The Admiral and the Ambassador (19 page)

The court of Catherine the Great was as much a snake pit as any other royal court, and if Jones had reservations about serving a royal court in which two of the previous four leaders had emerged from coups, he never gave voice to it. The pay was about twice what he made as an American captain, and while he was antsy to get back into battle, the prime draw was the rank. He had long coveted what is known as a “flag rank,” which
was unavailable to him in the United States—there was no longer even a US Navy—and here Catherine was making him a rear admiral. It was, Jones believed, the crowning achievement in an up-and-down career. He was anxious to get to Saint Petersburg to receive his commission and get to work, so he set off in mid-April from Copenhagen for Stockholm and then Grisslehamn, a coastal Swedish town to the northeast. Jones planned to hop on a packet ship there to cross to Finland, but the Gulf of Bothnia was still packed with winter ice and packet ships weren't moving.

Jones feared delay. So he hired an open-deck thirty-foot boat with several oarsmen and a smaller craft to be towed behind, which he could, if needed, drag across an ice field and then drop back into open water. He didn't tell the crew where he was going. He had the men pull to the south, along the Swedish coast, and as they reached the end of the ice pack, he brandished a pistol and ordered the men to steer eastward. It took four mostly sleepless days of frozen spray and cutting wind—they lost the small boat in heavy seas—to get to Tallinn, in Estonia, where Jones paid off the crew and then bought some horses and continued overland for Saint Petersburg, arriving May 4. He wasted no time in getting to the Hermitage to present himself to his new employer. Catherine was satisfied, writing to her friend and confidante, Friedrich Melchior, the Baron von Grimm, that “I think he will suit our purpose admirably.”

Jones was similarly pleased. “I was entirely captivated and put myself into her hands without making any stipulation for my personal advantage,” he wrote. “I demanded but one favor: That she should never condemn me without hearing me,” meaning he exacted a pledge that Catherine would always give him a chance to tell his side of a story. That he sought such an assurance suggests he was either sensitive to the palace intrigues of the royal court or anticipated problems in the war zone or with his crews. Or perhaps both. Regardless, the promise was worthless.
⁹

Jones left immediately for Crimea and was stunned to discover when he arrived twelve days later that he would be but one of four rear admirals fighting the Empress's sea battles and answering to Potemkin. The other three were Charles, prince of Nassau-Siegen, the heir to a worthless German principality who had known Jones in Paris; Marko Vojnovic, a veteran of the first Russo-Turkish War; and Nicolay Mordvinov, who was in charge
of the arsenal.
¹⁰
The existing admirals had no interest in sharing command with Jones, and he quickly realized that he “had entered on a delicate and disagreeable service,” as he later wrote. Jones was assigned to lead a small squadron consisting of his flagship, eight dodgy frigates, and four other small boats deployed in an estuary of the Dnieper River, whose shallows made it difficult to maneuver a fleet in battle. Nassau-Siegen, assigned a small yacht for his flagship, commanded a more practical fleet of agile, oar-propelled fighting ships that could navigate shallow water and would not have to rely on the shifting winds.

The estuary, called the Liman, ran roughly thirty miles east-west at the northwest extension of the Black Sea east of Odessa. The Turks manned a significant fort on the north shore of the mouth of the estuary, at Ochakov Point, and the Russians were hurriedly trying to establish a countering battery—Jones's suggestion—two miles across the water on the sandy spit of land that marked the southern edge of the mouth, near the Russian Fort Kinburn. The Russians hoped to use their fleet to provide cover for land forces to take the Turkish fort; the Turks hoped to keep the Liman clear of Russian ships so they could help defend and resupply their troops at Ochakov. Just to the east of the fort was the mouth of the Bug River, another strategic asset the Russians wanted to keep out of Turkish hands—in large part because Russian land forces would have to cross that river to get to the fort.

When Jones arrived, he found there was no coherent plan for attack. Given the politics of tsarist Russia, Potemkin stayed aloof from the command decisions so as not to be stained in the event of failure, while maintaining his ability to claim credit for success. Jones had an aide row him out into the Liman to get a look at the Turkish forces, which he found considerable. The ships were large, numerous, and well armed with powerful cannons. The Russians would stand little chance in a head-to-head confrontation. So Jones hatched a plan in which he would maneuver his squadron at an angle running from the southwest to the northeast and Nassau-Siegen would place his detachment of smaller ships along the northern edge of the estuary to attack the Turkish flank.

