THE TURKS had their own imported naval hero. Known as the Capitan Pasha, the Algerine Renagado, and the Crocodile of Sea Battles, Ghazi Hassan-Pasha was a Barbary pirate who had become commander of the Sultan’s navy in the Ottoman Empire. For his defense of Istanbul and his ruthless suppression of Egyptian rebellions, he had been favored with a palace and showered with diamonds. As a pet, the Capitan Pasha kept a lion, who lay down at his command. He terrorized his enemies and his own crews. He thought nothing of firing on his own ships if they retreated prematurely, and he once made an example to timid firefighters by ordering four of them thrown into the fire. Jones respected his adversary, whom he described as “brave.” Jones would come close enough to the Capitan Pasha in battle to admire his great white mustache.
Jones did not wish to encounter the Capitan Pasha’s fleet, not in open water. The Turkish fleet hovering outside the Liman consisted of over 100 vessels, including eighteen ships of the line and forty frigates. Marshaling his far smaller forces inside the estuary, Jones was careful to advocate a shrewd, defensive strategy, to play the odds and the angles and not put his entire fleet at risk. After many hours studying French fleet evolutions, Jones wanted to employ a measured, scientific approach to war. Nassau-Siegen, on the other hand, was interested only in flashy lunges. Jones had no regard for Nassau-Siegen as a strategist. “The Prince … talked a great deal of projects of descents, surprises, and attacks, but without any rational plan,” Jones later recalled.
Still, Jones dutifully tried to work with Nassau-Siegen. On June 4, invoking the custom of Peter the Great, Admiral Jones summoned his captains to a council of war. Pacing the great cabin of the Vladimir, resplendent in his white coat despite the oppressive damp heat, he made an urgent appeal for selflessness and unity. “We must be determined to win! Let us therefore join our hands and hearts! Let us show our noble sentiments, and throw away from ourselves any personal consideration,” Jones declared, according to notes taken by his Russian secretary. Seeking to be collegial, Jones posed a series of nine questions to be considered by his fellow captains. The council of war had disposed of only three of them when Nassau-Siegen and the surly Alexiano broke up the meeting. They had apparently heard enough.
Before the meeting collapsed, the captains did agree to a rudimentary plan: to draw up Jones’s heavy ships (“the Squadron”) and Nassau-Siegen’s galleys and lighter craft (“the Flotilla”) in a line across the Liman, just beyond the mouth of the Bug River but short of the Turkish fort at Ochakov, a citadel bristling with heavy guns that could fire red-hot shot. Jones wanted to protect the mouth of the Bug because Potemkin and his army were supposed to ford the river before marching on Ochakov. Jones repeatedly asked Potemkin for orders and guidance, but he received only silence in return. The commander-in-chief was at once meddlesome and a hedger. He wanted to see how Jones would perform before he attached his own reputation to the American mercenary’s.
On June 5, the first two of the Capitan Pasha’s ships were seen entering the Liman. The next day, a small number of Turkish galleys crept up the north shore, toward the mouth of the Bug. It was agreed that Nassau-Siegen and part of the Flotilla would slip down the estuary in the dead of night and try to cut off the enemy from behind. The Prince set out shortly after 1 A.M., but the mission was a botch; the Turks opened fire and Nassau-Siegen retreated in disarray.
On the morning of June 7, Jones could see scores of the Capitan Pasha’s ships sweeping down the estuary. The Turkish fleet was a kaleidoscope of sails, Western-style square-riggers and Mediterranean lateens and galleys. Nassau-Siegen, who saw battle as costume drama, wrote his wife that the spectacle of the enemy fleet was “better than a ball at Warsaw.” Aboard the Vladimir, Jones strapped on his sword, put a brace of pistols in his belt, and readied himself for action. He had heard that the Turks did not take prisoners.
At 8 A.M., the admiral climbed into his barge and ordered his men to row along the line of Russian ships. The sight was not quite what he may have dreamed about as he had pored over naval texts on snowy nights in Portsmouth. Jones’s two ships of the line were only half-armed, and his poorly built frigates were manned by impressed serfs. Jones could barely communicate his commands. He knew no Russian and had no signaling system. Accompanied by a translator, he had to shout his orders, ship by ship. From his barge, he stared up at swarthy Slavic faces, which stared dumbly back.
Jones returned to witness a pathetic spectacle. As the morning brightened and the two fleets drew close, Brigadier Alexiano, the Vladimir’s captain, suddenly appeared on deck in his night clothes. For some time, he had been “indisposed” below. Now he cried out, “like a frantic man,” recalled Jones, “in French and Russian, that the Turks were going to attack and board us, and that we would be blown to pieces for having been so foolish as to leave our former position.” Jones told him to get dressed and put him to work shoring up Nassau-Siegen’s flank.
