OLIVER

See also:

• HAZARD (0. Fr. hazard, from Span. czar, unlucky throw at dice, misfortune, from Arab. al, and zar, dice)

HAZARD

See also:

• PERRY
• PERRY (from Fr. Moire, from poire, a pear)
• PERRY, MATTHEW CALBRAITH (1794–1858)
• OLIVER HAZARD PERRY (1785-1819)

PERRY (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 fine 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 Amherst-burg, 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) .