FRESH GALES, Close Weather” reads the log of Ranger for April 15, the day she entered the St. George’s Channel between England and Ireland. Under lowering skies, Jones was still fussing with Ranger’s ballast, ordering the men to move “28 pigs of lead” farther aft, so that her bow would not dig so deeply into the waves. He wanted to coax as much speed as possible out of his “little frigate.” In a few days, if all went well, she would be showing her heels to the Royal Navy. Jones was heading right into the British Lion’s mouth. He planned to burn the ships in a British port and then kidnap an earl, a peer of the realm, and ransom him for the American seamen suffering in Britain’s prisons.
The city Jones chose to raid, as well as the lord he wished to abduct, were familiar to him. Jones had first seen the port of Whitehaven, on the southern coast of the Firth of Solway, as a thirteen-year-old boy going to sea for the first time. The Earl of Selkirk was the lord of the largest estate near Kirkcudbright His father had been William Craik’s closest friend and a frequent visitor at Arbigland. Jones had practical reasons for choosing these targets. He knew the local waters and he could act as his own pilot to bring Ranger in close to shore. But he may also have been moved by a desire to gain vindication and settle old scores. Both Whitehaven the place and Selkirk the man were reminders of Jones’s youthful subservience. He had submitted himself to indentured apprenticeship aboard the Friendship in Whitehaven because he lacked the connections to join the British navy as a midshipman or “young gentleman.” Though as a youngster he had been exempt from the British press, he would have seen the navy’s press gangs in the streets of Whitehaven, pulling merchant sailors out of the taverns. When the owners of the Friendship were forced to sell the ship, the best job he could get in Whitehaven was as third mate on a slave ship, the lowest form of maritime service. No one had bothered to know John Paul’s name; but they would not forget John Paul Jones. To John Paul the gardener’s son, the Earl of Selkirk symbolized the height of riding class dominance, outranking even his father’s master and the local gentry around Kirkbean and Kirkcudbright. Selkirk was one of those stuffed shirts who had believed that the well-born Mungo Maxwell was an innocent victim. Capturing his lordship, Jones believed, would bring representatives of the crown crawling with ransom money. Jones would disdain it, and demand to be paid with freedom for his fellow American seamen, proving his own nobility.
It was a daring, possibly reckless, plan from a leader possessed. Unfortunately for Jones, his men had no intention of following. They wanted to go home, not invade England. One of the crew had come down with the dreaded smallpox. They were tired of cold and drudgery, of endlessly shifting ballast and trimming yards to suit their fussy captain. Jones sensed the crew’s unease in their surly looks and sluggishness. “A slow and half obedience I had observed even from the beginning,” he recorded.
Within a few days of leaving France, Jones had to face down a mutiny. He was alerted by the only officer loyal to him, Jean Meijer, the lone foreigner in a wardroom dominated by New Englanders. Lieutenant Meijer had volunteered to take Matthew Parke’s place (without his prospect of prize money) when the marine captain had been reluctantly purged by Jones to appease the Simpson-Hall cabal. Meijer confided to Jones that he had heard from a Swedish sailor aboard ship that the men were plotting against the captain. The mutineers planned to throw him overboard, or at least put him in irons, then make Lieutenant Simpson their captain and sail back to New England. At the appointed hour, the captain would be rushed by Ranger’s master, David Cullam, a burly New Hampshireman. The other officers would be nowhere to be seen; by prearrangement, reported Meijer, they were to “scat.”
Alerted by his informant, Jones was ready when Cullam confronted him as he paced his familiar groove on the quarterdeck. The captain pulled out his pistol and put it to the master’s head. Cullam and the rest of the Portsmouth gang backed off. They may have heard the rumors that a young Jones had run through a mutineer with a sword. An uneasy truce settled over the ship. Cullam was not clapped in irons, as he deserved to be, but rather allowed to maintain his post as sailing master. Jones knew that he would have to watch his back, especially when he went into battle with men who had little desire to fight the enemy.
The open defiance of Jones’s officers and men may seem astonishing to readers more familiar with the British navy in the Age of Sail, with its tradition of taut discipline enforced by the lash. On a British man-of-war, no one could even speak to the captain on his sacred quarterdeck without first doffing his hat. Jones had to put up with insolence and downright dereliction from his men, yet the log of the Ranger suggests that the captain never ordered the cat-o’-nine tails taken from its red baize bag. Jones grimly appreciated that a harsh disciplinarian could find himself in shackles or swimming after the ship’s wake. He was far from alone in alternately appeasing and defying unruly or craven ships’ companies in the Continental Navy. The crews of the Fly and Trumbull refused to fight, and Captain Manley of the Hancock had to hold off a mutiny by drawing his sword. Overall, some of the officers of the fledgling navy showed so much shyness in the face of battle that congressional delegate William Ellery of Rhode Island, an exasperated member of the Marine Committee, suggested “a little Bynging.” He was referring to Admiral Byng, a notably unaggressive British fleet commander executed, as Voltaire put it, pour encourager les autres.
Jones was hardly a soft touch. But he understood that the spirit of liberty that animated the Revolution was a double-edged sword when it came to discipline. He could see that the crew regarded their fellow New Englander, Simpson, as the defender of their rights. “As they were ‘Americans fighting for liberty’ ‘the voice of the people’ ought to overrule every measure of an arbitrary foreign captain which was not sanctified by their general approbation,” wrote Jones. Jones’s bitterness should have been tempered by the realization that he was himself partly to blame for the crew’s truculence. Had he spent less time flattering the French and more time trying to win over his officers, he might have exercised more sway over the men. Nonetheless, he was shrewd and sophisticated enough to understand the reasons for his crew’s inbred resistance to authority. Those roots ran deep: on Essex County fishing boats that supplied much of Ranger’s manpower, captains were regarded as no more than first among equals. Aboard privateers (and pirate ships) major command decisions were often arrived at by vote. New Englanders were accustomed to town meeting democracy, where each voice carried equally. Lord Loudoun, the British commander of colonial forces in the French and Indian Wars, was amazed at the attitude of the New England militia, who believed they were fighting under contract—subject to bargaining and work stoppages—rather than out of unquestioning duty to King and country.
