Pearson heard the cry. “Do you call for quarter?” he shouted.
For answer Paul Jones’s nine-pounder cut away the rail on which he was standing.
Then came the turn in the fight. Horrible as had been the slaughter on the “Richard,” the quick flashes from his tops told Paul Jones that his marines had not been placed aloft in vain. He saw the crew on the spar-deck of his enemy fall one by one and men fleeing below for safety. Raising his trumpet, he cheered his topmen to further efforts. In their unceasing fire lay his only hope.
One of them in his maintop with great deliberateness laid aside his musket and picked up a leather bucket of hand grenades. Jones watched him anxiously as, steadying himself, he slowly lay out along the foot-rope of the main-yard. His captain knew what he meant to do. He reached the lift, which was directly over the main hatch of the “Serapis.” There he coolly fastened his bucket to the sheet-block, and, taking careful aim, began dropping his grenades down the open hatchway. The second one fell on a row of exposed powder charges. The explosion that followed shook sea and sky, and the air was filled with blackened corpses. The smoke came up in a mighty cloud, and soon the forks of flame licked through it and up the rigging.
That was the supreme moment of Paul Jones’s life, for he knew that victory was his.
The fire from the “Serapis” ceased as if by magic. The explosion had blown a whole battery to eternity, and, as the smoke cleared a little, he could see the figure of Pearson leaning against the pin-rail, almost deserted, his few men running here and there, stricken mad with fear. Then the English captain stumbled heavily, as though blind, over the slippery deck towards the mizzen, where the flag had been nailed, and with his own hands tore it frantically from the mast.
A mighty victory for Paul Jones it was. But now, as the flames mounted higher through the rifts of smoke, he could see at what a cost. His dead lay piled upon the poop so that he could not get to the gangway. His masts were shot through and through, and strained at the stays at every lift of the bow. The fire, though beaten from the magazine, still burst from the forward hatches, firing the tangled rigging and outlining them in its lurid hues against the black beyond. The water had risen, and the freshening breeze lashed the purple foam in at the lower-deck ports. For hours the men fought against their new enemy; but towards five in the morning their captain decided that no human power could save her. He then began moving his wounded and prisoners to the “Serapis”.
The first gray streaks of dawn saw Paul Jones upon the poop of the “Serapis,” looking to the leeward, where the “Richard” lay rolling heavily. Her flag, shot away again and again, had been replaced and floated proudly from its staff. Lower and lower she sank into the water, mortally wounded, a heavy swell washing in at the lower gun-ports. At length, heaving her stern high in the air, her pennant fluttering a last defiance to the captured “Serapis,” she slowly disappeared, dying grandly as she had lived.
After Pearson’s release, the British government offered ten thousand guineas for Paul Jones, dead or alive. Forty-two British frigates chased him and scoured the Channel; but Jones passed within sight of them, the American flag flying at the mast, and reached France in safety, where he became the hero of the hour. And so long as the Stars and Stripes fly over American war-ships will the men who know hold up as their ideal of a dogged warrior and gallant seaman the hero of Flamborough—Paul Jones.