Commodore Paul Jones

by Cyrus Townsend Brady

"Take the map of the empire of Russia for canvas, the darkness of ignorance for background, the spoils of Poland for drapery, human blood for coloring, the monuments of her reign for the cartoon, and for the shadow six months of her son's reign."

A singular and complex character was that of this famous despot, this "Semiramis of the North." Never more than a half-educated woman--and in that she corresponded with her empire--she learned her politics from Montesquieu, drew her philosophy of life from Voltaire, and shaped her morals after Brantôme! A creature of singular contradictions, she loved liberty, favored the struggle of the United States, and ruled an absolute despot; she wrote charming fairy tales for children and rode horseback astride like a man; she was one of the greatest sticklers for morals--in other people--the world has ever known, and yet was herself one of the most colossal examples of unblushing and shameless professional sensuality that ever sat upon a throne. Other rulers and sovereigns have had their favorites, she alone made favoritism a state institution. "What has ruined the country," she naïvely writes, "is that the people fall into vice and drunkenness, and the comic opera has corrupted the whole nation!" As a corrupter by example she surpassed all the comic operas ever written. The morals of Russia, in her day, were rotten from the head downward. Yet in spite of all this she was a great princess. She was allowed to occupy that throne because she made Russia greater with each successive year; not alone by force of arms either, and the Russian destiny makers loved her. Education, the arts, and sciences, all felt the stimulus of her interest and responded to her efforts. Progress was the word of this imperious woman. She had a faculty for ruling as remarkable as her exploitation of favoritism. Yet she governed her empire with a sublime indifference to public opinion, and squandered its revenues in a shameless prostitution of her own person, which ceased only with her death, in 1794, at the age of sixty-five! The fact that Catherine made an official business out of favoritism, and that she was so utterly oblivious to the moral inconsistency of it--for she was a faithful member of the Holy Orthodox Church--seems to lift it upon a plane of its own, so simple and brazen was it.

Upon the chief of her favorites alone she had bestowed more than fifty million roubles, vast estates carrying with them nearly one hundred thousand serfs, and in addition orders, titles, privileges, and decorations innumerable. The name of this favorite was Gregory Alexandrovitch Patiomkine, commonly called Potemkin. He was the second of the great Vremienchtchick, as the favorites were called, the word meaning "men of the moment!" He succeeded the gigantic Orloff, whose term as the favorite was longer than that of any successor, for he had enjoyed a tenure of almost ten years--the usual period being about two. Patiomkine's personal association with the empress was only for that short time, when he was supplanted by another object of royal regard. Unlike all the other favorites, Patiomkine was not relegated to prompt obscurity, and he continued to be the power behind the throne for practically the remainder of his life. He was greater than all the others--too great to be done away with, in fact. If he could not be the favorite, he would, like Warwick the kingmaker, make the favorite, and for fifteen years he continued to do so. During this period he swayed the destinies of the empire as a sort of mayor of the palace.

The analogy is not altogether accurate, for Catherine was no supine Merovingian to commit the administration of the state to others while she passed hours of dalliance in the secret chambers of the palace; she was too strong and too great for that, and she always retained her grasp upon the helm; but it is certain that none of her favorites had ever enjoyed such power and wielded it so openly as this princely pander.

As to Patiomkine himself, the world did not know whether he was a genius or a madman. At times he seems to have passed over that slender line which divides these two antitheses of character, and appears now on one side, now on the other. Personally he was a man of huge bulk and great strength, with the natural instincts of an animal and a veneer, more or less strong on occasion, of refinement. He, too, typified Russia, a giant rising through barbarism into the civilization of the century--and not yet arrived, either--now inclining to the one side or the other. Catherine usually chose her favorites among men of great physical vigor. Patiomkine was a giant in size. His vast frame was capable of sustaining the most tremendous hardships. He was a black-haired, swarthy, hot-tempered man, not pleasant to look upon, for he had lost an eye in a fist fight after a drunken revel with the Orloffs. He squinted with the other, and even had not a figure to redeem him, for he was markedly knock-kneed. He, like his mistress and his country, was a creature of contradictions. In his palace in St. Petersburg we find him trifling with the most delicate creations of the most skilled chef, and on his journeys eating rapaciously of anything that came to hand. He sent his adjutants thousands of miles for perfumes which caught his fancy, and galloped madly himself across half Europe without rest or sleep for days in pursuance of duty, and then spent weeks in dalliance with his harem.