How lonely and disappointed Jones must have felt as he sailed into the most critical action of his career with officers and men who could not be trusted. He would later say that he rarely slept on Ranger’s voyage. No wonder. With mutinies brewing belowdecks and in the wardroom, he was not safe with his eyes closed, despite the marine guard standing by his cabin door. It is an interesting question whether Jones entertained any private sense of guilt over his ship’s unhappy state. Though Jones brooded, and though he appreciated the proper qualities of an officer, he rarely conceded error. His willful denial may have been useful in a way. Unwilling to look back, he was able to forge ahead. His sense of grandeur, his belief that he strode on a great stage, allowed him to appreciate the larger stakes. America’s Revolutionary War hung in a state of suspended animation. The British effort to crush the rebels had been stymied at Saratoga. But Washington’s army was too weak to drive the occupying army into the sea, and the Continental Navy had been inept and timid against a force that was far mightier, if over-stretched by its global reach. America needed to strike a blow that would shock the British people and sow dissension against the war.
England had not been invaded by a foreign army in more than 700 years. It had been more than a century since a Dutch raiding party burned a town on the southeastern coast of England. The last raiders to strike at the northwestern coast, by Whitehaven, had been Jones’s ancient ancestors, the Vikings, in an earlier millennium. Britain was not like the continent of Europe, where populations felt vulnerable to conquest. The British slept secure in their island fortress, protected by the “wooden wall” of the Royal Navy. Jones was determined to surprise them, to show the British that the American War of Independence was not some far-off colonial dust-up but a threat to their own livelihoods and security.
Up the St. George’s Channel, into the Irish Sea, Ranger plunged on, heading for Jones’s old home waters, the wide Firth of Solway that divides the west coast between Scotland and England. On the night of April 17, Jones steered past the Isle of Man and manuevered inside of St. Bees Head, which juts out southwest of Whitehaven harbor. By cajoling and persuasion, Jones had managed to put together a raiding party of about thirty men. They were lowering away in boats at 10 P.M. when the wind shifted and came on strong. Giant rollers kicked up, breaking on the far shore. Jones realized that he risked not only losing his boats but allowing his ship to be embayed, trapped on the Solway Firth’s southern coast by wind and current and driven down on the rocks. Aborting the mission, Jones tacked to the west, clawing with difficulty off the lee shore. Carrying “all possible sail to clear land,” Jones withdrew from Whitehaven “to await a more favorable opportunity.”
In a “fresh gale” off the Isle of Man the next day, Jones encountered the enemy. A British revenue cutter, the Hussar, on patrol for smugglers, sailed close by to investigate. Jones, as usual, had his ship in disguise. The commander of the Hussar, a Captain Gurley, later reported that “the person who appeared to be captain was dressed in white with a large hat cocked.” It is not clear why, other than for reasons of sheer flamboyance, Jones was attired in white—the uniform of a French army or Russian navy officer. Atop its main masthead, Ranger was flying the British Union flag; atop the mizzen, a Dutch pendant. Jones had his sailing master, the mutinous Cullam, pick up a speaking trumpet and hail Captain Gurley to ask if he could spare a pilot (an old hostage-taking trick; Jones would use it again). Suspicious, Gurley called out to Jones, who was standing on the quarterdeck, “What ship are you?” Jones’s reply: “Molly of Glasgow.” Jones suddenly dropped the charade: he ordered Gurley to bring to, head the Hussar into the wind, or he would sink her. Gurley, a crusty salt, replied that he would do the same to Ranger, even though Ranger outgunned Hussar by eighteen cannons to eight At that moment, Master Cullam dropped the speaking trumpet, grabbed a musket, and took a shot at Captain Gurley. Jones cried out, “Fire!” and the Ranger yawed to give Hussar a broadside.
But Hussar was too quick for Ranger. Gurley took Jones on a chase, just as Jones had taken larger British frigates for a merry ride in Providence. Though Ranger “far outsailed” Hussar, Gurley reported, he was able to lose the American ship by making short tacks and sailing into shallow shoal water. Ranger was able to wound the British revenue cutter, putting one 9-pound ball in her stem and two in her mainsail and peppering her with small arms fire. The Hussar “has received great damage in her sails, ropes and masts,” Gurley reported to the Admiralty. But she escaped. The Ranger, the British officer reported, was last seen “skulking around under the Isle of Man,” about twenty miles from Whitehaven. Jones’s sullen crew blamed their captain for letting a prize “slip through our fingers,” recorded the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Ezra Green, in his diary.
Jones knew that his cover was blown. As soon as Hussar made port, an alarm would go out. He had to move quickly, to find targets of opportunity. He briefly considered striking at a merchant fleet on the coast of Scotland, but a squall deterred him. Sailing to the west toward the Irish coast, he sank a pair of smaller ships “to prevent intelligence” about his whereabouts. Then a chance for glory opened up: from a captured fishing boat, Jones learned that a British sloop-of-war, the Drake, twenty guns, lay unsuspecting at anchor a few leagues away at Carrickfergus harbor, outside Belfast in northern Ireland. Jones immediately wanted to enter the harbor in broad daylight and “cut her out,” according to Dr. Green’s diary. But Ranger’s “people were unwilling to undertake it,” Dr. Green noted laconically. Dickering with the “voice of the people”—the reluctant Lieutenant Simpson—Jones offered a more stealthy compromise. Ranger would wait until nightfall, then slip into the harbor and surprise the British ship.
