In 1856, American writer and educator Francis Lister Hawks published a two-volume work on Commodore Matthew Perry’s expeditions to Japan between the years 1852 and 1854. Sponsored by the US government, the expedition’s main goals were to open up that isolationist country to the US, as well as lay the groundwork for further expansion into the Pacific region. Hawks wrote in the prefatory note that he was prompted by his “personal friendship for Commodore Perry,” who asked that he “undertake the task” – even though Perry worked with Hawks to compile a larger three-volume work of the same title for the US Senate, which was catalogued under the 33^rd Congress (2^nd Session) as Executive Document No. 79, and published that same year. The massive three-volume Senate compilation contained the efforts of numerous other officers involved in the expedition, such as Captain William Grenville Temple, and the expedition’s chaplain, Reverand George Jones, who served at the new Naval Academy in Annapolis in the 1840s before accepting the two-year commission aboard Perry’s flagship USS Mississippi. The two aforementioned works were published in Washington DC in the spring, while another one-volume 800-page work was published that summer in New York City by D. Appleton and Company. The third volume of the larger government compilation written by Jones was titled, Observations of the Zodiacal Light, from April 2, 1853 to April 22, 1855, made chiefly aboard the United States Steam-Frigate Mississippi, and ran an astounding seven hundred pages. Because Perry had anticipated a long-winded government report that few outside of Washington DC would ever read, he made efforts in advance with Hawks to ensure that his version, which included notes from his journal, would be published and available to the general public. Others from the expedition such as Perry’s second-in-command Joel Abbot resented this decision – claiming Perry was attempting to steal the glory – but ultimately Perry ensured that interested people could properly digest the most important elements of what occurred during the historic expedition.[1]  

Right:  Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, USN. Circa 1856-1858. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, online collection (The Met object ID 283184).

In early January of 1856, roughly ten months after Perry returned from Japan, an anonymous letter from New York written by a “Wayne” appeared in Raleigh’s Semi Weekly Standard. Addressed to the editors, the author noted that Hawks “has been engaged almost constantly for nearly a year supervising the printing of the history of the Japan Expedition under Com. Perry.” The author must have been someone close to the process, because he asserted that he “had seen some of the proof-sheets and manuscript.” Compiling and summarizing the entire corpus of information gathered was no easy task – a feat not dissimilar to the multi-volume work published in 1844 after Charles Wilkes circumvented the earth’s southern hemisphere for four years between 1838 and 1842. “All of the officers in the expedition from the Commodore down,” Wayne wrote, “kept journals, and no doubt but what we will get a true and interesting history of Japan. The book is very large, containing about one hundred large plates and drawings, and many correct likenesses of the ‘distinguished individuals’ of the east, taken from the Daguerreotypes by the officers of the expedition.” The anonymous author believed the work would be available in March of 1856. “Congress will distribute about one half of the work, or one volume. The other, 2d volume, is the property of the officers and will come out in a less costly edition to supply the wants of the people.”[2]

Perry and Bonin Islands

On March 11, Washington DC’s National Intelligencer reported that Hawks had recently given a speech at the Geographical Society of New York advocating the colonization of the Bonin Islands near Japan, which would act as a “port of safety, refreshment, and rest for the weary crews traversing the Pacific.” Situated more than 600 miles off the southeastern coast of that country, prospective control over the islands meant that “America could receive news from Canton and Shanghai very many days sooner by direct mail communication, via San Francsico, with those places, and even England would get her news several days in advance by adopting the same route.” Known in Japanese as the Ogasawara, the archipelago consisting of more than thirty volcanic islands held many nineteenth-century connections with Hawaii due to western-running trade winds. The Narrative indicated:      

Peel Island [Chichijima] is the only one of the Bonin group inhabited, and it contained on the visit of the Commodore but thirty-one inhabitants, all told: of these, three or four were native Americans, about the same number Englishmen, one a Portuguese, and the remainder Sandwich [Hawaiian] islanders and children born on the island. The settlers have cultivated patches of land of some extent, and raise a considerable quantity of sweet potatoes, Indian corn, pumpkins, onions, taro, and several kinds of fruit, the most abundant of which are water-melons, bananas, and pine-apples. These productions, together with the few pigs and poultry that are raised, find a ready sale to the whale ships constantly touching at the port for water and other supplies.[3]

Left: A Japanese woodblock print of Perry (center) and other high-ranking American seamen. Gasshukoku suishi teitoku kōjōgaki (Oral statement by the American Navy admiral). A Japanese print showing three men, believed to be Commander Anan, age 54; Perry, age 49; and Captain Henry Adams Greg The 3rd junior, age 59, who opened up Japan to the west. The text being read may be President Fillmore's letter to Emperor of Japan. This is a somewhat extensive restoration, meant to keep focus on the artwork, instead of the damage. Source: Wikimedia.

