Patriot or Pirate?
chron.com
Another Myth shot to hell!
July 18, 2003, 12:58PM
Teddy Roosevelt restored John Paul Jones' ailing reputation
By JAMES D. FAIRBANKS
REVOLUTIONARY War hero John Paul Jones is best remembered for his defiant response "I have not yet begun to fight" delivered to a British warship captain who demanded his surrender. For many, these words represent the sum total of what is remembered about him.
Biographer Evan Thomas doubts that Jones ever spoke the famous words. In Jones' official report on his battle with the British man-of-war Serapis, he wrote only that he had answered in "the most determined negative" when called to surrender. In another dispatch Jones quoted himself as telling the enemy, "I haven't as yet thought of surrendering, but I am determined to make you ask for quarter."
The first record of the stirring words now associated with Jones came from an interview with an aging crew member conducted 45 years after the battle.
According to Thomas, very few of the words now attributed to Jones were actually his. Adm. Ernest King thought he was quoting Jones when he promised a congressional committee after Pearl Harbor "to do the best we can with what we have." These words first appeared in a 1900 biography of Jones published by a "charlatan" named August Buell.
Thomas finds that while Jones was often underappreciated during his life, he came later to be over-mythologized.
Some of Jones' exploits did have a mythic quality. He carried America's war for independence across the Atlantic with daring raids along the English coast. The raids constituted a kind of terrorist campaign conducted to show the English there was a price to pay for their continued presence in the Colonies. The raids caused little real damage but had a psychological impact on a people who had imagined themselves secure in their island fortress.
Much of the action engaged in by Jones and the other commanders of the small Colonial fleet resembled piracy more than conventional naval warfare. Often unpaid, they were more interested in seizing merchant ships than fighting other warships because officers and crew shared in the value of any cargo captured at sea. Jones was unusual in desiring fame more than riches, but he was still viewed by the British as a pirate and would have been hanged if apprehended.
In his famous encounter with the Serapis, Jones failed in his real goal, which was to capture as many prizes as possible from the convoy of 44 merchant ships sailing under the Serapis' protection. The other ships of his squadron fled when they saw they would have to battle a British man-of-war, but Jones took on the clearly superior British vessel in what would become the most famous naval encounter of the Revolutionary War.
Jones managed to get his aging Bonhomme Richard close enough to the Serapis to lock the two ships together with grappling hooks and engage the enemy in fierce hand-to-hand combat.
His own ship had been so badly damaged it was already sinking when he defiantly refused to surrender. The merchant ships all escaped as this intense battle took place, but Jones' tenacity finally won out. He had done the unthinkable -- captured a ship of the all-powerful British navy in one-on-one conflict.
Unfortunately, Jones' personal bravery, skill as a seaman and brilliance as a military strategist were counterbalanced by a huge ego and an obsession with self-glorification. These personality flaws, Thomas argues, made his crews distrust him and his fellow officers jealous of him.
This thoroughly researched book provides a vivid picture of what life was like aboard a naval ship in the 18th century. The accounts given of Jones as he takes on both enemy ships and violent storms leave little doubt but that he was a superb seaman.
Thomas' contention that Jones' ego and ambition made it impossible for him to work effectively with others is less well-supported. There is much in this book to suggest that Jones was the victim of more than his share of bad luck, was often treated shabbily, and was fully justified in the contempt he felt for many of his colleagues.
It was just in the last century that Jones came to be honored as the father of the U.S. Navy. When Teddy Roosevelt set out to give the United States a world-class Navy, he needed a hero who embodied the skill and bravery he wanted to instill in future generations of American seamen.
He chose Jones and had his body brought back from its all-but-forgotten grave in France and laid to rest in a marble sarcophagus at the Naval Academy at Annapolis.
In many ways, Jones is a curious choice to represent American naval tradition. He first sought fame and glory in the Royal navy, but his class origins limited his opportunity for advancement there. He enjoyed some success as the commander of a British merchant ship but fled to America in 1773 to escape standing trial for killing a mutinous crew member.
Aside from somewhat ritualistic declarations of his belief in the "universal rights of man," Jones had little to say about politics. Had he not been treated with such condescension in the British navy, one suspects he could easily have ended up fighting against the colonies rather than for them.
Bored when the war ended and frustrated by the government's refusal to take his advice on building a powerful Atlantic fleet, Jones accepted an invitation to serve as a rear admiral in the Russian navy.
While he had some success in battling the Turks, he lost out in a power struggle with fellow officers and was ordered to return to St. Petersburg. Always something of a rake, he became sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl and was forced to leave Russia in disgrace.
The man who would later be called the Father of the American Navy spent his final years in Paris, where he bombarded Gouverneur Morris, America's minister to France, with unwanted advice on naval strategy. The aristocratic Morris considered Jones an inconsequential bore and refused to pay for or attend his funeral when Jones died in 1792 at the age of 45.
Having a somewhat greater appreciation of Jones' accomplishments, the French government pickled his body in alcohol in a lead-lined coffin "should more enlightened American governments seek to reclaim and properly honor their hero's remains."
Jones spent relatively little time in this country and was more of a naval warrior than a real patriot.
Nevertheless, Thomas is probably right in concluding that Jones was in many ways the prototypical American, "the quintessential striver ... in the purest American sense, a self-made man whose raw drive and talent broke through the era's brittle walls of class and place. His rise mirrors that of his adopted country and its restless people, the ascendancy of the New World over the Old."
James D. Fairbanks teaches political science at the University of Houston-Downtown. |
