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book reviews269 are excellent. For twenty-two years the editor grew not weary in well doing, and thus brought the study to successful completion. Berlin B. Chapman Oklahoma State University "Old Bruin": Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858. By Samuel Eliot Morison. (Boston: Litde, Brown and Company, 1967. Pp. xxiii, 482. $12.50.) This latest of some fifty volumes bearing the imprint of Samuel Eliot Morison is less dramatic than its companion, John Patd Jones. Matthew CaIbraith Perry was respected but not loved, had presence but no panache. He was a midshipman in the War of 1812 but missed the famous battles. In 1847 he took the naval command in the Gulf only after the Vera Cruz landings. To be sure, he had adventures chasing pirates in the Caribbean, leading a charge against breastworks in Tabasco (the Mexicans inconveniently melted away), and foiling the escape of a troublesome African king by grabbing the royal loin cloth and hanging on as the giant native bolted across the beach. But this was mostly a dull era of American naval history and Perry's fame rests on the Japan expedition. The question then arises whether one auspicious moment justifies an exhaustive biography . The fact is that Perry's importance is by no means limited to the events of 1853-1854. What emerges in Morison's biography is a model professional officer laboring to develop his expertise and improve the navy as a career. A patient, meticulous planner and organizer, Perry was influential in effecting the transformation of the navy from an aggregation of ships mobilized for specific tasks or emergencies into a permanent, peacetime institution. He played a key role in improving the instruction and quality of recruits (here Morison gives a gripping account of the Somers mutiny) and in founding the Naval Academy. It is true he was a strict disciplinarian, wedded to the lash, but his rigorous sanitary precautions on tropical cruises sharply reduced the incidence of the mysterious yellow fever. Perry contributed greatly to technological change as well. Even in the heyday of sail, he regarded the ship as no more than a gun platform and pioneered in the construction, manning, and trials of the navy's first steam vessels. The Japan mission takes a little less than half the book. Earlier chapters show that Perry was uniquely equipped for the command by previous experience : showing the flag along the Barbary Coast, a display of force at Naples, ceremonial visits with Near Eastern potentates, palavers with African tribes. By using Japanese sources, written and graphic, and visiting the scene himself, Morison has enriched but not substantially altered the standard interpretation. He concedes that the commodore was an imperialist with a grandiose sense of national destiny. At first he envisioned a continental empire stretching "from Davis' Straits to the Istiimus of Darien" and 270CIVIL WAR HISTORY then from the perspective of the Asiatic command he conceived of American strategic domination of the Pacific with footholds in Formosa, Okinawa, and the Bonins to control the great-circle approach to China. Here is a significant connection between the Manifest Destiny of the 1840's and the insular imperialism of the 1890's. But Perry was an imperialist with a difference, Morison contends, in that he eschewed forcible annexation and big colonies. Even so, it might be argued, great empires had a way of mushrooming out of small beginnings, and the distinction would have been lost on the Okinawans. Defense of his "hero" leads Morison into several curious distinctions. He sees the commodore reaching his greatest achievement, the opening of Japan, through diplomacy rather than military force. Undeniably, as Morison shows, Perry conducted negotiations with prudence and finesse; he shrewdly calculated how much he could realistically expect and the necessary mixture of pomp, civility, and menace to attain it. Nevertheless, his best argument was his squadron in the bay. He practiced diplomacy, ii you will, but at the cannon's mouth. And why rationalize it by evoking a Japanese reputation for treacherous surprise attacks? One wonders what rules would have applied if the situation had been reversed and a Japanese Perry had marched ashore at San Francisco. This is a book of substance and...

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