JOHN PAUL JONES AND his crew spent the rest of the fall and early winter of 1779 holed up in the Texel harbor, working to refit their ships while a British naval squadron waited offshore for the Americans to put back to sea. The Dutch were neutral in the war between the colonies and Britain, so the British did not pursue Jones into the port itself. They made regular demands for the Dutch to turn over the Serapis and the Scarborough— demands the Dutch resisted.
While the diplomatic drama played out, Jones’s crewmen fumed at being stranded without money in a port town that offered little in the way of diversions. It made for a long and boring stay, one in which small frictions could quickly escalate into confrontations and fights. And Jones himself bristled at being in command of a small fleet but not of his own fate.
In early November, the British changed diplomatic tactics and began demanding that the Dutch expel Jones. Of course, sending Jones out to sea would mean directing him into the guns of the waiting British warships. The French stepped in, arguing that Jones had set sail from Lorient, on the south coast of Bretagne, and was under French protection and thus not to be touched for fear of insulting Louis XVI. The Dutch seemed to fear the British more than the French and began wavering. As winter settled in, they ordered Jones to leave. The French ordered him to stay. Significantly, Jones had no orders from Franklin in Paris or from the Continental Congress.
Jones, for his part, kept crews working on getting the ships seaworthy after the intense battle off Flamborough Head. He was losing patience with the French as protectors, particularly after they asked him to accept a letter designating him a French privateer, a maneuver he found insulting. He saw himself as a captain in the US Navy and not some pirate or floating opportunist. Jones had no intention of hiding behind a French letter, turning himself over to the British, or making a suicidal run against the blockade. He could be a patient man, and sometimes the weather rewarded those who waited.
Jones’s hand was played for him in mid-November when the French told him they were taking control of all the ships except the Alliance, part of a maneuver rooted in diplomacy. The French were trying to forestall a rift between the Dutch and British, which occurred a short time later anyway, leading to war. For the moment, though, the French preferred that the Dutch remain neutral, as that made it easier to move and trade goods. Jones obeyed the order, transferring his flag and crew from the Serapis to the Alliance, and continued refitting the ship, which Landais—called to Paris by Franklin over his actions during the battle with the Serapis—had left a mess, including a rat infestation of seemingly biblical proportions.
For much of November and into early December, Jones couldn’t have left port if he had wanted to. Persistent westerly winds made it nearly impossible to sail out of Texel. Jones knew his moment would come, however, and it finally arrived in the form of a stiff gale from the east, which drove the British blockade some miles off their line. On December 27, on the strength of the fresh wind, the Alliance slipped out of port and, hugging the coast, sailed southwest, shadowed by a couple of British warships that several times looked as though they were ready to attack but then veered away. In detailing those encounters, Nathaniel Fanning wrote that Jones and the crew presumed the ships were uncertain of starting a fight they feared they would lose to the captain who, from the deck of his own sinking ship, had forced the surrender of the Serapis. And the British ships could not match the Alliance for speed; it zipped along at an average of ten knots per hour for much of the run along the British coast, past the cliffs of Dover and at least two anchored British squadrons, which could only watch helplessly as the ship sped by at a distance. Jones had made his escape.1
According to Samuel Eliot Morison, the Alliance was not “a happy ship.” Landais was a poor captain and had countenanced a fractious crew. Many of his men remained aboard, augmented now by Jones’s surviving Bonhomme Richard crew—the same crew that had been fired upon by the duplicitous Landais and his men. It made for a tense voyage, marked by spats and the occasional fistfight among the crew, and a threatened duel or two among the officers from the two ships. The Alliance took a couple of minor prizes and then put in at Coruña, Spain, for fresh water and other supplies.
After a couple of weeks, Jones ordered the crew to get ready to set out once again, but the men balked, angry over their lack of pay and the lack of proper clothing for winter sailing in the North Atlantic—most had lost their possessions when the Bonhomme Richard went down. Jones, with the support of his lieutenants, finally persuaded the men to return to work so they could head for Lorient. Once at sea, the tensions between Jones and the crew increased when word flitted around the ship that, rather than making straight for Lorient and a payday, Jones intended to cruise for three weeks looking for more prizes.