Jones’s plan was to “overlay her cable and to fall upon her bow so as to have all her decks exposed to our musketry, etc.,” he wrote in his official report to the American commissioners. Jones had armed Ranger with an arsenal of muskets, swivel guns, and blunderbusses that could be used in close combat. As the Ranger swung around the Drake’s bow, Jones’s men would throw grappling hooks over the side of the enemy ship and sweep clear the Drake’s deck with a fusillade of small and large iron balls. Before the British could wake up and cut their anchor cable, they would be in the grips of the marauding Americans, clambering over the bulwarks with cutlasses, pistols, and boarding pikes.
That was the hope. The execution was botched. As a rising wind whipped through the Ranger’s rigging, Jones ordered a pilot seized from the fishing boat to guide his ship into the harbor in the gathering darkness. The Drake lay quiet at anchor, her sentries oblivious to the ship swooping down. They had not yet heard the reports of the American raider “skulking” under the Isle of Man. In the gloom, with her guns drawn in, Ranger looked like an ordinary merchantman. The key to Jones’s attack plan was to drop anchor from the stem at precisely the right moment, swinging Ranger’s bow around until she was side to side with her quarry. But the crew’s indiscipline showed at precisely the wrong moment. The mate in charge of the anchor detail “had drunk too much brandy,” Jones recorded. He “did not drop the anchor at the instant the order was given to him, and that prevented the Ranger from running alongside the Drake as I had planned,” Jones wrote. The Ranger was brought up a hundred feet past the Drake. Unable to board, Jones ordered his own anchor cable cut, and his ship drifted to leeward, before tacking out of the harbor. “We had made no warlike appearance, of course had given no alarm,” Jones recorded. The sleepy Drake apparently suspected nothing amiss.
Jones, who must have been beside himself with anger and frustration at the drunken ineptness of the mate, was determined to try again—to “return with the same prospect of advantage which I had at the first,” he wrote. But the gale was increasing, and Ranger barely weathered the lighthouse on the lee side of the harbor. “The weather now became so very stormy and severe and the sea ran so high that I was obliged to take shelter under the south shore of Scotland,” recorded Jones in his official report.
Jones did not sulk. The next morning dawned cold and bright and brilliantly clear. Jones could see snow capping the mountains of the “three Kingdoms,” Ireland, Scotland, and England, glistening white under a freakish late-spring snowfall. “I now resolved once more to attempt Whitehaven,” Jones wrote.
He gathered his balky crew in the waist of the ship and addressed them from the quarterdeck. Jones’s voice could be soft, almost feathery in the drawing room, but from the quarterdeck, it boomed with urgency. This very night, declared Jones, a raiding party would sneak up on the twin forts that guarded the harbor. They would take the sentinels by surprise and spike the guns. They were going to burn the fleet of merchantmen sitting in the harbor and escape before dawn. They would take two boats, the ship’s cutter and jolly boat. He needed forty volunteers, including officers. Captain Jones himself would lead. He would be the first to land and the last to leave the enemy shore. Any questions?
There were, not just questions but resistance and defiance. Jones’s dependably unreliable first and second lieutenants, Simpson and Hall, preferred the safety of the ship. They had not signed on to burn British cities but to take prizes, they said, or as Jones later put it, “Their object, they said, was gain not honor.” Jones said he had no desire for profit; if there was any to be made from the raid, it was all for the crew. Jones’s only interest, he said, was in honor. The two lieutenants were unpersuaded. Pathetically, they told the captain they were feeling too “fatigued” to perform their duties.
There were more principled dissents. An assault by a couple of boatloads of sailors on a city guarded by two batteries of heavy guns was “a rash thing,” opined Surgeon Green. The boats themselves would be so overloaded that they would swamp if the weather came up. The doctor made a moral argument as well: “Nothing could be got by burning poor people’s property,” he said. Jones acknowledged that Green was a “wise officer,” but as he later wrote, the good doctor “had no turn for enterprise.” Jones listened, controlling his indignation at his unresponsive crew, and continued to make impassioned arguments. By 11 P.M., he had won over, or shamed into action, some thirty volunteers.
But time and tide were working against Ranger. As night fell, the wind dropped, slowing the ship’s progress toward the enemy shore. Jones had hoped to stealthily row into the port around midnight, as the tide was beginning to ebb. He knew from his experience at Whitehaven that at low tide, most of the merchant and fishing fleet, hundreds of ships, would be sitting high and dry on a mud bank. Jones wanted to reach port shortly after high tide, spike the guns on the forts, and then escape as the ships were settling in the mud and the tide was racing out of the harbor. But the necessity of cajoling his crew had wasted time, and by midnight the Ranger was drifting, nearly becalmed, several miles from shore.
Jones knew he could not wait. Finding thirty volunteers had been difficult enough. Give Lieutenants Simpson and Hall another day and the crew would be so truculent and demoralized that Captain Jones would have to row into Whitehaven alone. Seizing the moment, Jones ordered cutlasses and pistols issued to the raiding party He had a swivel gun mounted in the stem of the launch to help cover their retreat. “Candles,” incendiary devices made up of canvas and pinecones dipped in brimstone, were loaded in the boats, along with flint and steel to light them. Wrapped in his dark boat cloak, wearing his black cocked hat, Jones settled in the stem of the cutter for the long haul into Whitehaven.