Jones wanted to catch the Turks in a vise by creating a large V out of his line of battle. But the wind was against Jones, forcing him to commandeer galleys to tow the left flank of the Squadron to windward, a ponderous manuever. As slow-footed peasant crewmen fumbled with tow ropes and their officers shouted confused commands, the Turks opened up a brisk fire on Nassau-Siegen’s Flotilla on the right flank. The galleys were easily galled by shot, and, rather than stand and fight, their captains began to row for safety. Jones could see the Capitan Pasha’s ship, a very sleek, fast fourteen-gun galley called a kirlangitch, leading the enemy thrust. To Jones’s disgust, Nassau-Siegen, whose flagship was a large yacht, fled the heat of battle to take cover under the guns of the Vladimir.
A wind shift allowed Jones to spring his trap. The breeze, which had been blowing out of the west, favoring the Turks, swung around to the east. With his square-rigged ships able to run before the wind, Jones was able to create his V-shaped nutcracker, forming a wedge of two lines of ships to catch the Turks in an enfilade, a cross fire. The Russian gunnery was neither efficient nor accurate, but the Russians had cruder and more devastating weapons for close-in action. The Russian gunboats began lobbing brandcougles, incendiary bombs that were lethal to vessels made of wood, tar, and canvas. Two Turkish warships caught fire and burned. Seeing that his position was untenable, the Capitan Pasha ordered his ships to withdraw.
Jones watched from his quarterdeck as the smoke cleared to show Turkish warships and galleys flying before the wind to escape the cross fire. Russian casualties were not severe: about fifty men, including one officer. Jones permitted himself a tiny gloat. “I do not think Captain Pasha who commanded in person will dine with pleasure. He had 57 boats with him,” Jones wrote the Prince Potemkin that night from his cabin aboard the Vladimir.
The victory was not smashing, but it was a victory nonetheless. A Te Deum, the traditional Russian Orthodox thanksgiving, was sung aboard the Vladimir the next day. Jones was in a magnanimous mood. Determined to follow Franklin’s advice to bestow more credit on his subordinates, Jones decided to play up the role of Nassau-Siegen in his official dispatches to Potemkin. Jones was feeling brotherly toward the Flotilla’s commander. As the last Turkish galley had fled down the estuary, the Prince embraced Jones and declared, “We should always make but one!” Heartened (and deceived) by this show of comradeship, Jones wrote Potemkin, generously if a trifle condescendingly:
The Prince conducted himself with a great deal of composure and intelligence. I had the honor of serving him as aide-de-camp and he took all of my advice in the best of spirits. Monsieur Alexiano came in another cutter and helped us to maintain good order.
Nassau-Siegen rewarded Jones’s graciousness by maligning him. He convinced Potemkin that the glory was all his and that Jones had timidly hung back from the battle. Potemkin, who had favored Nassau-Siegen to begin with, was not hard to convince. “It is to you alone,” Potemkin wrote his fellow prince, “I attribute this victory.” Potemkin repeated this misjudgment to Catherine: “Nassau was the real hero and to him belongs the victory.” Nassau-Siegen made sure that all the courts in Europe heard his version of the battle. With feigned sorrow, he put down his rival. “Paul Jones has changed very much. Fortune has taken from him that intrepidity which people said that he possessed.” Nassau-Siegen wrote his wife. “I am greatly dissatisfied. You see what three-quarters of a reputation is!” To a fellow courtier, he wrote, “The corsair Paul Jones was very famous, but I fear greatly that at the head of a squadron is not his place.”
Jones heard or sensed Nassau-Siegen’s calumnies and labored to stay on the high road. “He is too jealous to be content with my self-denial,” Jones lamented to Littlepage, the Virginia cavalier who had helped recruit him to Catherine’s navy and now served in his fleet. “Perhaps he is ill-advised, without knowing it. There is nothing, consistent with my honor, that I would not do to make him easy…. If he now becomes my enemy, I will not imitate his example.”
But the whispering was getting to Jones. He knew he was being watched at all times by his subordinates, Russian and British officers who were just waiting for him to misstep. “My situation here is very delicate and critical,” he had confided to Don José de Ribas, his liaison officer to Potemkin, on May 31. “I have people around me who appear to be on their guard, and if I make the slightest mistake, even when following their advice, I was given to understand today that they would consider themselves only as passengers.”
By June 11, Jones was sick in bed, exhausted and depressed. His usual post-battle letdown was deepened by suspicions about his fellow commander. Nassau-Siegen “seems to wish me to go to the devil,” Jones wrote Ribas, the only officer he really trusted, “for no other reason, as far as I know, except that I faithfully extricated him from his confusion and danger during the affair of the 7th, for which he assumed so much credit.” Jones gritted his teeth and vowed to swallow his bile. “I will do my best to go along with his temper,” he wrote Ribas.
