Give Me a Fast Ship

by Tim McGrath

  Jones also took steps regarding conditions in the fo’c’sle. The French and American hands were constantly fighting with each other, but that paled in comparison to the activities of the British sailors Jones had rescued from the l’Orient jail. Upon learning that they planned to mutiny, Jones seized the ringleader and sentenced him to 250 lashes—enough to kill a man (and 238 more than John Adams had declared the maximum punishment in the Continental Navy).

  Jones replaced the British hands with Americans recently exchanged by the British, and also signed on several dozen Portuguese sailors, giving them permission to bring a statue of the Virgin Mary aboard.

  The new hands were climbing the gangway just in time to witness punishment: a dozen sailors being flogged. Days before, these men had manned a longboat taking Jones to shore. Once he disembarked they did too—to get drunk at a wharf tavern. Jones was forced to return to ship on a fishing boat. Now that drunken detail took turns “tasting the cat.” Jones would no longer tolerate the insolence and disobedience he had endured aboard the Ranger.19

  Thirty days of stressful refitting, punishments, and re-manning sent an exhausted Jones to his cabin, but by early August he was himself again, awaiting new orders. They arrived in a coach carrying Jones’s cuckolded patron M. de Chaumont. In a manner some historians believe was payback for Jones’s peccadillo, Chaumont dealt with each captain in the squadron individually instead of with Jones alone as commodore. Chaumont intended that the captains reach “common Consent” regarding the capture of prizes during the forthcoming cruise, and that Chaumont, as a financier of the squadron, would act as agent for any and all prizes. This “concordat” was a hodgepodge of initiatives that Jones saw clearly as an attempt to undermine his already tenuous authority over the French captains. He duly sent a protest to Franklin, but not before he signed the concordat himself. On August 14, the squadron sailed, accompanied by two privateers, the Monsieur and the Grand Ville.20

  After his cruise with the Ranger, Jones’s mere name was sure to strike terror along the British coastline, and a squadron of this size guaranteed that the Royal Navy would bend every available sail in their desire to hunt Jones down. Sartine cautioned Jones against any Whitehaven-like raids, advising him to concentrate on taking prizes at sea, which would keep the British guessing about both his whereabouts and his destination.

  This squadron was small potatoes to Sartine, who still intended it to serve as a decoy for the combined Franco-Spanish fleet under Admiral d’Orvilliers, now bearing down on England. Four British ships spotted the forty-five ships off the Scillies, a cluster of small islands off southeast England. To one English officer, the fleet looked “like a wood on the water.”21

  On August 17, the fleet was off Plymouth, raising hope in Mill Prison. While prisoners prayed that they were about to be rescued, Gustavus Conyngham wrote in his journal how the fearful townsfolk fled into the forts that evening. As alarm guns boomed into the night, the men of Plymouth threw up ditches and earthworks, anticipating the worst. “All in confusion,” Conyngham happily noted.22

  But poor planning and bad luck took the wind out of the fleet’s sails and the will to fight out of d’Orvilliers. If no British force stood out to fight him, d’Orvilliers was supposed to establish a beachhead at Cornwall. He soon spotted a British fleet of thirty-eight ships. Their commander, Admiral Sir Charles Hardy, took d’Orvilliers on a two-day chase away from England.

  D’Orvilliers had been at sea for weeks before he entered the channel, and he was already low on supplies. Epidemics of smallpox, typhus, and scurvy infected sailor and soldier. Thousands became ill; hundreds died—including d’Orvilliers’s only son. The admiral sailed for Brest, where 7,000 Frenchmen were carted off to hospitals. There would be no invasion of England. Jones’s mission was now the only act on the stage.23

  “I had before me the most flattering prospect of rendering essential service to the common Cause of France & America,” Jones wrote to Franklin before sailing, confident that his captains “would persue Glory in preference to Interest.” The Bonhomme Richard was just passing Île de Groix when a topman fell off the main yard, hurtling sixty feet to his death and just missing Jones, who would have been killed himself on the spot, but the poor man only clipped Jones’s tricorn hat. As Jones bent over to retrieve it, he ordered the body removed and buried on the island.24

  Jones’s optimism about his captains was tested four days later. On August 18, the Monsieur captured a small merchantman. What should have been a squadron prize was, in the privateer captain’s eyes, his alone. When Jones discovered him looting the ship’s hold of brandy and wine, he ordered the ship sent to l’Orient as a squadron prize. Privateers being privateers, the Monsieur slipped away, followed by the Grand Ville days later. Soon afterwards another prize, the brigantine Mayflower, carrying salt and butter, was also sent to l’Orient.