Writing in the mid-twentieth century, the eminent American naval historian, and two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author Samuel Eliot Morison, who compiled a massive fourteen-volume work between 1947 and 1962 at the behest of U.S. officials titled History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, addressed part of Perry’s inclinations towards the Bonins. Morison would later write a biography of the man his sailors nicknamed ‘Old Bruin,’ due to his “loud and gruff” voice, and was keen as to how Perry viewed U.S. expansionist policies in the Pacific region. In the fourteenth volume of that work titled, Victory in the Pacific: 1945, Morison, discussing Iwo Jima (part of the Bonin Islands), elaborated on Perry’s Expedition interest in acquiring those islands:    

The Bonin Islands might have been an American possession if President Franklin Pierce’s administration had backed up Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry. Chichi Jima was first settled from Honolulu in 1830 by two New Englanders – Aldin B. Chapin and Nathaniel Savory – a Genoese, and 25 Hawaiians, who made a living raising provisions for sale to passing whalers. Commodore Perry called at Port Lloyd on 14 June 1853, next day purchased for fifty dollars a plot of land on the harbor, stocked it with cattle brought over in U.S.S. Susquehanna, set up a local government under Savory, promulgated a code of laws, and took possession for the United States. He intended to make Chichi Jima a provisioning station for the United States Navy and American mail steamers. But this action was repudiated by the Pierce administration in Washington. Thus, in 1861 Japan was able to annex the Bonin Islands without opposition. The government did not disturb the American colony, and serious colonization of the group by Japanese did not start until 1887.[4]

There were a number of reasons why the U.S. was not eager to absorb the Bonin Islands in the 1850s, but in retrospect, Perry was obviously a forward-thinking strategist. On April 1, 1856, a report appeared indicating that printing of the massive Narrative of the Expedition was taking place. The issue was that the Wilkes Expedition to the southern hemisphere and Antarctica had produced so much material that it took years (beyond the original five volumes) to compile and publish all of the material. Reducing the cost of the Japan expedition publication, and making the information available thus became a priority for Perry and Hawks. “It is stated that the cost of publishing Lieut. Wilkes’ book, which grew out of the Arctic Exploration Expedition, has already amounted to a million and a quarter of dollars.” One observer close to the printing estimated that “Commodore Perry’s book on Japan has cost the government two hundred thousand dollars, while three hundred dollars is the esticate [sic] for publishing the reports and engravings of the reconnaissances of the Pacific railroad routes.” Indeed, compiling and printing was no easy (or inexpensive) task, but the first volumes of the expedition’s long-awaited Narrative were printed that month.[5]   

Right: Narrative of the expedition of an American squadron to the China seas and Japan. Perry, Matthew Calbraith, 1794-1858. Hawks, Francis L. (Francis Lister), 1798-1866. United States Naval Expedition to Japan (1852-1854) Japan--Description and travel. New York, D. Appleton and company; [etc., etc.] 1857.  Source: Library of Congress.

‘High rank among the classics’

Morison wrote that Perry properly assigned “due credit and thanks” to the multitude of experts and officers who contributed to the work, and thus dispelled “Captain Abbot's charge that Perry grabbed all the glory and left none for his subordinates.” According to him, the Narrative of the Expedition “deserves high rank among the classics of American exploration and adventure,” and received similar praise at the time from influential critics in New York and London. Of the three-volume set, Congress printed 34,000 copies costing $400,000 – half of which “were given away to members of Congress and high government officials” for their collections. Around 2,000 were sent to the Navy, and 1,000 to Perry for his effort.

Morison noted that Perry used about 500 of those “to compensate Hawks and the contributors.” The American historian, who held the utmost respect for Perry, also noted that the second volume was published late the following year. “Perry and Hawks found out what many subsequent editors have learned to their cost,” Morison wrote, “that it is often easier to write a thing yourself than to drag a promised contribution out of an eminent but reluctant specialist.” Nevertheless, it was not the long-winded tome that defined the Wilkes Expedition, despite the effort. The editors at Boston’s Evening Transcript were equally impressed with the shorter 800-page summation, which has remained a classic, as Morison claimed it would. “It is utterly impossible to in a newspaper notice of so voluminous and interesting a work as this,” they wrote in July of 1856, “to do anything like justice to the book.” Due to poor health, Perry passed away in 1858, but the work that he did during and after the expedition resulted in a lasting legacy:  

Its contents are of interest to the political inquirer, the student of physical geography, the naturalist, the navigator, the man of commerce, the ethnologist, the scholar and the Christian… Our means of information regarding Japan have been so limited, and the work before us come in so authentic form, that the knowledge has the charm of romance, and the story of the entrance of the Americans into the mysterious country will be much read, by parties who rarely peruse a work of such character… Commodore Perry’s Narrative will become a standard authority on all subjects relating to Japan.[6]

[1] Francis L. Hawks, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854, Under the Command of Commodore M.C. Perry, United States Navy, by order of the Government of the United States, vol. 1 (Washington: A.O.P. Nicholson, 1856), iii.; Samuel Eliot Morison, “Old Bruin”: Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), 419; Hawks, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan: Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854, Under the Command of Commodore M.C. Perry, United States Navy, by order of the Government of the United States. 3 vols. (Washington: Beverley Tucker, Senate printer, 1856); Francis L. Hawks [Perry], Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, Performed in the Years 1852, 1853, and 1854, Under the Command of Commodore M.C. Perry, United States Navy, by order of the Government of the United States (New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1856); Rev. George Jones, United States Expedition. Observations of the Zodiacal Light, from April 2, 1853 to April 22, 1855, made chiefly aboard the United States Steam-Frigate Mississippi, vol. 3 (Washington: Beverley Tucker, Senate printer, 1856).

[2] “Correspondence of the Standard.” Semi Weekly Standard, Raleigh NC, Jan. 5, 1856. Letter from New York dated Dec. 30, 1855; Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition: During the Years 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841, 1842, 5 Vols. (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1845).  

[3] Hawks [Perry], Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan, 233.

[4] Morison, “Old Bruin”: Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858, ix; Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II: Victory in the Pacific: 1945, vol 14, (Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 6.

[5] “News and Other Paragraphs.” Buffalo Daily Republic, April 1, 1856.

[6] Samuel Eliot Morison, “Old Bruin”: Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858, 419–20; “A Splendid Work.” Boston Evening Transcript, July 10, 1856.