The plate fell into the hands of the prize agents. After much difficulty and considerable delay, Captain Jones succeeded in purchasing it, though at a price above its real value. He then returned it to Lord Selkirk, himself defraying all the expenses of transportation. Lord Selkirk, in acknowledging its receipt, from London, under date of August, 1789, wrote:
“Notwithstanding all the precautions you took for the easy and uninterrupted conveyance of the plate, yet it met with considerable delays, first at Calais, next at Dover, then at London. However, it at last arrived at Dumfries. I intended to have put an article in the newspapers about your having returned it. But before I was informed of its being arrived, some of your friends, I suppose, had put it into the Dumfries newspaper, whence it was immediately copied into the Edinburgh papers, and thence into the London ones. Since that time I have mentioned it to many people of fashion.
“And on all occasions, both now and formerly, I have done you the justice to tell that you made an offer of returning the plate very soon after your return to Brest; and although you yourself was not at my house, but remained at the shore with your boat, that you had your officers and men in such extraordinary good discipline, that your having given them the strictest orders to behave well, to do no injury of any kind, to make no search, but only to bring off what plate was given them; that in reality they did exactly as ordered, and that not one man offered to stir from his post on the outside of the house, nor entered the doors, nor said an uncivil word; that the two officers staid not a quarter of an hour in the parlor and in the butler’s pantry, while the butler got the plate together, behaved politely, and asked for nothing but the plate, and instantly marched their men off, in regular order, and that both officers and men behaved in all respects so well that it would have done credit to the best disciplined troops whatever.”
The style of Captain Jones’s letter has been found fault with. But in literary excellence it is certainly above that of the English lord. One of the London papers said of him:
“Paul Jones is about thirty-six years of age, of a middling stature, well proportioned, with an agreeable countenance. His conversation shows him to be a man of talents, and that he has a liberal education. His letters, in foreign gazettes, show that he can fight with the pen as well as with the sword.”
In the letter which Captain Jones sent to Lord Selkirk upon the return of the plate, he wrote:
“The long delay that has happened to the restoration of your plate, has given me much concern, and I now feel a proportionate pleasure in fulfilling what was my first intention. My motive for landing at your estate in Scotland was to take you, as a hostage for the lives and liberties of a number of the citizens of America, who had been taken in war on the ocean and committed to British prisons, under an act of Parliament, as traitors, pirates, and felons. You observed to Mr. Alexander that my idea was a mistaken one, because you were not, as I had supposed, in favor with the British ministry, who knew that you favored the cause of liberty. On that account, I am glad that you were absent from your estate when I landed there, as I bore no personal enmity, but the contrary, toward you. I afterward had the happiness to redeem my fellow-citizens from Britain, by means far more glorious than through the medium of any single hostage.
“As I have endeavored to serve the cause of liberty, through every stage of the American Revolution, and have sacrificed to it my private ease, a part of my fortune, and some of my blood, I could have no selfish motive in permitting my people to demand and carry off your plate. My sole inducement was to turn their attention and stop their rage from breaking out and retaliating on your house and effects the too wanton burnings and desolation that had been committed against their relations and fellow-citizens in America, by the British; of which, I assure you, you would have felt the severe consequences, had I not fallen on an expedient to prevent it, and hurried my people away before they had time for further reflection.”
We must now return from this episode to the continuance of Captain Jones’s cruise. In his letter to Lady Selkirk, he alludes to a naval battle with the ship Drake. After the descent upon Mary’s Island, Captain Jones again stood across the Channel from the Scottish to the Irish shore. On the morning of the 24th, he arrived off the Bay of Carrickfergus, and would again have entered, to make an attack upon the Drake, had he not seen that that ship was spreading her sails to come out. The wind was very light and the progress of the British ship slow. The captain of the Drake had heard of the ravages of the Ranger, for the appalling tidings had spread far and wide, and he was coming out in search of her. Seeing this vessel in the distance, a boat was sent out from the Drake to reconnoitre. Captain Jones kept the ship’s stern directly toward the approaching boat, and so succeeded in disguising his true character that though the boat’s crew carefully scrutinized him with a spy-glass, they were completely deceived, and, hailing the vessel, came alongside. As soon as the officer stepped upon the quarter-deck, he found, to his great surprise, himself a prisoner and his boat captured.
Captain Jones learned, from his captives, that the night before an express had reached the Drake, with tidings of the destruction of the shipping at Whitehaven; and the Drake had immediately increased its crew by a large number of volunteers, and was now pressing forward in pursuit of the Ranger. Alarm fires were also seen on the eminences on both sides of the Channel, their columns of smoke rising high into the air. It was evident that the achievements of the bold little Ranger had created a great commotion, rousing all England to a sense of danger, for no one knew upon what point her next blows might fall.