This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
PERRY, O. H.—PERSEPOLIS
185

on the 7th of April and on the 8th of July dropped anchor off the city of Uraga, on the western shore of the Bay of Yedo with the “Susquehanna,” his flagship, the “Mississippi,” and the sloops-of-war “Saratoga” and “Plymouth.” On the 14th of July, accompanied by his officers and escorted by a body of armed marines and sailors (in all about 300 men), he went ashore and presented to commissioners especially appointed by the shogun to receive them, President Fillmore's letters to the emperor, and his own credentials. A few days later the American fleet sailed for Hong-Kong with the understanding that Perry would return in the following spring to receive the emperor's reply. On the 11th of February, accordingly, he reappeared in the Bay of Yedo with his fleet-this time composed of the “Susquehanna,” “Powhatan” and “Mississippi,” and the sailing vessels “Vandalia,” “Lexington” and “Southampton,” and despite the protests of the Japanese selected an anchorage about 12 m. farther up the bay, nearly opposite the present site of Yokohama, and within about 10 m. of Yedo (Tōkyō). Here, on the 31st of March 1854, was concluded the first treaty (ratified at Simoda, on the 21st of February 1855, and proclaimed on the 22nd of June following) between the United States and Japan. The more important articles of this treaty provided that the port of Simoda, in the principality of Idzu, and the port of Hakodate, in the principality of Matsmai, were constituted as ports for the reception of American ships, where they could buy such supplies as they needed; that Japanese vessels should assist American vessels driven ashore on the coasts of Japan, and that the crews of such vessels should be properly cared for at one of the two treaty ports; that shipwrecked and other American citizens in Japan should be as free as in other countries, within certain prescribed limits, that ships of the United States should be permitted to trade at the two treaty ports under temporary regulations prescribed by the Japanese, that American ships should use only the ports named, except under stress of weather, and that privileges granted to other nations thereafter must also be extended to the United States. Commodore Perry died in New York City on the 4th of March 1858.

A complete and readable account of this expedition, and its results, scientific as well as political, compiled from the journals and reports of Commodore Perry and his officers, was published by the United States government under the title, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (3 vols, Washington, 1856). The first volume of this work, containing Commodore Perry's narrative, was also published separately. A brief biography of Perry is included in Charles Morris's Heroes of the Navy in America (Philadelphia and London, 1907). See also William E. Griffis's Matthew Calbraith Perry, a Typical American Naval Officer (Boston, 1887).

PERRY, OLIVER HAZARD (1785-1819), American naval officer, was born at South Kingston, Rhode Island, on the 23rd of August 1785. He entered the navy as midshipman (1799) with his father, Christopher Raymond Perry (1761-1818), a captain in the navy, and saw service against the Barbary pirates. At the beginning of the War of 1812 he was in command of a flotilla at Newport, but was transferred (Feb. 1813) to the Lakes. He served with Commodore Chauncey, and then was sent from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, where he took up the chief command at the end of March 1813. With the help of a strong detachment of officers and men from the Atlantic coast he equipped a squadron consisting of one brig, six line schooners and one sloop. Other vessels were laid down at Presque Isle (now Erie), where he concentrated the Lake Erie fleet in July. When Captain Perry appeared off Amherstburg, where Captain Robert Heriot Barclay (d. 1837), the British commander, was lying with his squadron, he had a very marked superiority. Captain Barclay, after a hot engagement—the Battle of Lake Erie—in which Captain Perry's flagship the “Lawrence,” a brig, was so severely shattered that he had to leave her, was completely defeated. Perry commanded the “Java” in the Mediterranean expedition of 1815-1816, and he died at Port of Spain in Trinidad on the 23rd of August 1819, of yellow fever contracted on the coast of Brazil.

See O. H. Lyman, Commodore O. H. Perry and the War on the Lakes (New York, 1905).

