Part of a Doyle (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) sale on November 24, where it made $42,000 (£31,580), it details events on the first cruise of the Shark, Perry’s first independent command, covering a period of around nine months, from July 1821 onwards.
Much of the log is concerned with routine matters – sailing directions and winds, the sick list, water and provisions, punishments – but matters of greater import are also recorded.
Japanese exploits still to come
Perry is much better remembered nowadays for the key part he later played in the opening up of Japan, but here are recorded events on two voyages of earlier years.
Having sailed to Liberia to deliver the newly appointed US Commissioner to that colony, and exasperated by frustrated attempts at deterring or detaining French slave traders, he returned to the US to re-provision in January 1822.
There followed a cruise against pirates in the West Indies, but he first sailed to Key West in Florida, where he formally took possession of the territory from Spain and raised the Stars and Stripes on Thompsons Island.
The region had been ceded to the US by the Adams-Onís Treaty in 1819, though it seems an enterprising American businessman had already purchased Key West from a Spanish official in St Augustine.
Perry then turned his attention to the pursuit of pirates in Mexican and Cuban waters.
Both men Woz here
The framed lid of an early Apple computer, signed by both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak – $33,000 (£24,810) at Doyle.
Sold at $33,000 (£24,810) was a very different lot: the framed lid of an Apple II plus computer signed by both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak – the latter simply as ‘Woz’.
After Jobs stepped down from the company in 1985 and founded NeXT, he and Wozniak had a falling-out and Apple material signed by both men is exceptionally rare, said Doyle.
