The Admiral and the Ambassador

by Scott Martelle

  According to Samuel Eliot Morison, the Alliance was not “a happy ship.” Landais was a poor captain and had countenanced a fractious crew. Many of his men remained aboard, augmented now by Jones’s surviving Bonhomme Richard crew—the same crew that had been fired upon by the duplicitous Landais and his men. It made for a tense voyage, marked by spats and the occasional fistfight among the crew, and a threatened duel or two among the officers from the two ships. The Alliance took a couple of minor prizes and then put in at Coruña, Spain, for fresh water and other supplies.

  After a couple of weeks, Jones ordered the crew to get ready to set out once again, but the men balked, angry over their lack of pay and the lack of proper clothing for winter sailing in the North Atlantic—most had lost their possessions when the Bonhomme Richard went down. Jones, with the support of his lieutenants, finally persuaded the men to return to work so they could head for Lorient. Once at sea, the tensions between Jones and the crew increased when word flitted around the ship that, rather than making straight for Lorient and a payday, Jones intended to cruise for three weeks looking for more prizes.

  After some two weeks of fruitless cruising, the Alliance encountered a British warship, and Jones ordered the crew to get ready to take her. “But our crew swore they would not fight, although if we had been united we might have taken her with a great deal of ease,” Fanning wrote. When Jones was told of the rank-and-file insubordination, he gave in. “Our courses were dropped, and we in our turn ran from her, and made all the sail we could, by his order. All this time he appeared much agitated, and bit his lips often, and walked the quarter-deck muttering something to himself.” Three days later, on February 13, the Alliance anchored at Lorient.2

  The Serapis and other prizes taken by Jones’s crew were already in port, sailed there from Texel under the French flag. Jones received orders from Paris—presumably, from Franklin—to ready the Alliance for a transatlantic voyage to carry crucial communications from Europe to the Continental Congress. The Alliance was in miserable condition despite the refitting at Texel. Part of the issue was an oddly imagined placement of ballast—ordered by Landais—that made it hard to control the ship as tightly as Jones liked, a crucial lack of flexibility given the likelihood of more sea battles. Jones had the crew and port carpenters set to work, on the United States government’s bill, to ready the ship, a project that would take several months.

  But the captain managed to squeeze in some fun too. One afternoon the American agent at work in Lorient, James Moylan, boarded the ship to conduct some business with the ship’s purser; Jones went ashore leaving strict orders that no one was to leave the ship—including Moylan, an Irish-born man nearly sixty years old—until Jones returned. Moylan was “very rude in his manners … and he was what people commonly call a homely man, but rich in the good things of this world. His present wife was only about seventeen years of age, very handsome, and a little given to coquetry.”3 According to Fanning, Moylan had caught Jones in compromising positions with his wife before. This time, there would be no interrupting: Jones went straight to Moylan’s home, where he spent the afternoon and evening with Moylan’s young wife. The crew, meanwhile, got Moylan drunk and poured him into a berth, where he spent the night. The next day, gossip about Jones’s “gallantry,” as Fanning described it, swept through the port. On another occasion, Jones swept up the wife of a Lorient man and kept her in his cabin during a short cruise of a couple of weeks.

  In mid-April, Jones traveled to Paris, where he was received as a hero and presented at the royal court. Louis XVI gave him a gold-and-jewel sword. Jones also attended the opera with Marie Antoinette and was the guest of honor at a series of dinners and parties, despite his inability to speak or understand much French. (He would later gain some fluency.) Jones saw Franklin regularly, as well as a steady stream of women. The king also recommended that the French legislature bestow upon Jones the Cross of Military Merit, a first for a non-Frenchman. This would eventually lead to Jones being recognized as a chevalier, a title Jones clenched as though it was his key to the palace door. The Freemasons swore him into the elite Lodge of the Nine Sisters and then commissioned Jean Antoine Houdon, the premier sculptor of the day, to carve a bust of the naval hero. Jones trimmed his long hair by eighteen inches and sat for the artist, and once the bust was completed, contemporaries declared it an exact likeness. Jones was so pleased he ordered extra copies sent to George Washington, who kept it on display at Mount Vernon; Thomas Jefferson; and his friend Robert Morris in Philadelphia. Eventually he distributed about sixteen of the statues.4

