JONES HAD NO TIME to brood. At least eight Royal Navy warships, dispatched by a frantic Admiralty, were converging on Flamborough Head. The sea and wind were rising, the sky lowering. Jones and his squadron slipped over the horizen as the first of the British cruisers arrived on the scene. They split up and searched for Jones to the northeast, toward Scandinavia, to the southeast, toward Holland and France, and all around the British Isles. They never found him. Jones zigzagged in the North Sea for ten days and finally made a dash for the Texel island, the deep-water anchorage off Amsterdam, and the safety of a neutral port.
Jones’s legend was made. “Paul Jones resembles a Jack o’ Lantern, to mislead our mariners and terrify our coasts,” wrote the London Morning Post. “He is no sooner seen than lost.” As the reports of the battle began to filter back to London, the British press responded with lurid stories and illustrations. In the confused aftermath of the battle, a half-dozen British sailors who been set free from the hold of the Bonhomme Richard had stolen a small boat and rowed ashore near Flamborough Head. They described the incident of Jones throwing his pistol at the Bonhomme Richard’s carpenter, as the frightened man was trying to strike the American flag. The tale was quickly and colorfully embellished by the newspapers:
During the engagement, Paul Jones (who was dressed in a short jacket and long trousers with about twelve charged pistols slung in a belt around his middle and a cutlass in his hand) shot seven of his men for deserting from their quarters, and to his nephew, whom he thought a little dastardly, he said that damn his eyes he would not blow his brains out, but he would pepper his shins, and actually had the barbarity to shoot at the lad’s legs, who is a lieutenant in his ship.
It was important for the British establishment to depict Jones as a lowlife, a brigand who wore short jackets and trousers, not a gentleman in breeches and coat. The navy had been embarrassed and wanted to belittle its adversary. “Jones flings us all into consternation and terror, and will hinder Lady Carlisle’s sea bathing,” the Earl of Carlisle wrote, a little flippantly. A London paper sent a correspondent to Kirkbean to learn more about the devil’s incarnation; he reported back that Jones as a schoolboy had been a “blockhead” who lay in wait for his teacher and beat him almost to death. But the poems and ballads in the cheap penny chapbooks also made Jones out to be a Robin Hood figure, outfoxing the clumsy sheriff’s men.
The more abuse the press heaped on Jones—he was a “desperado,” “a good seaman but a bad man,” “a vile fellow,” “a daring pirate who has for some time past done so much mischief on the coast of Great Britain”—the greater the victory he could claim. His achievement was not simply to defeat a superior warship, but to spread fear all through Britain. He was teaching the British a lesson: that the price of keeping America as a colony was too high. By taking the war to the British homeland, Jones helped fuel an already vigorous anti-war movement amongst the loyal opposition, which questioned His Majesty’s government’s labored prosecution of a costly war that might not be lost, but which could not be won either. Jones was raising the stakes in uncomfortable ways. Intelligence reports seeping into the London papers hinted at dreadful escalations: “A gentleman in the city, well known at the ’Change for his early American intelligence,” reportedly learned that Ben Franklin was pressing Congress to put the British on notice: if Jones was captured and hanged, “the Congress would immediately retaliate, by treating a British prisoner of equal rank exactly in the same manner.”
The British might still hang the pirate, but first they had to catch him.
JONES AND HIS PRIZES safely reached the Dutch coast on October 3. The sight of the Stars and Stripes flying over a British warship thrilled the American agent dispatched by Benjamin Franklin to await Jones’s squadron. “My telescope, if not my imagination, gives me red & white lines, & a blue square in the head quarter,” wrote the agent, Charles-Guillaume-Frederic Dumas, as Jones’s ships anchored off the island of Texel, Amsterdam’s roads, seventy-five miles away down a winding channel through the Zuider Zee.
