John-Paul Jones.
Harris & Ewing, 1936. Engraving. Library of Congress.
In the period that followed, Jones sailed the Scottish and English coasts and terrorized the populations with his daring and effective raids on port towns and merchants. In between two such forays, he put another of his ships, the Ranger, into the French port of Quiberon and on entering the harbour, he fired the customary gun salute to the receiving admiral — France and the United States were allied. The entry of Jones’s warship into French territorial water on that Valentine’s Day of 1777 was a notable occasion for the United States — Admiral La Motte-Piquet returned the salute, the first time the Stars and Stripes was formally recognized by a foreign power.
By 1779, Jones had been promoted to commodore in command of a squadron of American and French ships. On September 23, a spectacular confrontation with the British took place, this time between his vessel and two of the enemy. At the Battle of Flamborough Head, Jones outmanoeuvred the twenty-two-gun Countess of Scarborough and took on the fifty-gun Serapis. With clever tacking, he brought his own ship, the Bonhomme Richard,[1] alongside the larger British vessel, which he then managed to grapple and lash together with his. The two adversaries now found their gun muzzles virtually touching each other at point-blank range, spitting fire point into one another’s hulls in a murderous melee. With Jones’s smaller vessel ablaze and sinking, the British demanded surrender and it was here that the valorous American made his celebrated reply: “I have not yet begun to fight!” Samuel Eliot Morrison, the noted naval historian, describes the scene:
The British frigate was in a deplorable condition; the spars and rigging were cut away and dead and dying men lay about her decks. But the state of the Richard was even more frightful. Her rudder was hanging by one pintle, her stern frames and transoms were almost entirely shot away, the quarterdeck was about to fall into the gunroom, at least five feet of water were in the hold, and it was gaining from holes below the waterline … and her topsails were open to the moonlight.[2]
Against all odds, John Paul Jones prevailed, and within three and a half hours of the battle’s start, the Serapis surrendered. The victor moved his flag from his own doomed Richard and raised it aboard his prize of war. The impressive triumph was a climactic moment in Jones’s career — he entered the realm of legend. Within weeks, he was the subject of toasts and ballads in stately drawing rooms and in lowly taverns throughout France, America, and Holland. Ambassador Benjamin Franklin wrote to Jones, “Scarce anything was talked of at Paris and Versailles but your cool conduct and persevering bravery during the terrible conflict.” Even in England, where the British defeat was a shameful blot on the naval escutcheon, ordinary folk stood in admiration of the daring American. “Paul Jones,” declared the London Morning Post, “resembles a Jack o’ Lantern, to mislead our marines and terrify our coasts … he is no sooner seen than lost.” On his arrival in France, he was received by King Louis XVI and was presented to Queen Marie Antoinette, whom he found “a sweet girl.” The king awarded the hero a gold sword.
The Treaty of Ghent in 1783 brought a formal close to the American Revolution and the United States received recognition as an independent nation. The Continental Congress began a slow demobilization of its armed forces, rewarding its hard-fought veterans with parcels of land. Jones, however, was unready to settle down into the sedentary life of a country squire and he set about exploring the possibility of a command abroad. It was at this point that Catherine persuaded him to enter the service of Russia, largely on the recommendation of Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassador to France. By that time, Catherine had begun to disassociate herself from the British and was cozying up with the French. That Jones was anti-British and a friend of France suited her well and she appointed him rear admiral. “Jones,” she confidently predicted, “will get us to Constantinople.”
Kontradmiral Pavel Ivanovich, as he was now called, arrived in St. Petersburg in May 1788 and was well pleased with the reception he received from Catherine. “The Empress,” he declared, “with the character of a very great man, will always be adored as the most amiable and captivating of the fair sex.” Within weeks of arriving, he was dispatched to the Black Sea with orders to take command of a flotilla of ships and engage the Turks. He was further ordered to put himself under the direction of the brilliant but capricious Prince Potemkin, commander of all Russian forces in the south — and Catherine’s lover.
Jones’s new assignment was beset with difficulties from the start. In the first place, he found himself junior to another mercenary, Prince Karl Heinrich von Nassau-Siegen, with whom he had been associated earlier during their joint service with the French. A strong enmity existed between the two men stemming from an incident in which Jones at one point refused to follow certain orders from Nassau-Siegen. But an even greater burden for Jones was Potemkin’s attitude toward the fleet — the prince viewed the navy as a mere adjunct to land forces and, much to Jones’s chagrin, he used it thus in coastal campaigns. And finally, Jones was appalled at the poor physical state of the ships he commanded. Would they be effective in action?
Dispirited or not, Kontradmiral Pavel rapidly established himself in the eyes of his crew as an admired leader and a brilliant tactician. On the eve of encountering the enemy at the Battle of Liman, he mustered his men and urged them to victory. “I see in your eyes the souls of heroes,” he declared. “We shall all learn together to conquer or to die for the country!” (Note: the country, not our country.) Were it not for the prospect of imminent battle, there was something droll about it all. An American commanding officer was extolling Russian naval officers to victory against the Turks, addressing them in the French language. With the successful outcome of that particular engagement, Jones’s stock increased even further.
In time, the endless and tiresome feuding between Nassau-Siegen and Jones became so serious that Potemkin could no longer bear it. He requested the recall of Jones to St. Petersburg. Returned to the capital in early 1789, the unhappy but relieved Jones plunged himself into a variety of schemes to strengthen Russian-American maritime cooperation. Proposals were drawn up for the suppression of the Barbary pirates, for direct naval alliances between the two countries, for joint partnerships in shipbuilding, and for bilateral naval action in the Black Sea. As he awaited government reaction to these initiatives, the unfortunate man became embroiled in a scandal so dire that by the year’s end he had to exit the country. A twelve-year-old delivery girl reported that the kontradmiral had attempted to rape her, a charge Jones heatedly denied. “The charge against me is an ignoble fraud,” he wrote to Potemkin. “I love women, I confess, and the pleasures which one enjoys only with their sex, but any enjoyments which it would be necessary to take by compulsion are horror to me.… I give you my word as a soldier and as an honest man that, if the girl in question has not at all passed through other hands than mine, she must still have her virginity.”
Unsurprisingly, the sensational accusation became the focus of much whispered gossip in the city, with John Paul indignantly claiming that the whole matter was the perfidious intrigue of his archrival, Nassau-Siegen. Formal charges were laid, but the matter never reached the justice courts and the case against him remained inconclusive. The court and St. Petersburg society, however, effectively washed their hands of Jones — he was a thorough embarrassment and ostracized. The French ambassador at the time commented in his memoir, “The enemies of Paul Jones, not being able to endure the triumph of a man whom they looked upon as an adventurer, rebel and corsair, determined to destroy him.”
By December 1789, Catherine had given him permission to retire from Russia, which he did in humiliation, but he did carry away with him the Order of St. Anna. On his way home to Paris, he passed through Warsaw and called on Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the volunteer hero of the American Revolution. Jones tried unsuccessfully to have the Pole intercede on his behalf to King Gustav IV of Sweden for an appointment to the Swedish navy — which was continuing to be at war with Russia. Interesting times, those were.
Jones returned to Paris, impecunious,