With the one hand he wrote poetic letters that quiver and thrill with tenderness and beauty, pathos and passion, and with the other he calmly consigned thousands of people to death. One day we find him raging because his soldiers are not better cared for, and on the next day remarking cynically, when the absence of ambulances was brought to his notice, that so much the better--they would not have to bother with the wounded! Sometimes cowardly, sometimes bold to the point of recklessness; atheist and devotee, debauchee and ascetic, coarse and refined, imperious and cringing, brutal and gentle, king and slave, Christian and pagan--his life remains a mystery.

After he died of a frightful attack of indigestion, brought on by gorging himself with coarse food, Catherine's son, upon succeeding to the throne, treated his body with great indignity; and it was not until seventy years later that his remains were discovered and interred in the Cathedral of Kherson. Prince of Taurida, the conqueror of the Crimea, and under Catherine the originator of that tremendous and irresistible Russian policy which will some day replace the Greek cross upon the temple of Justinian in Constantinople, Patiomkine is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of the world.

In the service of the first of these two personages, and under the specific orders of the last, Paul Jones was to make a campaign. It was foredoomed to failure. Jones was not a good subordinate to any one. His temper, his lack of self-control, his pride, and his vanity rendered any ultimate successful association with a man like Patiomkine impossible. Patiomkine had all Jones' faults and a thousand more. They harmonized like flint and steel. To further complicate matters, Jones was to be associated in his command, with the limits of authority not clearly defined between them--always a prolific source of trouble, and certain to cause failure--with Prince Otto of Nassau-Siegen, of whom we have heard before. He had asked to serve under Jones in the Indien, and when that project fell through he had failed to answer Jones' letters, and had treated him with discourtesy and indifference. In Catherine's army and navy thousands of soldiers of fortune found a congenial atmosphere and a golden opportunity. They were all made welcome, and, with anything like success to warrant them, they generally achieved a handsome reward in her generous service. The most noted among them, and one of the most worthless, is this man, whom Waliszewski calls "the last notable condottierre of Europe; a soldier without country, without home, and almost without family, his very name is the first of his conquests." His father was the illegitimate son of a princeling, but the Parliament of Paris, in 1756, gave the young Otto, then eleven years of age, the right, so far as they had the power, to bear the name of his ancestors, to which he had no legitimate claim. They could not, however, do anything for his patrimony. He had been a lieutenant of infantry, a captain of dragoons, and finally a sailor under Bougainville when he made his famous voyage around the world. Later he appears as an unsuccessful explorer in Africa. In fact, he was not successful at anything. Unlike Crichton, he did everything equally ill.

In 1779, as a colonel of French infantry, he made an unsuccessful attempt upon the island of Jersey. The next year, in the Spanish service, he commanded, unsuccessfully as usual, some floating batteries before Gibraltar. Among other exploits--and it was his one triumph--he seduced the Queen of Tahiti, so he said, and the reputation of the unfortunate lady found no defenders in Europe. He married a homely Polish countess with a great fortune, and after meddling (unsuccessfully) with all sorts of things got himself appointed to the command of a flotilla of Russian gunboats operating against the Turks.

But to return to the story; the long distance--seven hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies and probably twice that by road--between St. Petersburg and Elizabethgrad, was covered by Jones in twelve days. He was in a hurry, as always, to get to sea. The object of the Prince Marshal's attack was the fortified town of Otchakoff, commonly spelled in contemporary manuscripts Oczakow. This important place was situated on the Russo-Turkish frontier of that day, on the Black Sea, not far from the present city of Odessa, and occupied a commanding position at the confluence of the great river Dnieper and the smaller river Bug. Southward of the mainland the peninsula of Kinburn, a narrow, indented point of land, projects for perhaps twenty miles to the westward, forming a narrow estuary of the Black Sea about fifty miles long and from five to ten miles wide, into which the two rivers pour their vast floods. This estuary is sometimes called the Dnieper Bay, but more commonly the Liman, and the undertaking hereafter described is referred to as the campaign in the Liman. The bay or inlet is very shallow. Sand banks and shoals leave but a narrow, tortuous channel, which is of no great depth at best. The end of the peninsula of Kinburn terminates in a long and very narrow strip of land, a point which reaches up toward the northward and almost closes the opening of the estuary; the distance between the point and Fort Hassan, the southernmost fortification of Otchakoff, is possibly two miles. This narrow entrance is further diminished by a long shoal which extends south from Fort Hassan toward the point, so that, except for one contracted channel, the passage is practicable for vessels of very light draught only.