NEAR THE END OF its voyage to Europe, when it reached a spot a few hundred miles southwest of England, the St. Paul steamed across an invisible line: the course followed more than a century earlier by a small fleet under the command of John Paul Jones.
Jones and his ships had set forth from the Île de Groix, off the south coast of Bretagne, France, before dawn on August 14, 1779. The Scottish-born American naval commander was aboard the warship Bonhomme Richard, accompanied by six other American and French ships. It was Jones’s second foray into British waters, and his intent was to seize as many British ships as he could in the name of the Continental Congress and bring the violence of the American Revolution to England herself.
As a military maneuver, Jones’s efforts didn’t have much effect on the war. The psychological effect, though, was considerable. Jones, in the earlier sortie, had invaded the port of Whitehaven, the first time a foreign force had attacked a British port since 1667. His men had also raided the mansion of the Earl of Selkirk, making off with the family silver. So the presence yet again of Jones and a fleet of mismatched warships off the British coast stirred the island with fear. While the excursions would cement Jones’s reputation for skill and cunning at sea and help establish him as the father of the US Navy, to the British, Jones was a pirate, and his return to the land of his birth at the helm of an American navy ship was viewed as an act of treason.
Jones was born July 6, 1747, in a worker’s cottage on the Arbigland estate near Kirkbean in southwest Scotland, overlooking the Solway Firth, which separated Scotland from England. His name then was the same as that of his father, John Paul (the son would add “Jones” later), a gardener for the Craik family. Jones was the fourth of seven children, though only five survived into adulthood.1
The details of his early schooling are murky, but at age twelve Jones moved across the firth to Whitehaven, the port he would later attack, to apprentice himself to merchant John Younger, who handled trade with the American colonies. Dumfries, the market town closest to where Jones was born, was also a major hub for tobacco imports, so the region had a steady and deep relationship with sea trade. Jones’s oldest sibling, William, had already followed the trade route to Fredericksburg, Virginia, where he made his fortune as a tailor and local businessman.2 Jones, though, was as much interested in the way the goods moved as in the trade itself. As a child, he watched ships ply the Solway Firth and later taught himself celestial navigation. He made his first transatlantic crossing at age thirteen aboard one of Younger’s ships, but the next year Younger went bankrupt and Jones was cast out on his own. He spent the next few years moving from ship’s crew to ship’s crew, sailing between England and the West Indies and also several times to Africa on slavers before giving it up for more conventional trade.
In those early days of his sailing life, Jones saw the sea as a means to an end. As he picked up experience, he began to map out a future that did not involve the sea. He hoped to amass enough of a fortune to buy land, maybe near his brother in Virginia, by the time he reached thirty. Given the arc of Jones’s career, though, it seems that while he might have yearned for a stable life as a landowner, he gravitated to the sea, and eventually to the salons of powerful men and beautiful women. One suspects that had Jones joined his brother and become a Virginia tobacco grower, he would have died of boredom. And it’s hard to tell whether his desire to settle on a farm was a life plan or a dream he ultimately lacked the desire to fully pursue.
Regardless, Jones was adept at playing the hands he was dealt. In July 1768 Jones was in Kingston, Jamaica, and unattached to a ship. He was offered transport back to England as a passenger aboard the John, captained by Samuel McAdam, who was from the small port town of Kirkcudbright in the same part of Scotland in which Jones was raised. (He and McAdam likely knew each other.) En route to Liverpool, McAdam and the first mate—the only members of the crew who knew how to navigate—died of illness at sea. Jones, just twenty-one but an accomplished navigator, took command and brought the ship safely to port, earning the gratitude of the owners and two more assignments skippering the John to the West Indies.
Jones proved to be a remarkably precocious seaman, though his mercurial personality created troubles. In 1770 the carpenter aboard the John got so deeply under Jones’s skin that he had the man, Mungo Maxwell, tied to the rigging and flogged. Once moored in Rockley Bay at Tobago, Maxwell went ashore and pressed charges. Jones was cleared by a judge who saw nothing criminal in Maxwell’s scars. Maxwell, though, was done with Jones and the John. He booked passage back to England via another ship but died en route. When word of the flogging and the apparently unrelated death reached Maxwell’s father in Kirkcudbright, he pressed charges. Once the John arrived from the West Indies, Jones was imprisoned until he could arrange bail. Still, few in Kirkcudbright gave much weight to the charges, and Jones remained free on bond with the case in limbo. Six months and a trip to Tobago later, Jones obtained copies of the judge’s records and the charges in Scotland were dropped.3
The realities of life at sea meant that to succeed, a captain had to be tough but fair. Too lenient and he would lose control of the crew. Too strict and a captain might find himself killed or set adrift by a mutinous crew. Over his career, Jones developed a reputation not only for toughness but also for seamanship. He was often disliked by peers because of his arrogance and petulance and by some of his crews for his tempestuous and authoritarian nature. Yet sailors also admired him for his abilities at sea, and his success in trade—the crews received a cut. Still, his arrogance caused him occasional troubles.
