I've gotten through this finally, yay!

I have been building by modifying the Makefile.PL and using make and make install. I no longer remember exactly how I created the original _wrap.cxx file, it most certainly would have been via swig.

Regardless, I simply did a swig -perl on the existing .i file, and this time it created a .c wrapper. I hacked the Makefile to replace the .cxx extension with .c, and we're now past the Perl error, we're getting into the C code.