Jones wore graciousness like a hairshirt. In his stiffly self-abnegating dispatches to Potemkin, Jones couldn’t resist little digs at Nassau-Siegen that were none too subtly intended to show that Jones had rescued his comrade from peril. Jones had heard of Nassau-Siegen’s boasting, and he wrote Potemkin in a left-handed attempt to set the record straight. “I can assure you that I had no intentions whatsoever of putting myself forward personally during the engagement; my only object was the welfare of Russia; inasmuch as I saw the first division of her Majesty’s flotilla in disorder and in a critical situation.” The first division of her Majesty’s flotilla, of course, was Nassau-Siegen’s; the “disorder” was all his. Jones stopped short of taking credit for rescuing Nassau-Siegen and remembered to praise his subordinates instead. “Monsieur Alexiano helped to establish good order, during the last phase of the engagement so that, if there are any favors to be given. I solicit them for him; as for me, I do not as yet have any claims to them.” Later, as he was reading over his correspondence on the Liman campaign, Jones attached a bitter footnote at the bottom of the page: “I always, but vainly, hoped to be able to attach this man [Alexiano] to my service by giving him more credit than he deserved, but he from the beginning has indignantly allied himself against me with all Prince de Nassau’s cabal.”
One can see, in Jones tortured correspondence with Potemkin and in his angry marginalia, his desire for glory clashing with his self-image as a noble-minded man who is above interest and pettiness. Jones kept tripping over his pride. His honor would not permit him to allow Nassau-Siegen to trample on his good name. His old self-defeating habits reasserted themselves. Unable to conceal his true feelings, he let his pridefulness corrode his already strained ties with Nassau-Siegen and Potemkin. The two courtiers were no match for Jones at war, but they were far superior at the back-stabbing politics of the Tsarina’s entourage.
By sniping at Nassau-Siegen in his letters to Potemkin, Jones was just digging himself in deeper, because Potemkin showed the correspondence to Nassau-Siegen or told his protégé of Jones’s condescending tone. Jones wrote one more conciliatory letter. “We will gain more honor and give him [Potemkin] more pleasure if we live together in harmony,” he wrote Nassau-Siegen on June 14. But the split was irrevocable. In the letter, Jones reminded Nassau-Siegen that he had declared, “We should always be one!” But then, in another angry asterisk to himself, he wrote on a copy for his files, “I have been well duped by it.”
The only remedy for Jones’s anguish was battle. He nursed his fever in the rising heat of the Liman, a miasma in summer, and imagined stratagems that could be used to leverage the less powerful Russian fleet against the fearsome, but crude, Turk. He consoled himself with the certainty that the Capitan Pasha would return for a second round. Constantinople wanted the Russians driven back from the Black Sea, and the Capitan Pasha did not wish to return home having to explain how he was defeated by an American pirate.
The attack came on the morning of June 16, and it looked monstrous from the quarterdeck of the Vladimir. The Capitan Pasha had decided to go all-out. He had sailed into the Liman with his entire fleet, ships of the line as well as galleys. Henry Fanshawe, a young British adventurer who had joined the Russian navy, watched in awe as the Turkish fleet surged down the estuary, line abreast, their white sails gleaming in the brutal noonday sun. Fanshawe counted ninety-six craft, stretched from shore to shore: square-riggers, lateen-rigged gunboats, fast galleys. They were making a fierce commotion, banging on drums, clashing cymbals, blowing bugles. Across the water, the Russian crews could hear the Turks, who jammed the galleys gunwale-to-gunwale, crying to Allah, vowing death to the infidel, shouting, “No prisoners!”
The Capitan Pasha meant to use terror and overwhelming force to shock the Russians into submission. He did not intend to stand off and bombard the Russian fleet. The Turkish ships were ordered to drive right at the Russian ships and take them by boarding. Some of the Turkish ships were to be sacrificed on suicide missions, turned into burning hulks to set the Russian ships ablaze and strike fear in the hearts of the swine-eaters.
But Jones had been wise to position his ships well inside the estuary. A severe drought had lowered the water level in the Liman. The Capitan Pasha was forced to manuever his fleet through the sandbanks in the narrowed channel. His flagship was aimed straight for the Vladimir when it suddenly lurched, slewed, and stuck. The too heavy man-of-war had run aground. Without the Capitan Pasha leading the charge, the other Turkish captains hesitated, bore up in confusion, and began anchoring their ships.
Jones had at least a brief reprieve. At about 3 P.M., he summoned his captains to a council of war. Standing before his sulky charges, Jones was full of melodrama. “I see in your eyes the souls of heroes!” he exclaimed. This could be the battle that decided the war, he said. It was time to “conquer or die.” Jones proposed taking the offensive. He suggested the tactic that had paid off in the last engagement against the Capitan Pasha. Jones wanted to swing the Russian fleet’s left flank around to create a V. If the Turks regrouped and advanced, they would be sailing into a cross fire, a nutcracker of shot and shell. The procedure, he acknowledged, would be difficult. The wind was against the Russian fleet, so the ships would have to be towed or kedged, laboriously pulled to windward by advancing their anchors, a few yards at a time. Careful to play the democratic commander, Jones put his plan to a vote. The captains, who had no better idea, went along.