  The trip to Paris wasn’t all pleasure, though. Jones was trying to pressure the French to sell the Serapis and other prizes so he could collect the money needed to pay his crew members, who were becoming mutinous again as they heard “of Jones’s gay doings in Paris…. While the Commodore was making love to countesses and sleeping with scented courtesans, they hadn’t enough money to buy a drink or command the services of such poor trollops as a seaport provided for enlisted men.”5 Jones was also pushing plans for a joint American-French naval attack on British waters.

  Jones was frustrated on both fronts, and by late May was back at Lorient empty-handed and overseeing the final reconditioning of the Alliance. Landais surfaced in the port town by early June, though he largely stayed away from the wharf and out of sight, according to Fanning. He had booked passage to America, where he was to stand court martial, but he was hardly a chastened man and in fact was making plans for yet another act of duplicity. On the afternoon of June 23, Jones was ashore for a social call, and his officers were below deck eating, when they heard shouts from above. Scrambling topside, they found their ship freshly manned, and Landais striding back and forth. As soon as Jones’s officers were assembled, Landais claimed that his commission by the Continental Congress gave him command of the Alliance, and neither Franklin, in Paris, nor Jones could countermand that. He was taking control of the ship and would sail it to America. And, he said, if any officer aboard could not accept his captaincy, the officer was to go ashore immediately. The crew was given no option. All but one of the officers left the Alliance.

  Houdon bust of John Paul Jones, one of which was used to preliminarily identify his body in Paris.

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number HABS MD,2-ANNA,65/1--24

  Jones was livid and set off for Paris to consult with Franklin and French naval officials, but by the time he returned, Landais had moved the Alliance to an offshore anchorage. The entry to the port was a well-protected narrows, and at Jones’s request the French dropped a boom across the mouth to preclude the Alliance from leaving. As violent confrontation loomed, Jones backed off, striking a diplomatic pose by saying that French cannons firing on a French captain sailing an American ship would benefit only the British. He let the Alliance leave for America. Morison, Jones’s insightful biographer, suspected Jones let the ship go because he didn’t like sailing it and wanted to be rid of Landais, whose acts of treachery would catch up with him. As the Alliance neared Philadelphia, Landais’s officers seized control and steered for Boston, where Landais was called before a court of inquiry and, after a hearing, kicked out of the navy.

  Shipless, Jones returned to Paris for a short stay and presumably discussed the events at Lorient with Franklin. He was lobbying hard to be given the Serapis, but the French refused to give her up. In July, Jones was back at Lorient and had a fresh ship to command—the twenty-four-gun Ariel, which the French had captured from the British. Jones once again oversaw a refitting, and on October 7, 1780, the Ariel set out as part of a convoy of fourteen America-bound ships. They almost immediately encountered a massive tempest with “mountain seas,” as Fanning described the waves, which the Ariel barely survived. It was an epic storm; the French coast was littered with ships blown aground. After the storm passed, the Ariel limped back into port for another full refitting—the masts and sails were all but gone.

  By
now, Jones’s celebrity in Lorient was waning, in part because of his own sexual escapades, viewed as scandalous by many of the local residents, not to mention the cuckolded husbands. Jones added to his troubles with an odd set of actions, as recounted by Fanning. He had persuaded an Irishborn passenger named Sullivan to stay on the ship for several days after it made its way back to port to oversee a contingent of marines aboard ship. As Jones kept extending his need of Sullivan, the man eventually demanded to be let ashore. Jones instead ordered him thrown in chains and held below. Sullivan won his release through the intercession of friends in Lorient and then stalked Jones to a room the captain was renting in port and beat him savagely with a cane. Several days later, Jones was again beaten by a member of the military garrison after refusing a challenge to a duel.6 Twice battered, Fanning reports, Jones rarely left the ship again until it set out again for America, but only after further straining local relations when he rounded out his crew by pressing into service—essentially, kidnapping—a number of American sailors at port in Lorient.7

