“Have you surrendered?”
To this Paul Jones made that answer which will always mark him as the bravest of the brave. With his ship aleak and afire in a dozen places, his guns silenced, his decks swept by uninjured batteries, his hull riddled, and a hundred mutinous prisoners ready to spring from below upon him, he called out in a dauntless voice:
“We haven’t begun to fight yet!”
A tremendous cheer burst from the Americans at this, and the Serapis perceived that she must destroy her enemy before she could conquer him. She therefore managed to swing clear of the Bon Homme Richard, determined to get in a raking position, either across the bow or the stern of the ship. Laying her foresail and fore-topsail aback, and keeping her helm down while she shivered her after sails, she attempted to wear short around on her heel. Seeing the Serapis coming down on him, the Bon Homme Richard drew ahead to lay athwart her. But in the darkness neither captain could see very well what he was doing, and both ships came foul, the jib boom of the Serapis passing in over the Bon Homme Richard’s poop and becoming entangled in the mizzen rigging.
As soon as Paul Jones saw the Serapis’s spar passing over the poop, he called to the acting sailing master:
“Mr. Stacy, fetch a hawser immediately, and get grappling irons!”
But as the jib boom of the Serapis touched the mizzen rigging of the Bon Homme Richard, Paul Jones himself, without waiting for the hawser, seizing the ropes that hung to the bowsprit, with his own hand lashed the two ships together. In another moment Stacy came running up with a hawser. In the midst of the uproar, the smoke, the flame, and the confusion, Stacy bungled with his work, and an oath burst from his lips.
“Don’t swear, Mr. Stacy,” said Paul Jones. “In another moment we may all be in eternity, and this is no time for blaspheming our Maker.”[4]
Stacy glanced at the great man, who could remember such things at such a moment. The commodore’s face was pale, and a thin stream of blood trickled down the side of his head.
“Commodore, you are wounded!” he cried.