The Admiral and the Ambassador (41 page)

Loomis followed, accepting the coffin on behalf of the United States, and thanked Porter for his “patient, persistent, self-sacrificing search for the grave and body of John Paul Jones.” He went on to detail Jones's history, delivering a eulogy, really, more than a century late. Sigsbee followed with a much shorter speech, pointing out that Jones's naval achievements were due in large part to the support he had received from France, where he outfitted his ships and trained his crews before heading off for British waters. He, too, thanked Porter, and then accepted custody of the body from Loomis and promised to “bear the remains of John Paul Jones most reverently to their final resting place within the Naval Academy at Annapolis.”

With that, a choir in robes sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” as the vocalists walked to the church doorway. Twelve uniformed men under Sigsbee's command, each over six feet tall, hoisted the over-large coffin and carried it from the altar down the center aisle and out the door to the street, where they slipped it onto the bed of a horse-drawn artillery wagon decorated with both French and American flags, a mishmash of funeral floral arrangements, and a large wreath ordered by Sigsbee on behalf of his squadron. Around 5 PM the procession began along Avenue de l'Alma to the Champs-Élysées, led by a small contingent of French police, followed by regiments of French military units and US marines and sailors—the troops who had taken the early morning train in from Cherbourg. With the exception of the caisson carrying the coffin, a handful of artillery pieces, and the horse brigade, the procession was entirely on foot “as an additional mark of respect and courtesy.”

The parade moved slowly along the Champs-Élysées to the cutoff to the Pont Alexandre III, the sidewalks filled with tens of thousands of cheering people despite the solemnity of the occasion. When the parade reached the Esplanade des Invalides, the twelve pallbearers moved the coffin from the wagon to a raised bier near Napoleon's tomb, where diplomats and other dignitaries, the parading troops, and then members of the public walked past as military bands took turns playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “La Marseillaise.” A guard remained posted while Sigsbee and his commanders joined Porter, McCormick, Loomis, and others at a dinner.

John Paul Jones's body on parade at the start of its journey from Paris to Annapolis.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Horace Porter Collection, Manuscript Division

As darkness fell, the coffin was moved from the bier through the Gare des Invalides to a mortuary car. A little after 9 PM, the special train started its westward journey with the body of Jones and the American sailors and marines; Sigsbee, his command staff, and the diplomats remained in Paris until the next evening for another round of receptions, including a luncheon hosted by President Loubet. That evening, Sigsbee joined Loomis for a smaller, more private dinner with some old mutual friends, and then caught a 9:10 train that night. Porter had gone on ahead earlier in the day and Sigsbee had arranged for him to spend the night on the
Brooklyn.

By the time Sigsbee arrived back in Cherbourg on July 8, the coffin had been transferred to a dockside chapel. After a shorter program of speeches by French and American naval commanders, it was loaded onto the
Zouave
and, amid a flurry of cannon salutes, steamed out to the anchored
Brooklyn,
where the flags were at half-mast. A winch swung out over the smaller ship, and a hook was lowered carefully to the deck. French sailors attached it to a net of straps fitted around the coffin, which was then slowly lifted and
swung into place on the catafalque on the deck of the
Brooklyn.
A few hours later, as the clock neared 5 PM, the American squadron weighed anchor and steamed slowly out of the port, the sailors exchanging cheers and salutes with their counterparts aboard the French vessels, and throngs of people lined up along the shore and jetty. Once clear of the harbor, Sigsbee gave the command to increase speed to 11 knots, and the ships set a course for the West and the capes of northern Virginia.

One figure missing from the
Brooklyn
was Horace Porter. Sigsbee had offered the former ambassador a private berth so he could return to America with Jones's body. Porter demurred. His role, he believed, ended with finding the body and serving as its caretaker until it could be sent to the United States. That job was now done, and his special ambassadorship had expired. He was, once again, a private American citizen. So Porter turned down Sigsbee's offer. The morning after the
Brooklyn
left Cherbourg, Porter—who had arrived in France eight years earlier with a family and grand expectations—boarded the Hamburg America liner the
Deutschland
and sailed, alone, back to America.

Sigsbee's squadron took its time crossing the Atlantic, encountering fog, rain, and moderate seas for most of the voyage. Sigsbee set a speed of 10 to 11 knots, and it wasn't until July 20, when the squadron was within thirty or forty miles of the
Nantucket Lightship,
that the
Brooklyn
was able to get a message through to his superiors. “Report to Navy Department Paul Jones Squadron is off Nantucket light-ship and is due at Chesapeake entrance early forenoon of Saturday,” Sigsbee radioed the lightship. “No stops needed on passage. All well.”
¹⁶

The
Nantucket Lightship
was anchored about forty miles southeast of Nantucket Island off Massachusetts and marked the southeastern edge of the dangerous Nantucket Shoals, which had claimed hundreds of ships over the years. The lightship also served as the unofficial western end of the transatlantic shipping lane. Sigsbee's squadron sighted the
Nantucket
about 8:30 PM on July 20, then changed course to the southwest, headed for the Cape Charles lightship off the Virginia coast and the entrance to Chesapeake Bay.