In October 1773 Jones was captain of the Betsy, in port at Scarborough, Tobago, to sell a cargo of wine and other supplies, intending to reinvest the proceeds in cargo for the return trip to England. He decided to withhold his crew’s wages while in port to increase the amount of goods he could buy for the return trip. Many of his crew members, though, were Tobagonians, and they wanted their wages while in their home port. One seaman in particular took umbrage, and after some harsh words, began to steal one of the ship’s tenders to take himself ashore. Jones brandished a sword in hopes of intimidating the man. Instead, it drew him out, and the seaman went at his captain with a bludgeon. Jones ran him through with the sword, instantly killing the crewman. In Jones’s version of the events, related in a March 1779 letter to Benjamin Franklin, he painted a questionable scene in which the crewman impaled himself on the sword as Jones held it in front of him, a story akin to a child claiming that a purloined piece of candy jumped into his pocket on its own.
Jones turned himself in to the port authorities, viewing the killing as an act of self-defense for which he would be cleared at trial. Acquaintances in port persuaded Jones that the chances of acquittal were not all that strong and that a lynch mob convened by the dead man’s friends was not out of the question. That night, after entrusting most of his money and other holdings to a friend, the Scottish captain slipped across the island on horseback, boarded a different ship, and set sail with fifty pounds in his pocket and a new name: John Paul Jones.4
Jones disappeared for a few months, eventually surfacing in Virginia around the time that his older brother, the tailor, died. (The estate went to a sister in Scotland, rather than to his estranged wife; Jones was left nothing.) Over the next few months, Jones stayed nearby with a friend, Dr. John K. Read, and courted Dorothea Dandridge, daughter of a wealthy Virginia family. He lost that prize to plantation owner and widower Patrick Henry, soon to become governor of Virginia.
The rebellious mood in the colonies was growing, and tensions with England were increasing. In an effort to isolate the problem, the British barred trade between the colonies and the West Indies, which meant the money Jones had left in trust in Tobago was out of his reach. In April 1775 gun battles broke out between colonists and British soldiers at Concord and Lexington in Massachusetts. In October the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, ordered the creation of a Continental army and a Continental navy.
Jones, low on cash and seeking work, traveled to Philadelphia to offer his services. Though he later wrote that he was moved by the pursuit of liberty, not cash, the words ring a bit hollow given how little Jones had engaged with political thought and debate previously and how energetically he had pursued trade in his quest to retire from the sea by age thirty. It was a large part of his personality to play up the best parts of himself while ignoring the negatives. Failures were the fault of others; successes were his and his alone. Friends such as Benjamin Franklin warned Jones that his petulance, complaints, and transparent grasps for glory were alienating, and not helping his cause with fellow revolutionaries. Jones sought over time to rein himself in and be more magnanimous in doling out credit for victories at sea, but he usually fell short.
Whatever Jones’s motives in traveling to revolutionary Philadelphia, on December 3, 1775, he won an early commission as first lieutenant aboard the Alfred, and his ambitions for a quiet retirement as part of the Virginia landed gentry rapidly faded.
The Continental navy never quite got its sea legs. Between the creation of the navy in October 1775 and the signing of the peace treaty in Paris in 1783, the Continental navy took control of fifty-seven ships through purchase, construction, loan, or seizure. Of those, thirty-five were captured, sunk in battle (some scuttled to avoid capture), or lost at sea.5 Some of the American captains seized British merchant and warships as prizes, but they did not affect the trajectory of the war, although French warships in 1781 helped George Washington defeat Lord Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, the last major battle of the Revolution.
Still, the navy gave Jones the chance to shine. The plan for the American sailing force was to hassle the British fleet and interfere with British commerce at sea. Aboard the Alfred, Jones served under Captain Dudley Saltonstall, a man Jones intensely disliked. After a foray to the Bahamas with a small fleet of four ships under the command of Commodore John B. Hopkins (they managed to capture some munitions but let a cache of gunpowder slip away and botched an attack on the HMS Glasgow on the way back to port), Jones was given command of his own ship, the sloop Providence, on May 10, 1776.
