The Admiral and the Ambassador

by Scott Martelle

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Horace Porter Collection, Manuscript Division

  Most of the news reports out of Paris focused on the found coffin and the likelihood that Jones was in it. Speculation turned to probability. The New York Times printed a two-paragraph story the next day reporting that “a metal casket, which is believed to contain the bones of John Paul Jones, has been found 16 feet below a grain shed at 14 Rue Grange aux Belles.” In addition to getting the address wrong, it said Porter and others involved with the dig believed the bones were Jones’s; while they were hopeful, they in fact had no basis to believe it was the right coffin and made no such claim. The story went on to say that the coffin would be opened the next day—another error—and that the “time worn” nameplate was indecipherable.7

  But those weren’t Porter’s only problems with the media. From the beginning of the project, Porter had been concerned about intruders at the work site. When the lead coffin was found, he sent word to the prefect of police asking that two officers be assigned to watch over the site, particularly late at night through the early morning, when the workers were gone. “Late in the evening I learned that, owing to his absence from his office and an error in getting the communication to him, there would be no guard there that night,” Porter wrote later. “I could not help feeling some forebodings, and my state of mind may be imagined upon receiving a brief note early the next morning from an official saying he regretted to inform me that there had unfortunately been a depredation committed in the gallery where the leaden coffin was found.”

  Porter hurried to the site feeling “like a person who had delayed a day too long in insuring his property and learned that it had taken fire.” But the damage, as it turned out, was minimal. “An enterprising reporter and photographer … had succeeded in opening the gate, getting into the yard, and entering the gallery. In the darkness they had stumbled and broken their [camera] apparatus, and in trying to use one which our men had left in the gallery had broken it also.” Some camera pieces were missing, but otherwise the site was unscathed.

  Porter received a report on the nameplate the next day from André, the art restorer, who had been able to work his magic on the severely damaged piece of metal. The front of the nameplate was beyond recovery, so he went to work on the reverse side, which had spent most of its time underground affixed to the wooden casket and thus was less rusted. Working carefully over two days, André cleared away the dirt and sufficient rust to read some of the engraved letters in reverse, enough to conclude that the coffin held the body of an Englishman who had died May 20, 1790, nearly two years before Jones. It was the wrong coffin, he told Porter.

  By then, though, press accounts were swirling. “A reporter with a lively imagination could not wait for the deciphering of the plate and meanwhile invented a highly dramatic story,” Porter recalled later. A story appeared saying “there was such certainty entertained that this leaden coffin contained the body of Paul Jones that I had summoned the personnel of the embassy and others to the scene, including the commissary of police who attended ornamented with his tricolored scarf.” The coffin was opened “with great ceremony and solemnity, and the group, deeply affected, stood reverently, with bowed heads, awaiting the recognition of the body of the illustrious sailor” before it became clear that “a serious error had been made.” None of that had happened, and it bothered Porter that the fictitious story had been printed. More importantly, people in some quarters believed the article, leading to criticism that the ambassador and his work crews didn’t know what they were doing and were ready to conclude on the flimsiest evidence that they had succeeded.8

  The crews kept digging, but they had little to show for it beyond a deeper and more intricate maze of tunnels. Progress was slow. The area under the laundry was explored, but no other lead coffins were found. The terrain was dangerous and unstable and beleaguered by “infiltrations of water,” Weiss said, so “all the galleries were rapidly and carefully refilled and the work of exploring the property of the grain dealer begun.” The other three shafts were sunk and the galleries were then expanded below ground.

