“I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way.” (John Paul Jones – Letter to Le Ray de Chaumont (November 16, 1778))
John Paul (he added the Jones later) was born on the estate of Arbigland, Scotland on July 6, 1747. His father was the head gardener of the estate.
At the age of 13, he boarded a vessel where he signed up as a seaman’s apprentice. At 17, he went into the slave trade as third mate, but later quit the slave traffic in disgust calling it an ‘abominable trade’. John Paul had become a captain by his own merits at the age of 21.
Later, to protect his identity after he fled to avoid trial after killing a local mutineer in the West Indies, he changed his name to John Paul Jones.
Events were working up to the American Revolution; Jones was strongly on the colonists’ side. Jones was advisor to the Naval Committee of the Continental Congress when they formed the Continental Navy’. He offered his services and was commissioned as first lieutenant on December 7, 1775.
On a famous September 23, 1779 battle off Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast of England, with over half of his crew either killed or wounded and many men horribly burned, Jones was asked if he wished to surrender.
Jones gave the reply “I have not yet begun to fight”.
They fought a bloody battle; the hand-to-hand combat and small arms fire of the Americans was deadly and accurate. Americans threw a grenade onto the British ship that caused a chain reaction of their gunpowder igniting and exploding in the lower deck. The British ship surrendered.
John Paul Jones is remembered in the United States as the ‘Father of the American Navy’. He became a distinguished naval officer fighting for both the US and Russia.
Frances’s King Louis XVI credited Jones with maintaining “The Freedom of the Seas.” In Britain he is remembered as a pirate. (Info here is from John Paul Jones Cottage Museum, US Naval Academy, Naval Institute, Battlefield Trust)
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