While the Turks struggled to pull the Capitan Pasha’s flagship off the mud bank, about a mile away, the Russian ships on Jones’s left flank slowly crept forward through the night. After midnight, the wind, which had been strong in the Russians’ face from the west, swung around to the northeast. Now Jones had the advantage. Meeting with his captains again before dawn, Jones proposed to seize the initiative and launch an all-out attack at daybreak.
As the sun came up over the marshy waters of the Liman on the morning of June 17, Jones gave the signal and along the Russian line anchors weighed and sails billowed in the fresh morning breeze. The Turks, so fearsome just the day before, panicked. Capitan Pasha’s flagship had been floated off the mud bank, but his captains fled in disarray, pulling up anchors or “cutting cables with the greatest precipitation,” recorded Jones. “Not a shred of discipline remained” in the Turkish fleet. The Vladimir plunged ahead. Jones ordered the helmsman to make for the Capitan Pasha’s flagship.
The Vladimir was “within pistol shot” when she suddenly swung up short. Jones looked, aghast, to see a flurry of activity on the flagship’s forecastle. The Vladimir’s crew had dropped anchor. Captain Alexiano, speaking in Russian, so that Jones would not understand him, had given the order. Alexiano claimed that he was saving the Vladimir from running onto a sandbar, but Jones did not believe him. The Greek ex-pirate had tried to undermine Jones’s authority each step of the way. Jones suspected that Alexiano had halted the ship because he feared close action or boarding the Capitan Pasha’s ship.
Alexiano was not wrong to worry about sandbars. The ship of the Capitan Pasha’s deputy commander ran aground, then the flagship of the Capitan Pasha himself, for the second time in two days. Two fat prizes lay exposed in the mud before Jones—but the Prince of Nassau-Siegen suddenly appeared with his Flotilla of galleys to claim them. According to Jones’s acccount of the battle, Nassau-Siegen had dawdled at the beginning of the attack. Twice, Jones wrote, he had been compelled to slow his Squadron by heaving to in order to wait for Nassau-Siegen’s lagging Flotilla. But now that the Turkish command vessels were helplessly aground, Nassau-Siegen swept in to grab the glory. His galleys “swarmed … like a hive of bees,” pouring in shot and firebombs on the stranded Turkish warships, which were heeled over and unable to bring their guns to bear. The Turkish deputy commander’s ship blew up, “a magnificent spectacle,” recorded Fanshawe. Some seamen, Russian Cossacks, had recovered the Capitan Pasha’s flag, which had been shot away from its halyard and fallen into the water. They were presenting the flag to Jones when Nassau-Siegen, who had come aboad the Vladimir from his yacht, reached over and plucked it out of their hands. The opportunistic prince wished to be the one to present the spoils of war to Catherine. Jones swallowed his anger, for the time being.
The Turks were not done. The Capitan Pasha had escaped the grounded flagship in his kirlangitch, his fast galley. He had formed a line of gunboats in the shallows of the north shore of the Liman, and they began to pepper Jones’s squadron. The Aleksandr Malyi, a small frigate floating right next to the Vladimir, was battered and holed, caught fire, and sank. The quarterdeck of the Vladimir grew warm. Jones’s friend, the liaison officer Ribas, was badly wounded in the hand, probably by a splinter or shell fragment, as he stood beside Jones. With men falling around him, the admiral needed reinforcements.
He set out in a skiff to persuade Nassau-Siegen to send some of his galleys and gunboats after the Turks lined up along the shore. Jones’s frigates were too deep-draft to venture into the shallows. Nassau-Siegen coldly rebuffed Jones. He was too busy piling shot into the grounded Turkish flagship. Disgusted, Jones was finally able to persuade a Russian officer, Captain Korsakov, to counterattack. Jones had respect for the Russians under his command. They were not great seamen, but they were not timid about combat. Korsakov was “a brave and intelligent man,” Jones wrote.
The counterattack succeeded. The Russians had lost scores of men killed or wounded as well as a small frigate, but the Turks were in retreat. By dusk, the Turkish gunboats were driven back all the way down the coast to Ochakov, where they took shelter under the great guns mounted on the Turkish ramparts. Jones was surprised at the alacrity of the Turkish flight. What had happened to the fearsome, take-no-prisoners holy warriors of the Ottoman horde? “How imbecile does the human mind become under the influence of sudden panic!” he wrote in his memoir of the Liman campaign. The Turks seemed dazed and confused, stupid with fear.
One strongly feels in Jones’s account of the Liman campaign his disappointment in the unworthiness of his foe. Jones wanted to win against the odds, or in a fair fight. He took no satisfaction in one-sided slaughter. His responsibility as a fleet commander dictated strategic prudence, a caution not to overcommit against superior force. But his personal pride demanded boldness. He longed for an opportunity to show his gallantry. As the battle wound down in the late afternoon, Jones was still surging with the exuberance of action, the euphoria that filled him in combat. Jones decided, in his old way, to taunt the enemy by sailing right under their noses.