After some two weeks of fruitless cruising, the Alliance encountered a British warship, and Jones ordered the crew to get ready to take her. “But our crew swore they would not fight, although if we had been united we might have taken her with a great deal of ease,” Fanning wrote. When Jones was told of the rank-and-file insubordination, he gave in. “Our courses were dropped, and we in our turn ran from her, and made all the sail we could, by his order. All this time he appeared much agitated, and bit his lips often, and walked the quarter-deck muttering something to himself.” Three days later, on February 13, the Alliance anchored at Lorient.2
The Serapis and other prizes taken by Jones’s crew were already in port, sailed there from Texel under the French flag. Jones received orders from Paris—presumably, from Franklin—to ready the Alliance for a transatlantic voyage to carry crucial communications from Europe to the Continental Congress. The Alliance was in miserable condition despite the refitting at Texel. Part of the issue was an oddly imagined placement of ballast—ordered by Landais—that made it hard to control the ship as tightly as Jones liked, a crucial lack of flexibility given the likelihood of more sea battles. Jones had the crew and port carpenters set to work, on the United States government’s bill, to ready the ship, a project that would take several months.
But the captain managed to squeeze in some fun too. One afternoon the American agent at work in Lorient, James Moylan, boarded the ship to conduct some business with the ship’s purser; Jones went ashore leaving strict orders that no one was to leave the ship—including Moylan, an Irish-born man nearly sixty years old—until Jones returned. Moylan was “very rude in his manners … and he was what people commonly call a homely man, but rich in the good things of this world. His present wife was only about seventeen years of age, very handsome, and a little given to coquetry.”3 According to Fanning, Moylan had caught Jones in compromising positions with his wife before. This time, there would be no interrupting: Jones went straight to Moylan’s home, where he spent the afternoon and evening with Moylan’s young wife. The crew, meanwhile, got Moylan drunk and poured him into a berth, where he spent the night. The next day, gossip about Jones’s “gallantry,” as Fanning described it, swept through the port. On another occasion, Jones swept up the wife of a Lorient man and kept her in his cabin during a short cruise of a couple of weeks.
In mid-April, Jones traveled to Paris, where he was received as a hero and presented at the royal court. Louis XVI gave him a gold-and-jewel sword. Jones also attended the opera with Marie Antoinette and was the guest of honor at a series of dinners and parties, despite his inability to speak or understand much French. (He would later gain some fluency.) Jones saw Franklin regularly, as well as a steady stream of women. The king also recommended that the French legislature bestow upon Jones the Cross of Military Merit, a first for a non-Frenchman. This would eventually lead to Jones being recognized as a chevalier, a title Jones clenched as though it was his key to the palace door. The Freemasons swore him into the elite Lodge of the Nine Sisters and then commissioned Jean Antoine Houdon, the premier sculptor of the day, to carve a bust of the naval hero. Jones trimmed his long hair by eighteen inches and sat for the artist, and once the bust was completed, contemporaries declared it an exact likeness. Jones was so pleased he ordered extra copies sent to George Washington, who kept it on display at Mount Vernon; Thomas Jefferson; and his friend Robert Morris in Philadelphia. Eventually he distributed about sixteen of the statues.4
The trip to Paris wasn’t all pleasure, though. Jones was trying to pressure the French to sell the Serapis and other prizes so he could collect the money needed to pay his crew members, who were becoming mutinous again as they heard “of Jones’s gay doings in Paris…. While the Commodore was making love to countesses and sleeping with scented courtesans, they hadn’t enough money to buy a drink or command the services of such poor trollops as a seaport provided for enlisted men.”5 Jones was also pushing plans for a joint American-French naval attack on British waters.
Jones was frustrated on both fronts, and by late May was back at Lorient empty-handed and overseeing the final reconditioning of the Alliance. Landais surfaced in the port town by early June, though he largely stayed away from the wharf and out of sight, according to Fanning. He had booked passage to America, where he was to stand court martial, but he was hardly a chastened man and in fact was making plans for yet another act of duplicity. On the afternoon of June 23, Jones was ashore for a social call, and his officers were below deck eating, when they heard shouts from above. Scrambling topside, they found their ship freshly manned, and Landais striding back and forth. As soon as Jones’s officers were assembled, Landais claimed that his commission by the Continental Congress gave him command of the Alliance, and neither Franklin, in Paris, nor Jones could countermand that. He was taking control of the ship and would sail it to America. And, he said, if any officer aboard could not accept his captaincy, the officer was to go ashore immediately. The crew was given no option. All but one of the officers left the Alliance.
