The Admiral and the Ambassador (38 page)

F
ROM A TECHNICAL STANDPOINT,
the mining for Jones's body had not gone as smoothly as Porter and Weiss had hoped. Despite the support beams and board ceilings they'd installed, the unstable ground above the tunnels had settled in places, and the walls in some of Mme Crignier's buildings had cracked. In March—in the midst of the search—Porter was summoned to a Parisian court to answer a complaint about damage filed by Crignier's tenants. Vignaud, replying on Porter's behalf, pointed out that the ambassador was not subject to French subpoenas and that, regardless, his agreement with Crignier meant that all such complaints should be made to her.
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The work had also taken longer than expected. Porter had predicted the project would last three months, from the first shovelful of earth to be dug out to the last shovelful to be tapped back into place. The digging had begun February 3, and some ten weeks later, when the medical experts identified the body as Jones, sections of the old cemetery remained
unexplored. And only the tunnels beneath the laundry had been refilled with a mix of the original earth and large paving stones Weiss had ordered in to add stability. The records don't detail what became of the hundreds of bodies the men had encountered; presumably, they were left below ground, to be reburied with the filling of the tunnels.

The confirmation that Jones's body had been found at least allowed Porter to cut the search short. The day after Porter wired Washington with his confirmation, Weiss's crews ended their digging and began the restoration. The horse carts that had hauled away the excavated dirt to the remote storage field began the reverse process. The winch-hauled buckets that had brought the material to the surface now were used to take the stones and removed earth back below ground. Slowly, the tunnels were refilled.

There's no clear record of when the work ended, but it stretched well into summer and then fall, nearly eleven months altogether and more than three times what Porter and Weiss had predicted. Bassigny, in particular, was affected, since most of the work took up space in the property he had leased for his granary, cutting into his business. And even after the tunnels were filled, the ground continued to shift and settle, increasing the damage to Mme Crignier's buildings. The prolonged time of the project and the damaged walls created long-running problems and eventually a series of lawsuits for, and between, Mme Crignier and her tenants.
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The more immediate issue, though, was what to do with Jones's body. The exposure to the air had already begun drying out the skin, and what had been a remarkably preserved corpse was turning into a ghoulish apparition—head twisted to the side, skin turned to leather, lips shrunken back in that toothy grimace. And while the body was intact, it was still very delicate. After the examination and autopsy, the medical workers tried to comb out the admiral's long hair, which had become gnarled after it was unloosed from the bun and protective cap. Each brush stroke pulled locks away from the scalp, so they gave up, carefully rolled the hair into an unkempt ball, and tucked it back into the embroidered cap.

Though Jones's final resting spot had yet to be determined, Porter ordered the body packed up for the eventual trip to the United States. It was a much more involved process than simply dropping Jones back into his coffin. The medical workers rubbed glycerin onto the skin to preserve it,
and sprayed essence of thymol, another preservative, as an extra protective layer over the face, before redressing the corpse in the ruffled burial shirt. They folded the original burial sheet and placed it in the bottom of the lead coffin, still split wide from the cuts at the head and foot. On top of the sheet they spread a layer of impermeable oiled silk, over which they laid cotton batting soaked in glycerin. They gently placed the body on the cotton and then added second layers of treated cotton and silk on top, from the middle of the torso down. They tucked in a small sample jar of the original packing hay near the head, and by the feet placed a sealed-up sample of the discolored earth from the breaches in the coffin. More treated cotton was tucked around the body, taking the place of the hay, and the sides of the split coffin were bent back as near as they could be to the original shape.

With Jones snugly back in his coffin, the workers turned their attention to a new lead coffin ordered by Porter, which was somewhat larger than the one in which Jones had been found. They covered the bottom with treated sawdust, then placed the original coffin lid on top of the sawdust. Gently they lowered Jones and the old coffin to rest on top of the lid, and then they sealed the new coffin's lid in place—a lid with a glass pane “which exposed to view the head and chest” so Jones could be seen without reopening the coffin. After the coffin was soldered shut, seals were affixed bearing the imprint of the US embassy. The workers then used three bands of linen to lower the nesting coffins inside a large oak casket with eight silver handles, the lid of which was then closed tight with sixteen silver screws.
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When they were done, it resembled a morbid set of Russian
matryoshka
nesting dolls, six feet, ten inches long, two and a half feet wide, and a foot and a half high.
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With no pageantry and only a small entourage, the coffin was transported to the American Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity, an Anglican parish dating to the 1830s. Pallbearers carried the coffin to the church basement, where it was draped in an American flag. Ambassador Porter, Vignaud, Bailly-Blanchard, Gowdy, and Weiss stood solemnly as the Reverend Dr. John B. Morgan (a cousin of J. P. Morgan) offered a prayer for the long-dead hero. And there Jones would stay, until Porter and his superiors in Washington could figure out what to do with him. It would be a more fraught decision than Porter had any reason to anticipate. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to claim a hero.