An hour after the fighting ended, as darkness settled over the Liman, Jones set out on an expedition so bold that it verged on the foolhardy. “The Rear Admiral,” Jones wrote about himself in the third person, “advanced in his boat, took soundings all along the Turkish line, opposite the walls of Ochakov, and within reach of case shot, and not a single gun was fired upon him.”
An old Russian sailor named Ivak later gave a colorful rendition of this daring reconnaissance mission. His version was probably slightly exaggerated but, given Jones’s past exploits, not implausible. Climbing aboard a Cossack gunboat, Jones introduced himself simply as “Pavel.” The admiral was dressed as an ordinary seaman, but his “weapons were better.” He had “some grey hair,” but appeared strong and confident. Characteristically, as soon as he stepped aboard, Jones began to inspect and fiddle, arranging and rearranging the arms and sails to his liking. He had a small boat pulled aboard for his reconnaissance and the oars muffled.
It had grown dark, and Jones sat down to share a meal with the men. He ordered a double round of spirits for the sailors, and the Cossacks began to sing, at first gaily, then a sad song. “Our Pavel listened very attentively as though he were trying to understand the meaning of the song; yet it seemed that clouds of sadness passed over his face, though he tried very hard to conceal his mood,” recalled the sailor.
Suddenly, Jones jumped to his feet. “It is time,” he said. After peering intently into his face, Jones chose the sailor Ivak as his oarsman. They descended into the small boat with muffled oars and pulled for the Turkish fleet, about a mile off.
The moon was full. The battlements of Ochakov loomed, a ghostly castle on the far shore. The Turkish fleet “looked like an entire town as it lay at anchor, a whole forest of masts” recalled Ivak. Silently, stealthily, the boat rowed in amongst the galleys and larger men-of-war. Jones ordered Ivak to pull under the stern of a large warship. Ivak called up to the sentry on the quarterdeck: did the Turks wish to buy some salt? Apparently, a Russian speaker was found (the Turkish crews were a mix of Turks, Greeks, and impressed Russians), and Ivak and the Turks palavered for a while. Meanwhile, Jones had an inspiration, a bit of cocky impishness not unlike his saucy single-gun salutes to British men-of-war aboard the Providence. As Ivak distracted the sentry with chatter, Jones took a piece of chalk from his cloak, reached up to the stern, and wrote, in French:
TO BE BURNED. PAUL JONES.
Jones was gleeful, drunk with daring, when Ivak rowed him back to Nassau-Siegen’s yacht to report on the size, strength, and disposition of the Turkish fleet. (Jones later gave the sailor a dagger inscribed with his name, “From Pavel Jones to his friend the Zaporzhye Ivak, 1788.”)
The scene aboard the Prince’s yacht, as the commanders gathered sometime after midnight, was deflating to Jones. In the distance, cannon-fire rumbled along the shore. The Capitan Pasha had tried to remove some of his larger ships from the Liman under cover of night, but they had sailed within range of a Russian battery on the Kinburn Peninsula (presciently placed there by Jones). Veering out of range, the Turkish ships—all nine of them—ran aground on a sandbar. Standing on the deck of Nassau-Siegen’s yacht, Jones and the other officers of the Flotilla and Squadron could see, in the moonlight, the Turkish ships at sixes and sevens in the mud on the distant shore.
Impulsive for glory, Nassau-Siegen wanted to rouse the Flotilla and head for the beached ships, to burn them where they lay. Jones tried to restrain him. The shallow-draft and swift Turkish galleys were still gathered close by under the guns of Ochakov. What if they attacked Jones’s Squadron while Nassau-Siegen’s Flotilla was downriver enjoying a bonfire? Nassau-Siegen swelled up and denounced Jones for timidity. The Prince complained that he was always having to protect Jones’s ships. He boasted that it was he who had taken the two Turkish ships the day before. Fatigued, coming down from his high, Jones allowed his sarcasm to get the better of him. It is not hard, he told Nassau-Siegen, “to capture a ship that is aground.” Now it was the Prince’s turn to bristle. Like a teacher’s pet threatening to tattle, he told Jones that he would write Prince Potemkin to tell him of Jones’s insolence. Fully worked up, he insisted to Jones that he knew how to take ships better than Jones. Jones retorted, contemptuously, that he had proved his ability to “take ships which were not Turks.”
“This ridiculous dispute,” as Jones later described it, continued to go downhill, with Nassau-Siegen threatening to write the Empress Catherine herself. As dawn broke, the Prince did as he pleased. Leaving Jones with just a few small craft as a screen against the Turkish galleys, Nassau-Siegen set off with almost the entire Flotilla to wreak carnage on the grounded Turkish men-of-war. The Flotilla had no order or plan, aside from slaughter. “We had about as much discipline as a London mob,” recalled one of Nassau-Siegen’s mercenary captains, the British scientist and shipbuilder Samuel Bentham.
