Perry was hard at work, exhorting, organizing, cajoling. He journeyed to Pittsburgh and befriended the naval agent there, who was soon shipping rope, canvas, lead (for keels), and cannons up the Allegheny River and French Creek. Perry found his fifty lost carpenters on this trip, cursing the government for shipping their tools separately over a route that took three times as long. He also persuaded the commander of the Pennsylvania militia to give him five hundred men to guard the Presque Isle shipyard.

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Perry did everything in his power to cooperate with Commodore Chauncey when that timid leader asked for his assistance to attack Fort George, at the northwest end of the Niagara River. Sword in hand, Perry led marines in a crucial charge that carried the day. A grateful Chauncey wrote, ‘He was present at every point where he could be useful, under showers of musketry, but fortunately escaped unhurt.’

The victory prompted the British to abandon Fort Erie at the opposite end of the river, enabling Perry to reinforce his fleet with five small former merchant ships from the Black Rock navy yard. Perry, 250 sailors and soldiers, and teams of oxen had to drag the ships into Lake Erie against the Niagara River’s formidable current. It took six days of what Perry called ‘one of the hardest tasks I ever faced … the fatigue is almost incredible.’ Ill with fever and exhaustion, Perry led the virtually unarmed ships (they had only seven cannons between them) down the lake toward Presque Isle against a demoralizing headwind with three ships of the British Lake Erie fleet in close pursuit. At one point, a fog miraculously descended when the two fleets were only a half-mile apart. As Perry tacked into Presque Isle’s sheltered bay the sails of the British men-of-war appeared on the horizon.

These heroics did not persuade Commodore Chauncey to send Perry any sailors. As May dissolved into June and it into July, Perry’s shipbuilding program was almost complete. He had constructed two 110-foot, five-hundred-ton brigs with twenty guns each, three gunboats, and a pilot boat. With extra cannons added to his five Black Rock ships, Perry had a fleet that outgunned the British. But he needed 740 sailors to man it — and he had only 120. Not a few of these were down with ‘lake fever,’ a first cousin to typhus.

Letters arrived from the secretary of the navy and from General Harrison urging Perry to attack the enemy. Harrison reported that scouts had predicted another British foray against Fort Meigs. The mortified Perry could only report: ‘I regret that the force under my command is not yet ready for service….As soon as the government forwards men, I shall sail.’

In mid-July came news from the east that did nothing to raise Perry’s morale. One of his closest navy friends, Captain James Lawrence, commanding the star-crossed Chesapeake, had been defeated and killed in a ship-to-ship action with HMS Shannon off Boston. Perry was deeply moved by Lawrence’s dying words, ‘Don’t give up the ship.’ He asked a sailmaker to embroider them on a strip of blue cloth, which he planned to use as a personal battle flag. He also named the brig he intended to make his flagship Lawrence. Its sister ship was christened Niagara.

The news of James Lawrence’s heroic though losing fight only intensified Perry’s frustration at his immobility. Even more galling was the way the British fleet, now commanded by Captain Robert Heriot Barclay, a one-armed veteran of Trafalgar, sailed back and forth a few miles outside of Presque Isle Bay, taunting him. Perry’s letters to Chauncey began to acquire a cutting edge. On July 20, he wrote: ‘The enemy’s fleet of six sail are now off the bar of this harbor. What a golden opportunity should we have men.’

On July 23, Perry grew even more vehement. ‘For God’s sake and yours and mine,’ he wrote to Chauncey,’send me men and officers … send on the commander, my dear sir, for the Niagara. She is a noble vessel … send me officers and men and honour is within our grasp.’ In his desperation, he urged the commodore to come to Lake Erie with men from his squadron and take charge. Perry said he would ‘rejoice, whoever commands, to see this force on the lake.’

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