THE MISSION THAT would guarantee Jones’s fame began as a side show and was almost wrecked by a series of misadventures and displays of insubordination. The Combined French and Spanish fleet was supposed to be the main event, engaging the British in a duel for control of the Channel, then landing in force along Britain’s southern coast. The battle and the invasion never happened. In the late summer of 1779, the Combined Fleet drew near—but never engaged—an outgunned Royal Navy fleet near the Scilly Islands at the Western Approaches. Then the French gave up—not because they feared the British, but because of a massive epidemic of shipborne disease. French ships were notoriously filthy belowdecks, and d’Orvillier’s fleet was wracked with typhus and smallpox. As thousands died, the Franco-Spanish fleet limped back to port in September, just as Jones’s tiny squadron was sailing into harm’s way in the battle that would make his name and thrill all Europe.
Jones would later write that, during the voyage of the Bonhomme Richard, he slept no more than three hours out of every twenty-four. He needed to keep his wits about him at all times. Even before the Bonhomme Richard left the anchorage at Groix, a sailor fell off the main topsail yard and plummeted sixty feet straight down. Jones was standing directly beneath him. The falling sailor knocked off the commodore’s tricorned hat and landed on the quarterdeck beside him with a sickening thud. The man was dead; Jones reached down to pick up his hat.
The airs were calm, “hot and sultry” in late August, according to the Bonhomme Richard’s log, as Jones’s small squadron slipped across the Western Approaches toward the west coast of Ireland. The Bonhomme Richard brought up the rear: the frigates Alliance and Pallas, brig Vengeance, and cutter Cerf, all faster vessels, had to shorten sail to wait up for the sluggish old Indiaman. They were accompanied by a pair of privateers, Monsieur and Grandville, who had joined for the prize hunt. Jones caught the captain of the Monsieur looting the stores of the first prize captured by the squadron, a merchantman carrying wine and brandy. The Monsieur promptly vanished into the night, and the Grandville disappeared a few days later.
Off the Irish coast, Bonhomme Richard was becalmed and began slowly drifting, pushed by the swell and the current, toward the rocks. Jones sent out the captain’s barge with a towline to pull the Bonhomme Richard out of danger. The coxswain of the barge, as it happened, was one of the men who had been flogged by Jones for stranding the captain on the beach at L’Orient earlier that month. The half-dozen oarsmen aboard the barge were all homesick English and Irishmen. The night was dark; they saw their chance to escape. Cutting the tow rope, they began pulling madly for shore. Pandemonium on the quarterdeck: a 9-pounder was futilely fired in the general direction of the deserters, and the ship’s longboat was lowered away and rowed after in hot pursuit. The longboat vanished in a thick fog bank. Neither returned.
That night, the next day, and the next night Jones cruised back and forth off the ragged Irish coast, firing signal cannons, but seeing nothing. Finally, he ordered the cutter Cerf, a smaller vessel with a shallower draft, to sail in toward the shore and take a closer look. A gale came up—and the Cerf disappeared as well. The storm tested the Bonhomme Richard’s aging frame. “She appeared to have as many joints in her backbone as a rattlesnake,” wrote Midshipman Fanning, who reported that the pumps could barely keep up. Jones had been understandably vexed when he received Captain Landais on the afternoon of August 25, while he was still tacking back and forth, vainly searching for his missing boats. The captain of the Alliance was in a lather because Jones had forbidden him from chasing a prize into rocky waters near the coast. Landais announced that he was “the only American” among the captains of the squadron (the Frenchman had been made an honorary citizen of Massachusetts by his congressional friends). “He was determined to follow his own opinion in chasing when and where he thought proper and in every other matter,” Jones recorded.
At first, Jones tried conciliation. He took Landais by the hand and led him to his cabin and told him that he was his friend, that he was the one responsible for Landais retaining his command of Alliance after the mutinous voyage from America. Landais scoffed at this assertion, and the conversation grew cold. Changing the subject, Jones began lamenting his lost boats. Landais offered that Jones had only himself to blame for sending them out into the fog. “That’s a damn lie,” Jones muttered under his breath, according to Landais. To an eighteenth-century gentleman, such an accusation—“giving the lie” was an affront to honor and enough to provoke a challenge to a duel. Few duels were actually fought; most gentlemen found ritualistic face-saving ways to back down. The way out for Jones and Landais was to invoke “the good of the service”; it would be inappropriate for ship captains, comrades-in-arms, to fight a duel aboard a warship sailing toward the enemy. But back on dry land, Jones assured Landais, he would gladly accept Landais’s challenge.
