Neptune's Needle

The son of a gardener, who tended the estates of the Scottish gentry, John Paul, after some schooling, went to sea at age 13. During his first three years he made eight transatlantic crossings. Then he served for three years on a British slave ship. At age 21 his first real break occurred when, as a passenger aboard a British merchant ship sailing from Jamaica to England, the captain and first mate both died, he took command and brought the ship safely to port. The grateful owners then hired him as one of their captains. Although an uncertain disciplinarian, he seemed to be on his way as a successful merchant captain.

An encounter with an insubordinate crew member in Tobago, which resulted in Jones killing the man, ended his career as a merchantman and required his hasty departure to Virginia. Upon arriving at Fredericksburg in late 1773, he changed his name by adding "Jones" to it. There he found employment as a coastal sailor.

In the spring of 1775 he traveled up to Philadelphia to seek a commission in the newly forming Continnental navy. His membership in the Masons gave him an entree to Joseph Hewes, a fellow Mason and member of the Continental Congress from North Carolina, who secured him a commission as a lieutenant.

Offered command of the 70' sloop Providence, Jones declined because of his unfamiliarity with fore-and-aft rigged vessels, all his previous experience being with square-rigged ships. Instead, he accepted the second position aboard the bark Alfred, a converted merchant ship captained by Dudley Saltonstall. The Alfred participated in the first squadron action of the Continental navy in the West Indies in the spring of 1776, under the command of Esek Hopkins and comported himself well.

Upon his return to Newport in mid-1776, Jones was given command of the Providence, which he sailed out of Narragansett Bay in search of British supply ships all along the New England coast. In 1777, at the urging of Hewes, who served on the Congress's Maritime Committee, Jones was given command of a new sloop, the Ranger, under construction in Portsmouth. Once fitted out, Jones sailed the 18-gun Ranger to France, from where he hoped to begin raiding English coastal towns, so as to "annoy our enemies." One such raiding expedition in the Irish Sea in April 1778 brought Jones and a raiding party ashore in the port town of Whitehall, where he spiked the port's cannons and nearly set the town's merchant fleet afire. He then proceeded up the coast in an attempted kidnapping of the local lord, the Earl of Selkirk. The Lord was off in London but Jones's crew managed to filch his silver tea service (later returned with apologies) before departing the premises under the scornful eye of the earl's wife. Such exploits only confirmed Jones's reputation in England as a rascally pirate.

Back in France, Jones's incessant lobbying of the American delegation and the French (to one of whom he wrote that "I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm's way" -- finally secured him the use of a sizable (if not particularly fast) 14-year-old merchant ship, which he fitted out with 42 guns and renamed Bonhomme Richard, after his erstwhile patron in Paris, Benjamin Franklin. It was in the Bonhomme Richard that Jones set sail in the summer of 1779, along with three other ships under his command, intent upon raids all up and down the English coast, including a half-hearted assault on the Scottish city of Edinburgh. Coming back down the North Sea off the Yorkshire coast at the latitude of Flamborough Head, Jones happened upon the 40-gun HMS Serapis, which, along with the sloop Countess of Scarborough, was convoying the 40 merchant ships of the Baltic fleet, bringing much needed naval stores from the Baltic to England's Channel ports. The ensuing battle during the late afternoon and evening of September 23, 1779, between the Bonhomme Richard (his accompanying ships declining to engage the enemy) and the Serapis,, which Jones won in so far as the Serapis struck its colors minutes before theBonhomme Richard sunk, provided Jones with his strongest claim to immortality, even if he did not, as seems likely, respond to the British captain's question, when there had been some confusion with the Bonhomme Richard's ensign flag and whether it had been struck, with "I have not yet begun to fight."

After sailing the damaged Serapis back into the neutral port of Amsterdam, Jones was disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm generated among his superiors by his exploits. He was not given a subsequent command and ended the war on the beach. In 1782 he signed on as a mercenary in the naval fleet of Catherine the Great of Russia. He died in Paris in 1792, at age 45, and it was only in 1905, at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt, that his remains were brought to Annapolis and where he came to be regarded as the father of the American navy and its earliest advocate of aggressive naval warfare, the American Nelson. war.

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Peter Richards