Page:The Ifs of History (1907).pdf/168

 Janeiro on the way, and some trouble having arisen with this functionary for which Commodore Aulick was blamed, he was superseded in command of the expedition by Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, in command of the Hartford.

It was Perry, therefore, who "opened up Japan." His name will be associated, as long as the story of the two nations is told, with the event. But it was Aulick's idea, not Perry's; and it all hung upon the luck which those Japanese fishermen, waifs upon a boundless ocean, had in being picked up by a generous Yankee skipper, and in finding their way to so wholehearted and so hospitable a city toward "Mongolian" wanderers as San Francisco was—then!

If this incident had not suggested and been followed by the Aulick-Perry expedition, what then? Russian authorities have claimed that Russia was preparing a similar expedition at the time when Secretary Webster—"too