The Admiral and the Ambassador (10 page)

Jones's orders were to sail the
Ranger
to France and be outfitted there with yet another ship to sail back to America. (After at first balking, so as to avoid an entanglement with the British, France was now beginning to aid the revolutionaries directly.) By November 1, the
Ranger
was ready, and Jones set sail. A month later, after a challenging crossing of the stormy North Atlantic, the ship arrived at the mouth of the Loire. Once in port, Jones discovered that the Dutch-built ship he was expecting to take over was caught up in a diplomatic row between the French and the Dutch. So Jones stayed with the
Ranger,
spending the rest of the winter refitting the ship and waiting for the weather to break. And he received orders that must have gladdened his heart: a blank check from his superiors to engage in whatever sorties he thought would best help the revolutionary cause, whether on sea or land.

In early February, Jones set sail in the
Ranger
along the French coast, acquainting himself with the waterways. He put in at Quiberon, on the south coast of Bretagne, and upon his arrival, Jones exchanged a traditional naval salute with a French ship leading a small squadron of escorts
for commercial vessels preparing to leave France. Jones's
Ranger
was flying the new Stars and Stripes, and the exchange of ceremonial fire marked the first time the new flag of the fledgling United States of America was saluted by a foreign power.

On April 10, 1778, Jones finally set sail with his crew on a mission of his own design.

The
Ranger
headed straight for England.

In letters, Jones revealed deep anger at the British over two issues. First, when American sailors were captured, the British treated them not as prisoners of war but as traitors, which Jones viewed as the British intentionally failing to recognize him and his fellow seamen as fighting men. He hoped, in raiding England, to kidnap a high-profile prisoner and force an exchange that would repatriate captured American sailors. The second was the growing British practice of torching civilian ports. Jones aimed “to put an end, by one good fire in England of shipping, to all the burnings in America.”
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Jones wasn't the first American skipper to try to poach prizes off the coast of England. The previous summer, the
Reprisal,
the
Lexington,
and the
Dolphin,
under the lead of the
Reprisal
's captain, Lambert Wickes, took twenty-one ships among them in two forays in and near English waters. Jones intended to press further. On April 14, the
Ranger
encountered a different
Dolphin,
a merchant brigantine ferrying flaxseed from Ostend, Belgium, to Wexford, Ireland. He captured the crew, scuttled the ship, and then sailed on. Two days later, the
Ranger
came within sight of the southeast coast of Ireland and then cut north through St. George's Channel into the Irish Sea, where it encountered the 250-ton
Lord Chatham
heading for Dublin with one hundred hogshead of porter, as well as hemp and iron. Jones seized the ship, installed a prize captain and crew, and ordered it to set sail for Brest, France.

On April 18, the
Ranger,
nearing the entry to the Solway Firth—Jones was, in a sense, returning home—encountered the wherry (a small sailing vessel)
Hussar,
which carried a few light guns and tax inspectors. The British ship came alongside and tried to hail the
Ranger;
Jones's crew opened fire
with muskets. The
Hussar
fell away and after some quick maneuvers managed to evade the faster
Ranger
by sailing into the shallow waters of Luce Bay, where Jones dared not follow.

Despite these encounters, the
Ranger
's mission remained unknown to most of the ships sailing the waters between England and Ireland, giving Jones the advantage of surprise. Jones took two more vessels and had his eye on the HMS
Drake,
an eighteen-gun sloop of war guarding trade in and out of Belfast, but bad weather interfered, sending Jones back across the sea to shelter the
Ranger
in a lee off the coast of Scotland. Bad weather wasn't his only concern: Jones's crew was becoming increasingly frustrated with—and was complaining about—Jones's focus on causing damage ahead of seizing prize ships. The captain's autocratic impulses were beginning to chafe on the men he most relied upon for the success of the mission—and, indeed, for survival.
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Still, Jones pressed on. These were familiar waters for him, and he had been nurturing a plan that he hoped would send a clear message to the British. It would be an audacious act by an audacious man.

By April 22, the bad weather had turned fair, and from the deck of the
Ranger
“the three kingdoms”—Scotland, England, and the independent Isle of Man—“were, as far as the eye could reach, covered with snow.” Jones made for Whitehaven, the port city whence he first sailed at age thirteen, though light winds made for slow progress. Around midnight he left the
Ranger
with thirty-one crew members aboard two rowboats and pulled for the pier. Dawn was beginning to seep into the sky as they made landfall. Jones sent one rowboat to the north side of the harbor with orders to set afire the ships moored there. Increasingly concerned that his crew might abandon him, Jones left a trusted seaman to guard the second boat and led the remaining crew to scale the walls of a small fort, where they bound the unarmed sentinels in their guardhouse, and drove spikes into the touch holes of the cannons, rendering them useless. Jones and a crewman named Green then moved along the shore spiking all the cannons they found.

Jones was perplexed by the lack of fire to the north, where the first boat's crew should have already done its damage. When he returned to the landing spot, he found the first crew was already there. Both crews, it turned out, had let their “candles”—smoldering, sulphur-caked canvas torches—go out, so they had nothing with which to torch the ships.

