JONES’S FELLOW PASSENGERS on the packet boat to France were convivial company, brother officers from the French army returning home after their adventures abroad. Among them was Major L’Enfant, described as “everyone’s favorite,” a “gay and gallant officer,” a member of the Society of Cincinnati and the urban planner who would later lay out the broad avenues of Washington, D.C. For most of the wintery voyage, the French officers stayed below, playing cards and dice. Captain Jones, however, preferred to walk the quarterdeck, his cloak wrapped tight against the November gales, as he moodily watched the gray sea rise and fall.
Often, his companion as he paced back and forth was Captain Joshua Barney, the commander of the packet boat, the General Washington. Barney, though twelve years younger, was a kindred soul. With jet black hair and a raffish manner, he was a ladies’ man and, rare among Continental Navy officers, a brave and ambitious commander. Barney shared Jones’s contempt for the craven and inept captains who had outranked them. Barney recounted his experiences with the hopeless Captain William Hallock of the Hornet, a sloop that had dropped out of the New Providence expedition in the winter of 1776 after colliding with the sloop Fly. Barney was then sixteen years old, a master’s mate eager for combat. He described standing by his cannon with a lit match in his hand as a lightly armed British tender approached the Hornet off Chesapeake Bay. Naturally timorous, given to prayer and reflection, Captain Hallock ordered Barney to hold his fire because, the captain explained to his incredulous mate, he had “no inclination of shedding blood!” The British ship escaped. Barney entertained Jones with the even more ludicrous tale of James Nicholson, the captain at the top of the seniority list who had lobbied to deny Jones flag rank by smearing his character to Congress. In April 1778, with his brand-new frigate, the Virginia, caught on a sandbar and a British warship fast approaching, Nicholson had run from his cabin in his nightshirt, jumped in a small boat, and rowed for shore. While Barney, then a lieutenant, pleaded with the men to fight, the crew, in the pusillanimous spirit of their captain, broke into the liquor stores. They were thoroughly drunk by the time the British arrived to take their prize without a shot fired. Captain Nicholson slunk back on board the next day and pitifully asked if he could have his clothes and his books. This was too much for Barney, who called his captain a coward in front of the enemy. Given command of his own sloop, the Hyder-Ally, in the last year of the war, Barney won a rare American victory in a ship-to-ship action, taking a twenty-gun British sloop, the General Monk.
Jones, who regarded himself as a “voice crying in the desert” about the sorry state of America’s young navy, must have taken some pleasure in knowing that there were officers like Barney coming up the ladder. Jones may have shared a mordant laugh or two as he listened to the description of Nicholson in his nightshirt, deserting his crew for safety. But as the two men paced the quarterdeck in the November gloom, Jones said little himself. Barney observed that Jones seemed reserved, even morose.
He was understandably low about his career and future prospects. “After my return to America in 1780,” he wrote in his memoir, “my services were less brilliant and less useful than I would have desired.” He missed war and the planning for war. Jones had a fertile mind, and he was usually able to keep it churning. In April, as he had cruised with the French, he had been thinking hard about “the future of our marine,” as he put it to his friend Captain Hector McNeill. “I have not been idle since I saw you, but have collected many ideas on the subject.” But even Jones’s persistence and inventive zeal flagged in the face of constant disappointment and inaction. Reflecting on his frustrations over getting the America ready for sea, Jones had written John Brown, “In such a situation the labouring mind loses by degrees its fine edge and glowing energy; and becomes less and less fitted for great thoughts and glorious actions.” Jones’s fire had dimmed. He needed a spark of danger to reignite it.
That may explain why, to Captain Barney’s surprise and consternation, Jones insisted on being put ashore in England. The General Washington had encountered head winds off the coast of France, so Jones told Barney to steer for England and drop him off in a fishing village near Portsmouth, on Britain’s southern coast. Jones explained that he had secret dispatches to deliver to the American minister (John Adams) in London. Barney spluttered that Jones was a wanted man and would be hanged if he was caught wandering around the English countryside. Jones shrugged off the caution. He was accustomed, he said, to being chased by “British blood hounds.”
Barney dutifully put Jones ashore, where he found a coach to London. He traveled, as he had once put it in an earlier context, “incog.” The caricatures of the Pirate Paul Jones in the British press made him look dark and menacing. No one glanced twice at the weather-beaten, somewhat haggard sea captain swathed against the December chill in a boat cloak. Jones must have enjoyed this latest ruse—sailing, as it were, right into his former enemy’s home port without arousing so much as a blink of an eye. Jones did not tarry in London. After he had come and gone, the British newspapers, excited to belatedly discover that the elusive Jones had been right under their noses, calculated that he had arrived in the capital at 9 P.M. on December 5 and departed at 3 A.M. on December 6. He had presumably met Adams at midnight and passed the dispatches, then caught a coach for Dover and the Channel boat to France.
