JOHN PAUL JONES AND THE _RANGER_
THE FIRST SHIP THAT CARRIED THE STARS AND STRIPES--DASH AT A CONVOY
THAT FAILED--WHEN THE DUTCH WERE BROWBEATEN--THE _RANGER_ SENT ON
A CRUISE IN ENGLISH WATERS--A SHIP TAKEN OFF DUBLIN--THE RAID ON
WHITEHAVEN--WHEN ONE BRAVE MAN COWED MORE THAN A THOUSAND--THE
WHOLE TRUTH ABOUT LORD SELKIRK’S SILVERWARE, WITH THE NOBLE LORD’S
EXPRESSION OF GRATITUDE WHEN HE GOT IT BACK--HOW CAPTAIN JONES
MISSED THE _DRAKE_ AT FIRST, BUT GOT HER LATER ON IN A FAIR AND
WELL-FOUGHT BATTLE.
A most important date in the history of the United States is June
14, 1777, for on that day it was in Congress “_Resolved_, That the
flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate
red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white, in a blue
field, representing a new constellation.” In the annals of the navy
it is also important, from the fact that on that day Capt. John Paul
Jones was appointed to the eighteen-gun ship _Ranger_, which had been
built at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Repairing at once to his post,
Captain Jones, in placing his ship in commission, hoisted with his
own hand the new-made flag of the Union, and that was the first
occasion on which “old glory” was spread to the breeze on an American
naval ship. Thereafter every effort was made to get away to sea, but
the difficulties which the struggling Americans had to overcome in
obtaining supplies were so great that the _Ranger_ did not sail until
November 1st.
The destination of the _Ranger_ was Nantes, France, and her mission in
European waters was to carry on the work begun in such famous fashion
by the _Reprisal_, the _Lexington_, the _Surprise_, and the _Revenge_.
On the way over Captain Jones, when not far from the Azores, sighted
a fleet of ten well-guarded merchantmen. The warships were too heavy
for the _Ranger_, and the merchant ships kept so close to their
protectors that it was impossible to cut one of them out of the fleet.
The _Ranger_ was not swift enough for such a purpose. The Yankee
ship-builder had not yet learned the art of building men-of-war.
After leaving the convoy nothing happened save the capture of two small
English brigs in the fruit trade, and on December 2d the _Ranger_ was
at anchor in the harbor of Nantes, then one of the most flourishing of
French ports.
[Illustration: _From the Original in possession of Col. John H.
Sherburne, Author of “The Life and Character of John Paul Jones.”_]
At that time the American commissioners in France were Benjamin
Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee. The commissioners had been
secretly building a fine frigate in Holland--the finest afloat it
was to be--but the able British minister at Amsterdam discovered the
ownership of the new vessel and made such a vigorous protest that the
Dutch were obliged to refuse to let the Americans have her.
That was a great disappointment to Captain Jones, but he cheerfully
obeyed the orders of the commissioners, who decided that “after
equipping the _Ranger_ in the best manner for the cruise you shall
proceed with her in the manner you shall judge best for distressing the
enemies of the United States, by sea or otherwise, consistent with the
laws of war.”
Accordingly on February 10, 1778, the _Ranger_ sailed from Nantes,
having in convoy several American merchant ships that were bound home,
and that were to be placed in charge of a French squadron then lying in
Quiberon Bay (Brest) and bound eventually for America; for France had
by this time acknowledged the United States as an independent nation,
and had decided to openly aid the Americans in their fight for liberty.
On reaching Quiberon Bay he had the great satisfaction of seeing the
French admiral salute the American flag after the _Ranger_ had, under
the custom of such occasions, saluted the French flag. It was an honor
especially gratifying for the reason that this was the first occasion
on which a foreign power saluted the Stars and Stripes.
Having overhauled his rigging and taken on additional supplies, Captain
Jones sailed from Brest on April 10, 1778, and steered across to the
coast of England. Passing between the Scilly Islands and Cape Clear,
he overhauled a brig loaded with flax bound from Ireland to Ostend. As
she was of small value he scuttled her, and to save himself the bother
of prisoners, sent her crew ashore in their boat, for the capture was
made in plain view of the land. This was done on April 14th. Three days
later he was off Dublin, where he seized the ship _Lord Chatham_ and
sent her to Brest.
Thereafter he headed away to Whitehaven, that is found a short distance
south of the Clyde. It was a port with which Jones was entirely
familiar, for there he had passed his childhood. It was his intention
to burn the shipping which, as he knew, thronged the harbor. He arrived
off the harbor at ten o’clock at night of the same day he captured
the _Lord Chatham_, but a gale of wind prevented his landing, so he
cruised on to the north. The next day (April 18th) the _Ranger_ chased
a revenue cutter that escaped him, but on the 19th he sank a coasting
schooner loaded with barley.
