Paul Jones

by Hutchins Hapgood

Jones crowded on all possible sail, and the Bonhomme Richard came within pistol shot of the Serapis. It was seven o'clock of a fine moonlight night. Captain Pearson, of the British ship, then hailed, and was answered with a whole broadside from the Bonhomme Richard, an unfriendly salute which was promptly returned by the British ship.

From the beginning the fight seemed to go against the Bonhomme Richard. There was hardly any stage of the three and a half hours' desperate combat when Jones might not, with perfect propriety, have surrendered. Hardly had the battle begun when two of the six old eighteen-pounders forming the battery of the lower gun-deck of the Richard exploded, killing the men working them and rendering the whole battery useless for the rest of the action. Captain Pearson, perceiving his advantage in speed and power of shot, attempted again and again to pass the bow of the Richard and rake her. Jones's whole effort, on the other hand, was to close with the Serapis and board, knowing that it was only a question of time when, in a broadside fight, the Richard would be sunk.

After the broadsiding had continued with unremitting fury for about three quarters of an hour, and several of the Richard's twelve-pounders also had been put out of action, Captain Pearson thought he saw an opportunity, the Serapis having veered and drawn ahead of the Richard, to luff athwart the latter's hawse and rake her. But he attempted the manœuvre too soon, and perceiving that the two ships would be brought together if he persisted in his course, he put his helm alee, bringing the two vessels in a line; and the Serapis having lost her headway by this evolution, the Richard ran into her weather quarter. Jones was quick to make his first attempt to board, but he could not mass enough men at the point of contact to succeed, and the ships soon swung apart.

The Richard, even at this early stage of the action, was in a deplorable condition. Little of her starboard battery was left. Henry Gardner, a gunner during the action, stated in his account of the battle that, at this time, of the 140 odd officers and men stationed in the main gun-deck battery at the beginning, over eighty were killed or wounded. There were three or four feet of water in the hold, caused by the Serapis's eighteen-pound shot, which had repeatedly pierced the hull of the Richard.

It is no wonder that Captain Pearson, knowing that his enemy was hard put to it, thought, after the failure to board, that Jones was ready to surrender.

"Has your ship struck?" he called, and Jones made his famous reply:—

"I have not yet begun to fight."

That Jones really made some such reply, there is no doubt. Certainly, it was characteristic enough. Jones fought all his life, and yet when he died he had hardly begun the conflict, so many of his ambitious projects remained unrealized.

When the ships had swung apart, the broadsiding continued, increasingly to the advantage of the Serapis. Had not a lucky wind, favorable to the Richard, arisen at this point, doubtless her time above water would have been short. The veering and freshening breeze enabled the Richard to blanket the enemy's vessel, which consequently lost her headway, and another fortunate puff of wind brought the Richard in contact with the Serapis in such a way that the two vessels lay alongside one another, bow to stern, and stern to bow. Jones, with his own hand, helped to lash the two ships together. The anchor of the Serapis fortunately hooked the quarter of the Richard, thus binding the frigates still more firmly together.

During the critical time when Jones was bending every nerve to grapple with the Serapis, the Alliance made her first appearance, poured a broadside or two into the Richard, and disappeared. Of this remarkable deed Jones wrote to Dr. Franklin: "At last the Alliance appeared, and I now thought the battle at an end; but to my utter astonishment he discharged a broadside full into the stern of the Bon Homme Richard." It is probable that the Serapis also suffered from Landais's attack, but not so much as the Richard, which lay between the other two ships.