Houdon bust of John Paul Jones, one of which was used to preliminarily identify his body in Paris.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number HABS MD,2-ANNA,65/1--24
Jones was livid and set off for Paris to consult with Franklin and French naval officials, but by the time he returned, Landais had moved the Alliance to an offshore anchorage. The entry to the port was a well-protected narrows, and at Jones’s request the French dropped a boom across the mouth to preclude the Alliance from leaving. As violent confrontation loomed, Jones backed off, striking a diplomatic pose by saying that French cannons firing on a French captain sailing an American ship would benefit only the British. He let the Alliance leave for America. Morison, Jones’s insightful biographer, suspected Jones let the ship go because he didn’t like sailing it and wanted to be rid of Landais, whose acts of treachery would catch up with him. As the Alliance neared Philadelphia, Landais’s officers seized control and steered for Boston, where Landais was called before a court of inquiry and, after a hearing, kicked out of the navy.
Shipless, Jones returned to Paris for a short stay and presumably discussed the events at Lorient with Franklin. He was lobbying hard to be given the Serapis, but the French refused to give her up. In July, Jones was back at Lorient and had a fresh ship to command—the twenty-four-gun Ariel, which the French had captured from the British. Jones once again oversaw a refitting, and on October 7, 1780, the Ariel set out as part of a convoy of fourteen America-bound ships. They almost immediately encountered a massive tempest with “mountain seas,” as Fanning described the waves, which the Ariel barely survived. It was an epic storm; the French coast was littered with ships blown aground. After the storm passed, the Ariel limped back into port for another full refitting—the masts and sails were all but gone.
By now, Jones’s celebrity in Lorient was waning, in part because of his own sexual escapades, viewed as scandalous by many of the local residents, not to mention the cuckolded husbands. Jones added to his troubles with an odd set of actions, as recounted by Fanning. He had persuaded an Irishborn passenger named Sullivan to stay on the ship for several days after it made its way back to port to oversee a contingent of marines aboard ship. As Jones kept extending his need of Sullivan, the man eventually demanded to be let ashore. Jones instead ordered him thrown in chains and held below. Sullivan won his release through the intercession of friends in Lorient and then stalked Jones to a room the captain was renting in port and beat him savagely with a cane. Several days later, Jones was again beaten by a member of the military garrison after refusing a challenge to a duel.6 Twice battered, Fanning reports, Jones rarely left the ship again until it set out again for America, but only after further straining local relations when he rounded out his crew by pressing into service—essentially, kidnapping—a number of American sailors at port in Lorient.7
Jones set sail around December 12. With his guns reduced and his hold full of military supplies (not to mention volatile gunpowder) and other cargo for America, he chose a southern route in hopes of avoiding a battle. He almost succeeded. Near the end of the voyage, a loyalist privateer far faster than the Ariel approached. Jones ordered the Ariel’s deck cleared, the gun ports closed, and a detachment of French marines to stay ready below deck. Hoisting a British flag, Jones struck a pose as a British captain and demanded that the privateer, the Triumph, account for itself. After a shouted exchange, he ordered Triumph’s captain to present his papers aboard the Ariel; the captain refused. Jones ordered the Stars and Stripes hoisted and directed his men to fire; they did, strafing the deck of the Triumph. The gambit caught the Triumph by surprise, and after a weak attempt at defense, the captain, John Pindar, surrendered.
Yet Jones wasn’t the only commander capable of a ruse. As Jones was distracted issuing orders to seal the victory and assemble a crew to sail the Triumph to the United States as a prize, Pindar suddenly ordered his men to unfurl the sails. The ship sprinted away before Jones could maneuver the Ariel into a position in which it could use its cannons. The duplicitous Jones had been outmaneuvered. There was nothing left to do but set out again for Philadelphia. En route Jones caught wind of a mutiny plot and headed it off; the Ariel sailed into port with twenty crew members in irons but its cargo of military supplies, French soldiers, and letters from Franklin and the French government to the Continental Congress intact.
