The New Student's Reference Work/Jones, John Paul

Jones, John Paul (1747–92). In 1761 a sea-captain brought a sailing vessel with a cargo of Virginia tobacco into the harbor of Whitehaven, a sea-port on the English shore of Solway Frith. One evening, with a crowd of spectators on the stone pier, he watched a boy bring in his fishing-boat in the teeth of a gale that had strewn the coast with wreckage. The little hero of the hour was John Paul, a Scotch lad from the fishing-village of Kirkbean. Such good material for a sailor was not to be left behind, so, when the vessel made its next voyage, John Paul was on board, apprenticed for five years. On the Rappahannock River, Virginia, he saw his elder brother William, who had been adopted by a wealthy planter and distant relative and taken his name of Jones. Then he sailed away again. At 17 he brought the vessel into Whitehaven after all the officers had died, and became captain. At 25, it is said, he knew as much of seamanship as any man in his majesty’s navy. Besides, he was a handsome youth of courtly bearing. He had picked up French and Spanish in foreign ports, studied history, philosophy and polite literature, and cultivated the society of shipowners, planters and bankers. Three times he visited his brother on the Rappahannock, the last time to find the brother dying and himself the heir to 3,000 acres of tobacco land.

Twenty-eight years old, rich, handsome, accomplished, he immediately put his estate into the hands of trustees and offered his services to Congress in the Revolutionary War. Before Christmas, 1775, John Paul Jones raised the pinetree-and-rattle-snake flag on the first American man-of-war. In 1778 he floated the stars and stripes from the Ranger and carried the news of Burgoyne’s surrender to France. He sailed the western coast of England, destroyed the shipping at Whitehaven, and defeated the guardship Drake in the English Channel. Flushed with victory he asked Louis XVI of France for a naval vessel, He got one, and named it Bon Homme Richard in compliment to Franklin, then our minister to France. With this vessel he fought the famous battle with the Serapis. Lashing the two together, he boarded the enemy, cut loose and saw his own ship go to the bottom. He was made a chevalier of France and an admiral of the Russian navy. Congress voted him a gold medal. The reward seems trivial, but the young republic had no money, no navy, no way of honoring its seafighter or using his services. So he disposed of his Virginia estate, lived in Paris and died there in 1792. A week before he died he was offered the command of the navy of the French Republic. Gouverneur Morris, then United States minister to France had his body placed in a lead coffin filled with alcohol and placed in the vault of the church of foreign Protestants, temporarily, so it could be brought home for burial. But three months later the days of the Terror began, and Jones’ casket was hurried into an unmarked grave in the old cemetery of St. Louis. The ground was afterwards built over, and our hero lay under a solid block of buildings for more than a century. In 1905 the American ambassador, Gen. Horace Porter, after a five year’s search found the casket, and the body of our first naval hero was brought home in a man-of-war and buried at the naval academy, Annapolis. It has been proven, too, that he did not die in poverty and neglect, as has been charged to our country’s discredit. He had a fortune of $50,000, well invested, that was inherited by Scotch relatives, and he was surrounded by devoted friends. Still young, ambitious and an ardent republican, he meant to help the French win their liberty, as they had helped us. The great Napoleon deplored the untimely end of this naval genius, and said that if Jones had lived France would have had an admiral worthy to meet Nelson at Trafalgar. See Lives by Abbott, Hamilton and Simms.