JOHN PAUL JONES’ FELLOW OFFICERS
So much public interest has been aroused in the United States by the discovery of the body of John Paul Jones in Paris, and so many misleading and confusing statements have been published about his career that it is desirable to understand just what was the part he played in the naval struggle for independence, and what is the value of his services as compared with those rendered by his compatriots on the high seas. Jones, unquestionably, stood head and shoulders over his brother officers in the service of the Revolution; yet there were some who pressed him rather closely in the award of honors concerning whose deeds comparatively little is known.
[It was our hope to have printed an account of the finding of John Paul Jones’ body, written by General Horace Porter, but the General wrote us from Paris May 22:
“I knew very well Mrs. Lamb’s Magazine, and would be very happy to be a contributor to yours, but am so pressed by the winding up of my duties here, and the finishing of the translations of French experts and scientists, etc., on the Paul Jones matter, that I really have not a moment I can call my own. Assuring you of my appreciation of the interest you have manifested in the subject, and regretting very much that I cannot answer you more favorably.
Yours very truly,
Horace Porter.”
We have, however, much pleasure in quoting from the New York Evening Post the article by Edgar Stanton Maclay.—Ed.]
Captain Jones was a prolific chronicler of his own doings and left invaluable records of his truly brilliant achievements. This is mentioned not in the least to detract from the credit so justly due him (for it is the more to his honor that, in the rough-and-tumble calling he espoused, he found time to cultivate one of the “polite arts,” then generally deemed unnecessary in his profession), but to explain why it is that so little is known of what his brother captains accomplished in the same period. Our navy officers of the Revolution were bred, as a rule, in the hard school of experience, and, to most of them, the task of writing was about as distasteful as taking a dose of unpalatable medicine. The result has been that, while the world for one hundred and twenty-five years has been fully informed of the superb heroism of John Paul Jones, it has been kept in comparative ignorance of what his contemporaries accomplished.
This is regrettable for more reasons than one, chief among which is that, while Jones will be found to have suffered nothing by the comparison, these humbler heroes of his day have not received the recognition so justly due them. Of the twenty-nine officers who held the rank of naval captain in our service during the Revolution, only a few emerged from obscurity. They, like the great majority in all services, were destined to perform that hardest of all professional work, the monotonous routine duty incident to the carrying on of naval war.
There were a few, however, who had the good fortune to emerge from the oblivion of naval drudgery, and, perhaps, the greatest of these is Nicholas Biddle, of good Pennsylvania stock. He commanded the Andrea Doria in the first naval expedition of the war, Captain Jones (then a lieutenant) serving in the same squadron aboard the flagship Alfred. Jones shortly afterward won the immortal distinction of taking the Serapis while his own ship went down.
A year before the Bonhomme Richard-Serapis fight, Biddle had the unique distinction of both “going up” and “going down” in his ship, the thirty-two gun frigate Randolph, in her engagement with the ship-of-the-line Yarmouth. Jones’ bravery of Flamborough Head was superb, but it does not equal the patriotism and noble sacrifice of Biddle, who, in order to save his convoy of seven rich merchantmen laden with goods indispensable to the American cause, unhesitatingly ran alongside the monster ship-of-the-line and was blown up, 311 of the Randolph’s complement of 315 perishing, including Biddle—but the convoy was saved. This was the noblest act of self-sacrifice on a large scale, in the annals of the American navy. Earlier in the war Biddle, while in command of the Andrea Doria, in a cruise of four months captured ten English vessels, which, with the exception of two, reached port in safety—two of the prizes containing 400 soldiers of a Highland regiment.
While the immortal distinction of being the first man to hoist our national colors aboard an American warship belongs to Captain Jones, the by no means small honor of showing the American flag for the first time on a regularly commissioned American warship in European waters belongs to Captain Lambert Wickes, who crossed the Atlantic in the sixteen-gun war brig Reprisal. Lambert made a cruise in the Bay of Biscay, and in two circuits of Ireland took some twenty prizes.
Nor should the daring cruises of Captain Gustavus Conyngham in the Surprise be overlooked. One year before Captain Jones appeared on the other side of the Atlantic as commander of an American warship, Conyngham scoured the coast of England and picked up prizes in the very chops of the English Channel. Our commissioner in Europe, Silas Deane, wrote:
“Conyngham, by his first and second bold expeditions, is become the terror of all the eastern coast of England and Scotland, and is more dreaded than Thurot was in the late war.”