It was a very long haul. Whether because of the ebbing tide, or because the men were not pulling with all their strength, the two boats did not reach the stone pier in Whitehaven until dawn was beginning to break. If the men hoped that Jones would abandon the plan with the light of day, they were mistaken. Clambering from the boats, Jones took a party of men and made for the nearest fort. The others were ordered to prepare to burn the shipping, perhaps 200 vessels resting together on the tidal mud flat.
Lacking any ladders, Jones and his men improvised, climbing up on the shoulders of the tallest and strongest men to scale the fortress wall. As he had promised, the dimunitive Jones was the first to slip through the embrasures of the parapet. Inside the fort, nothing was moving. It was a cold morning, Jones recalled, and all the sentinels were keeping warm in the guardhouse. Swords drawn, pistols out, Jones and his men kicked in the door. The dozing guards gave up without a shot. Jones and his men promptly spiked all thirty-six guns of the battery, driving heavy nails into their touchholes so the cannon could not be fired.
With the sun just beginning to rise over the hills behind town, Jones raced along the quay to the northern battery and quickly spiked the guns there. He still had the advantage of surprise. Waving, he yelled to his men to join him so they could put the torch to as many vessels as possible and hope that wood, tar, and canvas would do the rest to spread a conflagration. A group of Ranger’s men trudged, or in some cases, staggered over to their captain. They were drunk. While Jones was running about spiking the cannons, one of the boat’s crews had broken into a tavern and found the whiskey and ale. At least the Ranger’s men were still on shore. They had been planning to abandon the captain on the quay and row back to the ship. Only Lieutenant Meijer had stopped them by wisely posting a guard at the boats.
Jones rallied his groggy men. Why haven’t you started burning ships? he demanded. A crewman explained that they had heard “strange noises.” What’s more, their lanterns had gone out. They had no flame to start a fire. Jones repressed what may have been a temptation to shoot someone right there and herded the men toward a house, where they managed to get a candle lit. Jones found a large collier, a coal ship, as a flammable-looking target and hurled in the burning candle. Nothing happened. Feeling the sun on his face now, Jones ordered his men to grab a barrel of tar and pour the black, sticky goop into the smoldering hold of the collier. Finally, ignition. A blaze shot out of the collier’s hatchways.
Suddenly, there was a commotion in the town. One of the seamen had slipped away and began running through the streets and banging on doors, warning the townspeople to arise and save their ships. The seaman was a traitor who went under the name David Smith. His real name was David Freeman, and he was an Irishman who had enlisted in Portsmouth for the sole purpose of returning to Europe, where he planned to desert and make his way home.
Townspeople began to run onto the quay to see what the hubbub was about. His pistol drawn, Jones turned to face them. Let Jones describe the scene, which reads as if he was writing an eighteenth-century version of High Noon:
The inhabitants began to appear in thousands and individuals ran hastily towards us. I stood between them and the Ship of Fire with a pistol in my hand and ordered them to retire which they did with precipitation. The flames had already caught the rigging and began to ascend the main mast. The sun was a full hour’s march above the horizen, and as sleep no longer ruled the world [here Jones was paraphrasing from one of his favorite poems, Young’s Night Thoughts], it was time to retire.
Jones’s men had taken several prisoners, all but three of whom they released as they scrambled into the boats. “After all my people had embarked, I stood on the pier for a considerable space yet no person advanced,” wrote Jones. He looked up at the heights above town and saw them covered “with the amazed inhabitants.”
Finally, Jones jumped in the stem of the launch and ordered his men to pull hard. This time they did. As the two boats stroked out of the harbor, the Whitehaven men, furious to find their batteries spiked, struggled to mount some cannon lying on the beach. They finally succeeded in arming one or two and fired wildly after the fleeing marauders. As the cannonballs splashed harmlessly astern, Ranger’s men, giddy with excitement as well as whiskey and ale, laughed and fired their pistols in a mocking salute. Jones fired off a swivel gun on the stem. He was, for a moment, enjoying himself.
IT WAS NOW 6:30 A.M. Aboard the Ranger, the remaining crew had been “watching the night and til broad daylight in expectation of seeing the smoke of the town and shipping (ascend as the smoke of a furnace),” wrote Dr. Green. The men had begun to “fear that our people had fallen into the enemy’s hands.” Then, someone spotted “two small boats a great distance coming out of the river’s mouth, and clouds of smoke arising from the shipping.” Leaning over the rail, cheering the boats on, the Ranger’s crew could see a few muzzle flashes or puffs of smoke on shore as the Whitehaveners futilely shot at Jones and his men.
Jones was not welcomed aboard with a hearty handshake by Lieutenants Simpson and Hall, who were disappointed that their men had not left the captain stranded on the beach. Despite his jaunty show of defiance, Jones knew that his raid had been less than a success. The fire had been contained to only the one ship. Jones later grumbled that if he had been accompanied by his old crew aboard the Providence, Whitehaven’s toll would have been 200 ships burned at their moorings.
But Jones could not afford to brood. He guessed that after his scrape with Hussar, the Royal Navy was stirring into action. Indeed, news had reached London, and officials were sending out “expresses” warning other ports and ships to beware. Whitehaven should have been more on guard. In the records of the British Admiralty, there is an envelope from Whitehaven dated April 19, 1778, and marked “haste, haste, post haste.” Inside the report begins, “Mr. Gurley, the master of the revenue service here who is come in much shattered last night.” It was unlikely that Jones would catch anyone sleeping a second time.