In a small cabin aboard the Serapis (Captain Pearson had been allowed to keep his quarters), Jones drafted, in his clear, precise handwriting, a long and vivid report of his voyage to Benjamin Franklin. Always keen to burnish his reputation, Jones would make sure in the days ahead that the report received wide distribution. Copies were sent to Congress and variations on it began appearing in the newspapers. It was a detailed and reasonably accurate accounting, in which Jones took pains to make Captain Landais the villain. As historian Thomas Schaeper has documented, Landais was probably more bewildered than malign that night off Flamborough Head. He had recklessly fired grapeshot intending to hit the Serapis but spraying the Bonhomme Richard as well. Nonetheless, Jones could hardly be blamed for nurturing a sense of grievance and resentment against Landais, who had been nothing but an aggravation from the beginning, and he had every reason to be appalled that Landais had fired on his ship.
Jones was rightfully annoyed with Captain Pearson as well. Jones had been magnanimous in victory. He had returned Pearson’s sword a few days after accepting it on the quarterdeck, and once the vanquished captain was installed in perfectly comfortable quarters on shore, Jones made sure that he was provided with his furnishings and silver service from his cabin. But Pearson announced that he would not deign to receive his possessions from a “rebel.” So Jones, showing unusual forbearance, used Captain Cottineau, who held a more respectable French commission, to deliver the items. Pearson never offered any thanks.
Pearson was at least a useful hostage. Jones wanted to swap his 500-odd prisoners for a like number of Americans stranded in British jails. The American captain was worried, however, that his long-held dream of using hostages to force Britain to release American prisoners would become caught in diplomatic snares. Three days after arriving at the Texel, Jones set off for Amsterdam to try to push the idea of setting up a prisoner exchange.
As he was rowed away from the Serapis, the men of the late Bonhomme Richard gave their captain a hearty three cheers. The reception he received in Amsterdam was overwhelming. Jones was a curiosity, a celebrity. He was mobbed by crowds, craning to get a glimpse of the lion-killer. “We have almost been smothered at the Exchange and in the streets,” wrote the agent Dumas to Ben Franklin. “Captain Paul Jones arrived here yesterday,” a correspondent wrote to the London Evening Post on October 8. “At two o’clock he appeared at ’Change; the crowd of persons assembled together to see him was astonishing and it was with the utmost difficulty he could afterwards pass to the house of the gentleman with whom he was to dine.” Jones, “dressed in a blue frock coat, metal buttons, white cloth waistcoat and breaches, with a broadsword under his arm,” was “huzzaed all the way home,” according to another paper.
Picture the scene in the streets outside the Amsterdam Exchange, a prosperous neighborhood of mercantile mansions in the Dutch style, where a throng of moneychangers, stock jobbers, sea captains, merchant princes, soldiers of fortune, and the common rabble jostle about a small, proud man, dressed in the irregular uniform of a British naval officer. They are “overjoyed and mad to see the vanquisher of the English. They applaud him and bowed down to his feets, ready to kiss them,” wrote Dumas, who was caught in the crowd with his new friend. Jones, accustomed to the solitude of the quarterdeck, kept his dignity. While one English gentleman demanded to know how “this desperado” could be allowed to “parade the streets,” another correspondent observed, “he is a very different man from what he is generally represented; good sense, a genteel address, and a very good, though small person. Great Britain will find him a man capable of giving her a great deal of trouble.”
The news of Jones’s triumph caused a sensation from Paris to Philadelphia. It had been a grimly disappointing summer at sea for the Franco-American alliance. The French invasion fleet had returned to Brest with no glory to show and thousands of mortally ill men aboard. In Penobscot Bay, Maine, an American naval expedition against the British—commanded by Jones’s detested first captain, the snobbish Dudley Saltonstall—had been a fiasco. “A great hue and cry raised by John Paul Jones,” Abigail Adams wrote a friend from Braintree, Massachusetts. “Unhappy for us that we had not such a commander at the Penobscot expedition.” Ben Franklin was gratified that Jones had given the British people a “little taste” of what their soldiers were dishing out in America. He praised Jones for occasioning “terror and bustle” along the coasts of the British Isles.*
Colonel Chamillard of the marines, who had traveled overland to Paris from Amsterdam in early October, found himself in the bard’s role, recounting Jones’s exploits under fire. The victory at Flamborough Head “immortalizes you,” Chamillard wrote Jones, after regaling a rapt table at Passy. Chamillard’s tale of the pitched battle—the fires in the night, the flames creeping ever closer to the magazine, “made our hair stand on end,” wrote Jones’s financier and patron, Jacques Leray de Chaumont. Dumas, the American agent who first greeted Jones at the Texel and quickly became his companion, was amused to pass on this bawdy felicitation from a “friend”: “Congratulations for the commander, the same one who screwed the lady who works in the garden at Passy, and who is now screwing the English so nicely.”