If Landais is to be believed, the two men very nearly struggled then and there. In Landais’s retelling of the scene, Jones reached over, grabbed a key, and began to lock the door of the great cabin, presumably to keep others out while the two men drew swords and settled their score. Landais pushed him away. Jones caught himself and calmed down. The prudent, rational side of his character reasserted itself; his voice softened and he tried to make peace. But the damage was done; the two captains were now mortal enemies.
For the rest of the cruise, Landais ignored Jones’s signals and disappeared and reappeared whenever he felt like it. When Jones sent a delegation of officers to ask Landais to come on board the Bonhomme Richard, Landais “spoke of Capt. Jones in terms highly disrespectful and insolent, and said he would see him on shore where they must kill one or the other, etc.,” reported back the purser, Mathew Pease. Jones sent written instructions requiring Landais to appear on board and Landais wrote back, curtly and cryptically, “I shall not go on board the Frigate B. H. Richard…. You know the reason why.”
Jones was indignant, but he knew that his authority was hobbled by a concordat that he had very grudgingly accepted the day before leaving L’Orient The concordat was designed to sort out the division of prize money between the different captains, but with its emphasis on “common consent,” the document was a blueprint for confusion and squabbling. Jones had only agreed to sign it because he was impatient to get to sea.
Jones’s overall orders for the voyage were similarly muddy and bound to provoke dissension. Earlier in the summer, Jones had been told by Chaumont, who was presumably speaking for Minister of the Marine Sartine, that the squadron should only engage in destroying commerce—in taking prizes—and not stage any surprise landings on the British coast. The French government wanted to keep the British guessing about the movements of the “Pirate Paul Jones,” as a distraction from the Franco-Spanish invasion planned for late summer or early fall. Jones bridled at this restriction. He had fitted out the Bonhomme Richard to support raids on British ports. His ship wasn’t fast enough, he complained to Franklin, to catch other ships. Franklin had wearily responded that it was too late to get the King’s council to change Jones’s orders. Jones chose instead to reinterpret them—to insist that he was bound by an earlier set of orders, given by Sartine back in January, that gave him carte blanche to do as he pleased. It is possible that Franklin, who could be slippery about such matters, signaled verbally that he wouldn’t mind if Jones went his own way. But the other captains in Jones’s squadron all believed they had signed on to seize prizes—not to take the far riskier course of invading cities to put them under ransom.
Jones had planned to sail clockwise around the British Isles—up Ireland’s west coast, around Scotland’s wild shore to the north, then down England’s east coast. Off of Limerick, Jones had hoped to intercept a fleet of Indiamen and was frustrated when the truant Landais wandered away to the north, compelling Jones to catch up. The reduced squadron did capture a couple of valuable prizes, carrying British military supplies, near Scotland’s northern tip, but Jones’s real aim was a grand coup de main: to hold hostage a British city or port town.
For Jones to descend on the coast of Great Britain was a dangerous undertaking. The deserters who rowed ashore in Ireland had quickly spread the alarm: Paul Jones had come armed with “combustibles” to burn a city, they warned. The country was in an “uproar,” according to the newspapers; rumors flew about that Jones was preparing to sail right up the Shannon River to Limerick. Back in London, the Admiralty went on alert, dispatching two frigates to find Jones (figuring that he might come back to finish an earlier job, they looked in the waters off Whitehaven).
The British people were on edge. The American Revolution, which remained essentially stalemated, was turning nastier and threatening to widen. In the west, the British, under bloody-minded commanders like Colonel Henry Hamilton (“the Hair Buyer”), the lieutenant governor of Detroit, had organized loyalists and Indians into raiding parties. The rebels were fighting back to protect their settlements, several of which had been the scenes of Indian massacres. In Connecticut in early July, British troops had dropped their customary restraint and burned and plundered two towns, Norwalk and Fairfield, as the citizens fled. In Britain, leaders of the opposition warned in Parliament that, by violently repressing the rebels, the King’s party risked bringing down violent reprisals from raiders like the Pirate Paul Jones. (Indeed, Congress was so incensed by British atrocities that the delegates debated, but did not send, an order to Franklin in Paris, directing him to hire arsonists to burn London.) The British countryside was buzzing with rumors of war. The Franco-Spanish invasion fleet had been spotted in the English Channel. Unaware of the epidemic of illness that was silently ravaging the French invasion force, English gentlemen were raising militias to resist any French landing.