He still had the most audacious half of his plan to accomplish, the kidnapping of the Earl of Selkirk. Though he had barely rested for days, he immediately ordered the master to set a course for St. Mary’s Isle, twenty miles across the Firth of Solway. From the quarterdeck, he could plainly see the snow-fringed peak of the Criffel, the mountain he had seen rising up before him every morning as he walked to the parish school in Kirkbean as a boy.
The Ranger entered the bay off St. Mary’s Isle, which is not an island but a penisula below Kirkcudbright, around eleven that morning. The channel is a tricky one, twisting and turning between mudflats submerged at high tide, but Jones had steered it before. By noon, Jones’s cutter was sliding onto the wet sand of the low wooded shore of St. Mary’s. Jones jumped out with a dozen armed men, including Lieutenant Wallingford of the marines and Master Cullam. The day was brightening, the wind light. Although it had snowed in the higher elevations two days before, the coastline of St. Mary’s was yellow-green with spring leafing. The air was soft, suffused with the earthy, tangy smell of mud, salt, and seawood familiar to Jones from his boyhood days. Lugging their muskets and brandishing cutlasses, Jones and his men trudged up the path toward the rambling Georgian manor house owned by the Fourth Earl of Selkirk. Jones’s eyes were as always fierce and bright, if hollow from sleeplessness, but the men were unshaven, haggard, and probably none too clean, even if Jones had tried to spruce up his sailors for their audience with his lordship.
On the path, Jones encountered Lord Selkirk’s gardener. Jones had a clever cover story: he told the man that his armed crew was a British press gang, come ashore to draft able-bodied men for the navy. This had the desired effect: the man was soon headed up the path to warn all the young men working on the estate. Fearful of getting pressed into a hard life at sea, the workers promptly fled—removing any potential guardians of the Earl’s safety.
Jones might have exulted over this latest ruse, but for one critical piece of information: before he hurried off, the gardener had announced that his lordship was not at home. The Earl had gone to England to take the baths. This news was a severe blow to Jones. He had been thwarted by rough weather, brutish seaman, fickle officers, and now bad luck. The captain turned to head back to the boat and thence to his ship, dejected and empty-handed.
The two officers, Wallingford and Cullam, stopped him. They weren’t going back, they said, not empty-handed and unsatisfied. They had come too far and endured too much to pass up such a golden opportunity. Here they were, a dozen men, armed and dangerous, standing but a short march from an undefended British lord’s manor house. Inside, Wallingford and Cullam and all the others could readily guess, they would find treasure, drink, possibly other pleasures. As Jones later put it, with contempt, his men were disposed to “pillage, burn, and plunder all they could.”
The captain was in a dicey spot. If he gave his men free rein, they might leave the lord’s estate a burning shell, its valuables looted, its women terrorized if not raped and murdered. Jones’s name and honor would be blackened for all time. If he resisted, Master Cullam and the other brigands would probably kill the captain, step over his body, and run amuck anyway. “I had only an instant to think,” Jones recalled. As he had so often in the past, he nimbly temporized.
In his firmest quarterdeck voice, he gave his instructions: the two officers were to go to the manor house. While the men waited outside, the officers were to politely ask for Lord Selkirk’s family silver plate. They were to accept what was given them, behave decently, and return without mischief or delay. Jones’s compromise was reasonable under the circumstances. But then his vanity intruded. He did not wish to be seen as a scavenger or a mere brigand. Jones himself would not deign to go along on this tawdry mission. He would wait on the path to the boat.
This was a clear dereliction of duty. Jones was responsible for his men, and he should have accompanied them to guarantee, with sword and pistol if necessary, their good behavior. Fortunately, the Earl’s formidable lady was at home when Jones’s men banged on the door. The butler, an old retainer named Daniel, informed Lady Selkirk that a press gang was “on the isle” and that the “gardeners had run from their work.” She peered outside, she later recalled, and saw a gang of “horrid-looking wretches” surround the house. Each was armed with a bayoneted musket, two pistols, and a cutlass. Pirates, she thought. The women and children in the household, a visiting family and Lady Selkirk’s own children, fled to the third floor, fearful of the ravages about to befall them. Lady Selkirk, a brave and sturdy woman who was several months pregnant, went into the parlor. She received Lieutenant Wallingford, whom she described as “a civil young man in a green uniform, an anchor on his buttons.” She observed that the other man, who was dressed in a blue coat, “had a vile blackguard look.” The lieutenant, who seemed a little uncomfortable, ordered her to turn over her silver plate. “We are masters of this house and everything in it, it is needless to resist,” he announced.
“I am sensible of that,” she coolly replied. She summoned the butler and followed him into the pantry, where old Daniel tried to hide some of the silver in a kitchen maid’s apron. Lady Selkirk told him to stop and together they carried the pieces back into the parlor. The “vile blackguard”—Master Cullam—demanded, “Then where is the teapot and the coffee pot?” These, too, were found and delivered (the teapot was still full of warm leaves from breakfast). The men requested sacks for their booty, took a glass of wine, and headed back to the boat. “Upon the whole,” Lady Selkirk wrote her husband, “I must say they behaved civilly.”
The men shambled back down to the shore to find their captain, who had been waiting anxiously to see if the manor house and his reputation would survive the visit. The boat pushed off for the Ranger, and all sail was made to run down the Firth. In the nearby village of Kirkcudbright, panic broke out. “Many of the inhabitants packed up their valuables; Mr. Murdoch, draper, pulled down his sign,” according to a contemporary account. The customs collector “set off in a cart for the country, carrying along with him all the books and documents relating to his office.” Among the younger men, there was much hallooing and hollering and dashing about looking for something to shoot. An ancient cannon was found and aimed out to sea. For the rest of the afternoon, it banged away at a distant rock that might have looked like a ship.
