Published in London, October 22, 1779.
In view of the barbarities of which the English had been guilty in America, and of the retaliation which self-defence as well as justice demanded, John Paul Jones, after his cruise along the coast, might well and righteously have used the words which a titled British robber of the helpless used when brought before Parliament to answer for his crimes: “By God, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.”
After one hundred years have passed away it is safe to say that every American who reads of the events of the American Revolution stands astonished at the moderation of the fathers.
As to the facts of the descent on Whitehaven, they may be soon told. Lowering two boats after the Ranger had arrived, Captain Jones ordered fifteen men, armed with cutlasses and pistols, into each. Then he placed Lieutenant Wallingsford in charge of one, and took the other himself. Unfortunately, one of the crew, a man named David Freeman, had shipped with the express purpose of serving the English whenever opportunity offered.
It is said that 220 vessels, great and small, lay in Whitehaven harbor, of which 150 were on the south side, where the town stood, and the remainder were on the north. Nearly if not quite all had been left aground by the ebb tide—the tide that prevented Jones reaching the shipping until daylight. Wallingsford was sent to fire the shipping at the north, while Jones landed at the town.
Whitehaven was guarded at that time by two forts of fifteen guns each. With his single boat’s crew Jones ran to the nearest one. The sentinels, greatly alarmed, fled into the guard-house, where Jones locked them in. Then he spiked the guns. At the other fort, a quarter of a mile away, he was equally successful.
Turning, then, to see the flames rising from the ships across the harbor, he found that nothing had been done to them. Lieutenant Wallingsford’s failure to obey orders has been variously accounted for, but whatever his error may have been, he wiped it out by fighting for the flag till he died in the battle of two days later.
Seeing his plan partly frustrated, Captain Jones hastened back to the water-front, and with his own hands built a fire on a large vessel in the midst of the fleet, using a brand which he had snatched from the breakfast fire in the kitchen of a nearby house. To increase the flames, he broke open and spilled a barrel of tar over the light-wood he was firing.
Meantime the deserter had been alarming the town. “The inhabitants began to appear in thousands.” There must have been not less than 1,200 sailors alone among the 150 ships lying there. As the flames mounted in air above the burning ship the men of the town came down en masse, but Jones stood between them and the fire, and, with pistol in hand, “ordered them to retire, which they did with precipitation.” Men in a crowd numbering hundreds fell over each other to get out of range. A more amusing instance of the power of a resolute man over a mob will rarely be found in history.
For fifteen minutes John Paul Jones, single-handed, held at bay more than a thousand men. Then he entered his boat and rowed away, leaving the townsmen to fight the fire and shed tears of gratitude over the deserter who had saved them from destruction at the hands of fifteen men armed with cutlasses and flint-locked, single-barrelled, shoot-if-you-are-lucky pistols!