Jones, John Paul

Jones, John Paul (1747–92), American naval officer, born at Kirkbean, Galloway, son of John Paul, gardener on the Arbigland estate. At the age of 12 he sailed as a cabin boy to Virginia, where his elder brother had settled as a tailor, and in 1766 obtained work as chief mate aboard a ship involved in the slave trade. He returned home two years later and was appointed a master, making voyages from the Solway Firth, London, and Africa to the West Indies and Virginia. In 1772 he bought a ship in the West Indies, but having killed a mutinous seaman in self-defence, he changed his name to John Jones, and fled to Virginia in 1773. When fighting broke out between England and the thirteen colonies, and Congress formed the Continental Navy, John Paul Jones, as he now called himself, was commissioned as first lieutenant, and distinguished himself in action against the British, capturing several prizes and sinking several others.

In 1777, after promotion to captain, he was appointed to command a sloop. He sailed to Nantes and then visited Paris, where Benjamin Franklin, commissioner of the American colonies in France, judging him to be a brave fighting man, took him under his wing. On receiving orders to cruise about the British Isles to ‘distress’ the enemy, Jones launched a series of shore raids. On the night of 22/23 April 1778, he raided Whitehaven, hoping to destroy with incendiaries the large number of ships in the harbour. However, the landings were bungled and little damage was done, but the moral effect was immense.

Then, on the morning of 23 April Jones landed with a boat's crew on St Mary's Isle, intending to abduct the owner, the fourth Earl of Selkirk, so as to obtain the release of several hundred American sailors who had been captured in battle and were in English jails with indictments for treason hanging over them. The earl was not there and Jones's men, who disliked profitless raids, seized the family silver, but afterwards Jones apologized, bought back the silver from his men, and returned it. A more satisfactory exploit, on 24 April, was the sloop's battle off Belfast Lough with HMS Drake which, after an hour of close combat, surrendered. Jones eventually got his prize safely into Brest, together with 200 prisoners of war who were exchanged for the American sailors in English prisons.

Jones's next command was a squadron comprising the new USS Alliance, three French vessels, a frigate, corvette, and cutter, all flying the American ensign, and Jones's flagship, an East Indiaman bought for him by the French government and renamed Bon Homme Richard as a compliment to Franklin. With infinite difficulty Jones got the Bon Homme Richard converted, gunned, equipped, and manned, and the squadron sailed from Lorient on 14 August 1779. It was soon weakened—the cutter got lost, the Alliance went off prize-taking on her own account—but on 23 September 1779 Jones bravely intercepted a Baltic convoy of 44 vessels escorted by two Royal Navy warships, HMS Serapis and HMS Countess of Scarborough. What ensued was one of the bitterest naval encounters of the century, known as the battle of Flamborough Head. The two naval escorts, after covering the escape of the convoy, closed with the squadron. The Serapis grappled the Bon Homme Richard, in an attempt to board her, and a desperate fight ensued which caused heavy casualties on both sides, but eventually the Serapis caught fire and was forced to surrender. The losses in each ship were high, 128 killed and wounded in the Serapis, 150 in the Bon Homme Richard.

Jones's flagship was so badly damaged that she sank two days later, and Jones transferred with the remains of his crew to the captured Serapis. With the rest of his squadron, he then sought refuge in the Texel on 3 October; and after delays, caused by repairs, neutrality complications, and a British blockade, he sailed for Corunna on 27 December, now flying his flag in the Alliance which had rejoined him. After sailing to Corunna, he reached Lorient on 17 February 1780 and proceeded to Paris where he found himself a hero. After some weeks he returned to America in the sloop Ariel, where Congress gave him command of the America, the only 74-gun ship in the country, then being built at Portsmouth, NH. However, after working hard to get her completed and launched, he lost her in 1782 because Congress, unwilling to support a peacetime navy, presented her to France.

Jones spent much of the rest of his life in France, going through the tiresome business of collecting prize money due to his squadron, and endeavouring without success to obtain a command in the French Navy. Eventually, he obtained the rank of rear admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy, and was given command of a squadron of nine frigates on the Liman of the Dnieper, where Russia was trying to capture Ochakov from the Turks.

The Russian Black Sea Fleet was a scratch collection of shoal draft vessels manned by impressed serfs, Cossacks, Volga boatmen, and Levantine pirates, officered in part by adventurers of six or seven nations. The Empress Catherine felt that only an outstanding naval officer from another country could weld this motley collection into a real fighting force. Possibly Jones could have done so had he not got into the ill graces of Prince Potemkin, the commander-in-chief after whom the battleship Potemkin was later named. Potemkin resented having another foreign officer of flag rank on his hands, but Jones got to fight the Turks and won the two battles of Liman, on 6 and 17 June 1788. But Prince Nassau-Siegen, commander of the light flotilla, received all the credit from Potemkin, and Jones was left out of the list of honours. He won the respect and loyalty of the Russian naval officers under him, but that did not help him with the commander-in-chief who relieved him of his post and sent him to St Petersburg to await orders.

Jones waited there through the winter of 1788–9. In the spring an important personage, probably Prince Nassau-Siegen, arranged to have him falsely charged with rape. Jones now had little alternative but to leave Russia and between 1790 and 1792 he lived in Paris and spent his time writing letters to anyone who might find him a post at sea or in the diplomatic service. Eventually, two commissions from President Washington, dated 1 and 2 June 1792, appointed him American consul in Algeria and plenipotentiary to negotiate with the Dey of Algiers for the release of American prisoners. It was too late, for on 18 July 1792, before the commissions reached France, Jones died from an attack of bronchial pneumonia, complicated by jaundice and nephritis.

The Legislative Assembly gave him a state funeral, and he was buried in an unmarked grave in the Protestant cemetery on rue Granges-aux-Belles. In 1905 the lead coffin was exhumed, and the body identified. It was then carried across the Atlantic in an American cruiser escorted by three others, and was met off Nantucket by seven battleships, and his remains were laid to rest in a marble sarcophagus in the crypt of the Naval Academy chapel at Annapolis.

The diminutive Jones was egotistical, extremely ambitious, and an aggressive self-promoter. He wanted most to be an admiral, and when that was not forthcoming in American service, he readily went elsewhere. Nevertheless, he proved himself to be a superb fighter, an impeccable seaman, and a thoughtful and forceful writer on naval education.

Bibliography

Morison, S. E. , John Paul Jones (1959).