His cheeky “To be burned” message notwithstanding, Jones was in favor, whenever possible, of boarding and capturing, not burning and destroying. He had suggested that Nassau-Siegen close in and take the Turkish ships, which would be useful prizes. Instead, Nassau-Siegen stood off and lobbed brandcougles, incendiary devices, onto the decks of the helpless ships. Flames quickly shot up the sails and riggings. Screams of fear and pain could be heard across the water. The spectacle was “beautiful” to Nassau-Siegen, horrifying to Jones. Many of the Turkish sailors were slaves, kept in chains. “Vainly the wretched Turks made the sign of the cross and begged for quarter on their knees,” Jones wrote. Some were Christians, captured by pirates and sold as slaves, others were just begging for Christian mercy. Nassau-Siegen gave none. More than 2,000 men burned to death. For days afterward, reported Bentham, their blackened corpses were seen floating by.
THE SECOND BATTLE of the Liman was a lopsided victory for Russia. The Turks lost ten warships, five galleys, and more than 1,500 prisoners, in addition to the thousands burned to death. The Russians lost only a single frigate and eighteen dead and sixty-seven wounded. At Ochakov, the Capitan Pasha was reportedly hanging his captains. As usual, Nassau-Siegen claimed all the credit “Our victory is complete—my flotilla did it!” he declared to his wife: “I am, in short, content with myself.” He sneered at Jones as a mere straggler on the march to victory. “Oh! What a poor man is Paul Jones! He has surely made a mistake to come here on such a day. I am master of the Liman.” Jones, by contrast, swallowed his ego in his official reports, praising his subordinates though he could not refrain from a dig or two at Nassau-Siegen: “It is well known not to be difficult to take ships when they are aground.”
Potemkin was thrilled with the news of victory. “I’ve gone mad with joy!” he exulted. “Isn’t it amazing? I am the spoilt child of God!” He gave Nassau-Siegen the glory and the Prince and his cronies the rewards. Nassau-Siegen was awarded a gold sword encrusted with diamonds, a large estate served by thousands of peasants, and the promise of a vice admiral’s flag as soon as Ochakov fell. His henchman Alexiano also received an estate, serfs, and a promotion to rear admiral. The officers of the Flotilla were all given extra pay and promotions. In an obvious snub, Catherine and Potemkin bestowed on Jones only a minor medal, the Order of St. Anne. His officers received nothing, and Jones burned with their humiliation. Catherine had not given up on Jones. But she was exasperated by his inability to get along with his colleagues. “I regret that Paul Jones drove everyone crazy,” she wrote Potemkin. “Pray god they stop acting crazy, we need him.”
The Capitan Pasha had withdrawn his larger ships outside the Liman, but his galleys and gunboats still remained anchored under the guns of the fortress at Ochakov. At the end of June, Potemkin ordered Nassau-Siegen to attack with his Flotilla. Jones’s Squadron was essentially cut out of the operation, since the square-rigged men-of-war were too heavy to take into the shallows near the fort. Nonetheless, Jones wanted to be in the thick of battle. He observed that Nassau-Siegen and Alexiano always kept swift galleys nearby for a quick escape, should the Turks suddenly gain the upper hand and counterattack. Jones was much too proud to hedge his personal fortunes in war. For him, he recorded in his journal, it was “conquer or die.” For the attack on the Capitan Pasha’s galleys, Jones took command of a chaloupe, a small, fast-sailing vessel that was easy to manuever, and loaded it with Russian sailors whose courage he did not doubt.
At 1 A.M. on July 1, the Flotilla began to move toward the Turkish fleet, very slowly. By dawn it was still too far from the enemy to open fire. Jones brought his chaloupe alongside Nassau-Siegen’s luxurious yacht. Wasn’t it time to begin the assault? Jones asked. Nassau stared haughtily at him. “Is it of me you thus inquire?” he sniffed. “I have nothing to say to you on the subject.” Jones shrugged and pushed off. He would give up any pretense of playing grand strategist and become a front-line combat officer instead.
Heavy rain clouds gathered over the muddy, dull Liman. While the Flotilla dawdled in the oppressive heat, Jones’s chaloupe made for the nearest Turkish galley. The Russian crew did not ready brandcougles or stand to their cannon. Jones meant to attack and board. With a grinding crash, the two vessels collided; with shouts and yells, the Russians clambered over the side, Jones in the midst of the rush. Muskets popped, steel clanged. Eyes wild, pistol and cutlass in hand, Jones probably looked a little like the cartoon of the Pirate Paul Jones in the British chapbooks.
The Turks, shocked by the attack, quickly surrendered. Jones towed the captured galley to safety and set out again, this time after a bigger prey, the galley of the Capitan Pasha. By now Jones was caught in a cross fire between the slowly advancing Russian Flotilla and the guns of the Turkish ships and battlements. Men were falling around Jones when he clambered over the side and onto the deck of the Turkish galley. The Crocodile of Sea Battles was nowhere to be seen. His galley crew, terrified of the Cossacks and their ferocious commander, surrendered, apparently without much of straggle. Most of the Turkish sailors were slaves, kept in chains.