Back on safe ground in Paris, Jones went favor-seeking at the royal court. On December 20, he had an audience with Louis XVI, who received him graciously at dinner at Versailles. The Marechal de Castries, who had succeeded Sartine as Minister of Marine and then become chief of all France’s armed forces, told Jones that he had been instructed to say “that His Majesty had been pleased to see me again, and would always be glad to further my interests,” Jones recorded in his memoir. Jones resumed his ties to the Lodge of the Nine Sisters, “that illustrious and learned society” he had been privileged to join, and picked up some of his old friendships with the ruling class of the old regime. But he no longer stayed at Passy. The Hôtel de Valentinois had become inhospitable since Jones began quarreling with its owner, Chaumont. Even Franklin was cool to Jones. A formality crept into their correspondence. Franklin, aging and gout-ridden, worn by his years shaking the tin cup for America, may have just run out of patience with the demanding sea captain. Jones, possibly, felt that Franklin had not been vigorous enough in his defense in his battles with Landais.
Extracting the prize money owed the American men of the Bonhomme Richard and Alliance proved to be a “difficult and disagreeable task,” Jones wrote. The French had sold the Serapis and the Countess of Scarborough for a fraction of their worth, for less than $100,000, and then gouged out more than half that in deductions. Jones protested: why should American sailors be charged a 1.67 percent fee to support Les Invalides, a soldiers and sailors hospital that no American would ever visit? Why should Jones be charged for the care and feeding of British prisoners of war for three months—especially when, to his fury and disgust, he discovered that the prisoners had not been exchanged for Americans, as promised, but for Frenchmen in English jails? It took Jones more than two years of haggling to settle the accounts and another year after that to get paid in cash (Jones’s share was roughly $2,500). The French government, as it tottered toward revolution, was nearly bankrupt in 1785.
While he dickered with French bureaucrats and waited, Jones cast about for opportunities. He contemplated going on a voyage to the South Seas with one of Captain Cook’s lieutenants. He pondered a trip to India as a merchant. He blew £1,800 on a failed scheme by his old friend Dr. Bancroft to import bark that could be used for yellow dye for clothiers. He warned—correctly—that the Barbary pirates were a problem that America would have to deal with sooner or later.
Piracy in the Mediterranean, an age-old scourge, was becoming a hazard to America’s growth as a global trader. Claiming that the Koran entitled them to do as they pleased with infidels, ruthless corsairs in fast galleys were striking out from Algiers and Tunis, seizing and enslaving Christian sailors, and demanding that their countries pay tribute. The outrage touched Jones’s compassion for Americans cast in chains and reminded him why America needed a strong navy. But he could not get Congress, still strapped for funds and celebrating independence from Britain, to pay much attention.
He did, to his satisfaction, accomplish one bit of unfinished business. At the end of 1784, he finally succeeded in returning Lord Selkirk’s silver. The Earl had reconsidered his earlier haughty refusal to accept anything from a brigand such as Jones. Through intermediaries, he had sent word to Jones that he would like his silver back after all. Jones sent the silver plate to Selkirk’s sister-in-law in London and received a gracious reply from his lordship. “I intended to have put an article in the newspapers about your having returned it,” Selkirk wrote Jones, but apparently Jones had already seen to that, arranging through friends to have his gallantry announced in the English and Scottish press. Still, Selkirk wrote, he had mentioned Jones’s chivalrous action to “many people of fashion” and tried to correct “confused accounts” in the London newspapers. “On all occasions, Sir, both now and formerly, I have done you the justice to tell that you have made an offer of returning the plate … and that you had your officers and men in … extraordinary good discipline.”
During his long stay in Paris, Jones went looking for romance and, with at least one woman, found it. He did not reunite with Countess Lowendahl or Delia. Before coming to Paris, Jones asked to be remembered to the alluring and artful Lowendahl, but she had no further use for him, since there was no more point in trying to obtain a commission for her husband in the American army. Delia did plead to see Jones, desperately writing him not long after his arrival in Paris in the winter of 1784:
Is it possible that you are then so near me and that I am deprived of the sight of the mortal who has constituted the misery of my life for four years? O, most amiable and ungrateful of men, come to your best friend who burns with the desire of seeing you. You ought to know that it was but eight days since your Delia was at the brink of the grave. Come, in the name of heaven!