The voyage of the Ariel was Jones’s last sailing command for the US Navy. The Ariel was returned to the French, who sailed it back to Europe. Jones sat through a board of inquiry to satisfy lingering questions about the Landais affair. Jones was cleared, but his volatile personality and reputation had long ago soured his peers in the navy. Jones desperately wanted to be named admiral and be placed in charge of the entire US Navy, but he was much less savvy on the battlefield of politics than at sea. Backroom communications by fellow captains—Captain James Nicholson prime among them—with members of Congress raised the specter of high-level dissent should Jones be made admiral. So Congress did what it has done ever since: it failed to act. Jones didn’t get his promotion, but his friend Robert Morris, who was overseeing naval operations, arranged a consolation prize. He gave Jones command of the America, which was under construction in Portsmouth and would be the largest fighting ship in the small and ineffectual American fleet.
Jones arrived in Portsmouth on August 31, 1781, his first visit to the city in the four years since he had overseen the fitting-out of the Ranger. Jones found many old friends waiting to greet him; old frictions had been smoothed by time and his growing fame.
One relationship, though, picked up right where it left off. John Langdon, the wealthy and irascible builder of the Ranger, was also building the America. Jones discovered the ship had barely progressed beyond the framing-out stage, and Langdon was unwilling to assign more than three or four workers at a time to the project. Jones and Langdon’s antagonistic relationship renewed to the point that they weren’t speaking and instead communicated through an intermediary—Morris in Philadelphia. This meant decisions that could have been made in minutes now took weeks. And Jones’s professional life was about to get more complicated.
In July 1782 a French squadron arrived at Boston harbor and, after taking on an American pilot to guide them into port, three of its ships went aground. Two were refloated, but the third broke apart on the rocks. To recompense the French, the Continental Congress turned over the America to its European allies, robbing Jones of his command. He stayed with the project until the ship launched, and then the chevalier watched as the French took command of it.
Jones was again without a ship, and by now the Revolutionary War was in its final stages. The French navy had driven the British out of Chesapeake Bay the previous fall, and Lord Cornwallis had surrendered his troops at Yorktown. In November 1782 the Americans and the British signed the initial articles of peace.
Seeing the end in sight and seeking a better understanding of—and contacts within—the French navy, Jones secured permission to sail the Caribbean with a French fleet to study its operations. The tropics were not kind to the native Scotsman: he came down with a persistent fever, probably malaria, which laid him low. He was slow to recuperate and, once back in Philadelphia, still felt the effects of the illness. In May 1783 Jones went to a sanitarium in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for the summer and finally regained his health.
And, it should be noted, his ambitions.
With the war over, Jones was anxious to create a future for himself. He contemplated settling down as a farmer, but a plan to buy land in New Jersey fell through. He wrote letters and advised his friend Morris that if the United States was to survive, it would need a true navy and not a hodgepodge of hastily drawn together privateers and merchant seamen—an institution that trained young sailors for sea and young leaders for commands. It was likely the first vision for what would become the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.
None of those ideas sparked a new life for Jones. Finally, though, he hatched a plan that took root. Jones and his crews were still owed tens of thousands of dollars from prizes they had seized during the war and sent to Danish and French ports. Jones persuaded Congress to deputize him to go to Paris to pursue settlement of those claims. It took some three years for the accounts to be settled (and decades more for the heirs of Jones and his crew to get their shares), a frustrating marathon of claims, counterclaims, and French royal bureaucracy. By the time the work ended, Jones was hungry for a next step. He dallied in the merchant world, concocting then aborting a scheme to trade otter pelts from the Pacific Northwest with Far East merchants, and losing money on a short-lived project to import American goods to Lorient. A sailor and fighter he might have been; a merchant he was not.
In Paris, Jones kept up his romances and his social life. But he pined to lead a navy. In 1786, he wrote a memoir of his life at sea for an audience of one: Louis XVI. The work reads like an immense job application. But the French king had no need of his services. Jones sailed for Denmark, hoping to recoup more prize money, but then, running low on cash, he decamped for the United States.
Jones spent the summer of 1787 in New York City, staying with his friend Robert Hyslop as he waited for the new Congress gathered at Philadelphia—which would sign the new Constitution—to approve his settlements for the prize money he was owed. By December, he was back in Paris, where good news awaited him. Jefferson, then the US representative to France, told him that the Russian ambassador to Louis XVI’s court had asked if Jones might be available for service under the czarina, Catherine the Great, who was heading to another war against the Ottoman Empire in the Black Sea.
Jones, it seemed, was about to get the fleet command he so hungered for.