Jones wanted to tow his captured prize back to the Vladimir. But a junior officer cut the anchor cable before Jones was ready, and the galley began to drift into shore. Jones and his men scrambled to find some ropes to try to anchor the galley to the hulk of a burnt-out frigate, but no cable was long enough. Jones dispatched another officer in a small boat to return to the Vladimir for rope and anchor. Meanwhile, he cast off in his chaloupe to look for another target. A few minutes later, he was “mortified” to see smoke and flames shooting up from the Capitan Pasha’s galley. He thought at first that the slaves chained on board had somehow escaped and set fire to the vessel. He later learned, to his greater consternation, that the perfidious Alexiano had sent a small boat to burn the captured galley, lest Jones receive credit for taking such a valuable prize. As Jones watched helplessly, the Capitan Pasha’s galley went up in flames. He could hear the screams of the Turkish slaves as they burned to death.
Aside from Jones’s foray, which captured fifty men and burned three galleys, the July 1 attack on the Turkish fleet was a failure. Nassau-Siegen withdrew without taking any ships. “Our flotilla never came up within the range of grape shot,” Jones wrote contemptuously in his journal. Jones and Nassau-Siegen were compelled by Prince Potemkin and his retinue to embrace and make up a few days later, but by then Nassau-Siegen was no longer Jones’s biggest problem. Potemkin had arrived on the scene.
Catherine’s commander-in-chief, after marching his army at a leisurely pace toward Ochakov for the final siege, had at last crossed the Bug River and encamped near the Russian fleet’s anchorage on the Liman’s north shore, a few miles from the Turkish citadel. The “Serenissimus,” as His Serene Highness Prince Potemkin preferred to be called, had brought his harem, including two nieces who were his “favorites.” To avoid the heat of day, he stayed up all night playing billiards in his dressing gown and eating sorbet. For the rest of the summer and into the fall, Potemkin ran Jones ragged with nonsensical missions. After the Turks captured a Russian ship loaded with watermelon, Potemkin flew into a rage and ordered Jones to attack the Turkish fleet under the guns at Hassan Pacha, a fort at the end of the Kinburn Peninsula. Jones’s nighttime surprise attack fizzled when a Greek lieutenant prematurely opened fire. Potemkin’s headquarters were situated on a bluff overlooking the Turkish fleet, and it somehow irked the Prince to see a large cannon on the bow of a large Turkish galley anchored near the shore. Jones was ordered to throw the offending cannon into the sea. He dutifully launched a raid against the well-defended position on a dark and rainy night against a strong current, but that mission, too, failed when the Russian boats were unable to reach their target by daybreak. Without the element of surprise, Jones withdrew rather than have his men uselessly slaughtered.
Potemkin wrote Jones that if he did not fight “courageously” he risked standing accused of “negligence.” This was too much for Jones. His attempt to heed Benjamin Franklin’s advice and play the “philosopher,” already wobbly, collapsed altogether. Jones wrote the Prince an intemperate letter, objecting to the insinuation that he was shy in battle. With a side-swipe at Nassau-Siegen, Jones angrily declared, “Since I did not come here as an adventurer, or as a charlatan to mend a broken fortune, I hope in the future to suffer no further humiliation.”
That did it. For all practical purposes, Jones was finished in the Russian navy. Prince Potemkin allowed only sycophants to serve under him. Jones was permitted one last audience, and, with nothing to lose, told His Serenissimus exactly what he thought. “I spoke very freely,” Jones recalled. “I told him he had played a very unfair game at the opening of the campaign by dividing the command in the Liman.” Maybe so, Potemkin wearily allowed, but “it was too late to think of this now.” Jones pressed on, telling him that he had been deceived by Nassau-Siegen. Potemkin protested that he had never been deceived, that he had known Nassau for what he was. “Don’t think that I am being manipulated,” he told Jones. “No one manipulates me.” Potemkin rose to his full height and stamped his foot. “Not even the Empress!”
As a fig leaf, Jones was given a command with the Northern Fleet, but no one was fooled. It was winter in the Baltic. No ships were sailing. In a private letter to Catherine, Potemkin described Jones as “sleepy” and claimed, falsely, that no one wanted to serve under the American “pirate.” (To the contrary, Jones’s Russian men and officers remained notably loyal.)
