It seemed as if Paul Jones was everywhere during those appalling hours of the night, always calm, cool, and unruffled. “We are in the hands of the good God,” he said to his men, “and if we have to meet Death, we might as well meet him with a bold face as a sheepish one.”
As the guns rolled about the deck, adding a new horror and a new danger to that of rocks and waves and storm, Dale, who had the deck, turned to Paul Jones and said coolly:
“Commodore, what shall we do about these guns?”
“We can not afford to throw them overboard,” answered Paul Jones; “we may have to fight the British by the time this storm is over. The Nonesuch may not weather it, nor may we; this may be our last night of life, but if we should survive, and should meet the Nonesuch, both of us would make a shift to fight.”
Dale said no more. As the ship would lurch forward into a black abyss, while above her hissed a mountain of water, the phosphorescent glare would cast a pale and unearthly light upon the horrors that encompassed her. The officers regarded her as a doomed ship, but the men had an unshaken confidence in the seamanship of their commander. In after years Dale declared: “Never saw I such coolness and readiness in such frightful circumstances as Paul Jones showed in the nights and days when he lay off the Penmarques, expecting every moment to be our last, and the danger was greater even than that we were in on the Bon Homme Richard when we fought the Serapis.”
In the last extremity Paul Jones let go sea anchors in the open ocean. There the tortured ship rolled and pitched, her lower yardarms often buried in the water, and unable, even with the help of all the anchors, to get her head round to the wind. Toward three o’clock in the morning Paul Jones shouted out the order he was never known to give before—for he was averse to cutting away spars and throwing guns or stores overboard—“Make ready, Mr. Dale, to cut away the foremast!”
The boatswain’s whistle could not be heard amid the confusion and the uproar, but Dale called to Bill Green, and in a few minutes the sailors were hacking the stout foremast away. It fell over the side with a frightful crash, and was swallowed up instantly. The helm was then put hard-a-lee, and the ship came up to the wind. But the mainmast was pitched out of the step and reeled about like a drunken man. As the great spar pounded the lower deck every soul on board expected it to crash through the ship’s bottom. At last Paul Jones ordered that, too, to be cut away, but before this could be done the chain plates gave way and the mast broke short off at the gun deck, taking the mizzenmast with it. The mizzenmast carried away the quarter gallery, and the scene of wreck was dreadful. The Ariel, now a dismasted hulk, rolled helplessly in the trough of the sea. Nothing more could be done but to keep the pumps going and to await their fate.
Something of the indomitable spirit of Paul Jones seems to have inspired every man under him, for he afterward spoke of the steady, composed courage of his officers and men.
Two days and three nights did he spend in the midst of these horrors, and when, on the 12th of October, the gale abated so that jury masts could be rigged, the ship was almost a wreck. But it was not destined that Paul Jones should perish on the ocean, and so he, without the loss of a single man, made his way back to L’Orient. It was considered the worst storm of the century, and the shores of Europe were strewed with wrecks and dead bodies for days and weeks afterward.