  Finally, on March 23, a month after the first lead coffin was found, a crew digging near what had been the back wall of the cemetery discovered another wooden casket with a smaller lead coffin inside. This coffin had a well-preserved nameplate that identified the dead man as RICHARD HAY, ESQ., who had died in January 29, 1785. Not only was it not Jones, but Hay had been buried seven years before Jones, calling into question Porter’s theory that the cemetery had been filled from the center outward. If Porter was disappointed or beginning to question the project, he didn’t reveal it in any surviving records.9

  The crews worked on. Eight days later, they hit another lead coffin, this one within a few yards of the second discovered coffin, both near the foot of Shaft E, the last to be sunk. (No explanation could be found as to why it took so long to find the third coffin given its proximity to the second one.) It, too, had been encased in a wooden casket, but this one had suffered the ravages of a century underground. Little of the outer wooden casket was found beyond rotted shards. A skeleton with no coffin of its own was lying atop the lead coffin, and the wooden lid was missing altogether, which meant there also was no nameplate. Workers sifted through the earth excavated from around the coffin but found nothing. Weiss supposed that the lid had been taken up and discarded at the time the coffin-less body had been buried. The workers pulled the coffin and exposed skeleton out of the earth, then carted the metal box to an open area in the gallery. Porter again was summoned.

  The ambassador, looking at the crenulated metal, decided to open the lead coffin there underground, in part to dampen public speculation. The air was already so foul that Porter was persuaded to wait, fearing that the added odors from the open coffin would be overpowering in the close, dank space. Crews got to work extending the gallery to connect with a main tunnel emanating from Shaft A, on the opposite side of the cemetery. Once they were connected, this created a ventilation circuit, and the foul air improved considerably. It delayed the opening of the coffin for a week.

  Finally, on April 7, Porter was alerted that the site was ready. He brought Bailly-Blanchard with him. Weiss was there too, as was a M. Géninet, Weiss’s on-site supervisor for the project. The visitors all donned long smocks over their suits, and even deep below ground all but Weiss wore bowler hats. The workers took a break and gathered around as well, curious, all, as to what they would find.

  The lead coffin had been placed atop a mound of dirt in a low-ceilinged gallery. The years and the weight of fifteen feet or so of earth had crumpled it so that the coffin looked like an elongated can crushed by giant hands. The original shape was still clear, though: narrow at the feet then broadening gradually to the shoulders before narrowing again to a rounded section for the head. There was a small solder plug sealing a hole near the head, and close by was a rough and jagged hole packed with darkened earth. It looked, Porter thought, as though it had been made by the end of a pickax, and he wondered if, sometime after the burial, someone had dug down and struck through the wooden top, piercing the lead coffin below. Maybe it was whoever had buried the skeleton found atop the coffin. There was a second hole in the coffin, too, a small crack near the foot, which Porter concluded had been caused by the shifting and settling of the earth from above. It, too, was packed with darkened dirt.

  The coffin had been sealed shut before it was buried, and Porter was concerned that it be protected as much as possible from further damage. So the workers took their time removing the thin line of solder from the seam. When they finished, the top was carefully pried loose and lifted, filling the gallery with the smell of alcohol. There was no liquid, though. It had apparently evaporated slowly over time through the pickax hole and the crack at the feet, which the men decided accounted for the discolored earth in the holes.

  The first thing the men saw was a packed layer of hay. After carefully removing a few handfuls, they found a body w
rapped in a long linen burial sheet. More hay had been jammed between the corpse and the walls of the coffin, as though prepared for a long, bumpy journey. The packing was

  John Paul Jones’s lead coffin, with, from left, an unidentified man; M. Géninet, a public works foreman; Paul Weiss, who led the excavation project; Arthur Bailly-Blanchard, second secretary at the US embassy; and ambassador Horace Porter.

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Horace Porter Collection, Manuscript Division seen as a good sign, since Blackden’s letter to Jones’s sister had mentioned that the admiral’s body had been interred in such a way that it could be exhumed and shipped to the United States. Excitement built.