Jones naturally hoped to convert some of his glory from martial into romantic conquest. He courted the ladies in Amsterdam and at The Hague. His most interesting flirtation was probably not innocent, but it was at least chaste. He wrote verses (“un petit badinage”) to Dumas’s beautiful thirteen-year-old daughter, Anna Jacoba Dumas, whom he dubbed “the Virgin Muse”:
Were I dear Maid “the King of Sea”
Such merit has thy Virgin song
A coral crown I’d give to thee
Thy throne on Azure waves should smoothly glide along;
The Nereides all around thy car should wait
And gladly sing in triumph of thy state
Vivat, vivat the happy Virgin Muse
Of Liberty the Plume! What Tyrant power pursues!
Or happier Lot! Were fair Columbia Free
From British Tyranny and youth still mine
I’d tell a tender Tale to one like thee
With looks as artless as her own or even as thine
If she approved my Flame, distrust apart
Like faithful Turtles we’d have but one heart
Together would we tune the silver sounding Lyre
And Love of sacred Freedom should our lays inspire.
But since alas! the rage of war prevails
And cruel Britons desolate our Land
For Freedom still I spread my willing Sails,
My sword unsheath’d my injured country shall Command;
Go on bright Maid, the Muses all attend
Genius likes thine and wish to be its friend
Trust me altho’ convey’d thru this poor shift
My New years thoughts are grateful for thy Virgin gift.
Jones kept a copy so he could recycle it to future muses, virgin and otherwise. But Dumas reported to Jones that “the Virgin Muse has snatched from me your agreeable couplets.” She charmed Jones by making up and singing a song about his exploits. “The Virgin Muse had my Virgin Thanks for her Virgin Song,” trilled Jones.
JONES’S PLEASANT SOJOURN was interrupted by a tense standoff with Landais. The two men encountered each other in an Amsterdam tavern, and Landais reminded Jones that he had agreed to duel once they were away from their ships and on dry land. Landais wanted to fight with small swords, at which he was expert. Aware that he had gone without fencing lessons while growing up in a gardener’s cottage, Jones wisely found a way to duck Landais’s challenge. Their differences, he said, would be resolved by a court-martial back in the United States. Landais, unstable at the best of times, was a dangerous man to cross. According to Fanning, at about that time Landais and Captain Cottineau dueled over some unknown slur or slight and Cottineau was badly wounded.
Despite his high profile in Amsterdam, Jones struggled, with mixed success, to appear humble. “Paul Jones frequents the coffee house and the Exchange, and seems not very fond of courting the attention of the crowds that daily surround him,” reported a London correspondent. He “seems perfectly indifferent as to the popularity he has gained by his desperate courage and unprincipled practices.” Maybe so, but he was surely aware of the figure he cut in his gold-laced roqueleau, a fur-lined cloak with a cape that he wore against the autumn chill.
Jones was always on the alert for put-downs as well as praise, and he began to hear whispers that he was overstaying his time in Amsterdam while neglecting the needs of his men back at the Texel. On October 18, he received a disturbing letter from Dumas. The American agent, who was a bit of a busybody as well as a philosophe, had been talking to “important people” who were “great friends of America.”