But Jones did not come. He moved on, possibly to a succession of mistresses. One stands out. For years, little was known about her, not even her real name, until that at last turned up in the papers of Thomas Jefferson, who acted as a reluctant intermediary in the romance. Jones called his lover “Madame T-----.” Her real name was Townsend. She was the widow of an Englishman who has been lost to history. Jones believed that she was the illegitimate daughter of the late king, Louis XV, a well-known sire of bastards. Her mother was a “lady of quality.” Only two letters from Jones to Madame Townsend survive, and their tone is quite different from the flowery pap Jones usually sent his lovers. In one letter, Jones genuinely shared Mme. T-----’s grief over the death of her protector, the Marquise de Marsan: “She was a true friend, and more than a mother to you! She would have been a mother to me also had she lived! We have lost her!”
Jones was feeling familial toward Madame T----- for another, perhaps more personal reason. Madame T----- was mother to a baby boy. Jones wrote that he hoped she would “cover him all over with kisses from me, they come warm to you both from the heart.” Who was the father of this child? John Paul Jones is a good guess. Perhaps Jones meant to make an honest woman of her, but he was distracted again by ambition.
In 1786, Jones presented a long memoir of his career to Louis XVI. The document, bound in red leather and preceded by a fawning poem,* was no doubt intended to further Jones’s career. Jones’s friends in Paris speculated that he was plumping for flag rank in the French navy. But England and France were once more at peace, and Louis had no money in his Treasury with which to create more admirals and the fleets for them to command. Jones was flailing about for ways to keep his famous name alive. He had copies made of Houdon’s bust of himself and sent them to various luminaries including Jefferson and Washington. He was indignant when a customs inspector imposed a duty on the busts. “They are not merchandise, and I flatter myself that my zeal and my exertions for the cause of America will not be requited with such a mark of dishonor,” he huffed. “I would rather hear that the busts were broke to pieces than consent that they should be subject to a duty.” At the same time, he was thrilled to get back a letter from Washington that he had received the bust “and shall place it with my own.” Jones was not forgotten in America. But if he was to have any chance of professional advancement, he needed to return to his adopted country.
He arrived in New York, the young nation’s capital for the time being, in the hot summer of 1787. He extracted from Congress a gold medal, of which he was exceedingly proud, but no flag or fleet—just permission to seek a French commission, the stratagem that had already failed. He had an unpleasant encounter with his old nemesis, Pierre Landais, who was now living in reduced circumstances in New York and still seeking the “satisfaction” of a duel with Jones. As Jones stood talking to another man in the street, Landais approached from behind, spat in the dust, and declared, “I spit in your face!” In the elaborate rites of gentlemanly honor, spitting in a man’s face would normally demand a duel, which Jones was eager to avoid. Jones put a statement in the New York Journal and Weekly Register insisting that reports of the spitting incident were “an absolute falsehood.” Landais then placed a letter “to the impartial public” in the newspapers: “I do hereby certify, to the public, that I really, and in fact, spit all the spittle I could spare out of my mouth then, out of contempt, in the face of John Paul, or Paul Jones…. Were I not more afraid of a law suit than I was of him, I would have caned him, showing him my cane at the same time.” An impartial witness—the man to whom Jones was talking—resolved the public standoff by swearing that Landais had indeed spoken the insulting words, but not delivered the spittle, and that in any case Jones had neither heard Landais nor noticed him as the mad captain passed six or seven yards behind.
Jones escaped Landais’s épée, but he was thwarted and frustrated in New York. Restlessly, in November 1787—a few days after his encounter with Landais—he sailed again for Paris.
He was beginning to behave in a skittish, if not paranoid fashion. He declined to sail in a French packet because he had heard rumors of a British fleet on the prowl. What if war broke out between England and France and he was seized by the British? He waited several days for an American ship instead, but then tempted fate by going to London to deliver dispatches to John Adams. In spite of, or perhaps because of, the danger of recognition and capture by an angry mob, he strolled to Covent Garden to enjoy an evening at the theater. Traveling on to Paris, he was extremely secretive with Thomas Jefferson, who had succeeded Ben Franklin as the American Minister or plenipotentiary to the court of Louis XVI. From a hotel, Jones sent the ambassador a note: “I would have waited on you immediately instead of writing, but I have several strong reasons for desiring that no persons should know of my being here till I have seen you and been favored with your advice on the steps I ought to pursue…. I shall not go out until I hear from you. And as the people in this hotel do not know my name, you will please to ask for the gentleman that just arrived, who is lodged in No. 1.”