  The squadron was becalmed off Cape Clear, the southernmost tip of Ireland, on the twenty-third, when the current and flood tide sent the Bonhomme Richard towards the rocks. Jones ordered out his barge to row his flagship to safety, placing it under command of the same man he had flogged for abandoning Jones for a l’Orient tavern. Fog set in and . . . let Jones explain: “Soon after Sunset the Villains who Towed the ship cut their Rope and Decamped with my Barge.” While one of the 9-pounders was fired in an attempt to cow the deserters back to ship, a longboat was manned and sent off in pursuit. It, too, disappeared, never to return.25

  “Hot Sultry Weather” greeted the becalmed squadron the next day, as Jones cruised the bay searching for the deserters. After two days he sent the Cerf closer to shore when a storm struck, and the cutter became the next to disappear (she eventually made for l’Orient). The tempest showed further evidence that the Bonhomme Richard was past her prime. Seams opened, and her old pumps required manning day and night. When a gun on the lower deck came loose from its tackle and bolts, it smashed into the hull, threatening to sink the ship by itself. To Midshipman Fanning, the old East Indiaman “appeared to have as many joints as a rattlesnake.”26

  Between weathering storms and looking for his missing vessels, Jones refused Landais’s request to let the Alliance pursue a strange sail. On the twenty-fifth, the Frenchman’s longboat bumped against the commodore’s flagship, and Jones’s l’enfant terrible came aboard.

  Landais immediately abandoned any show of respect for the commodore, berating Jones for losing his boats and the Cerf before telling the Scotsman that he, the Frenchman, “was the only American in the squadron,” having been made an honorary citizen of Massachusetts. Jones did his best to suppress his temper, but when Landais added that Jones’s ineptitude caused the loss of the boats, he exploded. According to Landais, Jones called him a liar, but other witnesses disputed this.

  Landais was an accomplished duelist, particularly good with the sword (he would later wound Captain de Cottineau in a duel), but Jones did not take the bait. However, in Landais’s version, Jones agreed to meet him on the field of honor upon their return to France. From this moment on, Landais heeded neither Jones’s signals nor his written orders.27

  For the next week the squadron took numerous prizes. Jones used one “for the sake of Peace” to placate Landais, allowing the Alliance’s captain to place a prize crew on a ship the frigate had no part in capturing. Landais habitually disappeared from the squadron. Later, he would do worse.28

  By the time Jones’s squadron reached northern Scotland, they had made enough captures that the Bonhomme Richard had a large number of British prisoners below deck. But Jones’s successes went hand in hand with increasing headaches. Starting with his freewheeling captains, the loss of his boats, the Cerf gone, and now the confounding, recurring question: where was Landais? Jones was averaging three hours of sleep a night. The pressure on him did not go unnoticed; Midshipman Fanning watched as Jones kicked a lieutenant down the hatchway, only to invite him to dinner half an hour later. “Thus it was with Jone
s,” Fanning recalled. “Passionate to the highest degree one minute, and the next ready to make reconciliation.”29

  Jones did not know it, but those living on the British coastlines were not sleeping either. Once ashore in Ireland, the deserters from his boats spread the word that “the Pyrate Jones” was back. The Admiralty sent two frigates after him, making straight for Whitehaven, anticipating that Jones was heading back there to burn more shipping.30

  September 14 began with cooperative winds and sunshine as the Bonhomme Richard, Pallas, and Vengeance came up the Firth of Forth, flying British colors. A cutter approached. Her captain, thinking the Bonhomme Richard to be the British warship Romney, hailed Jones, resplendent in his pseudo-British uniform, asking if he could spare any gunpowder. Jones said yes, inviting the cutter’s pilot to come aboard.