  Jones set sail around December 12. With his guns reduced and his hold full of military supplies (not to mention volatile gunpowder) and other cargo for America, he chose a southern route in hopes of avoiding a battle. He almost succeeded. Near the end of the voyage, a loyalist privateer far faster than the Ariel approached. Jones ordered the Ariel’s deck cleared, the gun ports closed, and a detachment of French marines to stay ready below deck. Hoisting a British flag, Jones struck a pose as a British captain and demanded that the privateer, the Triumph, account for itself. After a shouted exchange, he ordered Triumph’s captain to present his papers aboard the Ariel; the captain refused. Jones ordered the Stars and Stripes hoisted and directed his men to fire; they did, strafing the deck of the Triumph. The gambit caught the Triumph by surprise, and after a weak attempt at defense, the captain, John Pindar, surrendered.

  Yet Jones wasn’t the only commander capable of a ruse. As Jones was distracted issuing orders to seal the victory and assemble a crew to sail the Triumph to the United States as a prize, Pindar suddenly ordered his men to unfurl the sails. The ship sprinted away before Jones could maneuver the Ariel into a position in which it could use its cannons. The duplicitous Jones had been outmaneuvered. There was nothing left to do but set out again for Philadelphia. En route Jones caught wind of a mutiny plot and headed it off; the Ariel sailed into port with twenty crew members in irons but its cargo of military supplies, French soldiers, and letters from Franklin and the French government to the Continental Congress intact.

  The voyage of the Ariel was Jones’s last sailing command for the US Navy. The Ariel was returned to the French, who sailed it back to Europe. Jones sat through a board of inquiry to satisfy lingering questions about the Landais affair. Jones was cleared, but his volatile personality and reputation had long ago soured his peers in the navy. Jones desperately wanted to be named admiral and be placed in charge of the entire US Navy, but he was much less savvy on the battlefield of politics than at sea. Backroom communications by fellow captains—Captain James Nicholson prime among them—with members of Congress raised the specter of high-level dissent should Jones be made admiral. So Congress did what it has done ever since: it failed to act. Jones didn’t get his promotion, but his friend Robert Morris, who was overseeing naval operations, arranged a consolation prize. He gave Jones command of the America, which was under construction in Portsmouth and would be the largest fighting ship in the small and ineffectual American fleet.

  Jones arrived in Portsmouth on August 31, 1781, his first visit to the city in the four years since he had overseen the fitting-out of the Ranger. Jones found many old friends waiting to greet him; old frictions had been smoothed by time and his growing fame.

  One relationship, though, picked up right where it left off. John Langdon, the wealthy and irascible builder of the Ranger, was also building the America. Jones discovered the ship had barely progressed beyond the framing-out stage, and Langdon was unwilling to assign more than three or four workers at a time to the project. Jones and Langdon’s antagonistic relationship renewed to the point that they weren’t speaking and instead communicated through an intermediary—Morris in Philadelphia. This meant decisions that could have been made in minutes now took weeks. And Jones’s professional life was about to get more complicated.

  In July 1782 a French squadron arrived at Boston harbor and, after taking on an American pilot to guide them into port, three of its ships went aground. Two were refloated, but the third broke apart on the rocks. To recompense the French, the Continental Congress turned over the America to its European allies, robbing Jones of his command. He stayed with the project until the ship launched, and then the chevalier watched as the French took command of it.

  Jones was again without a ship, and by now the Revolutionary War was in its final stages. The French navy had driven the British out of Chesapeake Bay the previous fall, and Lord Cornwallis had surrendered his troops at Yorktown. In November 1782 the Americans and the British signed the initial articles of peace.

  Seeing the end in sight and seeking a better understanding of—and contacts within—the French navy, Jones secured permission to sail the Caribbean with a French fleet to study its operations. The tropics were not kind to the native Scotsman: he came down with a persistent fever, probably malaria, which laid him low. He was slow to recuperate and, once back in Philadelphia, still felt the effects of the illness. In May 1783 Jones went to a sanitarium in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for the summer and finally regained his health.