What were the “strong reasons”? Was Jones ducking a romantic entanglement or paternal obligations? He had already drafted Jefferson as an intermediary in his affair with Madame T-----. From New York in September, Jones had sent his tender letter to Madame T-----, wishing to cover her child with kisses, in care of Jefferson. In an accompanying letter to the American ambassador, he had asked Jefferson to look up Madame T----- for him and to please help her, perhaps by arranging an audience with the King. Coping with Jones’s mistresses was above and beyond Jefferson’s call of duty. Madame T----- herself wrote Jefferson and asked his indulgence: could the American ambassador make her a small loan, to allow her to travel to England and sell some stock? Jefferson gracefully demurred. He was “infinitely distressed,” he wrote back, but financial straits made him “incapable” of lending money.
Whatever “strong reasons” Jones had for sneaking about Paris, Jefferson apparently managed to resolve or finesse. Jefferson had his own agenda for seeing Jones on the night he arrived in Paris, a prospect that promised to divert Jones away from his romantic intrigues and restore him to duty and possibly glory at sea. Catherine, the Tsarina of Russia, was interested in hiring Jones to command a fleet in the Black Sea against the Turks. Was Jones interested in joining the Russian navy?
This was a startling gust in Jones’s becalmed career. It may seem peculiar that Thomas Jefferson, of all people, was willing to rent out America’s greatest naval hero to a famously cruel despot. But Jefferson shrewdly calculated that American interests would be served in the long run. Jones needed to be kept gainfully employed at sea until America could afford its own fleet. By permitting Jones to become a Russian admiral, America would be providing on-the-job training for a potential future naval commander-in-chief. The Russians, who were about to go to war with the Turks and quickly needed to organize a Black Sea navy, had sent feelers about Jones’s availability though secret diplomatic channels. Jefferson was receptive to the idea, though, canny observer that he was, he had some well-considered advice for the Russians: “Mr. Jefferson, who knows the character of the said Chevalier, pointed out,” wrote the Russian ambassador to France, “that on great and dangerous missions this officer, who is as spirited as he is disinterested, will be better employed as chief than under the orders of a superior.”
Jones himself did not instantly leap at the chance to serve in Catherine’s navy. “I regarded this as a castle in the air,” he recounted in a memoir. His natural reluctance to sail under a new flag was prudent America had just adopted its Constitution. Surely, Jones reasoned, a military establishment could not be far behind. Perhaps he would get his flag and his fleet after all. Russia was a mysterious and rather forbidding country without any naval tradition to speak of. “A man of very high rank at Paris,” Jones recorded, counseled him to stay away from the tangled court politics of Catherine the Great. “He would advise me to go to Constantinople at once rather than enter the service of Russia,” Jones wrote—in other words, anything, even fighting for the Turks, would be preferable to the Tsarina’s intrigues.
Jones equivocated, intending to go ahead to Denmark to recover prize money from the cruise of the Bonhomme Richard (under pressure from Britain, the Danes had set free three of Jones’s prizes when they arrived in Danish ports in September 1779). But the night before he left, Jones was approached by an American soldier of fortune, Lewis Littlepage, who urged him to meet with the Russian ambassador, M. de Simolin, in the morning. Over breakfast, Catherine’s emissaries laid on the flattery and the proper inducements. As supreme commander of the Empress’s Black Sea Fleet, Jones would have carte blanche. In less than a year, he would make Constantinople tremble. Jones liked to be flattered and wooed. He began to picture himself in the striking, all-white uniform of a Russian admiral.
From Denmark, where he dined with the royal family, Jones negotiated with Catherine personally. He was honest with her: “Loving glory,” he wrote, “I am perhaps too attached to honors.” He wanted no joint commands—no more concordats. “Being an entire stranger, I have more to fear from a joint authority than any officer in Her Majesty’s Service. But I cannot conceive that Her Majesty could deem it expedient to divide the command in the Black Sea.” Jones should have demanded ironclad guarantees. But his wariness had been replaced with impatience, his judgment clouded by ambition tinged with desperation. Catherine’s navy may have been a sorry boatload of intriguers, but it was the only navy offering him a job and a chance for action. The alternative was to wait for America to awaken to the need for a true navy, possibly a very long wait. In a great rash for glory, he set out for St. Petersburg and opened the last and most bizarre chapter of his career.
