The American commissioners were so poorly provided with money that they
could never secure Paul Jones a ship worthy of him, and the best they
could do was to get the Ariel, a French sloop of war. But Richard Dale
and Henry Lunt, together with nearly all the officers and men of the Bon
Homme Richard, were available for the Ariel, so that Paul Jones had the
same splendid company that had served under him in his last glorious
cruise.
A singular fatality seemed to attend all of Paul Jones’s departures from
port. He could never get the ship he wanted, or one worthy of him; nor
could he ever leave when he wished. Contrary winds detained him in the
roads of Groix for several weeks. When the wind finally changed, on the
morning of the 8th of October, there was every indication of squally
weather.
“Do you know,” said Paul Jones to Dale, whom he always treated with the
utmost confidence, “I have private information that Sir James Wallace,
in the Nonesuch line of battle ship, is waiting for me outside; and she,
you know, is copper sheathed, and one of the finest ships in the world.”
“But it is not written, Paul,” answered Dale, with an affectionate
smile, “that Paul Jones is ever to be taken by the British.”
The most affectionate intimacy had now grown up between the commodore
and his young lieutenant; and although Paul Jones was some years older
than Dale, the young lieutenant in private called his commander
“Paul.”[5] They were like an older and a younger brother. In public, the
strictest official etiquette was observed by both; yet when they were
alone they were like two boy friends in their tender friendship.
The wind increased in violence as they got out into the bay, and by
nightfall it was a roaring tempest. Then came up a storm of which, Paul
Jones himself wrote afterward, “until that night I did not fully
conceive the awful majesty of tempest and of shipwreck. I can give no
idea of the tremendous scene.... I believe no ship was ever before saved
from an equal danger off the point of the Penmarque rocks.”
These Penmarque rocks are among the most dangerous in the world, and lie
between L’Orient and Brest. The gale continued to increase, and on the
night of the 9th of October, when the Ariel had the Penmarques under her
lee, the storm became utterly terrific. The sky was of a dreadful
darkness, and the waves rushed up into great green mountain slopes, with
a crest of white phosphorus that made a weird and awful glare upon the
storm-swept ocean. Black as the sky was, it seemed to grow suddenly
blacker, as a great mass of clouds went flying over to the northwest,
where it formed a terrible bank that reached from the surface of the sea
to the arch of the heavens. The edges were of a luminous green, and
lightnings began to play upon the face of this awful cloud bank. It
spread quickly over the sky like a great black pall, and then a blast
burst forth. It was as if the cloud were a volcano, spouting wind, rain,
hail, thunders, and lightnings. A vast grayish-white veil of rain was
tossed by the screaming wind between heaven and earth, and rent by the
forked lightning.
The little Ariel, unable to show a single sail, staggered along,
trembling and shuddering like a human thing in mortal terror and agony.
The frightful buffeting of the waves had opened her seams, and water
poured into her both from below and above. The shrieking of the wind
through her cordage was like the howling of a thousand fiends. The guns
broke loose from their fastenings, and rolled over the decks with a
reverberation like the thunder which roared overhead. All night long
this lasted, and no officer or man left his post that night or closed
his eyes to sleep. The pumps were kept going, and every effort was made
to bring the ship’s head to the wind, but in vain.
It seemed as if Paul Jones was everywhere during those appalling hours
of the night, always calm, cool, and unruffled. “We are in the hands of
the good God,” he said to his men, “and if we have to meet Death, we
might as well meet him with a bold face as a sheepish one.”
As the guns rolled about the deck, adding a new horror and a new danger
to that of rocks and waves and storm, Dale, who had the deck, turned to
Paul Jones and said coolly:
“Commodore, what shall we do about these guns?”
“We can not afford to throw them overboard,” answered Paul Jones; “we
may have to fight the British by the time this storm is over. The
Nonesuch may not weather it, nor may we; this may be our last night of
life, but if we should survive, and should meet the Nonesuch, both of us
would make a shift to fight.”
Dale said no more. As the ship would lurch forward into a black abyss,
while above her hissed a mountain of water, the phosphorescent glare
would cast a pale and unearthly light upon the horrors that encompassed
her. The officers regarded her as a doomed ship, but the men had an
unshaken confidence in the seamanship of their commander. In after years
Dale declared: “Never saw I such coolness and readiness in such
frightful circumstances as Paul Jones showed in the nights and days when
he lay off the Penmarques, expecting every moment to be our last, and
the danger was greater even than that we were in on the Bon Homme
Richard when we fought the Serapis.”
In the last extremity Paul Jones let go sea anchors in the open ocean.
There the tortured ship rolled and pitched, her lower yardarms often
buried in the water, and unable, even with the help of all the anchors,
to get her head round to the wind. Toward three o’clock in the morning
Paul Jones shouted out the order he was never known to give before—for
he was averse to cutting away spars and throwing guns or stores
overboard—“Make ready, Mr. Dale, to cut away the foremast!”
The boatswain’s whistle could not be heard amid the confusion and the
uproar, but Dale called to Bill Green, and in a few minutes the sailors
were hacking the stout foremast away. It fell over the side with a
frightful crash, and was swallowed up instantly. The helm was then put
hard-a-lee, and the ship came up to the wind. But the mainmast was
pitched out of the step and reeled about like a drunken man. As the
great spar pounded the lower deck every soul on board expected it to
crash through the ship’s bottom. At last Paul Jones ordered that, too,
to be cut away, but before this could be done the chain plates gave way
and the mast broke short off at the gun deck, taking the mizzenmast with
it. The mizzenmast carried away the quarter gallery, and the scene of
wreck was dreadful. The Ariel, now a dismasted hulk, rolled helplessly
in the trough of the sea. Nothing more could be done but to keep the
pumps going and to await their fate.
Something of the indomitable spirit of Paul Jones seems to have inspired
every man under him, for he afterward spoke of the steady, composed
courage of his officers and men.
Two days and three nights did he spend in the midst of these horrors,
and when, on the 12th of October, the gale abated so that jury masts
could be rigged, the ship was almost a wreck. But it was not destined
that Paul Jones should perish on the ocean, and so he, without the loss
of a single man, made his way back to L’Orient. It was considered the
worst storm of the century, and the shores of Europe were strewed with
wrecks and dead bodies for days and weeks afterward.