Their feeling is that you have not done wrong, sir, to come and show yourself over here; but on the other hand they feel that it would not be right to repeat this visit, because it would amount to too much parading, and that would look bad even among the friends of America to see you visit especially public places.
By embarrassing the British with his visible presence, Jones was putting the neutral Dutch into an awkward position and making it harder for them to accommodate Jones’s needs, especially his pressing need to get medical treatment for his numerous wounded. On this last score, Dumas reported some distressing gossip of grotesque conditions aboard the Serapis:
I must warn you also, my dear sir, that these same friends have told me something which, whether it is true or not, hurts me as much as it does them: It has been said that a high degree of dirtiness and infection reigns aboard the Serapis. Pieces of corpses from combat have been seen there, from which people conclude that the ship has not been cleaned since the battle. This is quite shocking here at the moment, and raises fears as to the consequence of such negligence. In the name of God, my dear sir, put some order in all this. Do not leave your ship any more; have it cleaned and purged from this filth.
Jones had just arrived back aboard the Serapis when he received this letter. Jones abhorred a dirty ship, so it is puzzling to think that he would leave his prize stinking of rotting flesh. Where, in Jones’s absence, were his officers, including the normally reliable Lieutenant Dale? In any event, on October 19, the day after Jones returned from Amsterdam, the log of the Serapis notes—for the first time since the battle—“People employed cleaning the ships decks” and again three days later, “People employed cleaning the upper and lower gun decks.”
Jones’s own people were unhappy, and the British prisoners angrier still. Jones’s efforts to arrange a prisoner exchange had gone nowhere. The prisoners schemed to kill Jones within a few days of his return. “Last night I very fortunately discovered a plot that had been formed by the prisoners on board here to play a game at throat cut. They will not find opportunity a second time,” Jones wrote John de Neufville, a local agent who was (neither expeditiously nor well) refitting the Serapis. Word spread on the ship that Jones had been galavanting around Amsterdam while the officers and men, many of them nursing terrible wounds, suffered on board ship. Many of the hands from the Bonhomme Richard had only the tattered shirts on their backs; they grew cold and miserable as the days shortened and the temperatures dropped. The log shows entry after entry of “dark foggy weather” and winds sweeping in off the North Sea. While Jones was in Amsterdam, a score of sailors made a run for it in a stolen boat, and five of them drowned before they could be recaptured. The log lists a steady trickle of desertions thereafter, including the name of the hero of the battle off Flamborough Head, William Hamilton, the brave seaman who climbed out on the mainyard and dropped the grenade through the hatchway on the Serapis.
Jones at last tried to provide for his men, petitioning the Duc de la Vauguyon, the French ambassador to The Hague, to pay, clothe, and feed his crew. “The bread that has been twice a week sent down from Amsterdam to feed my people has been literally speaking rotten,” Jones angrily wrote on November 4. But he was caught in a diplomatic tangle. The British ambassador, Sir Joseph Yorke, had begun pressuring the Dutch government as soon as Jones’s squadron hove into view at the Texel. Sir Joseph demanded that “the Pirate Paul Jones” be arrested as a criminal in the street by Dutch authorities, his prisoners released, and his prizes turned over to the British government. The Dutch temporized, and at Jones’s prodding, allowed the American commander to jail his prisoners in an old fort on the Texel. The French played a shadowy, ambiguous role. France did not want to see an open breach between Holland and Britain; Paris wanted the Dutch to remain neutral, so they could continue to ship goods to blockaded France without interference by the British navy. France’s Ambassador Vauguyon was not eager to see Jones stir up trouble between Holland and England. In mid-November, Jones was informed that the Serapis, Pallas, and Vengeance, along with the prizes captured on the cruise, were all being put under the French flag. Jones was a captain again, not a commodore. He was ordered to transfer with his men to the Alliance, now the only ship still under the Stars and Stripes. The switch was made quietly, in the dead of night. Enraged, feeling poorly used, Jones looted the prize he had fought so hard to capture, moving everything that could not be nailed down, including twelve casks of rum, sixty cutlasses, four hen coops, and 100 pair of leg irons (for his increasingly mutinous crew). In their private correspondence, Dumas and Jones sarcastically referred to Vauguyon as “the great man.”