His abilities quickly became apparent. Jones’s first few trips involved ferrying George Washington’s troops or escorting merchant and supply ships. On August 6, 1776, Jones received orders from the Congress’s Marine Committee that effectively unleashed him on the seas to wreak whatever havoc he could on British navy and merchant ships. Jones had a crew of about seventy men, which made quarters quite crowded. It was a necessary overpacking, though: Jones needed skilled and trustworthy seamen in reserve to command whatever ships he might capture as prizes and sail them to friendly ports where the spoils would be accounted for. The Providence set sail on August 21, and less than a week later it had seized the British whaler Britannia and sent it under a prize crew to Philadelphia.
The Providence was sleek and nimble, and combined with Jones’s shrewd sailing skills, it was able to elude British warships. Over a span of forty-nine days he captured seven ships and scuttled or burned several others, most of them British fishing or trade boats. He had trouble—as did other captains—keeping his crew, though, because the privateers who worked independently of the navy offered more money and a larger split of the spoils from captured ships. Disputes over pay and percentages raged for years—the US Congress would receive bills from descendants of the sailors well into the mid-1800s.
On October 17, 1776, Jones was given the command of the Alfred, the ship on which he had served as a lieutenant, and ordered to sail for Canada to rescue captured American sailors pressed into service at a British coal mine. Jones captured several ships on the way and learned from the crew of one of them that the Americans no longer needed rescuing because they had joined the British navy. To add to the failure, the British managed to recapture nearly all of the ships Jones had taken.
Jones spent the winter in Boston as the Continental Congress’s Marine Committee rearranged its navy. Despite Jones’s seniority—he was the fourth man commissioned—and his skills as one of the force’s best and most effective captains, Jones lost out in the politics of the moment. The navy was rushing to build or refit existing ships as warships, and the work was being done at a range of ports. Jones had little history in the United States and only a few friends—political, military, or personal. As the assignments for the enlarged fleet were doled out, Jones found himself ranked eighteenth, which meant someone else would be assigned to the Alfred while he was returned to the smaller sloop Providence, his first command. Part of the problem was that the Marine Committee sought to pay political favors and so assigned captains in or near the ports where the ships were being built.
Jones took the news poorly, sending off angry letters and denunciations of some of his fellow captains to the Marine Committee and the president of the Continental Congress, as well as his own friends and his two main backers, Robert Morris and Joseph Hewes. Morris was a key figure in the financing of the Revolution and overseer of the Continental navy, and Hewes of North Carolina had a business partner with roots in Kirkcudbright. “I could heartily wish that every commission officer was to be previously examined,” Jones wrote bitterly to Morris. “For, to my knowledge, there are persons who have already crept into commission without abilities or fit qualifications.”6
Ultimately, Jones was saved the ignominy, as he saw it, of being sent back to the ship upon which he began as a captain in the Continental navy, though he never forgot the perceived slight. His friend Morris, with the support of John Hancock and others impressed with Jones’s early successes, decided in February 1777 to give the Scotsman command of the Alfred and direct him to lead a fleet of four other ships with orders to sail south to harass the British navy in the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico. That assignment hadn’t yet begun when, after some more vacillation, it was rescinded, and Jones was given command of the new twenty-gun sloop of war Ranger after its previously assigned captain, John Roche, “a person of doubtful character” in the words of a Congressional resolution, was booted out of the navy for malfeasance.7 It was the same day the Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as its new flag, and Jones would long make note that, as biographer Morison phrased it, “the most glorious part of Paul Jones’s career in the Navy began on the birthday of the Stars and Stripes.”8
A shipyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, owned by John Langdon, was building the Ranger, and Jones traveled there in July to oversee the final construction and to begin outfitting it with supplies and a crew. It was a small town, like most of the colonial villages, and Jones became a familiar figure bargaining with merchants over supplies, discussing the ship’s progress with Langdon, and, one presumes, making the rounds of the dinner tables of the city’s non-Tories. Jones experienced some frictions with some of the merchants and with Langdon, caused primarily by Jones’s exacting standards and his lack of diplomacy when not getting his way. That Langdon was a hard-driving and hard-headed shipbuilder didn’t help. They squabbled through the summer over matters both serious—how many cannons to install and the mast configuration—and minor, such as whistles for the boatswains (Langdon thought they should just yell orders).9
Jones’s orders were to sail the Ranger to France and be outfitted there with yet another ship to sail back to America. (After at first balking, so as to avoid an entanglement with the British, France was now beginning to aid the revolutionaries directly.) By November 1, the Ranger was ready, and Jones set sail. A month later, after a challenging crossing of the stormy North Atlantic, the ship arrived at the mouth of the Loire. Once in port, Jones discovered that the Dutch-built ship he was expecting to take over was caught up in a diplomatic row between the French and the Dutch. So Jones stayed with the Ranger, spending the rest of the winter refitting the ship and waiting for the weather to break. And he received orders that must have gladdened his heart: a blank check from his superiors to engage in whatever sorties he thought would best help the revolutionary cause, whether on sea or land.
