For those who aren’t aware, Matthew Calbraith Perry was the famous U.S. Navy officer who commanded the U.S. “black fleet” that “opened Japan to the West” in 1853-54.

Earlier in his career, Perry served twice with the U.S. Africa Squadron. As a young lieutenant, he helped to escort the first group of former slaves to Africa for the American Colonization Society in 1819, and was then assigned to the newly formed Africa Squadron, commanding the U.S.S. Shark in 1821. Later, when the U.S. re-established its Africa Squadron in 1843, Perry was assigned to command the squadron.

The most obvious conflict of interest was that the Perry and D’Wolf families were connected by marriage. Perry’s brother, Raymond Henry Jones Perry, married the daughter of James D’Wolf, the patriarch of the clan. It is from this union, in fact, that three of the D’Wolf family members in the film–Jim, Dain, and James Perry–descend.

I had initially assumed that this conflict of interest would have meant that Perry had little interest in chasing down illegal slave traders off the coast of Africa.

In fact, however, the D’Wolf family was out of “the business” by this time, and Perry seems to have taken his job quite seriously.

He is reported to have fallen in love with Africa during his first voyage, when he became involved in local affairs, personally selecting the site of Liberia’s future capital, Monrovia. Perry requested his two assignments with the Africa Squadron, and these were not career-enhancing moves. The U.S. squadron was notoriously small and under-funded, and there was little political impetus in the U.S. to enforce the ban on the slave trade.

It turns out that Perry’s instructions from the secretary of the navy in 1843, for instance, precluded him from effectively pursuing slave traders. He did press the secretary for additional resources specifically to catch slave traders, but was denied. He seems to have spent most of his time protecting the colonies of former American slaves which had sprung up along the west African coast.