Under pressure from Sir Joseph, the Dutch waffled and finally turned against Jones. A squadron of Dutch warships, led by a seventy-four-gun ship of the line, sailed into the anchorage at the Texel in mid-December to intimidate Jones into leaving. Jones received a Dutch captain, who told him the Americans were no longer welcome in Dutch waters and must put to sea immediately. Jones politely dismissed him, saying that he would sail when the wind was right. The Dutch admiral sent Jones a series of insolent messages, which the American captain ignored. Jones knew what was waiting for him just beyond the Texel Roads: a squadron of British men-of-war, which had been patrolling there on and off for days. “They have done me the honor to place four line ships at each entry to this Road, to give me a Royal Salute when I set sail,” Jones wrote a friend. The British burned to capture the Pirate Jones. “For God’s sake,” the First Lord of the Admiralty urged one of his captains at the end of November, “get to sea instantly in consequence of the orders you have received. If you can take Paul Jones you will be as high in the estimation of the public as if you had beat the combined [Franco-Spanish] fleet.”
The French ambassador stepped in to offer Jones a fig leaf: a letter of marque, designating the Alliance as a privateer ship temporarily under French protection. The Dutch might not respect the Stars and Stripes, but they would have to honor the French flag. Jones’s pride flared. Disdainful of privateers who fought for profit, not honor, he would not touch this “dirty piece of parchment,” he informed Ben Franklin. He would leave on his own time, when the weather was right. “I do not much fear the enemy in the long and dark nights of this season,” Jones wrote defiantly.
On Christmas Eve, Jones received a gift. The wind backed around to the east and blew a frozen gale, driving the British blockaders off their station. Jones decided to make his getaway. The day after Christmas, after a temporary delay (a drunken pilot had run the Alliance afoul of a merchantman), Jones was at last ready, he wrote Dumas, to “escape this Purgatory.” The captain was in an ebullient mood as the Alliance sailed out of the Texel Roads and went tearing down the Flemish coast. “I am here, my Philosopher, with a good wind at East and under my best American colors,” Jones wrote Dumas on December 27 from “Alliance at Sea.”
Jones’s plan was to catch the British off guard by taking the most direct route. Rather than head out into the wide expanse of the North Sea and sneak around the Scottish coast, Jones made directly for the straits of Dover. He would drive straight down the English Channel, right past the guardians at the British gate. No false colors or ruses de guerre; his gambit would be sheer brazenness. The Alliance was a fast ship, and her log shows Jones cracking on sail, pushing the limits, running the risk of carrying away a spar as he flew westward at nine and ten knots. A split main topsail checked him for a moment, but still he pressed on through a cold winter’s night, exhilarated to be back on the quarterdeck taunting the enemy.
At 9 A.M. on the morning of December 27, while British seamen were still recovering from their Yuletide carousing, the Alliance raced past the British fleet lying at anchor at the Downs. “Our thirteen stripes now floated over our stern, and we had a long streaming pendant aloft, and an American jack set forward,” wrote Midshipman Fanning. “I believe those John Englishman who now saw us thought we were pretty saucy fellows.” Master’s Mate Kilby recalled the scene on the quarterdeck, where the officers and men stood wide-eyed at their captain’s audacity as the Alliance cruised in plain sight of dozens of British men-of-war.
The morning was very clear, though the wind blew fresh. We were then under close reef topsails. Jones ordered out a reef. It was done quickly. He ordered out the second and it was not long before it was done. He ordered out the third, and also that the topsail yards should be hoisted up taut. It was done. One of the Lieutenants observed to Jones that he was fearful lest we should carry away the mast. Jones answered, “She shall either carry this sail or drag it.”