In early February, Jones set sail in the Ranger along the French coast, acquainting himself with the waterways. He put in at Quiberon, on the south coast of Bretagne, and upon his arrival, Jones exchanged a traditional naval salute with a French ship leading a small squadron of escorts for commercial vessels preparing to leave France. Jones’s Ranger was flying the new Stars and Stripes, and the exchange of ceremonial fire marked the first time the new flag of the fledgling United States of America was saluted by a foreign power.
On April 10, 1778, Jones finally set sail with his crew on a mission of his own design.
The Ranger headed straight for England.
In letters, Jones revealed deep anger at the British over two issues. First, when American sailors were captured, the British treated them not as prisoners of war but as traitors, which Jones viewed as the British intentionally failing to recognize him and his fellow seamen as fighting men. He hoped, in raiding England, to kidnap a high-profile prisoner and force an exchange that would repatriate captured American sailors. The second was the growing British practice of torching civilian ports. Jones aimed “to put an end, by one good fire in England of shipping, to all the burnings in America.”10 Jones wasn’t the first American skipper to try to poach prizes off the coast of England. The previous summer, the Reprisal, the Lexington, and the Dolphin, under the lead of the Reprisal’s captain, Lambert Wickes, took twenty-one ships among them in two forays in and near English waters. Jones intended to press further. On April 14, the Ranger encountered a different Dolphin, a merchant brigantine ferrying flaxseed from Ostend, Belgium, to Wexford, Ireland. He captured the crew, scuttled the ship, and then sailed on. Two days later, the Ranger came within sight of the southeast coast of Ireland and then cut north through St. George’s Channel into the Irish Sea, where it encountered the 250-ton Lord Chatham heading for Dublin with one hundred hogshead of porter, as well as hemp and iron. Jones seized the ship, installed a prize captain and crew, and ordered it to set sail for Brest, France.
On April 18, the Ranger, nearing the entry to the Solway Firth—Jones was, in a sense, returning home—encountered the wherry (a small sailing vessel) Hussar, which carried a few light guns and tax inspectors. The British ship came alongside and tried to hail the Ranger; Jones’s crew opened fire with muskets. The Hussar fell away and after some quick maneuvers managed to evade the faster Ranger by sailing into the shallow waters of Luce Bay, where Jones dared not follow.
Despite these encounters, the Ranger’s mission remained unknown to most of the ships sailing the waters between England and Ireland, giving Jones the advantage of surprise. Jones took two more vessels and had his eye on the HMS Drake, an eighteen-gun sloop of war guarding trade in and out of Belfast, but bad weather interfered, sending Jones back across the sea to shelter the Ranger in a lee off the coast of Scotland. Bad weather wasn’t his only concern: Jones’s crew was becoming increasingly frustrated with—and was complaining about—Jones’s focus on causing damage ahead of seizing prize ships. The captain’s autocratic impulses were beginning to chafe on the men he most relied upon for the success of the mission—and, indeed, for survival.11
Still, Jones pressed on. These were familiar waters for him, and he had been nurturing a plan that he hoped would send a clear message to the British. It would be an audacious act by an audacious man.
By April 22, the bad weather had turned fair, and from the deck of the Ranger “the three kingdoms”—Scotland, England, and the independent Isle of Man—“were, as far as the eye could reach, covered with snow.” Jones made for Whitehaven, the port city whence he first sailed at age thirteen, though light winds made for slow progress. Around midnight he left the Ranger with thirty-one crew members aboard two rowboats and pulled for the pier. Dawn was beginning to seep into the sky as they made landfall. Jones sent one rowboat to the north side of the harbor with orders to set afire the ships moored there. Increasingly concerned that his crew might abandon him, Jones left a trusted seaman to guard the second boat and led the remaining crew to scale the walls of a small fort, where they bound the unarmed sentinels in their guardhouse, and drove spikes into the touch holes of the cannons, rendering them useless. Jones and a crewman named Green then moved along the shore spiking all the cannons they found.
Jones was perplexed by the lack of fire to the north, where the first boat’s crew should have already done its damage. When he returned to the landing spot, he found the first crew was already there. Both crews, it turned out, had let their “candles”—smoldering, sulphur-caked canvas torches—go out, so they had nothing with which to torch the ships.