PERRY, a city and the county-seat of Noble county, Oklahoma, U.S.A., 30 m. N. by E of Guthrie. Pop (1900), 3351 (399 negroes), (1910) 3133. Perry is served by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé railway and by the St Louis & San Francisco system. It is the commercial centre of a large agricultural and stock-raising region, which produces cotton and grain. Perry was settled in 1889.

PERRY (from Fr. poiré, from poire, a pear), an alcoholic beverage, obtained by the fermentation of the juice of pears. The manufacture is in all essentials identical with that of Cider (q.v.).

PERRYVILLE, a town of Boyle county, Kentucky, U.S.A., about 10 m. W. of Danville. Pop. (1910), 407. Here on the 8th of October 1863 General Braxton Bragg, in command of the Confederate army of the Mississippi of about 16,000 men, with which he had invaded Kentucky, faced about in his slow retreat across the state and gave battle to the Union army of the Ohio of about 40,000 (of whom only about 22,000 were actually engaged) commanded by Major-General Don Carlos Buell. Bragg's order to attack was disregarded by Major-General Leonidas Polk, who preferred adopting the “defensive-offensive” rather than engage all of Buell's force. Bragg himself came on the field about 10 a.m. and repeated his orders for an attack, but it was 2 p.m. before there was an actual engagement. Then after much delay on Polk's part the Confederate army joined battle with McCook's corps. The Confederate lines were broken and driven back through Perryville, where caissons, ammunition wagons and 140 officers and men were captured. Darkness had now come on, and in the night Bragg withdrew. His losses were reported as 510 killed, 2635 wounded and 251 missing. The Union loss was 845 killed, 2851 wounded and 515 captured or missing. The battle was drawn tactically, but strategically it was a Union victory and it virtually closed Bragg's unsuccessful Kentucky campaign, which is sometimes called the Perryville campaign.

PERSEPOLIS, an ancient city of Persia, situated some 40 m. N.E. of Shiraz, not far from where the small river Pulwar flows into the Kur (Kyrus). The site is marked by a large terrace with its east side leaning on Kuhi Rahmet (“the Mount of Grace”). The other three sides are formed by a retaining wall, varying in height with the slope of the ground from 14 to 41 ft. on the west side a magnificent double stair, of very easy steps, leads to the top. On this terrace are the ruins of a number of colossal buildings, all constructed of dark-grey marble from the adjacent mountain. The stones were laid without mortar, and many of them are still in situ. Especially striking are the huge pillars, of which a number still stand erect. Several of the buildings were never finished. F. Stolze has shown that in some cases even the mason's rubbish has not been removed.[1] These ruins, for which the name Kizil minare or Chihil menare (“the forty columns or minarets”), can be traced back to the 13th century, are now known as Takhti Jamshid (“the throne of Jamshid”). That they represent the Persepolis captured and partly destroyed by Alexander the Great has been beyond dispute at least since the time of Pietro della Valle.[2]

Behind Takhti Jamshid are three sepulchres hewn out of the rock in the hillside, the façades, one of which is incomplete, being richly ornamented with reliefs. About 8 m. N.N.E., on the opposite side of the Pulwar, rises a perpendicular wall of rock, in which four similar tombs are cut, at a considerable height from the bottom of the valley. The modern Persians call this place Nakshi Rustam (“the picture of Rustam”) from the Sassanian reliefs beneath the opening, which they take to be a representation of the mythical hero Rustam. That the

  1. Cf. J. Chardin, E. Kaempfer, C. Niebuhr and W. Ouseley. Niebuhr's drawings, though good, are, for the purposes of the architectural student, inferior to the great work of C. Texier, and still more to that of E. Flandin and P. Coste. Good sketches, chiefly after Flandin, are given by C. Kossowicz, Inscriptiones palaeo-persicae (St Petersburg, 1872). In addition to these we have the photographic plates in F. Stolze's Persepolis (2 vols., Berlin, 1882).
  2. Lettera XV. (ed. Brighton, 1843), ii. 246 seq.