  One of the men measured the body at five feet, seven inches long, the recorded height of Jones. They placed a half dozen lit candles on the dirt pile around the top of the coffin and carefully began unraveling the linen sheets from the head and upper torso of the body, revealing the face. “To our intense surprise, the body was marvelously well preserved, all the flesh remaining intact, very slightly shrunken, and of a grayish brown or tan color,” Porter said. The skin was pliable and moist, as was the linen wrap, and “the face presented quite a natural appearance” except for the nose. The cartilage at the tip had been bent sharply to the side, as though the nose had been crushed by the lid.

  Porter and several of the other men had with them the Jones medallions Porter had ordered from the mint while he was conducting the records search. One was pulled out and placed next to the head. Both had the same broad forehead, similar-shaped brows, the same cheekbone structure, “prominently arched eye orbits,” and long, flowing hair. “Paul Jones!” some of the men shouted. Porter was ecstatic. “All those who were gathered about the coffin removed their hats, feeling that they were standing in the presence of the illustrious dead—the object of the long search.”

  They had found John Paul Jones. But for now, it would be a secret.

  Porter knew he needed more proof than his gut feeling and the well-preserved corpse’s resemblance to a face on a medal. Before the dig began, Porter had arranged with several Parisian-based experts in forensics to look over the body should it be found. One of them was Louis Capitan, a doctor and highly respected archeologist and anthropologist. Word was sent to the École d’Anthropologie, where Capitan worked and taught, to let him know a body had been found and that Porter thought it was likely Jones. Capitan replied via messenger that he was busy that day and Porter should reseal the coffin with plaster until he could get there. The linen was replaced around the head, the coffin lid set into a bead of plaster along the bottom lip, and the body sealed away.

  Capitan arrived the next day and descended the ladder to the subterranean gallery. Despite his confidence that he had the right body, Porter was too meticulous to suspend the search. So workers scurried by, and the voices and sounds of digging echoed through the candle-lit tunnels. In fact, over the next week or so the men would find two more lead coffins, one with a nameplate identifying it as someone other than Jones, and the second without a name tag but holding a corpse well over six feet in height and clearly not that of the diminutive Jones. And with Porter trying to keep the discovery out of the newspapers for the time being, it was important that the daily gathering of the curious see the site consistently busy.

  Capitan looked around the gallery. It was a close, ill-lit space with no room for a proper examination table. He decided conditions were too primitive and too busy for a proper examination. He conferred with Weiss and they decided to move the coffin to the École de Médecine. Capitan went first to the local police prefecture and explained the plan, asking for discretion, and then to the medical school, where he enlisted the aid and cooperation of the key figures there. That night, after the small crowd of curious Parisians had faded away, the coffin was carefully lifted to the surface, secretly loaded onto a cart, and hauled off to the medical school.

  The next morning, an august gathering of medical experts surrounded the coffin, which had been placed on a glistening steel table. Capitan was there, as were Dr. Georges Papillault, an anthropologist who would study the anatomical details of the body; Dr. Georges Herve, who oversaw the work; Dr. A. Javal, a government physician; and J. Pray, a police official. Weiss and Porter were there too, along with Bailly-Blanchard, Gowdy, and several other men. In all, a dozen men would take part in or witness different aspects of the examination and autopsy, which would stretch over nearly a week.

  The plaster seal was knocked loose and the lid carefully lifted away. The first issue was how to remove the corpse from its tight packing without risk of damage. They decided the safest approach would be to cut away the lead coffin. The metal was split at the head and the feet and then pulled apart, releasing the pressure and loosening the compacted hay. Then, very delicately, the body was picked up and moved to a dissecting table, where the linen was carefully unwrapped to reveal a man clad only in a long linen shirt decorated with plaits and ruffles. Exposure to the air two days earlier had already begun to affect it. Facial skin that had been moist and soft was now sunken and leathery, with the lips pulling back from the teeth in a grimace. Capitan noted that the body was so well preserved that the ligaments and muscles still kept the skeleton intact—they were able to move the body as a whole, without it falling apart, despite the more than 110 years that had elapsed since the man’s death.