Great Britain, and its newspapers, viewed the Scottish-born John Paul Jones as a pirate and a traitor.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, the Harris & Ewing Collection, reproduction 1 number LC-DIG-hec-07972

The sky was lightening, but Jones “would by no means retract while any hopes of success remained.” He sent a small party to raid nearby homes to find some embers; they returned both with fire and with rousted residents to keep them from sounding the alarm. Jones selected one ship, the
Thompson,
in the midst of “at least 150 others” that had been stranded by the receding tide, and instructed his crew to light it on fire. His men found a barrel of tar and poured it down a hatchway to feed the flames. They reignited the canvas torches and tossed them across the decks of other ships, in hopes of expanding the fire zone.

Yet Jones had an unforeseen problem: one of his crewmen, David Freeman, had snuck away and was pounding on doors, warning residents that raiders were burning the port. Some later speculated that he was a closet Loyalist who had signed on with Jones in order to get a ride back to England. Jones brandished pistols to fend off the gathering unarmed
crowd, and once the fire was in full roar, he and his raiders reboarded their rowboats and oared back to the
Ranger,
which had sailed in closer to the port to meet them. Some of the Whitehaven residents ran for their cannons but found them spiked. They managed to scrounge up a few others (Jones speculated later that the guns were aboard some of the ships) and open fire on the retreating raiders, but by then the rowboats were safely out of effective range. Despite the flames and the tar, the damage to the ships in port was minimal. While Jones had lost one turncoat, the raiding party slipped away with three hostages.
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But Jones wasn't done. A few hours later, the
Ranger
approached a headland on the north shore of the Solway Firth, and Jones and a detachment went ashore in a raiding party to kidnap the Earl of Selkirk. The lord wasn't home, but his wife and children were. When Jones ordered his men back to the ship, the crew objected; many had signed on because of the promise of prizes. So far, Jones had seized little of value. To defuse their anger, Jones relented and let the crew enter the house, where they terrorized the earl's family but left them unharmed as they made off with 160 pounds of the family silver.

In some ways, the raid was personal. Jones and Lord Selkirk knew each other, at least in passing, and Jones would later buy back a purloined tray and return it to the Selkirk estate. He had chosen Lord Selkirk as his victim because the earl was close to the king, Jones knew the territory, and he saw it as the most efficient way of grabbing a valuable hostage with which to force the release of American sailors. In a post-raid letter to Selkirk's wife, Jones drove home the point that what was good for the British soldiers should be good for the Americans. “Some officers who were with me could not forbear expressing their discontent, observing that, in America, no delicacy was shown by the English, who took away all sorts of moveable property—setting fire not only to town, and to the houses of the rich without distinction, but not even sparing the wretched hamlets and mil[k] cows of the poor and helpless, at the approach of an inclement winter.” His raiders, Jones wrote, wanted their spoils and their revenge.
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The
Ranger
set sail again. The damage was minor, and England's losses were light, but as word spread across the kingdom, so did fear. The
Morning Post and Daily Advertiser
reported on the raids on April 28 and gave details of
the ship and crew provided to investigators by Freeman, the turncoat crewman: “A number of expresses have been dispatched to all the capital seaports in the kingdom where any depredations are likely to occur; all strangers in town are, by order of the magistrate, to be secured and examined; similar notices have been forwarded through the country.” Many newspapers included details of the run-in with the
Hussar
and wrote of the ships being sent in pursuit of the
Ranger,
while issuing calls for better fortifications along the coast. The
Morning Chronicle
and
London Advertiser
observed that the raids and the “audacious conduct” of Jones and the men of the
Ranger
“will have this good effect: It will teach our men of war on the coast station, and our cruisers in St. George's channel, to keep a more sharp lookout.”

Jones next went in search of the
Drake,
the eighteen-gun warship stationed off Belfast. This time the weather was better, and after an hour of intense and close-quarters battle, the
Ranger
gained the advantage. A musket shot to the head killed the
Drake
's captain, and another grievous wound left his second in command on the verge of death. Cannon and grape shot—an artillery version of a shotgun shell—had wounded men on both ships and shredded the sails and rigging on the
Drake,
leaving it all but dead in the water. Leaderless, the crew quit the fight and gave up the
Drake
to Jones. The
Ranger
lost three men. As the British sent more ships to the channel in search of Jones, the American captain had his crew quickly refit the
Drake
with basic rigging and sails, and sent the two ships sailing north and then west around Ireland, eluding the searching warships. They arrived in Brest on May 8, 1778.

If Jones's goal were to agitate the British navy and citizenry, then it would have been a good trip. But his goal was different, and he fell short of his three main objectives: capturing a notable hostage to force the release of imprisoned American sailors, burning villages in revenge for British atrocities in America, and amassing plunder for his crew. The lack of spoils proved to be the biggest problem. In the hours before the attack on the
Drake,
the
Ranger
's crew huddled below deck so the
Drake
spyglasses wouldn't spot them. Talk of mutiny over the lack of loot arose, fanned by Lieutenant Thomas Simpson, and the crew's mood worsened at sea when a communication failure led to mixed signals and a botched attempt to seize another ship. Simpson, in charge of the
Drake,
thought Jones had signaled him to
continue on to Brest, when in fact Jones had ordered him to sail with the
Ranger
as it chased the other ship, which slipped away. When the
Ranger
and
Drake
reunited, Jones, presuming his subordinate had intentionally spurned his order, had Simpson put in chains; the crew, though, faulted Jones. It was a surly and resentful band of seamen that finally put into Brest. Jones eventually paroled Simpson so that he could sail the
Ranger
home after other unspecified plans emerged for Jones, much “to the joy and satisfaction of the whole ship's company.”
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