Great Britain, and its newspapers, viewed the Scottish-born John Paul Jones as a pirate and a traitor.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, the Harris & Ewing Collection, reproduction 1 number LC-DIG-hec-07972
The sky was lightening, but Jones “would by no means retract while any hopes of success remained.” He sent a small party to raid nearby homes to find some embers; they returned both with fire and with rousted residents to keep them from sounding the alarm. Jones selected one ship, the Thompson, in the midst of “at least 150 others” that had been stranded by the receding tide, and instructed his crew to light it on fire. His men found a barrel of tar and poured it down a hatchway to feed the flames. They reignited the canvas torches and tossed them across the decks of other ships, in hopes of expanding the fire zone.
Yet Jones had an unforeseen problem: one of his crewmen, David Freeman, had snuck away and was pounding on doors, warning residents that raiders were burning the port. Some later speculated that he was a closet Loyalist who had signed on with Jones in order to get a ride back to England. Jones brandished pistols to fend off the gathering unarmed crowd, and once the fire was in full roar, he and his raiders reboarded their rowboats and oared back to the Ranger, which had sailed in closer to the port to meet them. Some of the Whitehaven residents ran for their cannons but found them spiked. They managed to scrounge up a few others (Jones speculated later that the guns were aboard some of the ships) and open fire on the retreating raiders, but by then the rowboats were safely out of effective range. Despite the flames and the tar, the damage to the ships in port was minimal. While Jones had lost one turncoat, the raiding party slipped away with three hostages.12
But Jones wasn’t done. A few hours later, the Ranger approached a headland on the north shore of the Solway Firth, and Jones and a detachment went ashore in a raiding party to kidnap the Earl of Selkirk. The lord wasn’t home, but his wife and children were. When Jones ordered his men back to the ship, the crew objected; many had signed on because of the promise of prizes. So far, Jones had seized little of value. To defuse their anger, Jones relented and let the crew enter the house, where they terrorized the earl’s family but left them unharmed as they made off with 160 pounds of the family silver.
In some ways, the raid was personal. Jones and Lord Selkirk knew each other, at least in passing, and Jones would later buy back a purloined tray and return it to the Selkirk estate. He had chosen Lord Selkirk as his victim because the earl was close to the king, Jones knew the territory, and he saw it as the most efficient way of grabbing a valuable hostage with which to force the release of American sailors. In a post-raid letter to Selkirk’s wife, Jones drove home the point that what was good for the British soldiers should be good for the Americans. “Some officers who were with me could not forbear expressing their discontent, observing that, in America, no delicacy was shown by the English, who took away all sorts of moveable property—setting fire not only to town, and to the houses of the rich without distinction, but not even sparing the wretched hamlets and mil[k] cows of the poor and helpless, at the approach of an inclement winter.” His raiders, Jones wrote, wanted their spoils and their revenge.13
The Ranger set sail again. The damage was minor, and England’s losses were light, but as word spread across the kingdom, so did fear. The Morning Post and Daily Advertiser reported on the raids on April 28 and gave details of the ship and crew provided to investigators by Freeman, the turncoat crewman: “A number of expresses have been dispatched to all the capital seaports in the kingdom where any depredations are likely to occur; all strangers in town are, by order of the magistrate, to be secured and examined; similar notices have been forwarded through the country.” Many newspapers included details of the run-in with the Hussar and wrote of the ships being sent in pursuit of the Ranger, while issuing calls for better fortifications along the coast. The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser observed that the raids and the “audacious conduct” of Jones and the men of the Ranger “will have this good effect: It will teach our men of war on the coast station, and our cruisers in St. George’s channel, to keep a more sharp lookout.”
Jones next went in search of the Drake, the eighteen-gun warship stationed off Belfast. This time the weather was better, and after an hour of intense and close-quarters battle, the Ranger gained the advantage. A musket shot to the head killed the Drake’s captain, and another grievous wound left his second in command on the verge of death. Cannon and grape shot—an artillery version of a shotgun shell—had wounded men on both ships and shredded the sails and rigging on the Drake, leaving it all but dead in the water. Leaderless, the crew quit the fight and gave up the Drake to Jones. The Ranger lost three men. As the British sent more ships to the channel in search of Jones, the American captain had his crew quickly refit the Drake with basic rigging and sails, and sent the two ships sailing north and then west around Ireland, eluding the searching warships. They arrived in Brest on May 8, 1778.
