Stephanie Ocko

Descended from Nantucket whalers, Stephanie Ocko grew up in Newport, studied in Boston, worked in Washington, and has written nine books on the environment and travel (including two that won the ABA Best Travel Book Award). She has trudged through mosquito-infested jungles like the one that sickened Oliver Perry, and spent six weeks in the equatorial Pacific Ocean as a journalist aboard a research vessel with a team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who were deploying meteorological buoys.

All of this is by way of explaining her accidental preparation to write OLIVER HAZARD PERRY IN THE TEMPLE OF FAME. Life at sea is not like life on land. In the process of researching Perry’s life and the chaotic nature of mercantile and military maritime life in the early 1800s, Ocko discovered that a few of her own “lost-at-sea” whaling ancestors had jumped ship, settled comfortably in Australia, and followed their dreams of another life.

Ocko has graduate degrees in communications and in art history and was working on something entirely different when she inherited a vintage unsigned portrait of an unknown naval officer in a Commodore’s uniform, and the search was on.

A NOTE ON THIS BOOK: I am not an historian, but I am a journalist, and in researching Perry’s life (1785 to 1819), I was amazed to discover what a popular hero he was in the period between the end of the Revolutionary War and the beginning of the Industrial Age.

I imagined doing a short, accessible and highly visual book on Perry in the context of his times, as the extraordinary events in his life unfolded around him. He seems to have had some part in all the issues of the day in addition to the War of 1812, from the first foreign war in Tripoli, to pirates in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, to the ambivalent status of slaves, to the novel idea of vaccinating whole populations against smallpox. In this atmosphere of building a new country, Perry was at the forefront. But Perry himself still eludes: Not self-reflective, he simply lacked time to write copious letters, except to his wife, and she shared them with no one and had them destroyed when she died.

The more I read, the more I wanted to share with others this creative and vital period in our country when its new freedom was in full force, and in which so many resourceful and inventive people like Perry helped shape the institutions we take for granted, from the U.S. Navy to medicine. In good faith, therefore, I offer my take on Oliver Hazard Perry.