Jones was still trying to wrest a settlement out of Denmark for three British ships he had captured and sent to the Norwegian coastal city of Bergen, bounty that the Danes—who then controlled the city—turned back over to the British in what the United States considered a violation of international law. To push the issue, Jones traveled by carriage from Paris to Copenhagen. The late-winter trek took several days, during which time Jones caught a chill; he fell ill when he arrived on March 4, 1788. Following a few days of convalescence, Jones was presented to Danish officials, who, after some vacillation, told him that he had no authority to negotiate the issue and that it must be done in Paris by Jefferson.
Jones was flummoxed, but not particularly upset, for in Copenhagen he wasn’t talking only to the Danes. He met several times with Baron Krudner, the Russian envoy to Denmark, and through him cemented the deal that would give him a command in the Imperial Navy. It was a delicate situation, and Jones went to pains to clear the assignment first with Jefferson, saying that while he was an American citizen, his services were not needed by the United States and he wished to sail for the czarina unless the United States saw a conflict. There was none.
Catherine II was one of the most powerful women to ever engage in international relations. She was a minor German princess by birth, betrothed to the inept Peter III when both were teenagers. She supplanted him in 1762 in a bloodless coup (he was quietly strangled shortly afterward by members of her inner circle) and, through a masterful grasp of politics and manipulation, quickly assumed tight and ambitious control. As empress, Catherine added to the empire in significant ways, pushing westward into Europe and eastward as far as Alaska. Most significantly for Jones, she also pushed southward and engaged in a series of wars and skirmishes with the Ottoman Empire. In the winter of 1788, the Ottomans were fighting to regain territory in the Crimea lost in the war of 1768–74. And while some of the fighting was land based, a key battleground was the Black Sea, which was why Catherine was looking to add Jones to her stable of naval commanders.
Jones signed on, after some negotiations, as rear admiral. In a confirming letter from Krudner, Jones was told to proceed to Russia “as soon as your affairs permit, the intention of her imperial majesty being to give you a command in the Black Sea, and under the orders of Prince Potemkin,” who was not only Catherine’s lover for a time but also her most trusted advisor.8 Jones apparently presumed that he was being offered the command of the Black Sea fleet; he would soon learn this was not the case.
The court of Catherine the Great was as much a snake pit as any other royal court, and if Jones had reservations about serving a royal court in which two of the previous four leaders had emerged from coups, he never gave voice to it. The pay was about twice what he made as an American captain, and while he was antsy to get back into battle, the prime draw was the rank. He had long coveted what is known as a “flag rank,” which was unavailable to him in the United States—there was no longer even a US Navy—and here Catherine was making him a rear admiral. It was, Jones believed, the crowning achievement in an up-and-down career. He was anxious to get to Saint Petersburg to receive his commission and get to work, so he set off in mid-April from Copenhagen for Stockholm and then Grisslehamn, a coastal Swedish town to the northeast. Jones planned to hop on a packet ship there to cross to Finland, but the Gulf of Bothnia was still packed with winter ice and packet ships weren’t moving.
Jones feared delay. So he hired an open-deck thirty-foot boat with several oarsmen and a smaller craft to be towed behind, which he could, if needed, drag across an ice field and then drop back into open water. He didn’t tell the crew where he was going. He had the men pull to the south, along the Swedish coast, and as they reached the end of the ice pack, he brandished a pistol and ordered the men to steer eastward. It took four mostly sleepless days of frozen spray and cutting wind—they lost the small boat in heavy seas—to get to Tallinn, in Estonia, where Jones paid off the crew and then bought some horses and continued overland for Saint Petersburg, arriving May 4. He wasted no time in getting to the Hermitage to present himself to his new employer. Catherine was satisfied, writing to her friend and confidante, Friedrich Melchior, the Baron von Grimm, that “I think he will suit our purpose admirably.”
