“The Alliance has been captured by the British and is now attacking us.”
It is likely that this was the only moment when John Paul Jones thought of yielding, but as the Alliance drew off he continued the fight not only against the enemy, but against the fire and water in his own ship.
And more to be feared were the fire and water. The ship was filling, and when the carpenter tried the water, he found it five feet deep in her hold, while the fire was rapidly approaching the magazine. On coming from the well, he said disconsolately that the ship would sink. At that the Master at Arms liberated the prisoners, two or three hundred in number, who were confined below, and told them to save themselves. The struggle and confusion that followed as these men came from their quarters were frightful. Here were, indeed, many more English subjects running free than all the crew of the Bonhomme Richard who were below decks. There were almost as many as the entire crew. Then the gunner, who had heard the remark about sinking and had seen the prisoners liberated, ran to the poop-deck, and in a panic of fear strove to find the signal halliards that he might haul down the flag in token of surrender. He was shouting as he ran:
“Quarter! for God’s sake, quarter! Our ship is sinking”; but John Paul Jones heard the words, and turning around, he hurled an empty pistol at the man’s head, fractured his skull by the blow, and knocked him headlong down the hatch.
“Do you call for quarter?” shouted Captain Pearson, who had heard the cry.
“Never!” replied John Paul Jones.
“Then I’ll give you none,” replied Pearson, and the fight went on, while Jones sent his resourceful lieutenant, Richard Dale, below to see why the cartridges of powder were no longer coming up, for neither he nor Dale at this moment knew that the prisoners had been released.
But when he saw the condition of affairs below, Dale, instead of quailing, with ready wit told the prisoners that the Serapis was just sinking and their only hope of life was in keeping the Bonhomme Richard afloat. At this the whole mob of them went to the pumps and to fighting the fire. They worked in gangs till they dropped from sheer exhaustion, when other gangs took their places.
There was one of them—a captain of a captured ship—who did not believe the story. He climbed through the ports to the Serapis and told of the hopeless condition of the American crew. But his story was discredited because of an extraordinary occurrence on the Serapis. As the ships lay together the mainyard of the Bonhomme Richard stretched fair over the main hatch of the Serapis. Noticing this fact, a bright marine in the maintop of the Bonhomme Richard took advantage of it. The marines in the tops had been of the utmost service in clearing the decks of the enemy already, but this man, with a leather bucket of hand grenades and a candle, climbed out on the mainyard until over the hatch of the Serapis, and then, securing his bucket to the sheet-block, he began dropping the lighted grenades into her hold.
The hand grenade is a shell near the weight of a baseball. The first one he dropped exploded on a great heap of gun cartridges that had accumulated along the lower deck behind the guns. A tremendous explosion followed.