The success of the Black Prince was phenomenal—twenty-nine prizes, including a recapture, in the space of two months and eleven days. Franklin gave commissions to two sister privateers, the Black Princess and the Fearnot. Their combined efforts produced a total of 114 British vessels of all descriptions, brought into free ports, burned, scuttled or ransomed. They created havoc with coastal trade in the English, Irish and Scotch seas, embarrassed the British Admiralty, caused marine insurance rates to soar.
Franklin was proud of his three privateers and must have had a vicarious thrill in their exploits. His own role in the affair became increasingly worrisome. Each prize was judged in the local marine court of the port where it was brought. Sometimes there were delays, resulting in the loss of perishable cargo and voluble cries of protest from the crews who saw their prize money diminishing daily. In due time Franklin, as Judge of the Admiralty, received the bulky and voluminous report, handwritten and of course in French. It was up to him and Temple to appraise the contents if the venture was to be kept going.
Unfortunately, much as the privateers disrupted English shipping, the number of prisoners was far fewer than Franklin had hoped. Sometimes there was no room for prisoners on shipboard, or, when there were captive ships to man, not enough men to guard prisoners. Franklin proposed that the privateer captains get sea paroles from those they set free, but the British stubbornly refused to honor the paroles in prisoner exchange. There were also numerous British seamen who gladly joined the privateer crews, finding their free life far preferable to the cruel discipline of the British Navy.
Aside from his privateers, Franklin pinned his hope on a Scottish-born American seaman with a colorful past, named John Paul Jones. In 1778, Jones had captured the Drake, the first British warship to surrender to a Continental vessel. He had come to Brest from America in the Ranger, which had raided English and Scottish coasts, taking seven prizes. Red tape kept Jones idle for some months after that but at length he was given an aged and decrepit French forty-gun ship, which he renamed the Bonhomme Richard—the French translation of “Poor Richard.”
In September 1779, the Bonhomme Richard closed in on the superior British frigate, the Serapis, in a battle which lasted three and a half hours. When the hull of the Bonhomme Richard was pierced, her decks ripped, her hold filling with water, and fires destroying her, the British captain asked if they were ready to surrender.
“Sir, I have not yet begun to fight,” Jones reportedly replied.
While his ship was sinking, he and his men boarded the Serapis and took her captive.
Exultantly, Franklin prepared his dispatch to Congress, announcing “one of the most obstinate and bloody conflicts that has happened in this war.” With even greater pleasure he reported three weeks later that John Paul Jones was safe in Texel, North Holland, with some 500 British prisoners! In Paris soon afterward the welcome given the hero of the Bonhomme Richard rivaled only Franklin’s reception there.
At home the war was going drearily. Combined American forces failed to win Savannah from the British. A British expedition took Charleston. The British General Cornwallis, marching inland, routed General Horatio Gates. England, now at war with Holland, captured tiny St. Eustatius, thus cutting off America’s chief West Indian source of supplies. Benedict Arnold had turned traitor, and the British had moved their army from Philadelphia to New York.
The Bache family, who had been living in the country, returned to find that the officers who had occupied their house had carried off some of Franklin’s musical instruments, Temple’s school books, and some electrical apparatus. The portrait of Franklin done by Benjamin Wilson had also vanished. It turned out that it had been taken by the English spy Major John André. (It reached England but was later restored to the White House in Washington in 1906.)