  “What is the news on the coast?” Jones inquired.

  “Very great and bad news!” the pilot answered. “That rebel, Paul Jones, is expected to land every day.”

  Jones asked what the pilot thought of Jones and was told, “He is the greatest rebel and pirate that ever was and ought to be hanged.”

  “I am Paul Jones,” the commodore replied.

  As the unsuspecting pilot begged for his life, the bemused commodore said, “I won’t harm a hair on your head, but you are my prisoner.”31

  Jones intended to take the port of Leith—the gateway to Edinburgh—and hold it for ransom or “reduce it to Ashes.” The citizens of Leith knew who was coming and looked to their defenses. Drums beat and bagpipes blared as ragtag bands of Scotsmen gathered, carrying rusty flintlocks to defend their homeland (after Culloden the owning of firearms was prohibited in Scotland). Merchants piled their wares onto wagons, bankers carried bags of coins from their locked establishments, and villagers carried what goods they had on their backs, fleeing their homes. One old Presbyterian parson marched to the shore, planted a chair in the water, and beseeched God to turn the wind against the rebel ships.32

  Jones made preparations for the landing, the French-Irish marines changing into the uniforms of their British counterparts. Jones composed a letter to the Provost of Leith, demanding a ransom of £200,000 or Jones would destroy the town. He signaled Captains Cottineau and Ricot to come aboard for a council of war. Now came their turn to oppose Jones.

  By the time Jones overcame their objections to the raid, the prayers of the old Presbyterian minister were being answered. The wind changed, preventing Jones from getting ashore. He wanted to try again on the seventeenth, but by then the residents of Leith were convinced of the parson’s influence with the Almighty: Jones’s ships were within cannon shot of the town when a storm struck of such magnitude that one of the squadron’s prizes sank, her crew just barely rescued.33

  After the storm subsided, the squadron was off Newcastle, where Jones again met with his captains. He proposed sailing into the coal capital of the British Empire and burning the colliers in port, leaving much of England to face a very cold winter. Again, both captains were adamantly opposed. While Jones was seeking some headline-grabbing deed, “they saw the situation as most Perulous,” and told him so. “If I Obstinately continued on the Coast of England two days longer we should all be Taken,” he was assured by Cottineau. Both captains threatened to leave the squadron.

  Jones considered raiding Newcastle alone but soon abandoned the idea; Cottineau might be right, after all. The Pallas and the Vengeance sailed on ahead, compelling Jones’s old tub to catch up with them. Two more days of sailing southward netted the squadron a couple more prizes before the Frenchmen sailed over the horizon again.

  On the morning of September 23, the Bonhomme Richard’s mastheader sighted the Alliance and the Pallas. The Vengeance also came into sight. The squadron of misfit captains was back under Jones’s watchful eye.

  His cruise had created widespread fear throughout Great Britain, but all Jones knew at the time was that he had sailed around the British isles with only a handful of prizes to show for it. In two weeks he was expected in Holland to escort another convoy of French merchantmen. Haggard and sleepless, he had fought more with his French captains than against the enemy. He believed his cruise to be a disappointing failure.

  That afternoon the ships were sailing under “Pleasant Weather with [a] Moderate Brease of Wind.” The Bonhomme Richard was pursuing a distant ship when the mastheader cried down to the quarterdeck. One sail after another was sighted—at least forty ships. Below deck, Lieutenant Dale heard the commotion and came up the hatchway to find Jones giving orders to make all sail. Dale asked the captured pilot from Leith if he knew the ships. “The Baltic fleet,” he replied, “under company of the Serapis of 44 guns, and the Countess of Scarborough of twenty guns.” The squadron gave chase.

