John Paul Jones by Evan Thomas

Author:Evan Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2003-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

“No Sooner Seen Than Lost”

JONES HAD NO TIME to brood. At least eight Royal Navy warships, dispatched by a frantic Admiralty, were converging on Flamborough Head. The sea and wind were rising, the sky lowering. Jones and his squadron slipped over the horizen as the first of the British cruisers arrived on the scene. They split up and searched for Jones to the northeast, toward Scandinavia, to the southeast, toward Holland and France, and all around the British Isles. They never found him. Jones zigzagged in the North Sea for ten days and finally made a dash for the Texel island, the deep-water anchorage off Amsterdam, and the safety of a neutral port.

Jones’s legend was made. “Paul Jones resembles a Jack o’ Lantern, to mislead our mariners and terrify our coasts,” wrote the London Morning Post. “He is no sooner seen than lost.” As the reports of the battle began to filter back to London, the British press responded with lurid stories and illustrations. In the confused aftermath of the battle, a half-dozen British sailors who been set free from the hold of the Bonhomme Richard had stolen a small boat and rowed ashore near Flamborough Head. They described the incident of Jones throwing his pistol at the Bonhomme Richard’s carpenter, as the frightened man was trying to strike the American flag. The tale was quickly and colorfully embellished by the newspapers:

During the engagement, Paul Jones (who was dressed in a short jacket and long trousers with about twelve charged pistols slung in a belt around his middle and a cutlass in his hand) shot seven of his men for deserting from their quarters, and to his nephew, whom he thought a little dastardly, he said that damn his eyes he would not blow his brains out, but he would pepper his shins, and actually had the barbarity to shoot at the lad’s legs, who is a lieutenant in his ship.

It was important for the British establishment to depict Jones as a lowlife, a brigand who wore short jackets and trousers, not a gentleman in breeches and coat. The navy had been embarrassed and wanted to belittle its adversary. “Jones flings us all into consternation and terror, and will hinder Lady Carlisle’s sea bathing,” the Earl of Carlisle wrote, a little flippantly. A London paper sent a correspondent to Kirkbean to learn more about the devil’s incarnation; he reported back that Jones as a schoolboy had been a “blockhead” who lay in wait for his teacher and beat him almost to death. But the poems and ballads in the cheap penny chapbooks also made Jones out to be a Robin Hood figure, outfoxing the clumsy sheriff’s men.

The more abuse the press heaped on Jones—he was a “desperado,” “a good seaman but a bad man,” “a vile fellow,” “a daring pirate who has for some time past done so much mischief on the coast of Great Britain”—the greater the victory he could claim. His achievement was not simply to defeat a superior warship, but to spread fear all through Britain.

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