[Illustration: Map of the BRITISH ISLES AND THE COAST OF FRANCE.
Showing first and second voyages of Capt. John Paul Jones, and the
route of the Reprisal.
]
Thereafter he continued his cruise to the north. The weather prevented
an attack on a fleet of merchantmen with a man-of-war at Lochryan, so
the _Ranger_ was headed across to the Bay of Carrickfergus, Ireland,
at the head of which lies the city of Belfast. A fisherman picked up
outside told Captain Jones that the man-of-war _Drake_, a ship that
mounted twenty guns and was a larger ship and carried more men than the
_Ranger_, lay at anchor inside.
All this was learned on April 21st. That night Captain Jones undertook
capturing the _Drake_ as she lay at anchor. Waiting until night had
fully come, he stood up the bay, in spite of a freshening gale, until
he saw the _Drake_ lying at anchor and rolling gently to the swell.
At that the _Ranger_ was brought up into the wind almost beneath the
jibboom of the _Drake_, and then Captain Jones ordered his anchor let
go.
Had his order been obeyed instantly, the _Ranger_ would have swung
to her cable down across the cable of the enemy and then yardarm to
yardarm fair alongside.
Knowing nothing of the presence of an American man-of-war in those
waters, the crew of the _Drake_ would have been found in their hammocks
and the _Ranger_ would have carried her by boarding, with little if any
loss of life.
Unfortunately, the _Ranger’s_ anchor was not dropped at the word, and
when, at last, it did catch in the mud, Captain Jones found himself
between the _Drake_ and a lee shore and too far astern for effective
firing. The _Ranger_ was, in fact, in almost as bad a situation as
that in which Jones had intended to place the _Drake_. To remain was
to invite destruction, so the _Ranger’s_ cable was cut the instant
she brought a strain upon it, and she was headed out into the bay for
another attempt at the same manœuvre, leaving the anchor watch of the
_Drake_ to wonder what possessed the crew of what they supposed was an
especially ill-managed merchantman.
However, the second attempt was not made. The weather came on fierce
and cold, and the next morning, from his deck in the North Channel,
Captain Jones saw the hills on both shores white with snow. So he
headed away for another attempt on the shipping at Whitehaven.
Because the attempt on Whitehaven has been more persistently
misrepresented by British writers than any other act of the
Revolutionary war it is necessary to give not only the exact facts,
but the reasons which influenced Jones as an American naval officer
in making the descent. To fully appreciate his motives, it is only
necessary to recall but a few incidents of the British onslaught upon
the Americans--to recall the burning of Portland, Maine, by Captain
Mowatt, who “dispersed at a late season of the year, hundreds of
helpless women and children, with a savage hope that those may perish
under the approaching rigours of the season, who may chance to escape
destruction from fire and sword”--to recall that among the accounts
which Sir Guy Carleton turned in for audit to the British Parliament
was one item of “five gross of scalping knives,” which he distributed
to the savages under his command for use on the unfortunate Americans
that they might fall upon, and which were used for scalping women and
children as well as prisoners of war.
John Paul Jones went ashore on the British coast to burn the British
shipping and no more. He was determined to “put an end, by one good
fire of shipping, to all the burnings in America.” He was also
determined to capture an earl to hold as a hostage, and compel a brutal
enemy to treat captured Americans as civilized nations have always
treated prisoners of war. He missed the earl, and his men took the
earl’s silver plate to the value of £500, which plate Jones purchased
afterwards with his own money, and returned to the earl with a manly
letter.
[Illustration: An English Caricature of John Paul Jones.
(“From an original drawing taken from the Life on board the Serapis.”)
_Published in London, October 22, 1779._]
In view of the barbarities of which the English had been guilty in
America, and of the retaliation which self-defence as well as
justice demanded, John Paul Jones, after his cruise along the coast,
might well and righteously have used the words which a titled British
robber of the helpless used when brought before Parliament to answer
for his crimes: “By God, at this moment I stand astonished at my own
moderation.”
After one hundred years have passed away it is safe to say that every
American who reads of the events of the American Revolution stands
astonished at the moderation of the fathers.
As to the facts of the descent on Whitehaven, they may be soon told.
Lowering two boats after the _Ranger_ had arrived, Captain Jones
ordered fifteen men, armed with cutlasses and pistols, into each. Then
he placed Lieutenant Wallingsford in charge of one, and took the other
himself. Unfortunately, one of the crew, a man named David Freeman,
had shipped with the express purpose of serving the English whenever
opportunity offered.
