Perry with his old ship and crew left New York for Mexico. Before he arrived, the Spanish yoke had been totally overthrown and the National Representative Assembly proclaimed. Iturbide abdicated in March, 1823, and danger to our commerce was removed. Perry, relieved of further duty returned to New York, July 9, 1823, and enjoyed a whole summer quietly with his family. Perceiving the advantage of a knowledge of Spanish, Perry began to study the tongue of Cervantes. Though not a born linguist, he mastered the language so as to be during all his later life conversant with the standard literature, and fluent in the reading of its modern forms in speech, script and print. This knowledge was afterward, in the Mediterranean, in Africa, and in Mexico, of great value to him. Commodore Porter’s work in suppressing the West Indian free-booters was so well done, that piracy, on the Atlantic coast, has ever since been but a memory. Unknown to current history, it has become the theme only of the cheap novelist and now has, even in fiction, the flavor of antiquity. The _Shark_, the first war-ship under Perry’s sole command, mounted twelve guns, measured one hundred and seventy-seven tons, cost $23,267, and had a complement of one hundred men. Her term of life was twenty-five years. She began her honorable record under Lieutenant Perry, was the first United States vessel of war to pass through the Straits of Magellan, from east to west, and was lost in the Columbia river in 1846. CHAPTER IX. THE AMERICAN LINE-OF-BATTLE SHIP. THE line-of-battle ship, which figured so largely in the navies of a half century or more ago, was a man-of-war carrying seventy-four or more guns. It was the class of ships in which the British took especial pride, and the American colonists, imitating the mother country, began the construction of one, as early as the Revolution. Built at Portsmouth, this first American “ship-of-the-line” was, when finished, presented to France. Humpreys, our great naval contractor in 1797 carried out the true national idea, by condensing the line-of-battle ship into a frigate, and “line ships” proper were not built until after 1820. One of the first of these was the _North Carolina_, commanded by the veteran John Rodgers. The first visit of an American line-of-battle ship to Europe, in 1825, under Commodore Rodgers, was, in its effect, like that of the iron-clad Monitor _Miantonomah_ under Farragut in 1865. It showed that the United States led the world in ships and guns. The _North Carolina_ was then the largest, the most efficient and most formidable vessel that ever crossed the Atlantic. Rodgers was justly proud of his flag-ship and fleet, for this was the golden era of American ship-building, and no finer craft ever floated than those launched from our shipyards.