John Paul Jones was born in poverty in 1747 in Scotland. He became a seaman’s apprentice and at a young age, earned command of his own ship. He fought several naval battles for the United States during the American Revolution and for his contribution to the war, he is considered the father of the U.S. Navy. He also fought on behalf of the Russian Empire against the Turks on the Black Sea. In both the United States and Russia he is remembered as a hero and a legend; in Great Britain, however, he is remembered as little more than a pirate. He died at the age of forty-five in Paris and was buried there. Eventually, his remains were brought back to the United States and in 1913 he was finally laid to rest in a crypt in the U.S. Naval Academy Chapel in Annapolis, Maryland.
At the age of thirteen, John Paul Jones began as a seaman’s apprentice and sailed for ports in the Western Hemisphere. For four years he learned a great deal about sailing and navigation, but his apprenticeship was cut short due to his master’s financial difficulties. Jones then went to work in the slave trade at age seventeen, but after witnessing firsthand the horrors of the trade he left to find work elsewhere.
By the age of twenty-one, Jones had earned his first command of the merchant vessel John and then later the Betsy. He seems to have spent several years as a successful sea captain in the West Indies and accumulated a great deal of money. However, two incidents stained his reputation as a successful seaman. In one incident, he was accused of excessively whipping the ship’s carpenter, who later died. The charges were dismissed and Jones was absolved of responsibility. Later, Jones put down a mutiny by killing the gang’s ringleader. To avoid charges in a civil court, he fled to the American colony of Virginia. At that point the man known as John Paul changed his name to John Paul Jones. While in Virginia, the American Revolution erupted and Jones sided with the rebels. The new American Congress decided to form a navy but was in short supply of officers. Jones offered his services and in 1775 was commissioned as a first lieutenant of the Continental Navy aboard the ship Alfred. Jones also advised the fledgling American Congress on creating and codifying navy regulations.
Portrait of John Paul Jones (1747–1792), the most famous American naval commander of the Revolution, ca. 1780. In command of the gunboat Bonhomme Richard, Jones famously defeated the HMS Serapis, a large frigate, off the coast of England in 1779. Offered the chance to surrender as his ship was sinking during this battle, Jones famously retorted, “I have not yet begun to fight!” A salty old dog who first went to sea at the tender age of 13, Jones is a naval hero of epic proportions in both America and in Russia, for whom he fought the Turks in the Black Sea. (National Archives)
Jones spent the years 1777 and 1778 conducting small raids in English waters by destroying small vessels and spiking the cannons of a few forts. By 1779, Jones refit a ship that was given to the American navy by the French king and renamed it the Bonhomme Richard. With the Bonhomme Richard and six other ships Jones sailed for the English Channel to conduct raids and disrupt English shipping as part of the American war effort. It was at this point in his career that Jones entered the American lexicon of legends and Revolutionary War heroes. While engaging the HMS Serapis in 1779 off the coast of England, Jones’s vessel took extensive damage after the initial exchange of broadsides. Because the Serapis had superior firepower and the Richard had taken so much damage, the captain of the Serapis asked Jones if he wished to surrender. The reply given by Jones has gone down in history and is how he is remembered in American history. Jones defiantly replied, “I have not yet begun to fight!” Indeed, the fight raged on. Jones and his crew fought courageously against the odds while their ship was sinking. In the end, Jones and his crew proved to be too much for Captain Pearson of the Serapis and it was Pearson who surrendered. Contemporary accounts of the battle indicate that the Serapis had every advantage in terms of being a superior ship and having a professional crew versus the crew of the Richard, which was made up of Americans, French, Portuguese, and several other groups, many of whom could not speak English. With Jones at the helm, the Americans won a shocking victory and Jones’s legendary status was cemented in the minds of all American patriots.
Jones was recognized by King Louis XVI of France, who awarded him a gold sword and the Order of Military Merit, and by Congress, which decorated him with a gold medal. Jones then turned his attention to creating the United States Navy and training naval officers. On the recommendation of the American ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson, Jones received an appointment from Catherine II of Russia to help lead the Russian Black Sea campaign against the Turks. Jones served with distinction and is credited with killing 3,000 Turkish sailors, destroying more than a dozen ships, and taking more than 1,600 prisoners. Jones is recognized as a hero in Russian naval history.
Jones died in Paris in 1792 at the age of forty-five. During the French Revolution, the cemetery where Jones was buried was confiscated from the royal family by the new revolutionary government. The cemetery fell into disrepair and was forgotten. In 1845, efforts were made to bring Jones’s remains to the United States, but his remains were difficult to locate after the upheaval of the French Revolution. The American government supported a search for Jones’s remains in later decades, and they were eventually found and returned in the early twentieth century. In an elaborate ceremony his remains were buried at the U.S. Naval Academy, where an honor guard stands daily watch.
Since the United States was a young nation in need of heroes, John Paul Jones emerged, in time, as an icon alongside George Washington, Ethan Allen, and other Revolutionary War soldiers and sailors. Jones’s attainment of celebrity was aided by his own efforts at self-promotion, which historians have described as quite shameless for public figures in this period. The battle between Bonhomme Richard and Serapis was recounted in patriotic speeches and pamphlets and became a staple of nineteenth-century histories of the founding of the United States. The two ships served as a metaphor for the overmatched, upstart nation that defeated the mighty British Empire, which had a navy without rival in an era when Britannia ruled the waves. History knows Jones as a competent, professional sea captain with a large dose of courage to act in the face of “overwhelming odds” (Conrad 2015). Legend, however, goes beyond these assessments and credits him with “charming gallantry” and derring-do of the sort typically reserved for mythic characters (Dill 2006, 207).
Perry, Oliver Hazard (1785–1819)
Oliver Hazard Perry followed in the wake of John Paul Jones, becoming the great American naval hero of the War of 1812. Defeating the British at the Battle of Lake Erie, Perry informed his superiors with the famous words, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” Perry’s flag was itself emblazoned with another iconic phrase, “Don’t give up the ship,” the last words of Perry’s friend Captain James Lawrence, who died fighting the British in 1813. The Battle of Lake Erie is largely forgotten by many Americans, but it guaranteed control of the Great Lakes by the United States, which was vital to the development of Ohio and Michigan; indeed, Perry is celebrated throughout the region, with a Pennsylvania monument at Presque Isle—where Perry famously built his fleet in secret—as well as a national memorial on South Bass Island in Put-in-Bay, Ohio.
C. Fee
Paul Frazier
See also Allen, Ethan; Founding Myths; Washington, George; Yankee Doodle
Further Reading
Conrad, Dennis M. 2015. “John Paul Jones.” Naval History and Heritage Command website. http://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/people/john-paul-jones/john-paul-jones.html. Accessed November 4, 2015.
Dill, J. Gregory. 2006. Myth, Fact, and Navigators’ Secrets: Incredible Tales of the Sea and Sailors. Guilford, CT: Lyons Press.
Thomas, Evan. 2003. John Paul Jones: Sailor, Hero, Father of the American Navy. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Toll, Ian. 2008. Six Frigates: The Epic Founding of the U.S. Navy. New York: W. W. Norton.