Porter's success was heralded in newspapers across the United States, and both his and Jones's name were invoked at businessmen's lunches and other gatherings where American boosterism could be found. The
Spokane Press
managed to squeeze onto its April 14 front page a line from a Scripps News Association wire story out of Paris that “it is announced positively that the remains of John Paul Jones have been found.” An Associated Press story made it into more papers the next day, with details from Porter's report to the State Department. The
New York Tribune
and the
Evening World
in New York City carried their own front-page stories by Paris-based correspondents that included details from the autopsy, with the
World
adding a touch of biography about Jones, including how he came to rest in Paris. The
Tribune
's correspondent, the well-connected Charles Inman Barnard, gave the discovery his own spin. Barnard's boss,
Tribune
owner Whitelaw Reid, was an old friend of Porter and had been the US representative in France under President Benjamin Harrison. Reid was also a member of the Peace Commission that Porter had hosted to negotiate the treaty ending the Spanish-American War. That connection likely helped win Barnard a coffin-side seat. In a story dated April 15, the day after Porter's telegram to Washington, Barnard wrote that “the happiest man in Paris today is General Porter, who, after six years' patient research, discovered yesterday the body of John Paul Jones. Your correspondent examined the remains this morning. There is no doubt whatever about the identity, conforming in every detail to descriptions and measurements at the time of his death.”

While Porter was roundly credited with making the discovery, another man, journalist Julius Chambers, had already surfaced to claim that he, in fact, was the man who had found the cemetery. Flamboyant and self-promoting, Chambers was very much a journalist of his time, a veteran of the yellow press wars, with a ham actor's instinct for the spotlight. He and Barnard were longtime friends, and Chambers had also worked for Reid at the
Tribune
in the 1870s before he was hired away to work for James Gordon Bennett Jr. at the
New York Herald.
Bennett had sent him to France to create the Paris
Herald
in 1887. Two years later, Chambers was back in New York working for Joseph Pulitzer at the
World.

Early in his career, Chambers was an investigative reporter and a bit of a muckraker. In one series, he conspired with friends to get committed to an insane asylum and, after his release, wrote an exposé about abuses of the mentally ill, sparking inquiries and policy changes. In 1872, Chambers followed the Mississippi River to its northernmost point, gaining credit for determining that Elk Lake, rather than the previously identified Lake Itasca, was the wellspring of one of the world's mightiest rivers. The distinction is one of splitting hairs: Elk Lake is a small pond slightly south and a few feet higher in elevation than Lake Itasca, into which it empties through a short creek. Still, the discovery earned Chambers an invitation to join Britain's Royal Geographic Society. By 1899, Chambers was out on his own, freelancing articles and traveling the world writing books, including novels.

As Porter waited for Weiss's crews to do their work and before Jones's body was found, Chambers had written an article for the
Pittsburgh Dispatch
claiming that he and Barnard, working with Ricaudy, were the ones who had read the historical trail correctly and narrowed the burial spot to the abandoned Saint Louis cemetery. They began the search, he wrote, in July 1899, and Chambers claimed that he had paid for it. By then, though, Porter had already been making inquiries, as had Gowdy. In his memoirs, published posthumously in 1921, Chambers maintained his claim but had dropped Barnard and Ricaudy from the list of credits. “At my personal expense, I had employed a friend in Paris to search the Parisian journals contemporary with the funeral of Admiral Jones, and he had thereby located the grave, beyond question, in the Protestant cemetery as it existed in 1792.” Chambers noted that “I have a letter from [Porter] denying I had found the grave,” but Chambers neither reprinted the letter nor refuted it, other than to restate his claim.
⁵
Tellingly, Barnard, Chambers's supposed partner in the search, never claimed that his role had any significance, writing in October 1899 only that he had “upon several occasions profited by M. de Ricaudy's invitations, and accompanied him during some of his most interesting researches in the heart of antiquarian Paris.” Barnard notably doesn't mention Chambers. One suspects that Chambers, like Barnard, simply accompanied Ricaudy on some of his inquiries.
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And there were other claims. The Daughters of the Revolution (a now defunct rival to the Daughters of the American Revolution), gathered for
their fourteenth annual conference in Asheville, North Carolina, in late April and unanimously passed a motion commending Porter “in his work of finding and removing to this country the body of John Paul Jones—a project which originated with the Daughters of the Revolution.”
⁷

The Sons of the American Revolution also claimed credit, maintaining that since Porter had been the founder and top official of the group's Parisian chapter, he had conducted the search under the SAR's banner—though Porter never linked the search with his role at the SAR.
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In rural western New York, the
Randolph Register
claimed that its local lawyer J. G. Johnson had prompted the search with his June 1899 letter to McKinley—which could well have been the spark that led to the discovery. Since Gowdy had made some initial queries the previous winter at the behest of Congressman Landis, it's impossible to distill a single source to credit, given the national attention paid to Jones's history in the wake of Dewey's victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay.

Porter, though, had propelled the project and financed it. It's hard to see an avenue by which Jones's body would have been recovered without Porter. Even Chambers didn't claim to have taken steps to confirm that Crignier's property was indeed atop the old cemetery and that Jones was buried within.