On the morning of June 7, the massive Turkish fleet of fifty-seven ships sailed into the Liman, drawing fire from Nassau-Siegen's ships; the return fire sent the small Russian boats scurrying in retreat, which Jones
anticipated would embolden the Turks to press forward. They did, and with a favorable wind Jones's ships shifted their line into a
V
and let loose with a withering series of cannon blasts. Hollow, perforated shells filled with incendiary material were launched from mortars, and the flaming missiles were devastating to the wooden Turkish ships with their tar caulking and cloth sails. The Turks quickly retreated, losing two ships.

In reports submitted to Potemkin, Jones sought to spread around the credit for the victory, likely mindful that his ego in the past had caused problems with his peers. Jones overstated Nassau-Siegen's role and actions, while Nassau-Siegen, who was better at politics than fighting, savaged Jones in his reports and took all the credit. Jones learned of the other commander's reports and stifled his outrage, but his further communications with Potemkin took on a veiled edge. The poison was in the well.

The next battle took more than a week to come together. In the dark hours of June 16, the Turks again sailed into the Liman, this time holding nothing back. Some one hundred ships moved eastward, flags fluttering in the breeze and crews screaming and banging on drums and other items to create a ferocious—and intimidating—din. The Russian ships were anchored inside the estuary, which meant the Turks had to navigate tricky shallows that caused a series of groundings—including that of the flagship of the
capitan pasha,
or fleet commander. As the Turks stalled to free the flagship and others, and to regroup, Jones embarked on the kind of foray of which legends are made.

He wanted to take some depth soundings of the estuary near the anchored Turkish fleet, and selected a Russian named Ivak, who later wrote of the experience, to row him. They slipped along the shore on the northern edge of the estuary, Jones taking the measurements. They drew no interest from the anchored ships so ventured closer. And closer. Soon they were among the enemy ships themselves. Jones had Ivak pretend to be a vendor selling salt and strike up a conversation with Russian-speaking crew members on one of the large warships. As they conversed, Jones used a piece of chalk to write a message in French on the stern: “To be burned. Paul Jones.”
¹¹

Back at the Russian fleet, Jones met with the other commanders on Nassau-Siegen's yacht to pass along the soundings. As they spoke, they heard cannon fire in the distance. Some of the Turkish fleet had tried to use the cover
of darkness to sail back into the Black Sea, but the Russians at the fort Jones had recommended they build on the south spit caught sight of the sails and let loose. The ships were damaged and driven aground, setting the stage for Nassau-Siegen to again wander off to collect grounded prizes. Nassau-Siegen was intent on burning the Turkish ships, a tactic Jones deplored; better, he believed, to seize the ships and add them to the Russian fleet. The two admirals quarreled, and an already sour relationship was destroyed.

Jones had seen the array of Turkish ships and decided the best counter would be to reestablish the pincer array of ships that had worked so efficiently in the space in the previous battle, and to surprise the Turks by attacking first. Under cover of darkness, the Russian ships moved westward, and at daybreak they filled their sails and began the assault. The Turks, already disorganized, began to panic, cutting anchor cables and turning into the wind. Jones was aboard the
Vladimir
and was within pistol range of the
capitan pasha's
command ship when his advantage was quickly wasted. The captain of the
Vladimir
dropped anchor, saying later that he was saving the ship from running aground on a sandbar (which may or may not have been a real possibility). The
capitan pasha
's ship was again aground, as was another, and Jones was eyeing the prizes when Nassau-Siegen, who had held back during the attack, suddenly surged forward to claim them. The
capitan pasha
himself had already escaped to another ship, and his fleet regained some composure and began firing on the Russian ships, including raking the
Vladimir
's decks. Jones slipped into a small boat and was rowed to Nassau-Siegen's ship, where he vainly asked his colleague to leave the prizes and help repel the fleet. Jones finally persuaded several of the Russian captains individually to join the attack. By dusk, the Turkish ships had retreated westward to the protection of the fort's cannons.

