John Paul Jones: father of the American navy

John Paul Jones was the most famous naval fighter of the American Revolution, a Scottish-born captain who carried the war to Britain's own coasts and won one of the bloodiest single-ship actions of the age. Off Flamborough Head in 1779, his burning, sinking Bonhomme Richard fought on until the British frigate Serapis struck her colors. He is often called the father of the American navy.¹

Early life: the gardener's son from Kirkbean

He was born John Paul on 6 July 1747 at Arbigland, in the parish of Kirkbean in Kirkcudbrightshire, on Scotland's Solway coast, where his father was the estate's head gardener. He was the fourth of seven children. At about thirteen he was apprenticed to John Younger, a merchant shipowner of Whitehaven across the Solway Firth, and went to sea as a ship's boy on a voyage to Barbados and Virginia, where his elder brother William had settled.²

When the apprenticeship ended he went into the slave trade, sailing for about three years in ships carrying captives from Guinea to Jamaica, and in 1766 he was first mate of the slaver Two Friends. He quit what he called an “abominable trade” in disgust. When fever killed the captain and mate of the ship taking him home, he brought her safely to Scotland and her owners made him master; the Navy's biography dates his first command to 1769.³

Twice his temper and his discipline brought him into court. In 1770 he was arrested for murder over the death of a carpenter, who had in fact died of yellow fever, and was acquitted. Then in 1773, at Tobago in the West Indies, he killed the ringleader of a mutiny over wages with his sword. He claimed self-defense but fled rather than face trial, sailed for Virginia and added the surname Jones to hide his identity.⁴

Rise: a lieutenant in the Continental Navy

When the Revolution began he went to Philadelphia and offered his services to Congress. In December 1775 he was commissioned first lieutenant of the Alfred, flagship of the new Continental Navy. In May 1776 he was given the sloop Providence and the rank of captain, and on his first cruise he raided the British fisheries of Nova Scotia; American Battlefield Trust counts eight prizes taken and eight more sunk or burned that year.⁵

In June 1777 Congress gave him the new 18-gun sloop Ranger, built at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He sailed for France on 1 November with dispatches announcing Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga, and delivered the news to Benjamin Franklin in Paris. On 14 February 1778 in Quiberon Bay, the Ranger received the first official salute given to the Stars and Stripes, fired by a French fleet.⁶ › Battle of Saratoga, 1777

Campaigns

The Ranger in the Irish Sea, April 1778. The Ranger sailed from Brest on 10 April 1778. Before dawn on 23 April Jones landed at Whitehaven, the harbor of his boyhood, with about thirty men in two boats. They spiked the guns of the fort and set fire to shipping in the harbor. It was, in one historian's phrase, the only American operation of the war on English soil. The same day he crossed to St Mary's Isle to seize the Earl of Selkirk as a hostage for American prisoners, but the earl was away. His men carried off the family silver plate instead, which Jones had returned to the family after the war.⁷

The next day, off Carrickfergus in Ireland, he lured out the 20-gun sloop HMS Drake. After about an hour of fighting, by the Navy's ship history, the Drake struck; her captain was killed, and DANFS gives two Americans and forty British dead. Jones brought her into Brest as a prize on 8 May and found himself famous in France and notorious in Britain.⁸

The Bonhomme Richard, 1779. France gave him an old East Indiaman built in 1766 as the Duc de Duras. He renamed her Bonhomme Richard after Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac, known in France as Les Maximes du Bonhomme Richard. Her crew came from many nations, and Jones had to put down a plot by English sailors to seize her. In August 1779 he sailed with a mixed Franco-American squadron that included the frigate Alliance under the unreliable Pierre Landais, and took prize after prize around the north of Scotland. His plan to hold Leith, the port of Edinburgh, to ransom was ruined by a gale.⁹

Flamborough Head, 23 September 1779. In the afternoon, off the Yorkshire coast, Jones sighted a 41-ship convoy from the Baltic escorted by the frigate Serapis under Captain Richard Pearson and the sloop Countess of Scarborough. As night fell the Bonhomme Richard closed with the Serapis, which the Navy's ship history credits with 50 guns to Jones's 40. Two of his 18-pounders burst at the first broadsides, killing their crews, and he abandoned the rest. Outgunned, Jones grappled the enemy, lashing the two ships together himself with a fallen forestay so that half of Pearson's guns pointed away from him. For more than three hours they fought muzzle to muzzle, while the Alliance fired three broadsides into the wrong ship, the Bonhomme Richard.¹⁰

When some of his own men cried for quarter, Pearson called across to ask whether the Americans had struck. Jones's answer has come down as “I have not yet begun to fight!” The earliest printed version, Jack D. Warren Jr. notes, is the account of the Richard's first lieutenant, Richard Dale, published in 1825, which places the exchange early in the battle. Late in the fight a sailor dropped a grenade from the yards through a hatch of the Serapis and set off loose powder cartridges, and at about 10:30 p.m. Pearson struck his colors. Roughly half the men of both ships were killed or wounded. The Bonhomme Richard sank on the morning of 25 September, and Jones sailed the Serapis to the Netherlands.¹¹

Character and command style

The Naval History and Heritage Command paints a man of contrasts. Thomas Jefferson and others called him “little Jones,” and he may have stood about five foot five. Unlike most merchant seamen he dressed well, carried a sword and kept a careful decorum; he spoke with a Scottish brogue, wrote poems and many letters, spoke some French and, though he never married, had many romances. He was fiercely jealous of his honor and a harsh master at sea, yet surprisingly sociable ashore. Above all, no one questioned his daring.¹²

His strategy was as bold as his tactics. He knew the young Continental Navy could not face the Royal Navy fleet to fleet, so he meant to strike British shipping and coastal towns, drive up insurance rates and force the Admiralty to keep warships at home. In Britain, chapbooks pictured him as a pirate in the mold of Blackbeard. His relations with subordinates were often stormy, from the Ranger's mutinous officers to his feud with Landais. Pearson, for his part, went home to be knighted for saving the convoy; Jones is said to have remarked that if he met him again he would make him a lord.¹³

Death and legacy

France made him a chevalier, and Louis XVI gave him a gold sword. He returned to America in 1781 and was promised command of the new ship of the line America, but Congress gave her to France before he could take her to sea. In 1787 Congress voted him a gold medal. In 1788 Catherine the Great made him a rear admiral in the Russian navy, and he saw action in the Liman campaign against the Turks in the Black Sea, but he made enemies at court, among them Prince Grigory Potemkin. In April 1789 he was accused of assaulting a young girl in St Petersburg; he denied it, the case became a scandal, and he left Russian service that year.¹⁴

He spent his last years in Paris in failing health. Appointed United States consul to Algiers, he died before the commission arrived, on 18 July 1792, aged forty-five, and was buried in an unmarked grave in a Protestant cemetery, where he lay forgotten for more than a century.¹⁵

A century later the United States went looking for him. After a long search his remarkably preserved body was found in Paris in 1905 and brought home on the cruiser USS Brooklyn, saluted by seven battleships as she entered Chesapeake Bay. Through the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt, he was laid to rest in 1913 in a marble sarcophagus, modeled on Napoleon's tomb, in the crypt of the Naval Academy chapel at Annapolis. Five US Navy ships have carried his name.¹⁶ › The Greatest American Commanders

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