JONES HAD NOT COMMANDED a ship of war at sea for more than eight years. He was forty years old and no longer in the best of health. The month-long journey from Paris to Copenhagen in late winter had been taxing. Exhausted, shivering when he arrived at the Danish court, Jones had been forced to bed with a lung infection. On April 8, he wrote Jefferson, “My sufferings, from the inclemency of the weather and my want of proper means to guard against it on the journey, were inexpressible; and I believe, from what I yet feel, will continue to affect my constitution.” Jones was accustomed to extreme discomfort at sea, yet his frequent complaints were very rarely physical. He must have been sick indeed to write such a letter.
Neither illness nor the elements slowed him. Within a fortnight of bemoaning his health to Jefferson, he attempted a voyage that would have tested the constitution of the hardiest young sailor. He did not pause, as he headed north and east, for the usual honors and pleasures. “At Stockholm I stayed but one night … want of time prevented me from appearing at Court,” Jones wrote. Jones had hoped to reach St. Petersburg by taking a packet boat across the Gulf of Bothnia to Finland, but the ice was still heavy in mid-April, and no one was willing to risk the passage. So Jones took matters into his own hands. He chartered a thirty-foot open-decked boat and a small skiff to tow behind. His plan was to get as far as he could in the larger vessel, and then drag the smaller one across the ice, or use it to hop from ice floe to ice floe. “The enterprise was very daring,” Jones recalled, “and had never before been attempted. But by the far north [up the east coast of Sweden, down the west coast of Finland], the roads were impracticable.” The longer southern route to Russia by land, back down into Germany and across Poland, was the safer way to go, but Jones could not have delayed an instant, he wrote, because, “the Empress expected me day to day.”
Jones hired some Swedish boatmen for the voyage, but he did not tell them where they were going. Had he been honest about his destination, Jones believed, they would have refused to make the trip. From Grisslehamn, a port just north of Stockholm, Jones set out into the frozen waters of the Gulf of Bothnia. At first, Jones told the boatmen to steer to the south, skirting along the Swedish coast. But then, toward nightfall, he pulled out his pistol and gave a different order: steer due east—toward Finland, more than fifty miles across ice-choked, wind-tossed waters.
Jones’s only light was the lantern from his traveling carriage, which he used as a binnacle light so he could read the compass in the dark. The night was raw and the wind high but fair for Finland, pushing Jones’s boat and the smaller skiff at a fast clip toward their destination. Jones drew himself into his cloak and dreamed perhaps of leading a fleet into action, but he did not sleep. He was familiar with mutinous crews.
Dawn brought disappointment. In the far distance, Jones’s little party could see the rise of the pine-forested Finnish coast—but miles of hard-packed ice blocked the way. Returning to Sweden was impossible. The strong west wind meant they could only sail south, hoping to circle around the ice and enter the Gulf of Finland, which divides Finland from the Baltic states.
The sailing conditions were appalling. Air and water temperatures in those northern waters in mid-April hovered around the freezing mark. The open boat offered no shelter from the knifelike wind or the needles of spray. Ropes became stiff and slippery; hands grew numb and clumsy. Floating ice was a constant hazard. In the middle of the second night, “we lost the small boat,” wrote Jones, “but the men saved themselves in the large one, which with difficulty escaped the same fate.” Hour after chilling hour, day after frozen day, Jones struck south, looking for a gap in the ice, while his men wondered how many toes they would have left when the frostbite healed. Cradling his pistol, Jones dozed intermittently, if at all. Finally, he recorded, “at the end of four days we landed at Reval [in Estonia], where our enterprise was regarded as a kind of miracle.” Jones’s men were grateful to be alive. Jones thanked them by hiring a pilot and giving them money to replace the boat they lost, “with the provisions necessary for making their homeward voyage, when the weather should become more favorable.” Jones, who had sailed off Nova Scotia in a blizzard in December, remembered the experience as one of his most miserable at sea.
The canals were still frozen when Jones reached St. Petersburg in the first week of May. Russia’s magnificent gateway to the west, built out of a bog by Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was designed to rival the grandeur of London and Paris. With its classical columns and graceful arches and bridges, St. Petersburg offered a splendid facade. Court life was a glittery succession of dinners and balls “enhanced,” noted a diarist, “by Asiatic luxury.” Veneers were misleading in this strange land suspended between East and West. Jones, who prided himself on speaking plainly, was entering the bazaar.
