[It was our hope to have printed an account of the finding of John Paul Jones’ body, written by General Horace Porter, but the General wrote us from Paris May 22:
“I knew very well Mrs. Lamb’s Magazine, and would be very happy to be a contributor to yours, but am so pressed by the winding up of my duties here, and the finishing of the translations of French experts and scientists, etc., on the Paul Jones matter, that I really have not a moment I can call my own. Assuring you of my appreciation of the interest you have manifested in the subject, and regretting very much that I cannot answer you more favorably.
Yours very truly,
Horace Porter.”
We have, however, much pleasure in quoting from the New York Evening Post the article by Edgar Stanton Maclay.—Ed.]
Captain Jones was a prolific chronicler of his own doings and left invaluable records of his truly brilliant achievements. This is mentioned not in the least to detract from the credit so justly due him (for it is the more to his honor that, in the rough-and-tumble calling he espoused, he found time to cultivate one of the “polite arts,” then generally deemed unnecessary in his profession), but to explain why it is that so little is known of what his brother captains accomplished in the same period. Our navy officers of the Revolution were bred, as a rule, in the hard school of experience, and, to most of them, the task of writing was about as distasteful as taking a dose of unpalatable medicine. The result has been that, while the world for one hundred and twenty-five years has been fully informed of the superb heroism of John Paul Jones, it has been kept in comparative ignorance of what his contemporaries accomplished.
This is regrettable for more reasons than one, chief among which is that, while Jones will be found to have suffered nothing by the comparison, these humbler heroes of his day have not received the recognition so justly due them. Of the twenty-nine officers who held the rank of naval captain in our service during the Revolution, only a few emerged from obscurity. They, like the great majority in all services, were destined to perform that hardest of all professional work, the monotonous routine duty incident to the carrying on of naval war.
There were a few, however, who had the good fortune to emerge from the oblivion of naval drudgery, and, perhaps, the greatest of these is Nicholas Biddle, of good Pennsylvania stock. He commanded the Andrea Doria in the first naval expedition of the war, Captain Jones (then a lieutenant) serving in the same squadron aboard the flagship Alfred. Jones shortly afterward won the immortal distinction of taking the Serapis while his own ship went down.
A year before the Bonhomme Richard-Serapis fight, Biddle had the unique distinction of both “going up” and “going down” in his ship, the thirty-two gun frigate Randolph, in her engagement with the ship-of-the-line Yarmouth. Jones’ bravery of Flamborough Head was superb, but it does not equal the patriotism and noble sacrifice of Biddle, who, in order to save his convoy of seven rich merchantmen laden with goods indispensable to the American cause, unhesitatingly ran alongside the monster ship-of-the-line and was blown up, 311 of the Randolph’s complement of 315 perishing, including Biddle—but the convoy was saved. This was the noblest act of self-sacrifice on a large scale, in the annals of the American navy. Earlier in the war Biddle, while in command of the Andrea Doria, in a cruise of four months captured ten English vessels, which, with the exception of two, reached port in safety—two of the prizes containing 400 soldiers of a Highland regiment.
While the immortal distinction of being the first man to hoist our national colors aboard an American warship belongs to Captain Jones, the by no means small honor of showing the American flag for the first time on a regularly commissioned American warship in European waters belongs to Captain Lambert Wickes, who crossed the Atlantic in the sixteen-gun war brig Reprisal. Lambert made a cruise in the Bay of Biscay, and in two circuits of Ireland took some twenty prizes.