The next day Sigsbee spotted the new USS
Maine,
launched in 1901, which had been dispatched with six other ships from the North Atlantic Fleet to greet Sigsbee's squadron. At the direction of the commander of the
Maine,
Sigsbee aligned his ships one behind the other, and all eleven ships steamed around the southern tip of Cape Charles and on into Chesapeake Bay, where the
Brooklyn
and seven other ships continued northward, finally anchoring off Thomas Point Lighthouse, some seven miles from the US Naval Academy. The next morning, Sigsbee again weighed anchor, and the eight ships steamed in the midst of a furious storm to an anchorage just off Annapolis itself, where the French cruiser
Jurien de la Gravière
was waiting.

There was considerably less official pageantry surrounding the transfer of Jones's body ashore than had accompanied his departure from Paris and then Cherbourg. While Sigsbee was still at sea, the decision was made in Washington that the arrival of the body would be marked solemnly and only by the military, saving a full public ceremony for later.
¹⁷
Yet there was still considerable local excitement. After the storm passed, cottagers lined the shores to look at the ships at anchor. More than one hundred small pleasure boats and yachts, many sailing down from Baltimore, took to the bay off Annapolis to get a closer look. A floating party evolved, and more than one thousand people found space aboard the boats, for up to two dollars apiece, for a close view of the ships; a few dozen managed to secure permission to board the
Brooklyn
for a personal look at the flag-draped coffin.
¹⁸

Around 9 A
M
on July 24, the USS
Standish,
a naval tug, pulled up alongside the
Brooklyn,
and the coffin was hoisted from the deck of one ship to the other. The
Standish,
with Sigsbee also aboard, then steamed between two rows of navy ships, which fired off a fifteen-gun salute and continued on to the Naval Academy, where scores of seamen and some fifty sailors from the French
Jurien de la Gravière
stood silently as the Standish docked at a float attached to the north seawall. Midshipmen carried the coffin from the ship to the float to dry land, where an officer barked the order to present colors, followed by three quick flourishes by the academy band and then another fifteen-gun salute. As the echoes died out across the bay, the pallbearers loaded the coffin onto a hearse drawn by a team of four black horses. The band launched into Chopin's funeral march as the cortege began to move, a contingent of marines and sailors first and then the coffin. They crossed the
open park area to the under-construction chapel, near the Herndon Monument, where a temporary red-brick vault had been built in a rush over the previous few weeks. Hundreds of sailors and marines standing at attention lined the route and the park. After a brief prayer, a salute of three volleys was fired, and a single bugler played taps as the coffin was deposited in the brick crypt. The grated door was locked, and as an armed, though mostly ceremonial, guard took up its position, the crowd began dispersing.
¹⁹

The morning's ceremony came just days after the 113th anniversary of John Paul Jones's first burial in Paris's Saint Louis cemetery, an act that was viewed in some quarters as temporary, but that, were it not for the dogged efforts of Horace Porter, would have become permanent. This new interment was also intended to be temporary, though there was little risk that anyone would lose track of the coffin in the vault in the middle of the US Naval Academy grounds. There would be more pageantry and ceremonies and celebrations in the year to come as Annapolis prepared Jones's final resting place. There would be delays, too, and political bickering by a penurious Congress. But the long-lost American hero was at last on American soil.

T
HE
D
EUTSCHLAND
MADE A
much faster journey west than Sigsbee's squadron, perhaps reflecting the difference between a funeral fleet and a ship seeking to make a profit. Porter landed in Hoboken on July 14, and as he stepped onto the Hamburg America Steamship Line wharf, he was accosted by a larger-than-usual gaggle of newspapermen seeking scoops and tidbits among the arriving dignitaries and celebrities. A few asked Porter about diplomatic issues, questions he waved off. The newsmen also pressed him about how he could be certain that the recovered corpse was, indeed, that of John Paul Jones. Porter ticked through the steps taken to identify the cemetery, and the list of evidence that led the French experts to conclude that the body was Jones's. “There is absolutely no room for doubt,” Porter said in what was for him a rare public display of impatience.
¹

The
Brooklyn
was still at sea when Porter traveled a few days later to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to lunch with the vacationing President Roosevelt at his home, Sagamore Hill. At one level, it was a recently returned
ambassador's courtesy call on his former boss. But Porter also wanted to discuss the plans underway for building a permanent place for Jones's body on the grounds of the US Naval Academy, which, despite its role as the nation's elite training ground for future navy officers, was little more than a cluster of outdated and dilapidated wooden buildings.