Traveling in an open galley up the Dnieper River in November, Jones became very sick on the passage north to St. Petersburg. He was still suffering from pneumonia when he was granted a private audience with the Empress shortly after Christmas. Catherine was bland and noncommittal about Jones’s future, but any good that Jones did with her was quickly undone by Nassau-Siegen, who had his own private audience two days later with the Tsarina. (Characteristically, the Prince boasted to his wife that Catherine received him in her bedroom.) Jones was not likely to be rehabilitated. Still, he hung on. Taking an apartment in the First Admiralty District with his retinue (a translator, a seaman, and a German manservent), he churned out plans and ideas, including a proposal that Russia and America join forces against the Algerian pirates in the Mediterranean. He wrote Thomas Jefferson, sending the letter privately with the Virginian adventurer Littlepage. By Jefferson’s return post, Jones discovered that, since his arrival in Russia, all of his letters abroad had been intercepted and not delivered. His mail had all been confiscated by Catherine’s secret police, presumably so that only Potemkin’s version of the Turkish war would reach foreign capitals. Forlornly, Jones wrote Jefferson for any news of Madame T-----. He had not heard from her for a year.
Jones was isolated and lonely. He did not speak more than a few words of Russian, and the Englishmen in St. Petersburg, mostly former Royal Navy officers, would not speak to him. His only reliable friend was the French ambassador to Russia, the Comte de Segur, who had fought with the Americans in the Revolution and was Jones’s brother officer in the Society of Cincinnati. Jones would need Segur’s friendship. Before the end of the long Russian winter, the Kontradmiral Pavel Dzhones was swept up in a scandal.
In early April, St. Petersburg society was shocked, which is to say delighted, by a police report detailing a sordid episode. A ten-year-old German girl claimed that she had been raped by Jones. As the little girl described the incident, she had been selling butter in the Admiralty District when she was summoned to an apartment to see a man wearing a white uniform with gold braid and a red ribbon. The man punched her in the jaw, bloodying her mouth. He locked the door, threw off his uniform, and while holding the girl with one hand, threw a mattress on the floor. He pinned her down and penetrated her. Unable to call for help with a handerkerchief across her mouth, the girl fainted, woke up, and ran crying into the street.
The police had witnesses. Jones’s manservant or “lackey” described peering through the keyhole to Jones’s bedroom and seeing Jones, dressed in a gown, not his uniform. Later, the servant said, he had found blood on the floor. A midwife testified that the girl had indeed been raped, while a doctor testified that her “child bearing parts were swollen,” her lip was cut, and her jaw bruised.
Under Russian law, anyone convicted of rape was “to have his head cut off or be sent to the galleys for the rest of his days.” Jones had some idea what it might be like chained to an oar as a galley slave. He hired a lawyer—only to have the lawyer quit his case, feebly informing Jones that he had been ordered by the Russian government not to “meddle.” Jones seemed defenseless and desperate. The Comte de Segur called on his friend and found him in a suicidal state. Jones’s pistols were on the table in front of him. “I would have faced death a thousand times,” he declared, “but today I desire it.” Segur pleaded with him not to despair, and began pulling diplomatic strings.
Before long, the girl’s story began to fray. She was twelve years old, not ten, and she had been “selling butter” for quite a while. Her customers included Jones’s manservant. The girl’s mother admitted that she had been given money by “a man with decorations” in return for telling a damaging story about Jones.
What really happened? Jones himself probably told the truth in his statement, written in French, to the chief of police three days after the incident. He called the girl depraved (une fille perdue). Jones admitted that he had often badine (sported, teased, played) with her and given her money, but that he had “positively” not taken her virginity. Rather, each time she came to see Jones, she lent herself de la meilleur grace (very amiably) “to do all that a man would want of her.” She had left Jones that day appearing contente et tranquille. Jones delivered much the same message to Potemkin: “I love women, I confess, and the pleasures that one only obtains from that sex; but to get such things by force is horrible to me.”
While not as sordid as the crime originally charged, Jones’s account is tawdry. The kontradmiral’s taste for twelve-year-old girls left him vulnerable to scandal. The Tsarina’s courtiers were adept at exploiting the weaknesses of rivals through innuendo and stronger means, such as blackmail. It is more than likely that Jones was set up by his political enemies, with Nassau-Siegen the most obvious suspect. Jones was never obliged to stand trial, but he was ostracized by society, including the Empress. Though she deferred to no one in the intensity and, if legend is to be believed, the originality of her sexual appetites, Catherine referred to Jones’s episode as “nasty.” Hoping against hope, Jones continued to write the Empress fawning letters and proposing new schemes, like taking a squadron into the Mediterranean to attack shipping between Egypt and Constantinople. But Catherine was finished with him. The Turkish war was over for the time being (Ochakov had been captured by Potemkin, its 10,000 occupants put to the sword), and in the Baltic, all the English officers in Catherine’s employ refused to serve under the Pirate Jones. The kontradmiral was put “on leave” for two years, allowed to keep his pay and emoluments so that he wouldn’t turn right around and join the Swedish navy. In July, Jones was permitted to see Catherine long enough to kiss her hand. She bestowed upon him a curt and no doubt chilly “bon voyage.” In late summer of 1789, Jones left Russia, still resplendent in his beribboned white uniform, but shunned and disgraced.