naught.