Lady Selkirk had been informed by Lieutenant Wallingford that the captain of the ship was “John Paid Jones, Esq.” She wrote her husband: “It was immediately known that this Paul Jones is one John Paid, born at Arbigland, who once commanded a Kirkcudbright vessel belonging to Mr. Muir and others, a great villain as ever was born, guilty of many crimes and several murders by ill usage, was tried and condemned for one, escaped, and followed a piratical life, til he engaged with the Americans.” With his name so blackened in his native land, it is little wonder that Jones never went home again.
By now, the Admiralty, alerted by letters from half a dozen ports that an American marauder was on the loose, had dispatched two warships to find and capture the Ranger. Yet Jones was not done. He was still thinking of HMS Drake, sitting dumbly at anchor at Carrickfergus while Jones’s crew had fumbled around in the dark and squandered the chance to catch a valuable prize. Jones needed a victory to take back to France. If he could not burn a fleet or capture an earl, he could at the least take an enemy man-of-war. Ignoring exhaustion, he told Master Cullam, whose avarice had been momentarily sated by the Selkirk silver, to head for the coast of Northern Ireland.
As the ship rocked through the clear night across the Irish Sea, Lieutenant Simpson was once more stirring the pot with his fellow New Englanders. He held one of his town meetings on the gun deck. The captain was risking all their lives in his mad quest for glory, Simpson told the crew, who murmured mutinously in agreement. Jones stayed on the quarterdeck, wondering if he would have to shoot someone to avoid “being killed or thrown overboard,” he recalled. He had not slept for two days, but the seditious rumbling from down below helped keep him awake. At dawn, Ranger entered the Belfast lough and drew near the harbor at Carrickfergus, where the Drake still rode peacefully at anchor.
While Simpson and his men agitated belowdecks, the Ranger drifted slowly into the harbor, until she was just a few hundred yards from the Drake. It was too late to turn back. “The tide and what little wind there was had imperceptibly carried us in so far that there was very little chance for an escape,” wrote Dr. Green. The British warship was unfurling her sails, apparently readying to come out and challenge the intruder. But first the Drake sent out a boat to investigate. Eager to maintain the appearance of a merchantman, Jones kept most of the men hidden belowdecks. He ordered the helmsman to keep Ranger’s stern facing the British longboat. He could see a British officer peering through a spyglass, and he did not want the man to see Ranger’s broadside or count her gun ports. Ranger was flying a British flag. There was nothing to give her away as an American man-of-war.
Finally, the Drake’s boat came right alongside and Jones, wearing his British naval captain’s uniform, welcomed the Royal Navy officer as he climbed aboard. Jones promptly informed the man that he was a prisoner of war of the United States of America. The officer was mortified to have been so easily deceived. He revealed that the Drake had just the evening before received an express message from the Admiralty warning of an American raider in these waters. Jones had the man and six more of his mates from the Drake sent below to the hold.
Suddenly the mood aboard Ranger was transformed. Capturing the Royal Navy men with such aplomb had an “exhilerating [sic] effect” on the crew, Jones wrote. The truculent sailors were “soothed again into good humor.” Jones ordered the marines to beat to quarters. As drums rolled and the bos’un’s pipes shrilly whistled, the men went dutifully, even eagerly to their battle stations.
In a freshening breeze, the Drake was slowly working out of the harbor, firing a signal gun repeatedly in a futile attempt to summon back her launch, which was now being towed in Ranger’s wake. The British sloop-of-war was accompanied by “a number of small yachts that had gentlemen and ladies on board as if for a pleasure outing,” Jones recorded. But the pleasure boats sensibly backed away when Ranger ran out her guns. On shore, Jones observed bonfires making smoke signals to warn of danger.
Jones wanted to lure his opponent out of the harbor and into the Irish Sea, where he would have more room to manuever. He had Ranger play the coquette, slowing her by clewing up his main course and backing his top sails to let Drake draw closer, then spreading her canvas and pulling away again. On and on the two ships danced this way for most of the afternoon, until they were well off the coast. When the sun was a half hour from the horizon, Jones allowed the British warship to draw “within pistol range,” about twenty-five yards. At the guns, the men rammed home powder and shot and blew on the slow matches to make them glow. In the time-honored ritual of single-ship actions, as formal as the preliminaries of a duel between gentlemen, the two combatants hailed each other. Jones had Master Cullam interject a cocksure tone into the introductions. He was instructed to inform the British ship that, as Jones later put it, “we waited for them and desired they would come on.” Jones ordered the Stars and Stripes broken out; Drake ran up the red ensign of the Royal Navy.
No American navy ship had ever defeated a comparable British warship in one-on-one combat. The two ships were roughly evenly matched. Ranger carried eighteen guns, all 6-pounders. Drake carried twenty guns, smaller 4-pounders, but she had almost 50 percent more men aboard (roughly 150 to 110), a decided advantage in close fighting with small arms and especially if the two ships grappled and boarded. Drake’s real advantage was ineffable: centuries of tradition. The British navy had long believed it was invincible and hence it very nearly had been in centuries of battle against the French, Spanish, and Dutch. The drilled-in discipline of British crews contrasted dramatically with the easygoing democracy on Yankee ships. The Continental Navy had no traditions, although disobedience was quickly becoming its custom. The kindest thing that could be said about Ranger’s crew was that the men were untested. Probably none had ever fought in a real sea battle. As usual, Jones didn’t have enough powder to let them practice their gunnery with real ammunition. Practice consisted of running the guns in and out, not actually firing them.
