By 
Just before midnight on April 22, 1778, an absolute madman decided to take the American Revolution to Britain’s shores. Though he wasn’t particularly successful and his legacy is, shall we say, mixed, John Paul Jones cemented his place in the American story by being one of wildest men in U.S. Navy history, which is saying something.
A Scotsman by birth, Jones began his sailing career at the age of 13 and by 21 was the captain of a merchant vessel. Two years later, he was in a Scottish prison charged with murder. In his defense, the dead man in question had been flogged for attempting a mutiny and died weeks later from his wounds. Once he posted bail, he fled Scotland for England, where after 18 months captaining a British vessel he killed yet another accused mutineer, this time with a gun.
Up to this point, his name was merely John Paul. When he skipped out on England to avoid more serious charges (a single dead mutineer is one thing, two in less than two years is something else), he added the “Jones” surname to distance himself from his checkered past.
Like so many other criminals and reprobates, Jones took himself to the American colonies where he could continue his nautical adventuring with decidedly less British supervision. Shortly thereafter, Jones took up the revolutionary cause.
Jones made a name for himself on several vessels during the early war years, successfully capturing and routing British vessels from the Bahamas to Nova Scotia. Despite these successes, Jones had something of an attitude problem and his feuding with senior officers stymied his rise through the ranks. The Americans needed skilled officers too much to simply get rid of him, so Continental Navy leadership employed the time-honored method of shuffling him off to an overseas, out-of-sight-out-of-mind mission to aid Benjamin Franklin et al in their attempt to cajole France to their side.
Why anyone thought he’d be helpful in a critical diplomatic mission is a puzzle lost to the annals of history.
France and America came to an agreement in February of 1778 and by April of that year, Jones engineered a foolproof plan: take his one (1) ship, the USS Ranger, and harass British coasts and waterways, defended by the most powerful navy in the world. As previously stated, John Paul Jones was a madman.
He enjoyed some success attacking British merchant ships, but that wasn’t enough for Jones. No, he had bigger dreams.
With 30 volunteers (perhaps volun-tolds) spread across two small boats, he rowed into the harbor of Winterhaven, England, where a flotilla of several hundred British merchant vessels were anchored. According to history.com, rowing into this harbor was trickier than he anticipated and what was supposed to be a midnight raid ending in the whole harbor on fire became a bumbling misadventure. They didn’t enter the port until almost dawn and although the crew on his boat successfully captured and torched the harbor’s southern fort, the crew of boat #2 floundered. You see, they hadn’t actually brought the necessary supplies, such as lantern oil, to light any of the ships on fire.
On the hunt for something flammable, the men of that boat went ashore and raided a tavern. Instead of getting a few lanterns and leaving, they stayed for a drink or 12.
Jacob Bogage, the Washington Post, wrote, “When Jones arrived, they were already drunk, and staggered back aboard their boat. One crewman, Daniel Freeman, escaped his comrades and ran through the village to alert the fire brigade of the impending destruction.”
Secret raids become less secret when crewmembers run through town shouting about the plans.
In the end, they only managed to light one ship on fire (a coal barge) and that was quickly extinguished by the townspeople who rallied to save their harbor.
His next big scheme involved kidnapping and ransoming (for a prisoner exchange) a Scottish lord who, in a stroke of fortuitous luck, was not at home when Jones and company arrived. All they ended up taking in that attempt was a sack half filled with the family’s silver dinnerware. The bottom of the sack was filled with coal by a clever butler.
Despite these ostensible failures and few significant wins against merchant ships, Jones was successful in shaking the confidence of the British people. The idea that a single continental ship could freely raid up and down their own coasts brought the colonial rebellion home, literally.
Jones led the Ranger in capturing the HMS Drake in the Irish Sea, killing its captain and lieutenant in the process, another blow to British confidence.
Fitting the general theme of Jones’ various captaincies, he struggled with a nearly mutinous crew aboard the Ranger. After capturing the Drake and returning to their French port, Jones tried to have his own lieutenant, Thomas Simpson, court martialed after discovering the man and several others plotted to maroon Jones in Winterhaven. For various reasons, the Continental Navy denied the court martial request. Founding father John Adams was among those on the commission who, like almost every sailor who ever sailed with Jones, felt that Jones was out for his own personal glory, welfare of the crew be damned.
Jones may be most famous—or most quotable—from his time in 1779 captaining the USS Bonhomme Richard. There he led his five-ship squadron in a battle against a large British merchant convoy defended by the 50-gun HMS Serapis and the smaller 22-gun Countess of Scarborough. Like all his previous leadership experience, Jones’ squadron suffered ongoing insubordination from his junior officers and crew, including one ship that left the squadron entirely before the battle.
Despite his squadron’s superior ship numbers, none of them could match the sheer firepower of the Serapis and Countess together. Jones engaged the Serapis anyway, quickly doing significant damage to his own ship. When ordered by the Serapis captain to surrender, Jones allegedly replied, “I have not yet begun to fight!” Again I must reiterate that John Paul Jones was a madman.
With their ships locked together, Jones turned his deck gun and the Marine marksmen in the rigging loose on the Serapis, clearing the British deck while the USS Alliance hit the Serapis with a broadside, damaging both the British ship and the Bonhomme Richard.
At some point during the fierce man-to-man fighting between the two ships, the Bonhomme Richard’s ensign was cut, leading some to believe Jones was dead. When one of his own officers called out to surrender, Jones replied (according to reports from crewmembers), “I may sink, but I’ll be damned if I strike [colors].” Madman.
The fighting continued, featuring a grenade blowing up the Serapis’ gunpowder stores and two more broadsides from the Alliance, until the Serapis surrendered. Both the Serapis and the Bonhomme Richard sank, but Jones and the Americans sailed away victorious.
For his efforts, King Louis XVI awarded Jones the title Chevalier, the Continental Congress struck a gold medal valor award for him, and the British named him a pirate.
Not content with his accomplishments—riddled with mutiny against him as they were—Jones left America to fight for Catherine II of Russia in the Russo-Turkish War, however the Russian navy at the time was chock-full of ex-British Navy officers who had certain negative feelings toward Jones. His time in Russia was marked by courtly politicking that left him largely idle and ship-less, culminating in his admission that he regularly paid to “frolic” with a 10-year-old girl, though he insisted he kept her virginity intact. He left Russia shortly thereafter, though spent his remaining years trying to re-enter Russian naval service.
He died in Paris in 1792 at the age of 45.
John Paul Jones remains the only American to ever lead an assault on British soil.