Russia imported Western ideas, manners, inventions; the court language was French, but the underlying ethos was universal suspicion and Oriental despotism. Under Catherine “le Grand,” St. Petersburg was permeated by a feel of decadence, if not wickedness, that smacked more of late Byzantium than late European Enlightenment. Mannish and predatory, Catherine held transvestite balls, at which the men dressed as women and the women dressed as men. Catherine appeared to many courtiers to be not quite man nor woman, but somehow more than both. Intelligent and curious, she had, in her youth, befriended philosophers like Voltaire and affected liberal attitudes. She had talked about, someday, freeing the serfs and abolishing torture. She welcomed the Masons for their liberalism—and then banished them as potential rivals. Her real interest was in power.
As a young woman, she had arranged to have her aging husband strangled and her eldest son confined and watched. She intrigued abroad as well as at home, bribing Swedish nobles to conspire against their crown and installing a former lover as King of Poland. Her territorial ambitions to the south were signaled by the name she chose for her youngest son, Constantine. He would become the ruler of Constantinople and extend Eastern Christendom all the way to Greece. But first Catherine had to liberate Constantinople from the Muslim Ottoman Turks who had occupied it for the past 300 years.
In 1786, Catherine had made her famous progression down the Dnieper, Russia’s Mississippi, accompanied by fawning foreign ministers who marveled at the flower-bedecked villages and grottos along the way (some of them fake, erected by Catherine’s great lover and still friend, the Prince Potemkin). The procession of gilded carriages (the Empress’s was drawn by thirty horses) and imperial barges passed signs, written in Greek, that read, “the Road to Constantinople.” At the end of the mighty river on the north coast of the Black Sea stood, inconveniently, a Turkish fort and a Turkish fleet. Catherine needed a navy to liberate the Black Sea from the Sublime Porte, as Westerners called the government of the crumbling but still vast Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, Russia’s navy was slack and feeble. A much celebrated Black Sea victory over the Turks in 1770, at Tchesme, had really been the work of British officers imported as mercenaries. A Scotsman, ex-Royal Navy, had been imported to run Catherine’s Baltic Fleet. The Tsarina needed an able foreigner to command her Black Sea Fleet, such as it was, a collection of galleys and a few battleships of doubtful seaworthiness.
Catherine had first heard about Jones from her ambassador to France. “He is, in the opinion of everyone, one of the greatest sailors of the time,” Simolin had written one of Catherine’s ministers on February 3, 1788. “To rare boldness, valour, and intelligence, he adds a great deal of prudence, circumspection, and disinterestedness, and seeks nothing but glory…. In the Black Sea, this officer will make the Seraglio [the Ottoman Palace] tremble.” Catherine excitedly exclaimed, “He will get to Constantinople!”
At the age of fifty-nine, Catherine was fat and thick-browed, with swollen legs and false teeth, but she exuded an undeniable charm, certainly over Jones. “I shall never be able to express how much greater I find her than fame reports. With the character of a very great man, she will always be adored as the most amiable and captivating of the fair sex,” Jones wrote the French minister to Russia, Count de Segur. To Lafayette, Jones recounted: “I presented the Empress with a copy of the new American Constitution. Her majesty spoke to me often about the United States, and is persuaded that the American Revolution cannot fail to bring about others and to influence every other government.”
Catherine was shrewd about the contagiousness of revolution. What she did not tell Jones was that she was determined to keep it from spreading to her empire. Jones was such a romantic patriot that he seemed naive about his new employer. “I can never renounce the glorious title of a citizen of the United States!” he had written Thomas Jefferson, seeking formal permission to join the Tsarina’s navy. He wanted to believe that Russia and America, flanking the Old World, enjoyed some kind of New World kinship. Jones was to be bitterly disillusioned by the Empress. But, as he admitted, he was seduced by Catherine. “Her Majesty gave me such a flattering reception, and up to the period of my departure, treated me with so much distinction, that I was overcome with her courtesies (je me laissai seduire).” Jones later recounted, with chagrin, that he put himself “into her hands without making any stipulation for my personal advantage. I demanded but one favor, that I should never be condemned unheard.” Even that favor was too much to ask.
