Oliver Perry American Perry's Medal

At Presque Isle he established the shipyard needed to reinforce his fleet. The level of activity at Presque Isle was so frenzied that it was said a tree standing in the forest in the morning was sometimes part of a ship by that evening. Perry completed the brigs in near-record time, but faced another problem: there was not enough water to get the new ships over the sandbar that blocked the entrance to Presque Isle Harbour. But Perry and his building master, Noah Brown, devised a system to to float the new brigs into the open water with specially-built scows. Once again Perry had a stroke of tremendous good luck. While one of his new ships was stuck helplessly on the sandbar, the British fleet appeared in the distance. Perry decided to bluff and sent two small ships to pester the British fleet. In the morning haze, British commander Robert Barclay failed to realize that the new brig was stuck in the sandbar.. He sailed away believing that the new vessels had reached open water and that the Americans outgunned him. After winning the Battle of Lake Erie, Perry showed a great deal of compassion to his captured counterpart Barclay. The two men became very close and Perry won an unconditional parole for the badly wounded Barclay, enabling him to return to Britain to recover. Not long after, Perry asked to be relieved of the Erie command. On his way back to his Rhode Island home, he was greeted as a national hero by Americans citizens. Perry finally ran out of his legendary luck in 1819. When sailing two warships up the Orinoco River in Venezuela he contracted yellow fever. He died on August 23, the day of his thirty-fourth birthday.