One hundred and eighteen years ago a little man who had attracted the attention of two continents, and who, in his comparatively brief career of forty-five years, had won eternal fame for himself among the heroes of the world, died in Paris, alone in his room. He had been ill for some time, and his physician, calling late in the evening, found him prone upon his bed, sleeping a sleep from which no call to battle would ever arouse him. Like Warren Hastings, John Paul Jones was at rest at last; "in peace after so many storms, in honor after so much obliquy."
He was buried in a Protestant cemetery in Paris, which was officially closed in January, 1793. The exact location of his grave there was forgotten. For many years even the fact that he was buried there was forgotten. The other day the cable flashed a message which gladdened every American heart. Under the inspiration, and at the personal charges, of General Horace Porter, United States Ambassador to France, {282} a search had been instigated and the body was found and completely identified. It is a service of sentiment that General Porter has rendered us, but not the less valuable on that account. To love the hero, to recall the heroic past, is good for the future. The remains of the great captain came back to the United States. On the decks of such a battleship as even his genius never dreamed of, surrounded by a squadron that could have put to flight all the sea-fighters of the world before the age of steam and steel, the body of the little commodore was brought back to his adopted country to repose on the soil of the land he loved, for whose liberty he fought, whose honor he maintained in battle; and a suitable monument is to be raised by our people to commemorate his services, to inspire like conduct in years to come.
Commodore John Paul Jones, the first of the great American fighters, and not the least splendid in the long line, was born of humble origin in a southern county of Scotland. His family was obscure, his circumstances narrow, his advantages meagre, his opportunities limited. At the age of twelve he became a sailor. Genius rose, superior to adverse circumstances, however, and before he died he was one of the most accomplished officers who ever served the United States. The greatest men of America and France took pleasure in his society and were proud of his friendship.
He progressed rapidly in his chosen career. At nineteen he was chief mate of a slaver, a legitimate occupation in his day but one that filled him with disgust. At twenty-one he was captain of a trader. In 1773 he came to America, forsook the sea and settled in Virginia.
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I. The Birth of the American Navy
He was still poor and still obscure when on December 7, 1775, he was appointed a lieutenant in the new Continental Navy, In that capacity he was ordered to the Alfred, a small converted merchantman, the flagship of Commodore Hopkins. He joined the ship immediately, and in the latter part of December he had the honor of hoisting with his own hands the first naval flag of an American squadron. This was the famous yellow silk banner with a rattlesnake and perhaps a pine tree emblazoned upon it, and with the significant legend, "Don't tread on me!"
Hopkins made an abortive expedition to New Providence, in which Jones had but one opportunity to distinguish himself. At the peril of his commission, when the regular pilots refused to do so, he volunteered to take the Alfred through a difficult and dangerous channel. Needless to say, he succeeded—he always succeeded!
His first independent command was the little schooner Providence, of seventy men and twelve four-pound guns. In the Fall of 1775 he made a notable cruise in this schooner; he skirmished with, and escaped from, by seamanship and daring, two heavy frigates, the Solebay and the Milford; in four months he captured sixteen vessels, eight of which were sent in as prizes, five burned, three returned to certain poor fishermen; and he destroyed property aggregating a million dollars.
Later, in command of the Alfred, with a short crew of one hundred and fifty, when he should have had three hundred, he made another brilliant cruise in {284} which he burned several British transports, captured one store-ship, laden to the gunwales with priceless munitions of war and supplies, cut out three of the supply fleet from under the guns of the Flora frigate, and had another smart brush with the Milford.
II. Jones First Hoists the Stars and Stripes
Commissioned captain on the 14th of June, 1777, in the same resolution which established an American flag, he was ordered to the Ranger, a little ship-rigged corvette of three hundred tons. In her, on the 4th of July of the same year, he hoisted the first stars and stripes that had ever waved over a ship-of-war. In Quiberon Bay—famous as one of the battle-grounds of the world—on the evening of the 14th of February, 1778, in the Ranger, he received the first formal recognition ever given by a foreign fleet to the United States in a salute to the American flag. As it was after sunset when the salutes were exchanged, and in order that there should be no mistake about it, the next morning, the 15th of February, Jones transferred his flag to the Independence, a small privateer, and deliberately sailed through La Motte Picquet's great fleet of towering line-of-battle-ships, saluting and receiving salutes again.
Still on the Ranger, on the 24th of April, he fought the British sloop-of-war Drake, of equal force and larger crew, to a standstill in an hour and five minutes. When the Drake struck her flag, her rigging, sails and spars were cut to pieces. She had forty-two killed and wounded—more than one-fifth of her crew—and was completely helpless. The Ranger lost two killed and six wounded.
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In 1779 Jones hoisted his flag on the Duc de Duras, a condemned East Indiaman, which would have been broken up had he not turned her into a makeshift frigate by mounting forty guns in her batteries—fourteen twelve-pounders, twenty nines and six eighteens. This, in honor of Franklin, he named the Bonhomme Richard. Accompanied by the fine little American-built frigate Alliance and the French ship Pallas, with the brig Vengeance, and the cutter Cerf, he cruised around England, taking several prizes, and striking terror all along the shore.