If Jones’s goal were to agitate the British navy and citizenry, then it would have been a good trip. But his goal was different, and he fell short of his three main objectives: capturing a notable hostage to force the release of imprisoned American sailors, burning villages in revenge for British atrocities in America, and amassing plunder for his crew. The lack of spoils proved to be the biggest problem. In the hours before the attack on the Drake, the Ranger’s crew huddled below deck so the Drake spyglasses wouldn’t spot them. Talk of mutiny over the lack of loot arose, fanned by Lieutenant Thomas Simpson, and the crew’s mood worsened at sea when a communication failure led to mixed signals and a botched attempt to seize another ship. Simpson, in charge of the Drake, thought Jones had signaled him to continue on to Brest, when in fact Jones had ordered him to sail with the Ranger as it chased the other ship, which slipped away. When the Ranger and Drake reunited, Jones, presuming his subordinate had intentionally spurned his order, had Simpson put in chains; the crew, though, faulted Jones. It was a surly and resentful band of seamen that finally put into Brest. Jones eventually paroled Simpson so that he could sail the Ranger home after other unspecified plans emerged for Jones, much “to the joy and satisfaction of the whole ship’s company.”14
Other than the success against the Drake, Jones’s trip was a mixed bag. The Ranger seized several ships, but they sold for less money than Jones and, more important, his crew had hoped. The port of Whitehaven had barely been scorched. And though Jones had failed to kidnap Lord Selkirk, he did manage to sweep up the crew of the Drake—some 133 strong—and other hostages, who were eventually part of a trade through which the British released 228 American sailors held as pirates and traitors.
The biggest success, though, was one of perception. Jones’s reputation soared as one of the fledgling American navy’s savviest captains.
It would take ten months idling in France before another ship could be arranged for Jones, and six more months before it was outfitted and ready to sail. The ship was an East India trader named Duc de Duras, which Jones—with an eye toward keeping one of his patrons, Benjamin Franklin, happy—renamed Bonhomme Richard, after the French translation of Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Jones also freshened his crew, sifting through the unattached sailors in port, including a number of American sailors released by their British captors during prisoner exchanges. One of them, Nathaniel Fanning, met Jones, who lied and said that the Richard, once she was outfitted, would sail directly to America and Fanning could get passage as a midshipman. Other officers told Fanning that Jones’s true destination would be the waters off Great Britain; Fanning, lacking any other options, signed on anyway.15
When Jones and his fleet of seven ships left Île de Groix on August 14, 1779, they were to be an ancillary part of a broad military plan hatched by the French to invade southern England: the ill-fated Armada of 1779. With Spanish allies, they planned for a fleet with sixty-four ships of the line carrying 4,774 cannons, and scores of lighter craft arrayed against a depleted British navy, which had sent most of its ships to the colonies. The French part of the armada, which included forty thousand soldiers to serve as an invasion force, set sail in early June to rendezvous with the Spanish, who were slow in arriving. By then, smallpox and other diseases had swept through the French fleet. The ultimate goal was to land the fighting men somewhere in Plymouth as the start of an invasion, but with thousands of men dead or dying from illness, and food and water running low, the invasion was called off, and the ships limped back to their home ports.
Jones, meanwhile, had set out for his part of the plan, which was to sail around the western side of Ireland, over the top of Scotland and into the North Sea. He knew nothing of the failed invasion, and two of his ships—both privateers—quit the mission before the fleet reached its northward turn. Weather—fog, followed by a gale—separated many of the rest of the ships. Seven of his crew, all Irish seamen, slipped away in a small tender and made for shore; loyal crew members in a second tender who were sent to capture the runaways were themselves taken captive, news that quickly reached the newspapers. The London Evening Post reported “the country was in an uproar” and that the escaping Irish sailors warned “that Jones’s intention was to scour the coast, and burn as many places as he could.”
It wasn’t. The Bonhomme Richard continued north and then east and south—taking prizes or burning merchant ships as they sailed—and by mid-September the fleet of now four ships was off Dunbar, the southern entrance to the Firth of Forth, with Edinburgh a reachable target. Jones toyed with invading the Scottish seaport to draw British forces away from the south coast, where he presumed the invasion was underway. He hatched a plan to occupy the port of Leith and demand a ransom—under the threat of burning it to the ground. He had trouble persuading the French captains in his fleet, and by the time they came around, a gale blew up that led Jones to delay acting. One of his prize ships sank during the storm, and he released another for ransom rather than see it sink too. By the time the winds died down, Jones’s ships had been spotted, the alarm raised, and the element of surprise destroyed. So Jones turned his ships and headed south, collecting prizes as he went, though ships that got away continued to sound the alert. Rumors spiraled over the islands and were repeated in the newspapers that Jones had been sighted in several places—warships were still looking for him off Ireland. On the east coast of Scotland, where Jones had indeed been sighted, the fear reached near frenzy level.