At dawn, Nassau-Siegen sailed off, leaving Jones with light protection in the event the Turkish fleet decided to attack, a strategic error that, fortunately for Jones, wasn't pressed by the Turks. But a different slaughter ensued. Nassau-Siegen was taking no prisoners and offered no quarter. His ships bombarded the grounded but still manned Turkish ships with flaming missiles. The Turkish-oared galleys were propelled by slaves and prisoners chained to the vessels they rowed. Their panicked, then dying, screams echoed across the estuary.

Over the next several weeks, there were more skirmishes as Potemkin took his time moving the army into position, first crossing the Bug River and then preparing to lay siege to the fort. There were more internecine squabbles, too, and Jones, who had started out seeking to be gracious, returned to character. Potemkin was a capricious and autocratic commander, and he issued a series of senseless orders to Jones—including risking Russian men and ships to remove a single cannon from a Turkish ship that Potemkin deemed a threat. They were impossible and ill-considered assignments; still, Jones obeyed orders. Each failure, though, was a black mark. (One wonders if Potemkin, rather than being capricious, was hoping to get his American charge killed.) In one final exchange, Potemkin wrote Jones to confront the Turks “courageously” or face a charge of negligence.

If Potemkin was looking for the right button to push, he found it. Jones sent back a puckish response, including a gibe at Nassau-Siegen, telling Potemkin that “since I did not come here as an adventurer, or as a charlatan to mend a broken fortune, I hope in the future to suffer no further humiliation.”

Potemkin sent for Jones, and they quarreled, Jones telling his commander that Nassau-Siegen had duped Potemkin, Potemkin taking offense at the notion that he could be manipulated. Jones was relieved of his duties and offered a command in the Baltic Fleet, which he took as a meaningless gesture. Jones returned to Saint Petersburg hoping to make his case before Catherine and thinking that the promise he had exacted to be heard had indeed been sincere. In the midst of the turmoil, Jones learned that none of the correspondence he had sent to his American peers had made it out of Russia; Catherine's secret police had intercepted it all. Reports from Potemkin, Nassau-Siegen, and others had reached the empress, however, and she had already written Jones off as a bad decision.

Jones continued to try to hatch plans, including proposing a US-Russian naval alliance. His extended stay in Saint Petersburg, though, only exposed him to more intrigue. In what was apparently a scheme engineered by Nassau-Siegen, a young girl selling butter went to Jones's apartment and then claimed that the commodore raped her. The girl's story eventually fell apart, and a new version, featuring an ill-described man in a uniform who had paid her to play the role, emerged. Jones faced no criminal charges, but his reputation was left in tatters.

As the Russian summer faded, Jones left Saint Petersburg and floated around Europe for a year or so, still trying to come up with a fresh plan. Physically, though, he had been battered by both the Liman campaign and the court intrigues. His schemes found few listeners, and in May 1790 he was back in Paris. It was a far different city than he remembered, with the smell of revolution in the air and the aristocracy under siege. His health was failing and he was at loose ends. He became a bore to his friends, and his plans for resurrection seemed to miss the obvious politics of the moment. The French royal family was barely able to help itself let alone Jones, as Paris slid further into turmoil.

Jones still struggled to find fresh relevance for himself in the world. Jefferson was one of the few who envisioned a role for the former commodore, a role that Jones would have relished. Jones had suggested the United States join up with European powers to send a fleet into the Mediterranean to confront the audacious Barbary pirates, who were extorting European powers for safe passage and seizing American merchant ships for refusing to pay protection. The Americans weren't looking to forge any such alliances, but they did need to confront the piracy. Jones, Jefferson thought, would be the perfect American agent to deal with the pirates, and on June 1, 1792, Jefferson and Washington, as secretary of state and president, respectively, appointed Jones a special commissioner to negotiate with the Barbary pirates for the release of enslaved American sailors. Washington also appointed Jones a special consul to Algiers. The hope was that Jones's reputation as a sea warrior would strengthen his hand against the seafaring Barbary states.