III. The Battle With the Serapis
On the evening of the 23rd of September he fell in with the Baltic convoy. He was accompanied at the time by the Alliance and the Pallas. The Baltic convoy was protected by the Serapis and the Scarborough. The Serapis was a brand-new, double-banked frigate of eight hundred tons, carrying twenty eighteen-pounders, twenty nines and ten sixes. Inasmuch as the eighteen-pounders on the Richard burst and were abandoned after the first fire, the Serapis could and did discharge nearly twice as many pounds' weight of broadside as the Richard, say three hundred pounds to one hundred and seventy-five. The Pallas grappled with the Scarborough—a more equal match—and Jones attacked the Serapis, which was not unwilling—quite the contrary—for the fight.
The battle was one of the most memorable and desperate ever fought upon the ocean. The Richard was riddled like a sieve. Her rotten sides were literally blown out to starboard and port by the heavy batteries of the Serapis. Jones had several hundred English {286} prisoners on board. The master-at-arms released them, but, with great readiness and presence of mind, Jones sent them to the pumps, while he continued to fight the English frigate, his own ship kept afloat by their efforts.
Captain Pearson, of the Serapis, was as brave a man as ever drew a sword, but he was no match for the indomitable personality of the American commander. After several hours of such fighting as had scarcely been seen before on the narrow seas, he struck his flag. The Alliance, accompanied by a jealous and incapable Frenchman, had contributed nothing to Jones's success. Indeed, she had twice poured her broadsides into the Richard. The American vessel was so wrecked below and aloft that she sank alongside, and Jones had to transfer the survivors of his crew to the English frigate. The aggregate of the two crews was nearly seven hundred, of which about three hundred and fifty were killed or wounded.
It is the greatest pity that the poverty of America did not permit Jones to get to sea in a proper frigate, or in a ship of the line, before the close of the war. After the Revolution, in which he had borne so conspicuous a part, so much so that his exploits had electrified both continents, he took service under Catherine of Russia, carefully reserving his American citizenship. In her service he fought four brilliant actions in the Black Sea, in which he had to contend with the usual discouragement of indifferent personnel and wretched material, and in which he displayed all his old-time qualities, winning his usual successes, too.
Worn out in unrequited service, disgusted with Russian court intrigues of which he was the victim, resentful of the infamous Potemkin's brutal attempts {287} at coercion, he asked leave of absence from Catherine's service and went to Paris, where, in the companionship of his friends, and in the society of the beautiful Aimèe de Telison, the one woman he loved, he lived two years and died at the age of forty-five.
IV. A Hero's Famous Sayings
Besides the memory of his battles, Paul Jones left a collection of immortal sayings, which are the heritage of the American Navy and the admiration of brave men the world over. When the monument which is to be erected shall be ready for inscriptions, these may with propriety be carved upon it:
"I do not wish to have command of any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm's way!" Brave little captain.
"I have ever looked out for the honor of the American flag!" It is the truth itself.
"I can never renounce the glorious title of a citizen of the United States!" The title was one which Paul Jones signally honored.
Last, but not least, that curt phrase which comes ringing through the centuries like a trumpet call to battle; the words with which he replied to the demand of the astonished Pearson, who saw his enemy's ship beaten to a pulp, and wondered why he did not yield:
"I have not yet begun to fight!"
That was the finest phrase, under the circumstances, that ever came from the lips of an American sailor. "It was no new message. The British had heard it as they tramped again and again up the bullet-swept slopes of Bunker Hill; Washington rang it in the ears of the Hessians on the snowy Christmas morning at {288} Trenton; the hoof-beats of Arnold's horse kept time to it in the wild charge at Saratoga; it cracked with the whip of the old wagoner Morgan at the Cowpens; the Maryland troops drove it home in the hearts of their enemies with Greene at Guilford Court House; and the drums of France and America beat it into Cornwallis's ears when the end came at Yorktown. There, that night, in that darkness, in that still moment of battle, Paul Jones declared the determination of a great people. His was the expression of an inspiration on the part of a new nation. From this man came a statement of our unshakeable determination, at whatever cost, to be free! A new Declaration of Independence, this famous word of warning to the brave sailor of the British king."
V. What Jones Did for His Country
Never in his long career did Jones have a decent ship or a respectable crew. His materials were always of the very poorest. His officers, with the exception of Richard Dale, were but little to boast of. What he accomplished, he accomplished by the exercise of his own indomitable will, his serene courage, his matchless skill as a sailor, and his devotion to the cause he had espoused. After his death, among his papers, the following little memorandum, written in his own hand, was found:
"In 1775, J. Paul Jones armed and embarked in the first American ship of war. In the Revolution he had twenty-three battles and solemn rencontres by sea; made seven descents in Britain, and her colonies; took of her navy two ships of equal, and two of superior force, many store-ships, and others; constrained her to {289} fortify her ports; suffer the Irish Volunteers; desist from her cruel burnings in America and exchange, as prisoners of war, the American citizens taken on the ocean, and cast into prisons of England, as 'traitors, pirates, and felons!'"
Indeed a truthful and a brilliant record. Paul Jones was accused of being a pirate. The charge was a long time dying, but it is to-day generally disavowed. When recently his bones were returned to American shores, may we not believe that from some valhalla of the heroes, where the mighty men of the past mingle in peace and amity, he saw and took pride in the great if tardy outpouring of our fellow citizens to greet this first sea-king of our flag?
Now, this story of the magnificent career of John Paul Jones, so briefly summarized, has been often told, and its details are familiar to every schoolboy. There is one mystery connected with his life, however, which has not yet been............