Jones risked kicking over a beehive. With spies about (even if he did not suspect Bancroft), he knew that his mission might be compromised. Nonetheless, he was determined to plunge ahead. On September 14, the Bonhomme Richard arrived at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, the waterway that leads to Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital and largest city. By interrogating seamen of captured fishing boats and merchantmen taken as prizes, Jones determined that Edinburgh’s port, the city of Leith, was only lightly defended. Only a British twenty-gun ship and a couple of cutters rode at anchor, and the great guns in the fort at Edinburgh Castle could not reach the coast. The wind was right; Jones believed that he could sail right in and hold Leith ransom—extract a large “contribution” from the city or “reduce it to ashes.” But first he had to persuade the reluctant captains of the Pallas and the Vengeance.
Captains Denis Cottineau and Philippe Ricot arrived aboard the Bonhomme Richard at eight in the evening. Jones summoned them into his lantern-lit great cabin and held a parley of war. At first, Jones recalled, he appealed to the other gentlemen’s sense of honor and humanity. By laying the town under contribution, the raiding party could force the British to free American prisoners. Cottineau and Ricot made “many difficulties and objections,” Jones recalled. So Jones took a more practical approach. He told them he planned to demand a ransom of £200,000. That got their attention, and the French captains consented to lend their ships to the plan of attack.
Valuable time had been lost while the captains made “pointed remarks” and engaged in “sage deliberation,” Jones noted with more than a trace of sarcasm. Searching for prizes while their captains jawed aboard the Bonhomme Richard, the Pallas and the Vengeance had wandered off a considerable ways to the south. By the time the squadron reassembled, the wind had shifted and the three ships spent much of the next day laboriously beating up the Forth in a light breeze. Still Jones pressed on. Aboard the Bonhomme Richard, Jones’s men prepared for a surprise attack. Posing as merchantmen, the squadron flew British colors. The marines were issued British red coats. Swivel cannons were mounted on the small boats that would take them in.
Jones planned to have the Bonhomme Richard, the Vengeance, and the Pallas lay along the twenty-gun Royal Navy ship and the cutters in the harbor and quickly overwhelm their crews. Then Colonel Paul Chamillard of the marines was to take 130 of his men into the port and disembark on the breakwater. He would dispatch an officer and a drum to deliver a message. It was addressed to “the Worshipful the Provost of Leith” and written by Jones, in his customary florid style. “I do not wish to distress the poor inhabitants,” Jones wrote.
My intention is only to demand your contribution towards the reimbursement which Britain owes to the much injured citizens of America. Savages would blush at the unmanly violation and rapacity that has marked the tracks of British tyranny in America from which neither virgin innocence nor helpless age has been a plea of protection or pity. Leith and its port now lays at our mercy; and did not the plea of humanity stay the hand of just retaliation I should, without advertisement, lay it in ashes. Before I proceed to that stern duty as an officer; my duty as a man induces me to propose to you by the means of a reasonable ransom to prevent such scenes of horror and distress.
Chamillard was to give the provost “exactly half an hour’s reflection” to accept Jones’s conditions. The colonel was to ask for half the ransom in cash, half in a note, and to take six city councilmen as hostages, releasing three with the cash payment and holding the other three “as guarantee for the note.” (Jones instructed Chamillard to settle for £50,000 if he could not extract the rest.) If the city fathers of Leith refused, Chamillard was “to set fire everywhere.” The colonel was given two flags. He was to wave a white flag if the provost accepted the ransom, a red one if the answer was no, and both together if fighting had broken out and he was forced to retreat.
The day was bright, and Jones, though he had not slept, was cresting on the surge of euphoria he always felt going into action. As the Bonhomme Richard sailed up the Forth, a cutter approached, and its captain called out. Jones and his officers, as usual, were dressed in British naval uniforms. The cutter had mistaken the Bonhomme Richard for a British fifty-gun ship, the Romney. The cutter’s captain asked if the warship could spare some gunpowder. The man explained that “the rebel Paul Jones” was expected to land anyday, and that the shore defenses near Leith were weak and needed strengthening. Jones was happy to oblige. With his compliments, Jones ordered a keg of gunpowder lowered onto the cutter. Still pretending to the captain of Romney, Jones asked if he could borrow the cutter’s pilot to help him navigate local waters. The pilot came aboard, and the cutter sailed away with the gunpowder. Standing on the quarterdeck, Jones asked the man, What news? The pilot said that the pirate Jones was off the coast and deserved to be hanged. Jones smiled. “I am Paul Jones,” the captain announced. The poor pilot dropped to his knees and begged for his life. “Get up!” Jones commanded. “I won’t hurt a hair on your head, but you are my prisoner.”