Jones needed to outsmart his opponent, to get an edge and keep it. He had maintained his ship to windward and just ahead of the enemy to give himself more room to manuever. He knew that he could not afford to let Drake draw too near, or the superior British forces could board Ranger and take her by storm. But he wanted to keep Drake just close enough, where Ranger’s greater firepower could slowly grind down the enemy. Jones filled the tops, platforms about a third of the way up each mast, with marines, sharpshooters who could keep a steady fire of musket balls raining down on the enemy quarterdeck where the officers stood.
The sun was setting, the light fading. The moment had come to strike first “Ware ship,” he ordered. The men ran to the braces and swung the yardarms around to allow Ranger to steer away from the wind—straight across Drake’s undefended bow. The helmsman put the wheel hard over. “Fire!” Jones cried, and Ranger’s broadside, nine guns, crashed as a volley of grapeshot tore straight down the Drake’s exposed deck, sending splinters flying and drawing first blood.
Now Ranger was vulnerable. Her broadside spent, her crews worked furiously to reload and fire again. But as she slipped past Drake at a right angle and the British warship surged forward, Ranger’s stern was vulnerable to Drake’s broadside. Well-aimed, British 4-pound balls or grapeshot could smash the stern windows of Jones’s cabin or slice through the officers and men, including the captain, standing by the helm on the quarterdeck. Jones needed to move quickly. Before the light breeze tore away the veil of smoke that hung over Ranger, Jones ordered the wheel spun again, swinging the bow around so the two ships were now parallel, broadside to broadside, perhaps fifty yards apart.
A ship’s quarterdeck is a very exposed place to stand when the enemy is hurling a half a hundred weight of metal from close range. By gentlemanly custom, officers did not duck or flinch. Jones stood there, stock-still, in his dress uniform and cocked hat, doing his best to ignore the iron shrieking by and the cries of the wounded and dying. A seaman grasping the steering wheel to Jones’s side yelped as his finger was blown off. A midshipman standing nearby cried out as his hand was smashed to jelly. Lieutenant Wallingford of the marines, the uncomfortable man in the green coat who had been civil to Lady Selkirk, took a musket ball in the head and dropped dead. He fell out of the tops, where he had been stationed with his sharpshooters, and landed on the deck below.
The action was “warm, close, and obstinate,” Jones later recorded in his official report. As the two ships banged away, Jones wanted to keep Ranger to leeward of the Drake. He was trying to take advantage of the angle of the heel: with both ships heeling over—tipping away from the direction of the wind—as they sailed along side by side, Jones’s guns would be tilted upward, while the Drake’s were canted downward. Jones wanted Drake as a prize. He did not want to sink her by punching holes below her waterline. He preferred to see his shot cut up the sails and rigging of the British ship, staggering and slowing her. Drake’s 4-pound balls were probably not heavy enough to smash through Ranger’s exposed bottom; the log of the American ship does not show that she seriously leaked after the battle or that any major holes needed to be patched.
For “two glasses”—an hour—the two ships exchanged fire, getting off ragged broadsides every couple of minutes. Through the smoke, in the last light of the long day, Jones could see that Ranger’s shots were beginning to tell. Drake’s sails were riddled with holes and no longer drawing well. On the foremast and mainmast, the topsail yards had been cut away. The topgallant yard on the foremast and the mizzen gaff hung uselessly, like broken limbs. Drake’s jib had been shot down and dragged in the water. “Her sails and rigging [were] entirely cut to pieces and her hull also very much galled,” wrote Jones. Most humiliatingly, the British ensign had been shot down and hung over the quarter gallery, the glass-enclosed protuberance from the stern used as the captain’s privy.
On the Drake’s quarterdeck, the butcher’s bill was rising. Captain Burden had been gravely injured, shot in the head by a mustketball fired by one of Ranger’s marines in the tops. The first officer, Lieutenant Dobbs, had been mortally wounded as well. Seeing the carnage around him, no longer able to manuever his ship, the Drake’s sailing master cried, “Quarter! Quarter!” After one hour and five minutes, the battle was over. The Americans had won; Jones had at last found his measure of glory.
In the gathering dusk, Jones sent a boat of marines over to take possession of his prize and shackle the prisoners. The Ranger’s men found a peculiarly macabre scene. A cask of rum, brought on deck for the victory celebration the British captain had confidently predicted, had been shattered by an American cannonball. The spirits now spread along the deck, mixing with the blood of a score of men who had been wounded, some grievously. The boarding party had to step over the dead body of a British army officer who had “come to see the Yankees whipped,” as one of Jones’s men later wrote.
Down in the cockpit of Ranger, working under a swinging lantern with his saw and his crude probes, Surgeon Green was faced with a less awful, though still grim toll. He recorded the particulars in his diary: “Lt. Wallingford killed by a musket shot in the head. John W. Dangle by a double headed shot cut in two in the fore top…. Pierce Powers lost his right hand and his left badly wounded. James Falls [wounded] by a musket shot through the shoulder. Tho. Taylor lost his little finger by a musket shot at the wheel.” Green was soon treating the British prisoners as well. Infection was routine on an eighteenth-century warship. Sponges were dipped in a bloody pail of water and used on the next man. Anesthetics amounted to opium, if Green had any, or, if not, biting on a bullet. Captain Burden and Lieutenant Dobbs survived for no more than a day or two under Surgeon Green’s care. All in all the British lost four dead and nineteen wounded, the Americans three dead and five wounded. The bloodied British lay groaning in the Ranger’s hold, packed in with scores of other prisoners.