The Empress invited Jones to her magnificent Baroque palace at Tsarskoe Selo (“Tsar’s Village”), on a hill overlooking the broad Neva plain, twelve miles from St. Petersburg. The English gardens were filled with towering columns to her military triumphs. “If this war continues,” she told Voltaire during the first Russo-Turkish war, “my garden … will resemble a game of skittles.” (Catherine was a memorializer: she had also erected imposing monuments to her three deceased English greyhounds.) Jones was eager to head for the sound of the guns, “but I was detained against my will a fortnight,” he wrote Lafayette, “and continually feasted at court and in the highest society.” “Pavel Dzhones,” as he was known in St. Petersburg, was now a kontradmiral, a rear admiral. Catherine gave him a generous allowance, 2,000 ducats (about $1,000), to buy uniforms, and Jones looked dashing in the white coat with gold braid and blue stripes and facings. “He has made a good impression on the Empress,” wrote a diarist of the time, and was “welcomed everywhere, except among the English, who cannot bear him.” Out-of-work English naval officers had flocked to Catherine’s employ after peace reduced the size of the Royal Navy. They remembered the upstart Jones for his defeat of the Drake and the Serapis and chose to describe him as a pirate. Jones was delighted to see British scowls as he was feted by the Russian nobility. “This was a cruel grief to the English,” Jones wrote Lafayette, “and I own that their vexation … gives me no pain.”
Catherine was well pleased with her new acquisition. “I saw him today,” she wrote her adviser Baron Grimm. “I think he will suit our purposes admirably.” She understood the power of Jones’s reputation for bold strokes. “This man is extremely capable of multiplying fear and trembling in his foe,” she wrote Prince Potemkin, informing him that she was sending “one more bulldog for the Black Sea.”
Therein lay the seeds of misfortune: Jones was not the only bulldog, nor was he the top one. He did not have the unified command he had requested or the carte blanche he had been promised. When, in late May, he arrived at Russian military headquarters near the mouth of the Dnieper on the north coast of the Black Sea, after a twelve-day journey of a thousand miles, he reported to the ornately decorated tent of Prince Potemkin. The Prince in turn had three other rear admirals on the scene, none in a mood to defer to Jones.
Potemkin was a monster to be remembered among the many who ill-served the tsardom through the centuries. The favorite of Catherine’s official line of lovers (at least thirteen of them), His Most Serene Highness Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, Prince of Taurida, Field Marshal, Grand Hetman of the Black Sea and Ekaterinoslav Cossacks, Grand Admiral of the Black Sea and Caspian Fleets, President of the College of War, Viceroy of the South, was the Tsarina’s supreme military commander in the new war against the Turks. He was a joke of a soldier. In military deportment and just about every other way, he stood in stark contrast to Jones. A sensualist and a glutton, he was flabby with indulgence and slovenly in dress and manner. He sometimes startled foreign ambassadors by greeting them wearing nothing but an open dressing gown. He was deceitful and corrupt on an epic scale. Yet, like Catherine, he exuded a kind of cunning magnetism, and Jones, after one meeting, persuaded himself that Potemkin was not a bad sort. “You would be charmed with the Prince de Potemkin,” Jones wrote Lafayette. “He is a most amiable man, and none can be more noble-minded.”
Jones would revise this estimate, along with most of his first impressions of the Russian elite. He was, to an unfortunate degree, susceptible to flattery by the great and too easily impressed by the decorations and ribbons of nobility. Too often, he had been blinded by rank and status and then, after the inevitable letdown, left feeling betrayed and bitter. True, he had been matured by his stormy and frustrating relations with the French navy, the court at Versailles, and the U.S. Congress. Jolted by Ben Franklin’s letter criticizing his self-absorption, he vowed to show some of the “cheerful ardor” he knew to be essential to command. As ever, he was determined to try to rise above instinct. Older, wiser, and chastened by experience, he vowed to be on his best behavior, to follow the advice of his “philosopher” Franklin and show forbearance. Yet he was, at heart, a walking refutation of the Enlightenment ideal that passions could be tamed by reason and order. He could forbear only so long.
His patience was tested right away. Rear Admiral Mordwinoff, commander of the Russian naval arsenal at Kherson, near the mouth of the Dneiper, “did not affect to disguise his displeasure at my arrival,” wrote Jones. The reception was worse aboard Jones’s new flagship, the Vladimir, the next morning. Jones was used to sullen quarterdecks, but the one he mounted aboard the Russian ship of the line was openly defiant. The Vladimir’s captain, Brigadier Panaiotti Alexiano, was on deck conducting a meeting with the other ship captains in the fleet “to draw them into a cabal against my authority,” Jones wrote. Jones suspected that Alexiano, a Greek, had begun his career as a Mediterranean pirate who cut the throats of his prisoners. Wisely, Jones made no attempt to confront Alexiano or the others, but instead departed for a few days to reconnoiter the battlefield, “to give time to those angry spirits to become calm, and to be able to decide on the part I should take.”