Then there were Captains Thomas Thompson and Elisha Hinman, who one year before Captain Jones’ appearance in English waters, executed a dash against a British fleet which is second in audacity only to Jones’ attack on the British fleet off Spurn Head. On the night of September 2, 1777, the thirty-two-gun frigate Raleigh, and the twenty-four-gun ship Alfred, commanded by Captains Thompson and Hinman, while on their way across the ocean, discovered a fleet of merchantmen, escorted by four British warships, among them the Druid. Availing himself of the cover of night, Thompson worked his way into the fleet undetected, and getting alongside the Druid opened a terrific fire on her so that in a short time she was reduced to a sinking condition. Realizing the folly of fighting the combined escort, Thompson then made good his escape, and arrived safely in France with the Raleigh and Alfred.
Nor should the daring of an American privateer be overlooked, which, very much after the manner of Jones at Whitehaven, sent a force of men ashore on English soil and made prisoners of a lieutenant and an adjutant of a British regiment, as the following extract from the private letter of an English gentleman will show:
“An American privateer of twelve guns came into this road [Guernsey] yesterday morning, tacked about on the firing of guns from the castle, and, just off the island, took a large brig bound for this port, which they have since carried into Cherbourg. She had the impudence to send her boat in the dusk of the evening to a little island off here called Jetto, and unluckily carried off the lieutenant of Northley’s Independent Company with the adjutant, who were shooting rabbits for their diversion.”
Not only in English home waters were American naval efforts being expended with conspicuous advantage to the cause before Jones appeared on the scene, but in British colonial possessions our hardy mariners created unprecedented havoc in the enemy’s commerce, which did much to bring the mother country to terms. An English correspondent writing from Jamaica under date of May 2, 1777, said that in one week upward of fourteen English ships were carried into Martinique by American warships. Another Englishman, writing from Grenada, April 18, 1777, said:
“Everything continues excessively dear here, and we are happy if we can get anything for money by reason of the quantity of vessels that are taken by American privateers. A fleet of vessels came from Ireland a few days ago. From sixty vessels that departed from Ireland, not above twenty-five arrived in this and neighboring islands, the others (it is thought) being all taken by the American privateers. God knows, if this American war continues much longer, we shall all die of hunger. There was a Guineaman that came from Africa with 450 negroes, some thousand-weight of gold dust, and a great many elephant teeth; the whole cargo being computed to be worth twenty thousand pounds sterling, taken by an American privateer a few days ago.”
Captain Jones’ brilliant career does not suffer by a comparison with these extraordinary achievements on the high seas. On the contrary, his record is the more resplendent by the contrast. These incidents are mentioned only to show that while Jones was the brightest star in the galaxy of our naval heroes, “there were others” who contributed to the lustre of American naval renown in the Revolution.
Having shown, briefly, the work done by other distinguished sea fighters in our struggle for independence, we can better estimate the worth of the truly great achievements of Captain John Paul Jones while in the service of the United States. They suffer no diminution by having Captain Jones shorn of the false title of “Admiral.” There have been only three “Admirals” in the United States navy: Farragut, Porter, and Dewey. The nearest approach to an admiral in our navy of the Revolution was the title conferred upon Esek Hopkins, who was made “commander-in-chief” of our sea forces, a rank intended to correspond to that held by Washington on land. On the escape of the British warship Glasgow, in Long Island Sound, 1776, Hopkins was unjustly blamed for the mishap, and the title of “commander-in-chief of the navy” was dropped.
Neither is it necessary to call Jones the “father of the American navy.” If such a title could be properly applied to any one, that person is John Adams, who, from the beginning, strenuously advocated the need of a navy, and worked harder than any one man of his time for its establishment on a permanent basis. The fame of Captain Jones needs none of these artificial bolsters for its support. It stands on the solid foundation of personal merit and nothing can add to or detract from it. We have ample evidence of this in the extraordinary manifestation of popular interest in the removal of his remains from a foreign soil to a final resting place in America.
What has been said here about the exploits of other naval heroes in the Revolution is used merely as a foil for the better setting off of the great central figure of the navy of that period. What Biddle, Wickes, Conyngham, Thompson, Hinman, and the American privateersmen did separately, Jones did as one man.
After taking as commendable a part as a subordinate could in the successful expedition to New Providence, he commanded the warship Providence, and performed some of the most remarkable feats in seamanship on record, besides inflicting serious losses on the enemy. As commander of the Alfred, in which he began his American career as lieutenant, he added to his reputation as a daring and successful skipper. In the Ranger he cruised in the Irish Sea with a boldness and success that has never been surpassed, while his extraordinary career in the Bonhomme Richard stands unsurpassed in the annals of the world’s naval history. Within the scope of his necessarily limited naval activities, he has set a standard of professional excellence that present and coming generations of naval aspirants will find difficult to surpass.
Edgar S. Maclay.
Evening Post, N. Y.