Jones might have had more success if his fellow captains and their crews had shown as much fear of him. Throughout the voyage, Jones wrestled with insubordination from the other ships. Captain Pierre Landais, the French skipper of the Alliance, was a particular problem, refusing even to board the Bonhomme Richard to discuss attack plans and greeting an emissary from Jones’s ship with an oath-laden denunciation of the man himself.
Still, Jones had a much better relationship with the crew of the Bonhomme Richard than the one he had maintained with the Ranger’s crew. Jones selected most of the men himself. With plenty of time in port while the ship was readied, Jones was able to train with the men, shaping them into a loyal and effective fighting force. Still autocratic and prone to angry outbursts, Jones had earned the men’s loyalty “like a temperamental orchestra leader who enrages almost every musician under him, yet produces a magnificent ensemble.”16 Yet he also treated them, in anger, to the tantrums of a spoiled child. After losing the chase for one ship, Jones crowned members of his staff with his “trumpet,” or megaphone. In another instance, after an argument with one of his lieutenants, Jones ordered the man to the brig and kicked at his back as the man descended below deck.17
With the ships once again separated after the storm, Jones made for the water off Flamborough Head, near Hull, which he had prearranged as a rendezvous point. As dawn broke on September 23, the Bonhomme Richard, the Alliance (with the unreliable Landais in charge), the Pallas, and the small cutter Vengeance were all together again, cruising off the headland looking for prize ships. Around two in the afternoon, they spotted an invigorating sight—more than forty sails from a convoy of trade ships en route from the Baltic under escort by the forty-four-gun British Serapis, and the twenty-gun sloop of war Countess of Scarborough. The captain of the Serapis, Richard Pearson, had been warned by a boat sent out from Hull that Jones was in the area, and as the convoy cut closer to shore the Serapis and the Countess of Scarborough faced off against Jones and his ships. The Serapis was far better equipped (it had a double deck of cannons) and was more seaworthy than the Bonhomme Richard, which would help it survive the battle to come. But the Serapis would then sail away with Jones in charge.
The battle remains a classic encounter of the sailing era. Just after sunset on a moonlit night, Jones, his Bonhomme Richard flying a British flag, sailed to within hailing distance of the Serapis. The vessel’s suspicious captain—he thought it was Jones but wasn’t yet sure—hollered out for Jones to identify his ship. A crew member, at Jones’s order, shouted back a lie, and Pearson asked again for the ship’s captain to identify himself. At that, Jones ordered that the British colors be struck and replaced by the new American insignia as both captains ordered their gunners to fire. At that close range, the power of the shots was incredible, but the biggest damage to the Bonhomme Richard came when two of its own cannons exploded, heavily damaging the ship and killing or maiming a large number of the crew.
The captains sailed their ships in a slow-motion dance, each trying to angle his ship such that his men could fire across the other vessel’s deck, with cannonballs and grape shot shredding flesh, wood, and rigging. Jones, realizing that he was outgunned and likely to lose in a battle of broadsides, quickly changed strategy. Gliding to within feet of the Serapis’s starboard quarter—the back right of the ship—he attempted to board her. As gunfire from the Serapis mowed down the men trying to cross over, Jones veered off. Pearson countered by trying to cut across the front of the Bonhomme Richard, where his gunners could fire blasts along the length of the deck, front to back. He miscalculated time and speed, however, and the bow of the Bonhomme Richard struck the Serapis’s stern.
The most famous words of Jones’s life never came from his mouth, but they are part of the lore anyway. Pearson asked Jones if he was ready to strike his colors—to surrender. Years later, one of his crew members would say that Jones replied, “I have not yet begun to fight.” According to biographer Morison, the true words were closer to “I have not yet thought of it, but I am determined to make you strike!” A memoir by the midshipman Fanning offered a different version: “Ay, ay, we’ll do that when we can fight no longer, but we shall see yours come down first. For you must know, that Yankees do not haul down their colors till they are fairly beaten.”18
Whatever his actual words, Jones was not ready to quit, even though the Bonhomme Richard had taken several cannon shots below the water line and was leaking badly, with many of her guns no longer working. The ships separated, and Pearson ordered several of his sails struck to reduce speed, letting the Bonhomme Richard come up alongside her where the British cannons blasted yet again as the American ship sailed past. Jones steered his ship to starboard—the right—as it cleared the Serapis, cutting across her path and getting the British bowsprit (the mast jutting forward from the front of the ship) caught up in the sails at the back of his ship. Jones kept steering to the right, using the Serapis’s spar as a pivot point, and came alongside so close that “the muzzles of our guns touched each other’s sides,” Pearson said later.19 Jones ordered his men to tie the ship to the Serapis, which significantly reduced the cannon advantage the British enjoyed.
