The world was yet a world of piracy, and the extirpation of these wolves of the sea was a work which, when finished in the Mediterranean and in the West Indies, was to continue in the Far East to our own day. The situation, however, in the Caribbean Sea and its adjacent waters was particularly serious from the anarchic conditions arising through the revolt of Spain’s American dominions, with the exception of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, and this last was to join in the upheaval in 1821. But all became nests of piracy. The fault in the beginning was with our own Government, which had allowed too freely the fitting out of vessels, usually schooners, in our ports which sailed away for Venezuela or Argentina and there took out letters of marque and flew the insurgent flags. They captured not only Spanish vessels, but whatever seemed likely prize, and our own ships suffered as well as others. Galveston and Matagorda had also for years after the peace of 1815 been bases of piracy under the claim of patriotism. Our war with England had in fact so developed the greed in privateering that the more adventurous kept it up in the new form. Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico at the time thus bred pirates much as ill-conditioned ponds breed mosquitoes. When Mexico declared independence in 1821 and there was nothing left to Spain but Cuba and Puerto Rico, numerous privateers were fitted out from there against the privateers of the patriots, and the former became in turn as bad as the latter. Havana itself was one of the strongholds of these villains, the captain-general sharing in the profits, and each of the many curiously formed, deep, bottlelike harbors of Cuba was a pirate refuge. For nine years, from 1817 to 1826, the navy was busily engaged in suppressing these marauders, and it was on such duty, in 1819, that Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, in command of a squadron in the Caribbean, lost his life through yellow fever caught in the Orinoco. He was but thirty-four years old. But while this work had its losses, it had also great uses, besides protecting the commercial world, in serving as a school for the greatest admiral of his or any time in fact, and for another great officer who was bound to him by peculiarly romantic ties. These were Farragut and Porter, who forty or more years later were to come to such distinguished fame. The story needs a telling.