  And, it should be noted, his ambitions.

  With the war over, Jones was anxious to create a future for himself. He contemplated settling down as a farmer, but a plan to buy land in New Jersey fell through. He wrote letters and advised his friend Morris that if the United States was to survive, it would need a true navy and not a hodgepodge of hastily drawn together privateers and merchant seamen—an institution that trained young sailors for sea and young leaders for commands. It was likely the first vision for what would become the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.

  None of those ideas sparked a new life for Jones. Finally, though, he hatched a plan that took root. Jones and his crews were still owed tens of thousands of dollars from prizes they had seized during the war and sent to Danish and French ports. Jones persuaded Congress to deputize him to go to Paris to pursue settlement of those claims. It took some three years for the accounts to be settled (and decades more for the heirs of Jones and his crew to get their shares), a frustrating marathon of claims, counterclaims, and French royal bureaucracy. By the time the work ended, Jones was hungry for a next step. He dallied in the merchant world, concocting then aborting a scheme to trade otter pelts from the Pacific Northwest with Far East merchants, and losing money on a short-lived project to import American goods to Lorient. A sailor and fighter he might have been; a merchant he was not.

  In Paris, Jones kept up his romances and his social life. But he pined to lead a navy. In 1786, he wrote a memoir of his life at sea for an audience of one: Louis XVI. The work reads like an immense job application. But the French king had no need of his services. Jones sailed for Denmark, hoping to recoup more prize money, but then, running low on cash, he decamped for the United States.

  Jones spent the summer of 1787 in New York City, staying with his friend Robert Hyslop as he waited for the new Congress gathered at Philadelphia—which would sign the new Constitution—to approve his settlements for the prize money he was owed. By December, he was back in Paris, where good news awaited him. Jefferson, then the US representative to France, told him that the Russian ambassador to Louis XVI’s court had asked if Jones might be available for service under the czarina, Catherine the Great, who was heading to another war against the Ottoman Empire in the Black Sea.

  Jones, it seemed, was about to get the fleet command he so hungered for.

  Jones was still trying to wrest a settlement out of Denmark for three British ships he had cap
tured and sent to the Norwegian coastal city of Bergen, bounty that the Danes—who then controlled the city—turned back over to the British in what the United States considered a violation of international law. To push the issue, Jones traveled by carriage from Paris to Copenhagen. The late-winter trek took several days, during which time Jones caught a chill; he fell ill when he arrived on March 4, 1788. Following a few days of convalescence, Jones was presented to Danish officials, who, after some vacillation, told him that he had no authority to negotiate the issue and that it must be done in Paris by Jefferson.

  Jones was flummoxed, but not particularly upset, for in Copenhagen he wasn’t talking only to the Danes. He met several times with Baron Krudner, the Russian envoy to Denmark, and through him cemented the deal that would give him a command in the Imperial Navy. It was a delicate situation, and Jones went to pains to clear the assignment first with Jefferson, saying that while he was an American citizen, his services were not needed by the United States and he wished to sail for the czarina unless the United States saw a conflict. There was none.

  Catherine II was one of the most powerful women to ever engage in international relations. She was a minor German princess by birth, betrothed to the inept Peter III when both were teenagers. She supplanted him in 1762 in a bloodless coup (he was quietly strangled shortly afterward by members of her inner circle) and, through a masterful grasp of politics and manipulation, quickly assumed tight and ambitious control. As empress, Catherine added to the empire in significant ways, pushing westward into Europe and eastward as far as Alaska. Most significantly for Jones, she also pushed southward and engaged in a series of wars and skirmishes with the Ottoman Empire. In the winter of 1788, the Ottomans were fighting to regain territory in the Crimea lost in the war of 1768–74. And while some of the fighting was land based, a key battleground was the Black Sea, which was why Catherine was looking to add Jones to her stable of naval commanders.