Jones himself was not always a model officer and a gentleman, I discovered as I was researching a new biography. He was not much loved by his crews or his superiors, and he was disgraced by a sex scandal while serving in the Russian navy in 1789. And yet Paul Jones is a highly relevant historical figure for today’s precarious world.
Jones understood and practiced what is formally known as “asymmetrical warfare” but is more commonly regarded as terrorism. Jones was no Osama bin Laden in knee britches; he did not set out to kill civilians. But he did mean to terrify them. He understood that the tiny, feeble navy patched together by the Continental Congress in 1775 was no match for the Royal Navy. By raiding English coastal towns, burning shipping, taking high officials and even whole towns hostage, he meant to create a public panic. If the Royal Navy–the “wooden wall” that had protected the British people from invasion for centuries–could not stop the Americans from attacking British citizens in their own homes, Jones correctly figured, perhaps the cost of keeping the American colonies would seem too high.
Jones was for many years best known to scholars and schoolboys for his courage. As his ship, the Bonhomme Richard, was burning and sinking in its battle against a more powerful British man of war, the Serapis, on a September night in 1779, Jones reputedly cried out, “I have not yet begun to fight!” He probably did not say those exact words; contemporaneous accounts suggest he said something more like, “I’ll sink before I surrender.” Still, his refusal to quit eventually carried the day, and the British surrendered after a three-and-a-half-hour blood bath.
Jones’s boldness would have commended him to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has been campaigning against “risk aversion” in the modern military. Yet Jones’s strategic cunning was more important than his bravery. Alone among the captains of the Continental Navy, he grasped the need to take the battle to the enemy’s cities and towns. In April 1778, he set out from France (America’s ally in the revolt against Britain) to burn the fishing fleet in the English port of Whitehaven and kidnap and hold for ransom a Scottish peer of the realm, the Earl of Selkirk.
The mission was botched. Jones’s crew mutinied; Jones was able to set fire to only one fishing boat; the Earl was away, and Jones’s men ended up stealing his lordship’s silver. Jones, who justified his attack on civilian targets by arguing that the British were burning American towns, was embarrassed about the booty (he ultimately returned the Selkirk silver, legend has it, with the tea leaves still in the pot). But he understood the fear he had wrought. “What was done… is sufficient to show that not all their boasted navy can protect their own coasts,” Jones wrote Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, the American commissioners in Paris, “and that the scenes of distress which they have occasioned in America may soon be brought home to their own shores.” Jones was not wrong about the psychological impact. “When such ravages are committed all along our coasts, by one small privateer, what credit must it reflect on the First Lord of the Admiralty?” editorialized a London newspaper.
Emboldened, Jones found a worthy French partner for his shock-and-awe tactics. Freshly returned from America after fighting with General Washington’s army in the winter of 1779, the Marquis de Lafayette suggested that he and Jones try another snatch-and-?destroy mission on the British coast. Lafayette recommended hitting the city of Bath because “the best of London society comes together in Bath this time of year… The terror that we would spread would be felt much more intensely, and Bath would furnish us with some well-qualified hostages.” In Paris, Franklin was moved to caution the two would-be buccaneers not to get carried away. He warned them not to burn any English towns “unless where a reasonable ransom is refused,” in which case they were to “give time-ly notice” to “sick and ancient persons, women and children…”
The attack never came off. Lafayette was diverted to other missions, and Jones went on the voyage that would secure his fame, cruising around the British Isles in the Bonhomme Richard. Ashamed to be bested by Jones and his old slow tub of a war-ship, the British made excuses for the loss of the Serapis. Jones, they argued, was willing to fight to the death because he had nothing to lose; he knew he could hang if captured. During the Revolution, American naval officers were not swapped like gentleman officers in the routine prisoner exchanges of the time but rather treated as criminals and pirates.
The British never did catch Jones, though they tried, sending dozens of warships looking for him. Back in America, he did not, during his lifetime, win the recognition that he craved from his own countrymen. Congress refused to make him an admiral, and Jones slunk off to Catherine the Great of Russia to find employment. But the Pirate Paul Jones is not forgotten in Scotland. Last year, I was walking up the path from the beach on St. Mary’s Isle where Jones landed more than two centuries ago to try to kidnap the Earl of Selkirk. A gentleman wandered by. Had he ever heard of John Paul Jones? I asked. “Oh yes,” he answered. “He was the one who stole the silver.”
