The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 14

by Unknown

As another evidence of the strange mêlée which attended this engagement, and of the discouraging circumstances under which the Richard fought, it may be mentioned that eight or ten of her crew, who were, of course, Englishmen, got into a boat, which was towing astern of the Serapis, and escaped to Scarborough during the height of the engagement. This defection, together with the absence of the second lieutenant with fifteen of the best men, the loss of twenty-four men on the coast of Ireland, added to the number who had been sent away in prizes, reduced Jones' crew to a very small number, and greatly diminished his chance of success, which was due at length solely to his own indomitable courage.

Meantime the fire, which was still kept up from the lower-deck guns of the Serapis, where the seamen were ignorant of the scene of surrender which had taken place above, was arrested by an order from Lieutenant Dale. The action had continued without cessation for three hours and a half. When it at length ceased, Jones got his ship clear of the Serapis and made sail. As the two separated, after being so long locked in deadly struggle, the main-mast of the Serapis, which had been for some time tottering, and which had only been sustained by the interlocking of her yards with those of the Richard, went over the side with a tremendous crash, carrying the mizzen-topmast with it. Soon after, the Serapis cut her cable and followed the Richard.

The exertions of captors and captives were now necessary to extinguish the flames which were raging furiously in both vessels. Its violence was greatest in the Richard, where it had been communicated below from the lower-deck guns of the Serapis. Every effort to subdue the flames seemed for a time to be unavailing. In one place they were raging very near the magazine, and Jones at length had all the powder taken out and brought on deck, in readiness to be thrown overboard. In this work the officers of the Serapis voluntarily assisted.

While the fire was raging in so terrifying a manner, the water was entering the ship in many places. The rudder had been cut entirely through, the transoms were driven in, and the rotten timbers of the old ship, from the main-mast aft, were shattered and almost entirely separated, as if the ship had been sawn through by ice; so much so that Jones says that toward the close of the action the shot of the Serapis passed completely through the Richard; and the stern-post and a few timbers alone prevented the stern from falling down on the gunroom deck. The water rushed in through all these apertures, so that at the close of the action there were already five feet of water in the hold. The spectacle which the old ship presented the following morning was dreadful beyond description. Jones says in his official report: "A person must have been eye-witness to form a just idea of the tremendous scene of carnage, wreck, and ruin that everywhere appeared. Humanity cannot but recoil from the prospect of such finished horror, and lament that war should produce such fatal consequences."

Captain Pearson also notices, in his official letter to the Admiralty, the dreadful spectacle the Richard presented. He says: "On my going on board the Bonhomme Richard I found her to be in the greatest distress; her counters and quarters on the lower deck entirely drove in, and the whole of her lower-deck guns dismounted; she was also on fire in two places, and six or seven feet of water in her hold, which kept increasing all night and the next day till they were obliged to quit her, and she sunk with a great number of her wounded people on board her." The regret which he must, at any rate, have felt in surrendering, must have been much augmented by these observations, and by what he must have seen of the motley composition of the Richard's crew.

On the morning after the action a survey was held upon the "Poor Richard," which was now, more than ever, entitled to her name. After a deliberate examination, the carpenters and other surveying officers were unanimously of opinion that the ship could not be kept afloat so as to reach port, if the wind should increase. The task of removing the wounded was now commenced, and completed in the course of the night and following morning. The prisoners who had been taken in merchant-ships were left until the wounded were all removed. Taking advantage of the confusion, and of their superiority in numbers, they took possession of the ship, and got her head in for the land, toward which the wind was now blowing. A contest ensued, and, as the Englishmen had few arms, they were speedily overcome. Two of them were shot dead, several wounded and driven overboard, and thirteen of them got possession of a boat and escaped to the shore.

Jones was very anxious to keep the Richard afloat, and, if possible, to bring her into port, doubtless from the very justifiable vanity of showing how desperately he had fought her. In order to effect this object he kept the first lieutenant of the Pallas on board of her with a party of men to work the pumps, having boats in waiting to remove them in the event of her sinking. During the night of the 24th the wind had freshened, and still continued to freshen on the morning of the 25th, when all further efforts to save her were found unavailing. The water was running in and out of her ports and swashing up her hatchways. About nine o'clock it became necessary to abandon her, the water then being up to the lower deck; an hour later, she rolled as if losing her balance, and, settling forward, went down bows first, her stern and mizzen-mast being last seen.

"A little after ten," says Jones in his report, "I saw, with inexpressible grief, the last glimpse of the Bonhomme Richard." The grief was a natural one, but, far from being destitute of consolation, the closing scene of the "Poor Richard," like the death of Nelson on board the Victory in the moment of winning a new title to the name, was indeed a glorious one. Her shattered shell afforded an honorable receptacle for the remains of the Americans who had fallen during the action.

The Richard was called by Captain Pearson a forty-gun ship, while the Serapis was stated by the pilot, who described her to Jones when she was first made, to have been a forty-four. Jones and Dale also gave her the same rate. The Richard, as we have seen, mounted six eighteen-pounders in her gunroom on her berth deck, where port-holes had been opened near the water; fourteen twelve, and fourteen nine-pounders on her main deck, and eight six-pounders on her quarter-deck, gangways, and forecastle. The weight of shot thrown by her at a single broadside would thus be two hundred and twenty-five pounds. With regard to her crew, she started from L'Orient with three hundred eighty men. She had manned several prizes, which, with the desertion of the barge's crew on the coast of Ireland, and the absence of those who went in pursuit under the master and never returned, together with the fifteen men sent away in the pilot-boat, under the second lieutenant, just before the action, and who did not return until after it was over, reduced the crew, according to Jones' statement, to three hundred forty men at its commencement.

This calculation seems a very fair one; for, by taking the statement of those who had landed on the coast of Ireland, as given in a contemporary English paper, at twenty-four, those who were absent in the pilot-boat being sixteen in number, and allowing five of the nine prizes taken by the Richard to have been manned from her, with average crews of five men each, the total reduction from her original crew may be computed to be seventy men. Eight or ten more escaped, during the action, in a boat towing astern of the Serapis. To have had three hundred forty men at the commencement of the action, as Jones states he had, he must have obtained recruits from the crews of his prizes.