Jones was similarly pleased. “I was entirely captivated and put myself into her hands without making any stipulation for my personal advantage,” he wrote. “I demanded but one favor: That she should never condemn me without hearing me,” meaning he exacted a pledge that Catherine would always give him a chance to tell his side of a story. That he sought such an assurance suggests he was either sensitive to the palace intrigues of the royal court or anticipated problems in the war zone or with his crews. Or perhaps both. Regardless, the promise was worthless.9
Jones left immediately for Crimea and was stunned to discover when he arrived twelve days later that he would be but one of four rear admirals fighting the Empress’s sea battles and answering to Potemkin. The other three were Charles, prince of Nassau-Siegen, the heir to a worthless German principality who had known Jones in Paris; Marko Vojnovic, a veteran of the first Russo-Turkish War; and Nicolay Mordvinov, who was in charge of the arsenal.10 The existing admirals had no interest in sharing command with Jones, and he quickly realized that he “had entered on a delicate and disagreeable service,” as he later wrote. Jones was assigned to lead a small squadron consisting of his flagship, eight dodgy frigates, and four other small boats deployed in an estuary of the Dnieper River, whose shallows made it difficult to maneuver a fleet in battle. Nassau-Siegen, assigned a small yacht for his flagship, commanded a more practical fleet of agile, oar-propelled fighting ships that could navigate shallow water and would not have to rely on the shifting winds.
The estuary, called the Liman, ran roughly thirty miles east-west at the northwest extension of the Black Sea east of Odessa. The Turks manned a significant fort on the north shore of the mouth of the estuary, at Ochakov Point, and the Russians were hurriedly trying to establish a countering battery—Jones’s suggestion—two miles across the water on the sandy spit of land that marked the southern edge of the mouth, near the Russian Fort Kinburn. The Russians hoped to use their fleet to provide cover for land forces to take the Turkish fort; the Turks hoped to keep the Liman clear of Russian ships so they could help defend and resupply their troops at Ochakov. Just to the east of the fort was the mouth of the Bug River, another strategic asset the Russians wanted to keep out of Turkish hands—in large part because Russian land forces would have to cross that river to get to the fort.
When Jones arrived, he found there was no coherent plan for attack. Given the politics of tsarist Russia, Potemkin stayed aloof from the command decisions so as not to be stained in the event of failure, while maintaining his ability to claim credit for success. Jones had an aide row him out into the Liman to get a look at the Turkish forces, which he found considerable. The ships were large, numerous, and well armed with powerful cannons. The Russians would stand little chance in a head-to-head confrontation. So Jones hatched a plan in which he would maneuver his squadron at an angle running from the southwest to the northeast and Nassau-Siegen would place his detachment of smaller ships along the northern edge of the estuary to attack the Turkish flank.
On the morning of June 7, the massive Turkish fleet of fifty-seven ships sailed into the Liman, drawing fire from Nassau-Siegen’s ships; the return fire sent the small Russian boats scurrying in retreat, which Jones anticipated would embolden the Turks to press forward. They did, and with a favorable wind Jones’s ships shifted their line into a V and let loose with a withering series of cannon blasts. Hollow, perforated shells filled with incendiary material were launched from mortars, and the flaming missiles were devastating to the wooden Turkish ships with their tar caulking and cloth sails. The Turks quickly retreated, losing two ships.
In reports submitted to Potemkin, Jones sought to spread around the credit for the victory, likely mindful that his ego in the past had caused problems with his peers. Jones overstated Nassau-Siegen’s role and actions, while Nassau-Siegen, who was better at politics than fighting, savaged Jones in his reports and took all the credit. Jones learned of the other commander’s reports and stifled his outrage, but his further communications with Potemkin took on a veiled edge. The poison was in the well.
The next battle took more than a week to come together. In the dark hours of June 16, the Turks again sailed into the Liman, this time holding nothing back. Some one hundred ships moved eastward, flags fluttering in the breeze and crews screaming and banging on drums and other items to create a ferocious—and intimidating—din. The Russian ships were anchored inside the estuary, which meant the Turks had to navigate tricky shallows that caused a series of groundings—including that of the flagship of the capitan pasha, or fleet commander. As the Turks stalled to free the flagship and others, and to regroup, Jones embarked on the kind of foray of which legends are made.
He wanted to take some depth soundings of the estuary near the anchored Turkish fleet, and selected a Russian named Ivak, who later wrote of the experience, to row him. They slipped along the shore on the northern edge of the estuary, Jones taking the measurements. They drew no interest from the anchored ships so ventured closer. And closer. Soon they were among the enemy ships themselves. Jones had Ivak pretend to be a vendor selling salt and strike up a conversation with Russian-speaking crew members on one of the large warships. As they conversed, Jones used a piece of chalk to write a message in French on the stern: “To be burned. Paul Jones.”11
Back at the Russian fleet, Jones met with the other commanders on Nassau-Siegen’s yacht to pass along the soundings. As they spoke, they heard cannon fire in the distance. Some of the Turkish fleet had tried to use the cover of darkness to sail back into the Black Sea, but the Russians at the fort Jones had recommended they build on the south spit caught sight of the sails and let loose. The ships were damaged and driven aground, setting the stage for Nassau-Siegen to again wander off to collect grounded prizes. Nassau-Siegen was intent on burning the Turkish ships, a tactic Jones deplored; better, he believed, to seize the ships and add them to the Russian fleet. The two admirals quarreled, and an already sour relationship was destroyed.