The crews battled for two hours under the near full moon. Each kept trying to board the other’s ship, only to be repelled by lead and sword. The fighting was gory, the decks covered with bodies and limbs and blood as flames licked at the timbers. The Americans won the battle of the upper masts, with Fanning and others firing muskets and blunderbusses directly across at the men aloft above the deck of the Serapis. When the last of those British sailors fell, the Americans moved across and turned their weapons to the deck, peppering it like snipers.20
The Alliance had stayed out of the engagement (as had the Vengeance). In an act of treachery, its captain, Landais, now sailed around the bound ships and poured cannon fire to try to sink the Bonhomme Richard, hoping to claim the Serapis for himself. Cannon blasts did significant damage to the ship, disabled several of the Richard’s cannons, and killed a number of crew members. Then Landais sailed off to watch the end of the death struggle between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard.
The wind had died down, turning the sea to glass, and a current was carrying the two ships closer to shore. Pearson ordered an anchor dropped, hoping that if the grappling lines could be severed, the Richard would float free of his ship and give the Serapis enough space to finish her off with cannon fire. The effort failed and the ships remained tethered, a bond made faster after the Americans strapped their yardarms to those on the Serapis. The gunfire from above by Fanning and his men kept the British on the lower gun decks, where they continued to blast holes in the Bonhomme Richard’s hull—above the water line and on levels in which no American sailors remained—with eighteen-pound and twelve-pound cannons. More than a dozen fires broke out on the Serapis alone, from below deck to the sails and rigging, which meant sailors had to fight both fires and the enemy seamen. Pearson again ordered some of his men to cut the binds that held the two ships together, but they couldn’t get past Fanning and his men in the rigging. Lashed together, Jones stood a chance; if the ships separated, and the Serapis could again use her cannons, the Bonhomme Richard would be lost.
As it was, the American ship was grievously damaged. The Serapis was holding together better, but around 9:30 PM one of Jones’s men inched along a yardarm over the deck of the Serapis and began dropping grenades, one of which plummeted through an open hatch to the lower gun deck strewn with gunpowder cartridges. The grenade did its work; the blast and flash fire killed about twenty British fighters and badly burned many others.
A short time later, the Bonhomme Richard fell quiet. A rumor ran through the British command that the Americans had “asked for quarter” and “struck,” that is, surrendered. Pearson yelled to Jones for confirmation but received no reply. Pearson ordered his crew to board the other ship, but once the sailors were on deck and exposed, Jones’s men, carrying sharp pikes, emerged from hiding spots and swung away, killing several and forcing the rest to scamper back to the Serapis. Amid the renewed fighting, Jones’s men kept firing small cannonballs at the Serapis’s main mast, which began to creak and crack. A short time later, his ship ablaze and his cannons useless, Pearson—believing incorrectly that the Alliance was also trying to sink his ship—surrendered.
Jones had won the battle, but he lost his ship and a greater portion of his men as well. Efforts to save the Bonhomme Richard failed, and she sank into the North Sea. Jones reported 150 of his 322 men dead or wounded; Pearson, who had about 325 men, lost 49, with another 68 wounded. More would die over the next few weeks from their wounds or infections. And while Pearson lost the naval battle and two ships (the Pallas had taken the Countess of Scarborough), the convoy he was assigned to protect escaped unscathed.
Jones and his small fleet arrived at a port on the small Dutch island of Texel on October 3, 1779, four days after the battle. The British quickly learned of his presence and blockaded the harbor; they pressed the Dutch, who were neutral in the war, to return their ships and captured crewmen and order Jones to sail from Texel and, presumably, into their waiting blockade. The French intervened, arguing that Jones’s squadron consisted of French ships, and suggested that turning them over to the British would insult the French king, a not-so-veiled threat of retaliation. As the diplomats wrangled, Jones’s crew worked to get the ships seaworthy; Jones himself traveled to Amsterdam, where he was feted as a hero. Landais went on to Paris, where Benjamin Franklin had already received reports from Jones and crew members of both the Bonhomme Richard and the Alliance of his treachery at sea, and Landais was eventually bounced from the navy.
Jones, though, was hailed as a hero, and as word spread of the unlikely victory of the outgunned Bonhomme Richard against the Serapis, Jones’s reputation grew.