Determining what part to take in the coming military campaign was a delicate and vexing question. He would be operating in waters hardly suited to fleet actions by a deep-water navy. Sailing in a small boat along the muddy estuary in the rising heat of early summer, waving away the clouds of mosquitoes, Jones could quickly see the obstacles. The Liman is a thirty-mile-long enclosed estuary, created by the merger of the Dnieper and Bug Rivers as they reach the Black Sea. On the south side is the Kinburn Peninsula, a long sandspit. On the north side is the mouth of the Bug and the southern rim of Russia. At the mouth of the Liman, at Ochakov on the north side, the Turks had built a powerful fort. The Russians controlled the tip of the Kinburn Peninsula, directly opposite, two miles across the water. A Turkish fleet was amassing in the Black Sea, just outside the Liman. Jones’s job was to defeat that fleet and clear the way for Russian forces to lay seige to the Turkish fort at Ochakov.
The Liman is never more than eight miles wide, and in many places less than twenty feet deep. Since a frigate draws at least fifteen feet, full-size warships were in constant danger of running aground on the shifting mud banks. The winds in the river were fluky and erratic. Jones had under his command eight frigates and four other armed ships. They were built with green wood and armed with cannons that were as much a threat to their own gunners as the enemy. Cast too small for the gun barrels, the cannonballs had been thickened by a coat of tar. The Vladimir was pierced for sixty-six guns but carried only twenty-four, to reduce the ship’s weight and allow it to float higher in the shallow water. The flagship’s rotten beams probably could not have withstood the recoil of a full broadside. Spit and polish was not even a concept to the peasant crews and their polyglot officers, many of whom had been corsairs in an earlier career.
Jones was informed that he was up against a larger and more powerful Turkish fleet. The Russians did have one advantage: a flotilla of some twenty-five galleys and assorted other small craft, some bearing only one large gun. Manuevered by oars, the galleys (many of them leftover gilded barges from Catherine’s pleasure cruise down the Dnieper in 1786) could go straight into the wind, unlike the square-rigged frigates, and skim across shoals and sandbars because of their shallow draft. Jones could instantly see they were the keys to victory. Jones began to mold a strategy born of necessity. He needed to draw the more heavily armed but more ponderous Turkish fleet inside the Liman and then destroy it with a combined force of frigates and swift galleys.
A sound plan, but there was a catch: Jones did not command the galleys. That honor belonged to Charles, Prince of Nassau-Siegen. Handsome, in a rakish, indolent sort of way, Nassau-Siegen was a junior-grade version of Potemkin. The illegitimate heir to a penniless principality in Germany, the so-called Prince was a showy adventurer, oily, rash, untrustworthy, incompetent, except as a courtier. Jones knew him slightly from Paris. Nassau-Siegen had been commissioned by the French government to procure the frigate Indien for Jones, but the Prince had failed at that, like most of his undertakings. As a military commander, he had been a blundering amateur. His two combat missions for the French, a raid on the isle of Jersey and an attack on Gibraltar with fireships, had been fiascos, in part because of the prince’s sloppy preparation. His résumé was exotic: he had sailed around the world with the French explorer Bougainville and boasted that he had seduced the Queen of Tahiti. But he didn’t know enough seamanship, Jones quickly discovered, to identify the points of a compass. He married a Polish noblewoman, who seems to have encouraged his adventuring and philandering from afar. In 1786, he washed up on Catherine’s shore and shrewdly befriended Potemkin. “Strange that you have taken a fancy to Nassau,” the Empress wrote her Prince. “He had everywhere the reputation as a crazy fellow (un cerveau brule).”
Potemkin had a job for Nassau-Siegen. “Almost a sailor, is he?” he inquired as he was preparing for war against the Turks in the winter of 1788. Potemkin gave Nassau-Siegen almost a fleet—the galleys and gunboats in the Liman. Nassau-Siegen regarded his new command as a larksome opportunity for self-promotion. “Although my undertaking may not be very dangerous, yet I will make enough noise to get the attention of the world,” he wrote his wife. He planned, he told her, to “stand up to … this ‘sieur Jones.’”
When Nassau-Seigen greeted his co-commander and fellow rear admiral Paul Jones at the end of May, he oozed, “You know my esteem and friendship. It will end only with my life.” Then he offered some practical advice for the acquisition of glory, titles, land, etc., in the court of Catherine le Grand. He explained to Jones, “that if we gained any advantage over the Turks, it was necessary to exaggerate it to the utmost.” Jones icily replied that he had “never adopted this method of heightening my personal importance.” Jones meant to get along, but his sense of honor, prickly and stiff, stood in the way.
* Prosecutor of fair Freedom’s Rights Louis, thy virtues suit a God! The good Man in thy praise delights And Tyrants Tremble at thy nod!