On she drove down the Channel. At 9 A.M. the next morning, Alliance slipped past another British fleet, at Spithead on the Isle of Wight. By now the breeze had moderated but “thick weather” helped disguise the Alliance from enemy cruisers. In the Western Approaches, Jones was even emboldened to catch a prize, though she turned out to be a neutral ship, a Swedish merchantman that was off limits.
On January 16, Jones happily wrote Dumas from the port of La Coruña, Spain, “We have made our way through the Channel in spite of the utmost efforts of the British to prevent it. I had the pleasure of laughing at their expense as we passed the Downs in sight of their ships of war and along the coast in full view also of the Isle of Wight.” He wrote Franklin, “I made my passage safe through the Channel notwithstanding all the watchfulness of the many ships.” In the margin, Jones penned in, “The enemy employed 42 ships of the line and frigates.”
But Jones’s joy was tempered by dissatisfaction with the sailing qualities of his ship and the growing surliness of his crew. He had wanted to cruise in the Bay of Biscay, where British warships often patrolled. “Had the ship been in a condition to sustain stormy weather I should have given our enemies fresh alarms and would I think before this time have made some good prizes and taken a number of prisoners,” Jones wrote Franklin. “But to my great disappointment both sails and rigging are in so bad a condition thro’ want of former care that it would have been impossible to sustain such gales as I might have expected on that rude coast at this season.” The Alliance, though speedy, was crank and oversparred, and Landais had allowed her to become a filthy ship. Jones had such difficulty exterminating the vermin aboard that he had to close all the hatches and try to smoke out the rats by burning brimstone belowdecks.
Jones wished to come back to France with a string of prizes—perhaps even a British frigate. His crew was less enthusiastic. His men were still poorly clothed for the winter and still unpaid for their heroic work. In the fall, the sailors in Jones’s squadron had been paid a single ducat, worth a few pennies. Many of the sailors flung theirs overboard in disgust. Now, as the Alliance rode at anchor at a Spanish port, there was no money for drink or women. Jones wanted the crew to look sharp for visiting dignitaries (Fanning remarked on the length and cleanliness of the fingernails of the local nobility), and he harshly berated a crewman who was slow to dip the Spanish colors on demand. Jones apparently thought the bos’un meant to embarrass him; in a rage, the captain drew his sword and turned on the cringing mate, as if to run him through.
That was the last straw. On January 19, the log of the Alliance reported, “All the people refused doing duty, until they got some part of the money due them.” The officers had to go below with swords and drive the men on deck. From the quarterdeck, Jones, by now accustomed to mutinous crews, promised to get their prize money once they returned to L’Orient. He could truthfully say that he had not been paid either. In the meantime, Jones ordered up a soothing double round of grog. “The people were satisfied by the captain so as to appear cheerfullly to duty,” the log reported the next day.
Jones’s wardroom was fractious. Jones liked his junior officers, who were loyal and had been very brave in the action off Flamborough Head. Fanning wrote that Jones made a practice of dining with two midshipmen (there were six on board) every day, requiring the “young gentlemen” to show up in their best togs and make intelligent conversation. But the Alliance’s first officer, whom he had inherited from Landais, was a drunk, and the rest of Landais’s old officers bitterly feuded with the Bonhomme Richard’s men, refighting the night when the Alliance had mistakenly opened fire on Jones’s ship. None of the officers was keen to take another dangerous cruise. A delegation confronted Jones in his cabin, demanding to go home. He angrily told them to do their duty, that they still had a chance to fall in with a British frigate and carry her. The officers warned that the men were on the verge of another rebellion. Jones “stamped his foot,” wrote Fanning, and told them to get out.
Jones cruised for another seventeen days but found no prizes. When the Alliance finally dropped anchor off the Island of Groix near L’Orient on February 10, 1780, Jones himself was in poor shape. He was exhausted and his eyes had become infected. “I am almost blind with sore eyes, which prevents me at present from paying a visit to my friends on shore,” he wrote his maritime agents at L’Orient, Gourlade and Moylan. Jones “appeared much agitated,” observed Fanning, “and bit his lips often, and walked the quarterdeck muttering something to himself.”