It is said that 220 vessels, great and small, lay in Whitehaven harbor,
of which 150 were on the south side, where the town stood, and the
remainder were on the north. Nearly if not quite all had been left
aground by the ebb tide--the tide that prevented Jones reaching the
shipping until daylight. Wallingsford was sent to fire the shipping at
the north, while Jones landed at the town.
Whitehaven was guarded at that time by two forts of fifteen guns
each. With his single boat’s crew Jones ran to the nearest one. The
sentinels, greatly alarmed, fled into the guard-house, where Jones
locked them in. Then he spiked the guns. At the other fort, a quarter
of a mile away, he was equally successful.
Turning, then, to see the flames rising from the ships across the
harbor, he found that nothing had been done to them. Lieutenant
Wallingsford’s failure to obey orders has been variously accounted for,
but whatever his error may have been, he wiped it out by fighting for
the flag till he died in the battle of two days later.
Seeing his plan partly frustrated, Captain Jones hastened back to the
water-front, and with his own hands built a fire on a large vessel
in the midst of the fleet, using a brand which he had snatched from
the breakfast fire in the kitchen of a nearby house. To increase the
flames, he broke open and spilled a barrel of tar over the light-wood
he was firing.
Meantime the deserter had been alarming the town. “The inhabitants
began to appear in thousands.” There must have been not less than 1,200
sailors alone among the 150 ships lying there. As the flames mounted
in air above the burning ship the men of the town came down _en masse_,
but Jones stood between them and the fire, and, with pistol in hand,
“ordered them to retire, which they did with precipitation.” Men in a
crowd numbering hundreds fell over each other to get out of range. A
more amusing instance of the power of a resolute man over a mob will
rarely be found in history.
For fifteen minutes John Paul Jones, single-handed, held at bay
more than a thousand men. Then he entered his boat and rowed away,
leaving the townsmen to fight the fire and shed tears of gratitude
over the deserter who had saved them from destruction at the hands of
fifteen men armed with cutlasses and flint-locked, single-barrelled,
shoot-if-you-are-lucky pistols!
When Jones was well out in the bay the people found a couple of cannon
which Jones had overlooked. These they loaded and fired. And Jones,
recalling the time when a frigate had chased his brig in the Canadian
waters, fired a pistol in return.
From Whitehaven Jones sailed over to the Isle of St. Mary, landed with
a force of men, and surrounded the house of the Earl of Selkirk. It was
the avowed object of this landing to carry away the earl, “and to have
detained him until, through his means, a general and fair exchange of
prisoners, as well in Europe as in America, had been effected.” It
was to ameliorate the condition of the Americans, held in jail and
deliberately starved, that Captain Jones landed.
[Illustration:
_Pub. by_ A. PARK, _47 Leonard S^t._ _Tabernacle Walk, London._
“Paul Jones the Pirate.”
_From an old engraving in the collection of Mr. W. C. Crane._]
Finding that the earl was not at home, the men in the landing party
called on their commander to take the silverware from the castle as
fair plunder and but a just revenge for the acts of British sailors in
America, who had not only looted the homes of the rich, but had driven
off the one cow and the one pig of the laborer. Captain Jones permitted
them to do so. The following is the British account of the affair,
taken from Dodsley’s “Annual Register” (London) for 1778. On page 177
it says:
“Edinburgh, April 27. The following are the particulars of the
plundering of Lord Selkirk’s house by the crew of the _Ranger_,
American privateer.
“On the 23d of April, about ten o’clock in the morning, 30 armed men
came in a boat from a privateer of 20 guns, and pretending at first to
be a press gang, the men surrounded the house, and the officers entered
and desired to see the heads of the family. As Lord Selkirk was then at
London, Lady Selkirk made her appearance. They soon made known to her
who they really were; said they meant to have seized Lord Selkirk’s
person had he been at home, and to have carried him off, but all they
now asked was to have the plate of the house. As there could be no
thought of resistance, this was at once complied with; and having taken
possession of it they walked off and reimbarked. They behaved civily,
and only the officers presumed to enter the house, and happily her
ladyship did not suffer from the alarm.”
With this British account of this affair in mind, let the reader turn
back and read the British account of the burning of Portland (then
Falmouth), Maine, and so compare the American deed with that of the
British.
The silver taken was of the real value of £500, but when it was sold
for the benefit of the crew Jones bought it and returned it at his own
expense--at a cost of £1,000, all told--to the noble Lord. In August,
1789, years after the plate was returned, the earl was constrained
to write Jones that, “notwithstanding all the precautions you took
for the easy and uninterrupted conveyance of the plate,” there were
considerable delays; nevertheless, it arrived safely. “I intended to
have put an article in the newspapers about your having returned it,”
he adds, but his good intentions miscarried. However, if he did not
publicly acknowledge the honor of the American naval captain who
had spent $5,000 to return the plate, he privately “mentioned it to
many people of fashion,” so reads his letter. The British historians
deliberately omit mentioning that Jones returned the silver.
