is captain to the duties of a
lieutenant. The frigate was then employed as a convoy, making the tour
of the northern ports. This gave Perry an opportunity to study scenes
of the old world, which can never lose their influence in the
formation of the man of education and refinement.

In 1809, Perry got to sea in command of an armed schooner, the
Revenge, which was employed on the coast service. While on the
southern coast, he had an opportunity to gain distinction, which he
did not fail to avail himself of, in cutting out a stolen American
vessel from under the guns of a British ship in Spanish waters, off
Florida. Conveying his prize off the coast, he was threatened by his
Majesty's ship Gore, of double his force, when, having, as Mackenzie
says, "no idea of being 'Leopardized,'" he put his little schooner in
readiness for boarding at a moment's notice--a spirited resolution of
great bravery, which he would no doubt have carried out, had the
British vessel insisted upon overhauling the Revenge. While engaged in
cruising off Connecticut and Rhode Island, in the beginning of 1811,
he unfortunately lost his vessel, through an error of the pilot, on
the Watch Hill Reef, opposite Fisher's Island, as he was sailing from
Newport to New London. Every seamanlike effort was made to save the
vessel, and when all was unavailing, Perry showed equal skill and
resolution in landing the crew in a heavy January swell, with a
violent wind. He was himself the last to leave the vessel. He was not
merely acquitted of neglect, but his conduct was extolled by a court
of inquiry.

He was, of course, thrown temporarily out of command by the loss of
his vessel; an interval of repose which he hastened to turn to account
by forming a matrimonial alliance with Miss Elizabeth Champlin Mason,
of an influential family at Newport, to whom he had become engaged
several years before, on his arrival from the Mediterranean. The
wedding took place in May, 1811, affording him ample opportunity for
the honeymoon, previous to the actual outbreak of the war impending
with England.

This event found him at Newport, with the rank of master commandant,
in charge of the flotilla of gunboats keeping watch in the harbor. It
was a service not altogether adapted to satisfy the ambitious spirit
of a young officer, but it was important in itself, and became, in
Perry's hands, a step to future eminence. His course, at this time,
illustrates a valuable truth, that no h