Jones’s behavior began to fit into a pattern recognizable in isolated sea captains before and since. He was becoming Queeg-like, suspicious, jumpy, slightly dotty. He badly needed a respite from the burdens of command and his own unceasing ambition. From time to time as he brooded at the Texel in the late autumn, he had wondered if his warrior days were coming to an end. He had been in the naval service for four years. He moaned to a friend that he was an “old man” (he was thirty-three). He still entertained notions of becoming a gentleman farmer and settling down in Virginia. “It is very probable that I may retire from the naval service when I return to the continent, for I neither love the profession of arms or the Sea Service,” he wrote a friend, Thomas Scott, whom he had befriended while living in London in the early 1770s. Or perhaps he could find a place in genteel Dutch society by finding a proper wife. Writing in a somewhat stilted third-person voice on November 26, he had declared to John de Neufville, his Amsterdam agent, “So great is the respect of your humble servant for the friendship of Amsterdam that, if he [Jones] should be so fortunate as to escape the dangers that now surround him, he would esteem it an honor to become a member of that society by giving his hand to the fair daughter or sister of some patriotic citizen whose breast is all alive to the noble feeling of philanthropy, and who has influence to save his country.” Jones apparently had a particular matchmaker in mind, a woman of some influence, for he went on: “You can communicate this hint to the fair and sentimental lady with what delicate turn of expression you please, assuring her of my respect and asking her advice etc., etc., etc. If that amiable lady should undertake to stand my friend you may expect another visit from me very soon.”
But Jones never did go back to Amsterdam, either because the “sentimental lady” failed to find a father or brother with sufficient “philanthropy” to further Jones’s romantic ambitions, or because his duties carried him away. Jones was half-hoping to return to the United States soon after he landed in L’Orient in February. But once again, he was caught up in time-consuming intrigues of his own and others’ making.
Benjamin Franklin was eager to send Jones and the Alliance quickly back to America with badly needed supplies for the Continental Army, 16,000 stands of arms procured by Lafayette and 120 bales of uniform cloth. Jones was also asked to carry a prominent passenger, Arthur Lee, the meddlesome former American commissioner who had been traveling about the courts of Europe, vainly trying to drum up support for the American cause. Lee did not travel light. Along with various servants and a great mound of baggage, he asked Jones to transport his traveling coach. Jones diplomatically replied that he would if he could find room.
Before he left for America, Jones needed to live up to his promise to get his men paid and rewarded with their prize earnings. This seemingly straightforward task would require literally decades to accomplish. By the time the U.S. Congress finally voted to compensate the crew of the Bonhomme Richard for the prizes taken on their famous cruise of September 1779, the year would be 1848. The men and officers of the Bonhomme Richard were all dead by then. The money—$165,598.37—was ultimately paid to their descendants. There were murky and tangled reasons for the delay; Congress’s indifference to promoting a professional navy was an underlying cause. But Jones had no difficulty identifying an immediate villain: Chaumont, the French merchant prince, who had faithfully served as all-purpose provider and paymaster for the American cause in France. Chaumont was overextended and strapped for cash (he would ultimately go bankrupt). Jones, in his paranoid way, believed that Chaumont and his “cabal” in the French government were conspiring against him, trying to humiliate him in the eyes of his crew. “My mind is torn to pieces and can no longer bear the shameful wrongs that are practiced against the poor, the gallant seamen that fought so faithfully by my side and have followed their captain through so many dangers,” he wrote his “dear friend,” the spy Edward Bancroft on April 10. A few days later, Jones set out for Paris to confront the “cabal” and demand pay for his men. Jones had another motive as well: to find out just how much fame he had garnered since he last strolled in the Tuileries or the great places of the French capital.
* Typical was this letter to the London papers from a lady in Limerick, Ireland, after Jones appeared off the Kerry coast: “We already smelt the fire of the burning city and felt the wicked embrace of Paul Jones and his merciless crew. Those that had money hid it; those that had none had less trouble.”