By Peter F. Stevens

One look at the jut-jawed, broad-shouldered elderly man in the old photograph speaks volumes. His face framed by long white sideburns, he stares back with a no-nonsense visage that carries the air of command, the look of a man who strode the quarterdecks of warships and snapped off orders that crews immediately obeyed. Today, only a sign marking Percival Street pays tribute to Captain John "Mad Jack" Percival, one of the most colorful and courageous characters in Dorchester's annals.

Mad Jack Percival was born in Barnstable, but it was in a house on Meeting House Hill that he would place his "landlubber" roots. As a youth, he was seduced by the proverbial Siren's call of the sea, shipping out first as a "cabin boy' and soon after as a full-fledged sailor. One of his first notable seaborne adventures came when an impressment gang of British Royal Marines boarded the vessel on which the teen was serving and hauled him aboard their warship, the Epervier. Determined that he would die before spending a minute in slavery aboard a British ship, the youth somehow got his hands on a pistol, put it to a sentry's head, and managed to escape. Many more such harrowing moments would fill the life of Mad Jack Percival, including another rendezvous with the Epervier.

By the time that the War of 1812 erupted between the United States and Great Britain &emdash; in large measure because of the hated practice of impressment at sea &emdash; Jack Percival had risen to the command of the Peacock. He sailed into numerous engagements, maneuvering deftly at the helm, exchanging broadsides with British vessels that included the Epervier, and handling his crews with authority and aplomb. As Dorchester historian William Dana Orcutt writes: "His [Percival's] services during the war were so valuable that he was promoted to the line officers, and became lieutenant and afterwards captain. Congress gave a further proof of the esteem in which he was held by his country by presenting him with a handsome sword."

In Dorchester, many of the naval hero's neighbors had vociferously denounced the war, but valued the deeds of Captain Percival, for virtually all "of the good people of Dorchester really feared that English men-of-war might enter Dorchester Bay." The Town Meeting formed a company of militia and erected fortifications "on the Savin Hill side of the harbor, commanding the channel for quite a distance." Far outside the channel's mouth, Percival and other intrepid commanders saw to it that those Royal Navy warships never slipped into the waters flanking Dorchester and Boston.

After the War of 1812 ended with the Treaty of Ghent, the United States having seen Washington in flames but having fended off the British, Mad Jack Percival did not yet leave the sea for a more settled life in his adopted home of Dorchester; instead, pirates preying upon American vessels in shipping lanes from the West Indies to Africa offered a fitting venue for the "derring-do" talents of Percival.

On the quarterdeck of the sloop Cyane, he sailed into the waters of the West Indies with orders "to destroy the pirates, who were at that time committing many indignities to those who came within their reach." Percival stalked the marauders' vessels and outmaneuvered them time after time until he held the advantage and could rake their bows and sterns without giving them a clear broadside at the Cyane. Under cover of nightfall, he would lead raiding parties ashore to strike at pirates' island strongholds, leaving dead buccaneers and bastions ablaze throughout the Indies. Always materializing with cutlass in hand wherever musket balls, cannon fire, and blades were the thickest, Percival earned his appellation of "Mad Jack" &emdash; and then some. To the pirates, freebooters who feared little, Mad Jack's very name stoked alarm. As a historian records: "Captain Percival's efforts were so effective that, before he left the scene of so many depredations, he had broken their force, and they were no longer to be feared."

One could argue that Percival either harbored some sort of "death wish" or that he was a man who simply craved adventure, the more hazardous the better. He emerged from so many battles and storms unscathed that perhaps "Lucky Jack" might have proven a more fitting nickname.

In an era when a ship's master needed nerve and sheer toughness to control "rough men in a rough profession," few, if any, seamen had the temerity to challenge the authority of Percival. Anyone foolish enough to take on Mad Jack quickly learned that the square-shouldered officer did not have to rely on a "cat o'nine" whip to "hide" a miscreant's back: Percival could simply and brutally inflict discipline with his hammer-hard fists. His crews got the message loud and clear.

In waters across the globe, "hairbreadth escapes" proved Captain Percival's seafaring calling card. "On many occasions," Orcutt writes, "it seemed as if death was staring him in the face."

Still, certain dangers of the naval officer's trade could reach even Mad Jack. Fittingly, however, it took Nature, not a manmade threat, to slow down Percival. Orcutt relates an anecdote testifying both to Mad Jack's character and to his luck: "On one occasion [Percival] set sail on a sloop from Africa with only a boy and an old man on board for crew. When they were hardly out of sight of port, Captain Percival and the old man were taken down with African fever, and the boy alone was left to man the sloop. It was not long before the boy was washed overboard, and the vessel left entirely at the mercy of the waves. Captain Percival was able to summon strength enough to lash the helm, and then went below again, caring little, in his wretched condition, what might befall the vessel. The sloop sailed in the trade winds, and in time arrived at a port, when Captain Percival came on deck, and inquired where his course lay. Much to his astonishment, he found that without guidance the vessel had continued in her course, and that a better voyage could not have been made had she been manned by an entire crew."

In the years following his adventures at sea, Mad Jack Percival became a well-known figure in Dorchester, where his stately home on Meeting House Hill fittingly offered the aging "salt" an ocean view. Percival, his sun-bronzed, deeply lined face, piercing eyes, and sturdy physique both testifying to his years at sea and belying his more recent status as a "landlubber," would set out from Dorchester for one more seagoing adventure. He strode up the gangplank of the U.S.S. Constitution for the famed frigate's last worldwide voyage, an appropriate union of Dorchester's War of 1812 hero and the warship immortalized during the conflict as "Old Ironsides."

The Civil War erupted in 1862, not long after Mad Jack's last journey, but the venerable old seaman would have no hand in the conflict. He peacefully passed away in his sleep in Dorchester that same year, an ending that few who knew him would once have envisioned. His estate on the side of Meetinghouse Hill would later become home to the parish of St. Peter.

Mad Jack's well-deserved reputation as a man who courted and loved danger would linger for many years in Dorchester and beyond. As Orcutt notes, "The life of Captain Percival was so eventful that it has been made the subject of a romance entitled 'The Cruise of the Juniata.' The captain [Percival] is not called by his real name in the story; but as 'Captain Percy' he has become in fiction the hero that he proved himself to be in life."

No matter how bold the fictional "Captain Percy" was, the people of Meeting House Hill knew that he paled beside the genuine article, their neighbor &emdash; Captain Mad Jack Percival.

(Journalist Peter F. Stevens is the author of The Rogue's March: John Riley and the St. Patrick's Battalion, 1846-48, Brassey's, and Notorious and Notable New Englanders, Down East Books.)