After the descent upon the Isle of St. Mary’s the _Ranger_ still
lingered on that coast. Captain Jones knew very well that many cruisers
were already under orders to seek him; but they were still far away,
and he must needs try conclusions with the _Drake_ that he had tried to
take over in the bay near Belfast.
On the morning of April 24, 1778, he hove to off the bay, and then
filled and backed until well along in the afternoon. The commander of
the _Drake_, seeing a stranger outside, sent a young officer in a small
boat to see what she was. Captain Jones handled his ship so skilfully
that her stern was kept toward the coming boat until she was directly
under the _Ranger’s_ counter. Then the officer was induced to come on
board, and not until he had climbed up the ladder and reached the deck
did he know that he was on a Yankee cruiser.
Finding his officer did not return, the commander of the _Drake_ got
under way. Meantime signal fires had been built on every hilltop
along both coasts, and the black columns of smoke were rising high in
air. Moreover, a fleet of five excursion boats crowded with curious
spectators was seen following the British man-of-war. But the wind was
light and the tide against him, and it was not until an hour before
sunset that the _Drake’s_ captain was able to bring his ship within
fighting range of the Yankee. Finally he found himself under the lee
quarter of the _Ranger_ and but a pistol-shot away. There he hoisted
his colors. Captain Jones at once ran up the Stars and Stripes.
“What ship is that?” said a voice on the _Drake_.
“It is the American continental ship _Ranger_. We are waiting for you.
The sun is but little more than an hour from setting. It is therefore
time to begin,” replied Captain Jones. Then turning to the man at the
wheel, Captain Jones ordered the helm hard up. The _Ranger_ wore slowly
around, and the _Drake_ followed her motion until they were drifting
broadside to broadside and yardarm to yardarm fair before the wind.
And then Captain Jones opened the battle with a broadside. The enemy
replied in kind, and as fair a fight as naval annals record was begun.
But after a little the fore and main topsail-yards of the _Drake_ were
cut in two at the masts and hung useless. The mizzen-gaff was shot
away and dropped. The jib fell and dragged overboard in the water. The
rigging and sails were in tatters. Worse yet, blood was trickling
from her scuppers because of the dead and wounded on her deck. Among
the dead at the last was her commander, Captain Burden, who was killed
by a musket-ball through his brain. Among the wounded was the first
lieutenant, and he was mortally hurt.
The flag first spread on the _Drake_ was shot away, but they raised
another. This, too, was shot away, and falling overboard, it dragged in
the water. A little later, and just as the sun was going down behind
the Irish hills, a cry for quarter was raised on the _Drake_, and the
battle came to an end.
The _Ranger_ in this fight had eighteen guns. The _Drake_ carried
twenty. The _Ranger’s_ crew numbered 123. The _Drake_ had 151 men
on her books, and, in addition to these, had taken on a number of
volunteers from the shore, who had been anxious to help whip the
Yankees. These raised the number of her crew to 160 by the lowest
account and 190 by the highest. The _Ranger_ lost two killed, including
Lieutenant Wallingsford, and six wounded. The _Drake_ lost forty-two
killed and wounded. It is fair to say that the British account of the
battle in Allen’s history says the loss was but twenty-four. But Allen
probably counted only those killed and wounded among the ship’s regular
crew and ignored the volunteers, while the Americans counted the
corpses and men under the surgeon’s care.
The odds had been against him, but the honors remained with John Paul
Jones.
After the battle a merchant brig happened along, and a prize crew was
put on board of her. Then the fishermen who had been captured when the
_Ranger_ first arrived on the coast were not only released, but enough
gold was given them to pay for all their losses, together with a sail
from the _Drake’s_ outfit as a notice to the shore people that the
Yankee had won. They went away cheering the generosity of John Paul
Jones.
And while speaking of the generosity of this American naval captain,
it should be told that, in fitting out the _Ranger_ on the American
side, he advanced to the American government several thousand dollars
(continental currency) of his own money, and that he bore all the
expense of fitting and refitting her on the French coasts before her
cruise. In all, he spent some £1,500 sterling of his own money, and
because of the poverty of the American government he had to wait a long
time to get it back again.
It was very well written of this cruise that “the news of the brilliant
achievements of Paul Jones electrified France and appalled England.”
Just how much England was appalled by the American demonstrations
on her coast may be inferred from a statement of the number of men
“raised” (_i.e._, gathered in by press gangs) for her navy. In 1774 she
“raised” 345 men. In 1777 she “raised” 37,458, and in 1778 the number
was 41,847.