  The change in Jones’s mood was remarkable. He sent Lieutenant Henry Lunt and thirty men in one of the captured pilot boats to pursue the ship discovered before the fleet’s appearance. His squadron was sailing against the current and was impeded by the slackening SSW winds. By dusk, the ships were off Flamborough Head, just northeast of the town of Scarborough.34

  Across the water Captain Richard Pearson of the Serapis had been studying the movements of the approaching ships. For the past eight days he had convoyed forty-four merchantmen bearing military stores from Scandinavia. Pearson was forty-eight years old, with thirty years at sea behind him. He was peculiarly handsome, with sharp features encircled by a round face and a high forehead with wide-set eyes. He had been well tested by the sea, wounded in battle—six years a captain in the King’s Navy. His distinguished service was rewarded with the Serapis, a forty-four-gun frigate similar to the Roebuck: large, fast, and deadly.35

  Pearson was not surprised to see Jones’s squadron through his spyglass, having been forewarned of the rebel’s presence in these waters by the bailiff of Scarborough. The Baltic fleet was Pearson’s responsibility, and he was determined to keep every ship out of Jones’s clutches. He made two signals: one, for the merchantmen to stand in to shore; two, for the Countess of Scarborough to join the Serapis and make straight for Jones’s squadron. Duty is duty.36

  Flamborough Head juts out into the North Sea by the Yorkshire coast, easily recognizable from the water by its chalk white cliffs that rise four hundred feet from the shore. It is riddled with caves, once favorite hideouts for smugglers. Atop the cliffs, an equally white lighthouse, the oldest in England, still stands. In autumn, Flamborough Head is invaded by thousands of migratory birds. As the sun set this day, Scarborough’s citizens made their way to the cliff tops to watch their navy take on an enemy squadron that included a rebel commanding a lumbering French merchantman and a volatile Frenchman in charge of a speedy Yankee-built frigate.

  The sun would not witness the coming fight. It had begun sinking behind the cliffs just as the opposing ships made for each other and the pale moon began its ascent into the heavens. This would be a battle fought in moonlight.37

  At five p.m. Jones ordered “Beat to Quarters,” and the French-Irish marines under Colonel de Chamillard climbed the ratlines carrying their muskets. Once they reached the fighting tops, they hauled up their coehorns, a tub of water, and a basket of grenades. There was room on the Bonhomme Richard’s three tops for forty sailors and marines, a much larger contingent than was usually sent aloft. Three midshipmen were put in command, with Nathaniel Fanning in the maintop. Once the coehorns were raised, buckets of grog—enough for a double ration per marine—were brought aloft to calm nerves, deaden fear, and raise spirits.38

  In the dimly lit cockpit, Surgeon Lawrence Brooke was making his preparations for the coming battle. With the help of the “Loblolly Boys”—the youngsters named for the gruel served in sick bay—he laid out a ten-foot-square platform of planks, covering it with an unused sail. Then he set out the tools of eighteenth-century triage:

  Instruments, needles and ligatures, lint, flour in a bowl, styptic, bandages, splints, compress
es, pledges spread with yellow basilicon or some proper digestive . . . the medicine chest . . . wine, punch for grog, and vinegar aplenty . . . A bucket of water to put pongees in, another to receive blood from operations . . . Dry swabs to keep the platform dry . . . A water cask . . . to be dipped out as needed.39

  Chamillard and twenty marines joined Jones on the poop deck. Dale commanded the gun deck. Boarding weapons were placed in tubs near the gunwales—not only cutlasses, pikes, and pistols, but the shotguns and blunderbusses Jones had wanted brought aboard at l’Orient for just such a night. From the moment he first saw the Serapis through his spyglass, Jones’s battle plan was formed. If this were a single-ship encounter between the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard, the frigate would outmaneuver the old East Indiaman at every tack. But Jones had four ships—more than enough to take both British men-of-war.40

  The opposing ships were now a bit closer to each other. The squadron was on a port tack, heading west. Jones sent up a signal: a blue flag on the foremast, blue pendant at the main, and a blue and yellow flag atop the mizzenmast: Form Line of Battle.41

  Not a captain obeyed.42

  As the ships drew closer, Jones gave specific directions to the gun crews. The 18-pounders, manned by his best gunners, were to fire directly into the Serapis’s hull. Dale was to load the 12-pounders with double-shot and fire across the enemy deck to disable her masts and rigging. The 9-pounders on deck, under command of Purser Matthew Mease, were to do the same. Those manning the swivels along the rails were to join the marines aloft in taking out as many sailors on the Serapis’s deck as possible.43