Jones had seen the array of Turkish ships and decided the best counter would be to reestablish the pincer array of ships that had worked so efficiently in the space in the previous battle, and to surprise the Turks by attacking first. Under cover of darkness, the Russian ships moved westward, and at daybreak they filled their sails and began the assault. The Turks, already disorganized, began to panic, cutting anchor cables and turning into the wind. Jones was aboard the Vladimir and was within pistol range of the capitan pasha’s command ship when his advantage was quickly wasted. The captain of the Vladimir dropped anchor, saying later that he was saving the ship from running aground on a sandbar (which may or may not have been a real possibility). The capitan pasha’s ship was again aground, as was another, and Jones was eyeing the prizes when Nassau-Siegen, who had held back during the attack, suddenly surged forward to claim them. The capitan pasha himself had already escaped to another ship, and his fleet regained some composure and began firing on the Russian ships, including raking the Vladimir’s decks. Jones slipped into a small boat and was rowed to Nassau-Siegen’s ship, where he vainly asked his colleague to leave the prizes and help repel the fleet. Jones finally persuaded several of the Russian captains individually to join the attack. By dusk, the Turkish ships had retreated westward to the protection of the fort’s cannons.
At dawn, Nassau-Siegen sailed off, leaving Jones with light protection in the event the Turkish fleet decided to attack, a strategic error that, fortunately for Jones, wasn’t pressed by the Turks. But a different slaughter ensued. Nassau-Siegen was taking no prisoners and offered no quarter. His ships bombarded the grounded but still manned Turkish ships with flaming missiles. The Turkish-oared galleys were propelled by slaves and prisoners chained to the vessels they rowed. Their panicked, then dying, screams echoed across the estuary.
Over the next several weeks, there were more skirmishes as Potemkin took his time moving the army into position, first crossing the Bug River and then preparing to lay siege to the fort. There were more internecine squabbles, too, and Jones, who had started out seeking to be gracious, returned to character. Potemkin was a capricious and autocratic commander, and he issued a series of senseless orders to Jones—including risking Russian men and ships to remove a single cannon from a Turkish ship that Potemkin deemed a threat. They were impossible and ill-considered assignments; still, Jones obeyed orders. Each failure, though, was a black mark. (One wonders if Potemkin, rather than being capricious, was hoping to get his American charge killed.) In one final exchange, Potemkin wrote Jones to confront the Turks “courageously” or face a charge of negligence.
If Potemkin was looking for the right button to push, he found it. Jones sent back a puckish response, including a gibe at Nassau-Siegen, telling Potemkin that “since I did not come here as an adventurer, or as a charlatan to mend a broken fortune, I hope in the future to suffer no further humiliation.”
Potemkin sent for Jones, and they quarreled, Jones telling his commander that Nassau-Siegen had duped Potemkin, Potemkin taking offense at the notion that he could be manipulated. Jones was relieved of his duties and offered a command in the Baltic Fleet, which he took as a meaningless gesture. Jones returned to Saint Petersburg hoping to make his case before Catherine and thinking that the promise he had exacted to be heard had indeed been sincere. In the midst of the turmoil, Jones learned that none of the correspondence he had sent to his American peers had made it out of Russia; Catherine’s secret police had intercepted it all. Reports from Potemkin, Nassau-Siegen, and others had reached the empress, however, and she had already written Jones off as a bad decision.
Jones continued to try to hatch plans, including proposing a US-Russian naval alliance. His extended stay in Saint Petersburg, though, only exposed him to more intrigue. In what was apparently a scheme engineered by Nassau-Siegen, a young girl selling butter went to Jones’s apartment and then claimed that the commodore raped her. The girl’s story eventually fell apart, and a new version, featuring an ill-described man in a uniform who had paid her to play the role, emerged. Jones faced no criminal charges, but his reputation was left in tatters.
