It was the scurvy. It broke out so alarmingly that he was obliged to hurry home at full speed. Passing Nantasket roads August 31st decks were cleared for action. A strange ship was in sight. It was the _Constitution_ which a few days before had met and sunk their old enemy the _Guerriere_, two of whose prizes the _President_ had recaptured. In this, his first foreign cruise in a man-of-war, full as it was of exciting incidents, Perry had taken part in one battle, and the capture of seven British Merchant vessels. Driven home ingloriously by the chronic enemy of the naval household, he learned well a new lesson. He gained an experience, by which not only himself but all his crew down to the humblest sailor under his command, profited during the half century of his service. In those ante-canning days, more lives were lost in the navy by this one disease than by all other causes, sickness, battle, tempest or shipwreck. “From scurvy” might well have been a prayer of deliverance in the nautical litany. Perry was one of the first among American officers to search into the underlying causes of the malady. He was ever a rigid disciplinarian in diet, albeit a generous provider. To the ignorant he seemed almost fanatical in his “anti-scorbutic” notions, though he was rather pleased than otherwise at the nick-name savoring of the green-grocer’s stall which Jack Tar with grateful facetiousness lavished on him. Across sea, the American frigates were described by the English newspapers as “disguised seventy-fours;” and, forthwith, English writers on naval warfare began explaining how the incredible thing happened that British frigates had lowered their flag to apparent equals. These explanations have been diligently kept up and copied for the past seventy-five years. As late as the international rifle match of 1877 the words of the naval writer, James, learned by heart by Britons in their youth, came to the front in the staple of English editorials written to clear up the mystery of American excellence with the rifle,—“The young peasant or back-woodsman carries a rifle barrel from the moment he can lift one to his shoulder.” On the eighteenth of October, Rodgers left Boston with the _President_, _Constitution_, _United States_ and _Argus_. Perry, unable to be idle, while the ships lay in Boston harbor, had opened a recruiting office in the city enlisting sailors for the _President_. Each vessel of the squadron was in perfect order. On the 10th, without knowing it, they passed near five British men-of-war. They chased a thirty-eight gun ship but lost her, but, on the 18th off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland captured the British packet _Swallow_, having on board eighty-one boxes of gold and silver to the value of $200,000. On the 30th they chased the _Galatea_ and lost her. During the whole of November, they met with few vessels.