PERRY, CAPTAIN JOHN, a respectable engineer, who resided long in Russia, having been recommended to the Czar Peter whilst in England, as a person capable of serving him on a variety of occasions relating to his new design of establishing a fleet and improving inland navigation. His salary in this service was L.300 per annum, besides travelling expenses and subsistence money on what-
ever service he might be employed, together with a further reward to his satisfaction at the conclusion of any work he should finish. After some conversation with the czar himself, particularly respecting a communication between the rivers Volga and Don, he was employed on that work for three summers successively; but not being well supplied with men, partly on account of the ill success of the czar's arms against the Swedes at the battle of Narva, and partly by the discouragement of the governor of Astracan, he was ordered, at the end of 1707, to discontinue his operations, and next year was employed in refitting the ships at Veronise, and in making the river of that name navigable; but after repeated disappointments, and a variety of fruitless applications for his salary, he at last quitted the kingdom under the protection of Mr Whitworth, the English ambassador, in 1712. In 1721 he was employed in stopping with success the breach at Dagenham, in which several other undertakers had failed; and the same year he was occupied about the harbour at Dublin, to the objections against which he then published an Answer. He was the author of a work on the State of Russia, 1716, Svo, and an account of the stopping of Dagenham breach, 1721, Svo; and he died on the 11th of February 1733. These scanty particulars are all that is known of Captain Perry, who seems to have been a man of considerable ability and enterprise.