Following the “breaking out,” the grog and the cheers, Mr. Hewes, Mr. Hancock and their fellow-statesmen, retire—the day being over cold—to the land, while Lieutenant Paul Jones, now and until the coming of Captain Saltonstall in command of the Alfred, remains aboard to take up his duty as a regularly commissioned officer in the regular navy of the colonies.
CHAPTER IX—THE CRUISE OF THE “PROVIDENCE”
Four ships—the Alfred, Captain Saltonstall, in the van, with Commodore Hopkins in command of the squadron—sail away on a rainy February day. They clear Cape Henlopen, and turn their untried prows south by east half south. The fell purpose of Commodore Hopkins is to harry the Bahamas.
It will be nowhere written that Commodore Hopkins, in his designs upon the Bahamas, in any degree succeeds. Eight weeks later, the four ships come scudding into New London with the fear of death in their hearts. An English sloop of war darted upon them, they say, off the eastern end of Long Island, and they escaped by the paint on their planks.
Lieutenant Paul Jones of the Alfred is afire with anger and chagrin at the miserable failure of the cruise, and goes furiously ashore, nursing a purpose of charging both Commodore Hopkins and Captain Saltonstall with every maritime offence, from sea-idiocy to cowardice. He is cooled off by older and more prudent heads. Also, Commodore Hopkins is summarily dismissed by Congress, while Captain Saltonstall takes refuge behind the broad skirts of his patron Mr. Adams. Thus, that first luckless cruise of the infant navy, conceived in ignorance and in politics brought forth, achieves its dismal finale in investigations, votes of censure, and dismissals, a situation which goes far to justify those December prophecies of Lieutenant Paul Jones, that Mr. Adams, by his selections for commodore and captains, arranged for more courts-martial than victories.
It has one excellent result, however; it teaches Congress to give Lieutenant Paul Jones the sloop Providence, and send him to sea with a command of his own. With him go his faithful blacks, Scipio and Cato; also, as “port-fire,” a red Indian of the Narragansett tribe, one Anthony Jeremiah of Martha’s Vineyard.
The little sloop—about as big as a gentleman’s yacht, she is—clears on a brilliant day in June. For weeks she ranges from Newfoundland to the Bermudas—seas sown with English ships of war. Boatswain Jack Robinson holds this converse with Polly his virtuous wife, when the Providence again gets its anchors down in friendly Yankee mud.
“And what did you do, Jack?” demands wife Polly, now she has him safe ashore.