The locals were not fooled for long. All that day, as the squadron beat back and forth, slowly working up the Forth toward the capital and its port, there was pandemonium on shore. Drums rolled, bagpipes skirled. Families packed up and began to flee. Banks closed and tried to ferry their treasure out of town. Young men scrounged around for any kind of weapon, settling for a few rusty old fowling pieces (the Scots had been disarmed after Culloden in 1746). An aging Presbyterian minister went to the shore, settled his chair in the surf, and prayed for a strong wind to blow the Americans away.
Jones planned to catch the enemy sleeping with a dawn raid on Leith. At 4 A.M., he hoisted out the ship’s launch, equipped with muffled oars, and began embarking marines. It had been a very dark night, and first light brought only gloom and a rising wind. The prayers of the old minister had been answered. To Jones’s immense chagrin, the wind quickly whipped up to a full-fledged gale; squalls roared down out of the Highlands, gusting rain and sweeping straight down the Forth toward the sea. The progress of the squadron, Jones recalled, halted only a “cannon shot” from Leith. An amphibious operation was out of the question. Indeed, the men of the Bonhomme Richard had to scramble aloft to shorten sail. As the tempest shrieked and the ship plunged and rolled, Jones told the sailing master to send the men back out on the yards to take in sails before they shredded in the gale or carried away a spar or a mast. He kept only a scrap of canvas on the mizzenmast to maintain headway. Lashed by wind and rain, Jones stood disconsolate on the quarterdeck through the day and another sleepless night, his plans blown to tatters.
Yet he was not done. There was a cocky streak of defiance in Jones that showed itself in puckish ways. Sailing in close to the isle of Lindisfarne as he eluded British warships searching the coast, Jones lobbed a cannonball into ancient Bamburgh Castle as a kind of insolent salute. He was still scheming. On the border between Scotland and England was the coal-shipping port of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Jones summoned Ricot and Cottineau back on board and made a new proposal: they would descend on Newcastle and burn the city’s colliers, its coal ships. Without Newcastle’s coal, Jones argued, London would be cold that winter. Ricot and Cottineau dismissed Jones’s idea as foolhardy. By now, they argued, the alarm had spread all over Great Britain. If the squadron ventured inshore, they would all be taken and cast into prison. The two captains flatly refused to sail with Jones.
Jones briefly contemplated going it alone. He was cheered that the Bonhomme Richard’s “young officers” were “as ardently disposed to the business as I could desire.” No sullen or mutinous lieutenants, no Simpson or Hall, in this crowd. But in the end, Jones decided that odds against success were too steep. As usual, he weighed the possible consequences to his reputation, which he valued more than life. “Nothing prevented me from pursuing my design but the reproach that would have been cast upon my character as a man of prudence had the enterprise miscarried—it would have been said, was he not forewarned by Captain Cottineau and others.”
The Vengeance and Pallas sailed on ahead down the English coast, in search of prizes. The Bonhomme Richard was moving even slower than usual, having struck her main topmast, damaged by the storm. The weather was drizzly, the winds light and variable. At 11 P.M. on Wednesday, September 22, the lookout spotted two sails through the murk. Jones gave chase. At 2 A.M., he ordered “Beat to Quarters” and the marine drummer rousted the men from the hammocks to stand by their guns and prepare for battle. As dawn crept up, Jones peered through the gray mists and slowly made out the two ships he had been stalking all night. They were his own: the Pallas and, remarkably enough, the Alliance. Jones had not seen Landais’s ship in two weeks.
Jones’s squadron was intact again, more or less. But Jones was running out of time. His orders were to make for the Texel, the shipping roads that served Amsterdam, by the first of October. The French ministry wanted him to escort a fleet of merchantmen that had been holed up in the Dutch port avoiding British cruisers. Jones’s spirits were low indeed. After nearly six weeks at sea, he had nothing to show for his efforts but a few prizes. He might as well have been a privateersman. While he knew that the British, aroused, were on guard against his small fleet, he was unaware that he had already created a tremendous commotion in the public and press just by his presence off Britain’s shores. Jones knew only that he had been thwarted by bad luck and timid and vexatious captains. It was not in him to give up. But by the morning of Thursday, September 23, 1779, he was feeling desperate.