In London, warnings and messages were flying about between Whitehall and the Admiralty. A letter from the Secretary of State’s office to the Admiralty Lords declared that “the rebel privateer which plundered Lord Selkirk’s house has thrown the whole western coast into consternation.” The Admiralty sent more ships to sea in search of the “rebel privateer.” In addition to the two men-of-war dispatched to find Ranger after the Whitehaven raid, a thirty-six-gun frigate, Thetis, sailed forth from Glasgow and a sloop-of-war out of Liverpool ventured into the Irish Sea. A few days later, Boston, the thirty-two-gun frigate captured earlier from the Americans, was sent searching for the elusive Jones.
After using a calm night to patch up the Drake, Jones was finally ready to make his getaway. He would sail north around Ireland to take advantage of a southerly wind and elude the British cruisers. But first he indulged in a Robin Hood touch. Jones still had on board the half dozen fishermen he had seized five days earlier, the same men who had told him the Drake was lying in Carrickfergus harbor. The men had lost their boat in the storm that night, so Jones dipped into his own pocket for “English gold to replace their loss and recompense their services.” He sent the men ashore on the coast of Ireland in one of Ranger’s boats. He gave them, as a memento he knew they would show off, a piece of Drake’s sad. As the men headed off, they gave the Americans three “huzzahs.”
Jones congratulated his own men for putting up a “truly gallant fight” against the Drake. Their spirits were much improved, and they went to work fixing the rigging and mending sails. Ranger cruised unmolested down the west coast of Ireland and was making a last lunge for the French coast when Jones spotted a potential prize. At the time, the still wounded Drake was under tow, and Jones gave the order to the prize crew aboard her to cast off. The men on the Drake abruptly and needlessy cut the tow rope instead. That might have been a warning to Jones, who had sent Lieutenant Simpson across to the Drake as her prize captain. Jones had expicitly ordered Simpson, in writing, to “keep close by me” as they headed for France. Jones’s fitful attempts to make peace with Simpson and his crony Hall had never lasted long. After one confrontation early in the cruise, Jones wrote, “I gave the lieutenants my hand and freely forgave the past. Yet a day or two after without any prelude or provocation Mr. Simpson came hastily onto the quarterdeck and addressed himself to me in terms and manner which amounted to an outright challenge.” Now, given the chance to make his getaway, Simpson and Drake promptly disappeared in the mists. Ranger abandoned her chase of the prize, which turned out to be a Swedish merchantman, a neutral and thus hands-off, and sailed after the delinquent Drake. It took Jones a day to catch Simpson, during which time Ranger passed up several prizes entering the English Channel. He was indignant with Simpson, only now he could do something more than just splutter. Simpson had disobeyed a written order, Jones charged. Jones had him placed under arrest. With Ranger only a day or two from home port, he was finally free to muzzle “the voice of the people” without the people rising up in rebellion.
Ranger entered the French harbor of Brest on May 7 ahead of Drake, hanging an inverted British ensign beneath the Stars and Stripes. In a twenty-eight-day voyage Jones had captured several smaller prizes in addition to the British warship and 200 men. He understood the psychological impact of his raids on Great Britain. True, he had failed to burn a fleet or snatch a peer. “What was done, however, is sufficient to show that not all their boasted navy can protect their own coasts,” he wrote the American commissioners in May, “and that the scenes of distress which they have occasioned in America may soon be brought home to their own doors.”
If anything, Jones understated the terror he had loosed. The voyage of the Ranger seems so fractious and bumbling, its tangible accomplishments so far short of Jones’s outsized ambitions, that it may be hard to credit its real significance. But real war, with its fogs and frictions, is often closer to the voyage of the Ranger than the perfectly timed, jolly-tar adventures of an Horatio Hornblower or Lucky Jack Aubrey. The real impact of Jones’s daring was on the imagination of the British people, many of whom were beginning to have doubts about the cost and cruelties of repressing the American rebellion.
The British people expected their navy to keep them safe in their homes. “When such ravages are committed all along the coast, by one small privateer, what credit must it reflect on the First Lord of the Admiralty?” demanded the London Public Advertiser. Other newspapers made excuses: Captain Burden had been old and ill, the first lieutenant inexperienced, the Drake’s powder “very weak and bad.” But the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser of May 9 paid Jones and the Ranger the ultimate compliment: equating the rebels with the Royal Navy. True, the American ship had somewhat more powerful guns than the British ship. “In our engagements with the French and Spaniards, such a superiority would have been laughed at; but the case is widely different when we engage with our own countrymen; men who have the same spirit and bravery with ourselves.” The British were already vexed by earlier American privateers who had cruised off Britain’s coast. To have one land on British soil not once but twice in a day was too much.
Jones’s daring raid played into English anxieties, both ancient and topical, about pirates and the French. The countryside in the spring of 1778 was jumpy about a French invasion; the Franco-American alliance in February had triggered rumors of war. Was the piratical Jones some kind of advance guard or diversion for a larger onslaught? Militia camps were popping up all over England. They were even becoming fashionable, with the women’s dresses matching the uniform of their husbands. Mrs. Reginald De Koven, an early biographer of Jones, described the hysteria:
Chap books depicted Paul Jones as a buccaneer, armed to the teeth, in highly colorful pictures, bloody and terrifying. Mothers frightened their children with the bare mention of his name. From this time on he was celebrated in popular song, and took his place with Captain Kidd in the histories of the Pirate Kings.
In pubs and taverns, ballads were written around Jones’s name. Samuel Eliot Morison recounts one of them:
You have heard o’ Paul Jones?
Have you not? Have you not?
And you’ve heard o’ Paul Jones?
Have you not?
A rogue and a vagabond;
Is he not? Is he not?
He came to Selkirk-ha,
Did he not? Did he not?
And stole the rings and the jewels a’,
Did he not? Did he not?
Robbed the plate and jewels-a’,
Which did his conscience gall, Did it not?