As the Russian summer faded, Jones left Saint Petersburg and floated around Europe for a year or so, still trying to come up with a fresh plan. Physically, though, he had been battered by both the Liman campaign and the court intrigues. His schemes found few listeners, and in May 1790 he was back in Paris. It was a far different city than he remembered, with the smell of revolution in the air and the aristocracy under siege. His health was failing and he was at loose ends. He became a bore to his friends, and his plans for resurrection seemed to miss the obvious politics of the moment. The French royal family was barely able to help itself let alone Jones, as Paris slid further into turmoil.
Jones still struggled to find fresh relevance for himself in the world. Jefferson was one of the few who envisioned a role for the former commodore, a role that Jones would have relished. Jones had suggested the United States join up with European powers to send a fleet into the Mediterranean to confront the audacious Barbary pirates, who were extorting European powers for safe passage and seizing American merchant ships for refusing to pay protection. The Americans weren’t looking to forge any such alliances, but they did need to confront the piracy. Jones, Jefferson thought, would be the perfect American agent to deal with the pirates, and on June 1, 1792, Jefferson and Washington, as secretary of state and president, respectively, appointed Jones a special commissioner to negotiate with the Barbary pirates for the release of enslaved American sailors. Washington also appointed Jones a special consul to Algiers. The hope was that Jones’s reputation as a sea warrior would strengthen his hand against the seafaring Barbary states.
But by the time the documents reached Paris, Jones was dead.
Three weeks after Jones was buried in his lead coffin, Paris erupted in violence. Anti-royal mobs stormed the Tuileries, and the Swiss Guards protecting the royal family were no match. A slaughter ensued. Louis XVI was deposed and taken prisoner, and the bodies of the dead Protestant soldiers were heaved into carts and hauled off, many of them to the Saint Louis Cemetery. It was still the only place in Catholic Paris that could receive Protestant dead, though it’s unclear how much the revolutionaries were hewing to religious doctrine and protocol. Deep trenches were dug in the cemetery, a few yards from where Jones was buried, and the dead men were stacked in like cordwood then covered over with dirt.
The cemetery continued to receive Protestant dead for a few more weeks, but was then closed and eventually sold off, its location, and its best-known body, quickly forgotten amid the turmoil. Five months later, the king who had decorated Jones and presented him with a golden sword was executed on the guillotine in the middle of la Place de la Révolution, which until recently had been la Place de Louis XV, named for the freshly killed king’s predecessor and grandfather.
The day after Jones died, his friend Jean-Baptiste Beaupoil, former aide to Lafayette, wrote a letter to Jones’s sisters informing them that he had died, where the will was filed, and that his possessions had been sealed up in his apartment on Rue de Tournon. He also wrote that Samuel Blackden, another Jones friend, was heading to England and could be reached at No. 18 Great Titchfield Street in London. Janet Taylor, one of the sisters, wrote to Blackden there, and on August 8, Blackden replied with details on Jones’s final days and his burial.
Taylor traveled to Paris in October to collect her brother’s belongings and money owed him by the French. She found the city in violent uproar. She checked into the Hôtel Anglais on le Passage des Petits-Pères, where Beaupoil lived, a few blocks from the Tuileries, and then went to the Rue de Tournon apartment to collect her brother’s papers and possessions. She also linked up with an unidentified friend and an Irish-born Parisian valet de place—something of a tour guide for people seeking to navigate the local bureaucracy—to petition the French National Assembly for payments Jones had felt he was due. 12
Paris, though, was coming apart. A few weeks before Taylor arrived, the Republic had been declared, and roving mobs attacked prisons, executing some 1,400 inmates. Other revolutionary gangs invaded the homes of royalists, priests, and observant Catholics, or others not perceived to be aligned with the masses; others were simply the victims of score-settling under the guise of revolution. Revolutionaries roamed the streets, and Taylor quickly perceived that it would not be safe for her to linger. She fled before the Assembly could consider her request, a decision that may have saved her life. Three days later, the proprietor of her hotel was arrested and his assets seized. The Irishman and valet de place were also swept up and quickly lost their heads to the guillotine.
Interestingly, for all of Jones’s naval battles in the name of freedom from the rule of the British king, in France he was aligned with the king against those who sought their freedom. Had he not died of his illnesses, he could well have lost his head on the guillotine, too, a reminder—much like Jones’s role in the American Revolution—that often one man’s hero is another man’s pirate.