  The hands, feet, and legs were wrapped loosely in foil, a common burial practice in the late 1700s, when the Saint Louis cemetery was accepting bodies. The arms were folded across the chest, and the doctor straightened them to make it easier to examine the body. Porter reached out and gently picked up the right hand, as though to shake it in greeting. The knuckle joints bent easily, and the skin was soft to the touch. The face bore the stubble of a man who hadn’t shaved for a few days. The right eye was closed and the left slightly open, and lines had been creased into the skin from the linen wrap. The near-black hair had gone gray at the temples, and the bulk of it, some thirty inches long, was collected at the nape, rolled into a bun and wrapped in a linen cap with an odd bit of stitching that looked like the letter “J” from one view, but like the letter “P” when turned upside down.

  They removed the linen shirt, along with the remnants of the foil, and positioned the corpse in a sitting position for a series of photographs. They then carefully examined the exterior of the body and found no scars or malformations. The skin was dark in tone, and the torso was flecked with small white crystals, part of what the doctors called the “autolytic process”—the conversion of enzymes after death but before the alcohol bath could begin to preserve the flesh.

  Papillault carefully measured the body, now lying flat on the table. Consistent with the initial measurement at the cemetery site, he recorded it as five feet, seven inches long. Papillault then took a series of measurements of different elements of the corpse, creating an exhaustive collection of human topography. He focused particularly on the face, taking down its length and width, the dimension of the lips, and the chin. The plan was to match those measurements against the bust of Jones created by Jean Antoine Houdon when Jones was alive, a bust that Jones’s contemporaries had described as a near-perfect likeness. Paris’s Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro had a copy, and Porter used his connections to gain permission to use it for comparison purposes.

  It was not a perfect method, Papillault acknowledged. Allowances had to be made for artistic distortion, and a century-old corpse lacks the full-fleshed look of a living man modeling for his sculptor. “We had nothing to compare therewith but a skeleton covered with a tanned skin and shrunken tissues,” Papillault wrote later. Still, any sculptor of skill and repute would deliver a bust that resembled the subject in close details, he believed, or the sculptor wouldn’t have much in the way of commissions. Not perfect, no, but it would be good enough for their purposes. Especially since the bust and the corpse had an identical malformation of the earlobe—not the kind of tweak an artist would likely make for the sake o
f his art.

  It took a couple of days for all of the measurements to be taken, checked, and double-checked. The corpse was photographed in several details, though by now the air had dried out the flesh until it looked like an ancient mummy. A hair sample was washed clean and its color noted as dark brown to black, which matched contemporary descriptions of Jones as being a dark-complexioned Scotsman, with dark hair and eyes. Capitan and Papillault also reviewed the paper trail that Porter and his deputies had amassed, including the contemporary descriptions of Jones’s burial. There was nothing in their first examination of the body to suggest another conclusion, Papillault reported. The body was Jones, he felt.

  Yet they pressed on, seeking certitude.

  The doctors went to work on the internal organs. Not wanting to disfigure the corpse in a way that would be visible, Capitan turned the body face down and then carefully cut deeply into the back of the torso. A small amount of discolored alcohol leaked out onto the table, and Capitan “was greatly astonished” to find the internal organs contracted but preserved, like a lab specimen. He began with the lungs, which held small whitish crystals, but also “small rounded masses, hard and at times calcified,” scars caused by pneumonia, from which Jones had suffered while in the service of Catherine the Great. The heart was “the color of dead leaves” yet remained soft and flexible, and had been healthy at the time of death. The spleen was larger than it should have been, but the rest of the major organs were healthy and unscarred. Except for the kidneys. They were “small, hard, and contracted,” much more so than would be accounted for by the general changes in the corpse after death. Capitan concluded they were diseased, affected by interstitial nephritis, and that the damage to the lungs suggested “a patient rather pronouncedly consumptive.” Capitan took small samples of each of the organs and set them aside, then carefully placed the organs back in the thoracic cavity and sewed the skin shut.