Bon homme or pirate?
JIM GILCHRIST
http://www.scotsman.comPICTURE the scene: the seashore at Kirkcaldy, 17 September, 1779, where, surrounded by anxious parishioners who are keeping their eyes on three warships out in the Firth of Forth, the Reverend Robert Shirra implores the Almighty: "Lord, if they are enemies, put thou a hook in their nose and a bridle in their jaws, and take them back to where they came from."
Or so they say... However, various versions of the tale tend to agree that, lo, there came indeed a wind which blew the threatening vessels back out of the Firth. John Paul Jones, notorious privateer - or American naval hero, depending on your point of view - had been prevented by divine intervention, or perfidious Scots weather, from bombarding Leith, which he was threatening to do unless the port's municipal fathers stumped up £200,000.
He may have been Scots-born but, as a firebrand captain in America's emergent navy, Jones had no compunction in harrying his homeland as part of the colony's revolutionary war against Britain. And this summer, as audiences in New York will learn today , the hunt for the wreck of his fighting flagship, the Bonhomme Richard, will intensify off the Yorkshire coast, with three separate agencies searching the area, while excavations at Jones's birthplace at Kirkbean, Kirkcudbrightshire, may reveal more about the childhood of the man widely regarded as the father of the US navy.
In a Tartan Week presentation at the New York Historical Society, Dr Robert Neyland, the head of underwater archaeology at the US Naval Historical Centre, will talk about his ongoing search for the wreck of the Bonhomme Richard, off Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. Also during the presentation, one of four being given in New York by the Scottish Museums Council under the heading "Journeys from Scotland to America", David Lockwood, the curator of the John Paul Jones Cottage museum at Kirkbean, will discuss Jones's childhood there, as well as revealing that Jones had an illegitimate son who lived in Scotland.
The Bonhomme Richard was the converted French-built East-Indiaman on which, just a few days after his Firth of Forth escapade, Jones fought the sea battle which has been described as "one of the most desperate and sanguinary in naval history". The Bonhomme Richard was sailing with four other American ships when they engaged a British merchant convoy guarded by two Royal Naval vessels, the Serapis and Countess of Scarborough, off Flamborough Head. A savage battle ensued, lasting nearly four hours, and with many lives lost on both sides. Jones was outgunned by the Serapis, but managed to bring the Bonhomme Richard alongside the heavier vessel and lash the two ships together. Although his own vessel was blazing and shipping water alarmingly, he managed to board the Serapis and capture her, although he had to abandon the Bonhomme Richard, which sank after 36 hours.
It was during the battle that, challenged by the captain of the Serapis whether he wished to surrender, Jones is supposed to have come out with his famous battle cry: "I have not yet begun to fight." These are words known to every American schoolchild, although Bob Neyland suggests that they were actually attributed to Jones some years after the event: "I think it's more accurate that he said something to the effect that, 'I'll sink before I strike [as in striking his colours].'"
Whatever Jones actually said, the battle made him the toast of America and much of Europe, at a time when things hadn't been going so well for the rebellious colony. "It certainly helped morale," says Neyland, who explains that 1779 had not been a good year for the revolution. The Massachusetts State Navy and the Continental Navy had been caught in the Penobscot River by the British fleet, with the destruction of more than 30 vessels. "The [Flamborough Head] battle certainly brought the war to the British, but it also bolstered the support of the French government for the American colonists."
Neyland has been involved for some years in the search for the sunken Bonhomme Richard by Ocean Technology Foundation (OTF), an undersea research and education organisation, in conjunction with the Naval Historical Centre. But they are not alone. Local divers involved in the Filey Bay Initiative have long been investigating a wooden wreck some two-and-a-half miles off the Yorkshire resort of Filey. "It's just a matter of getting something which absolutely nails it," says John Adams, the leader of the Initiative's underwater unit, which has had carbon dating and dendrochronology (dating timber by growth rings) tests carried on some timbers from the wreck in question. "It really can't be anything else," says Adams, "given the size of the wreck and the position it's in. There's nothing else on record, so far as we know, of anything else that size being lost."
While he has been in communication with the Initiative, Neyland, however, thinks the remains of the Bonhomme Richard must be much further out, and the OTF has been using sonar and magnetometer scanning techniques to locate several different wreck sites, as far as 20 miles out from Flamborough Head. "The Bonhomme Richard drifted for 36 hours before it went down so, using historical information of what the winds and tides were, we created a computerised drift model - the kind of thing used to find ships lost at sea and plot oil spills.
"In our opinion, the Filey Bay wreck cannot be the Bonhomme Richard. Apart from anything else, the water depth in Filey Bay is such that, if the ship had gone down there, the masts would have been sticking out of the water and everyone would have known about it. We have a historical account, too, from one of Jones's officers, Lieutenant Fanning, who noted that when the Bonhomme Richard went down, Flamborough Head was low on the horizon. So I think we probably have to look as much as 20 miles out. Our predictive modelling gave us three search areas, all in the same general area, but you're still talking about 50 square nautical miles.
"We've obtained at least five different shipwreck anomalies with our sonar imaging. You can probably rule out a couple of these as they appear to be in too good a condition. At least one of the wrecks still seems fairly intact, although we've still to have a proper look at it; another is mostly buried, and that's what you'd expect of something 200-300 years old."
Meanwhile, the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), founded by the American adventure novelist Clive Cussler, will also be returning to Yorkshire waters, their fifth consecutive summer looking for the sunken vessel, according to Cussler's son, Dirk. "We have eliminated numerous targets to date," says Cussler, the president of NUMA, which was involved - as was Neyland - in the recent recovery of the Confederate submarine Hunley, which sank off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina in 1864. "We will continue to expand our search grid. The wreck is out there somewhere, so we are, of course, hopeful of finding it.
"At the same time, we have expended considerable effort to date without locating her, so we know that success is not guaranteed."
The Filey Bay Initiative's Tony Green agrees that these Yorkshire waters are busy these summers: "Everyone does their own thing and we have spoken to the main players from time to time and wished them every success." He remains confident that "their" wreck is a likely candidate: "While there are no factors that positively identify our wreck as the Bonhomme Richard, there is not one item of evidence that definitely disproves the identity."
To find whatever remains of Jones's vessel would locate an iconic vessel in US history, agrees Neyland. But in September, he and his archaeologist wife, Dr Julie Schablitsky, will turn their attention to the cottage at Kirkbean, Kirkcudbrightshire, where the American naval hero was born simply John Paul, on 6 July 1747. Neyland and Schablitsky want to excavate and carry out remote sensing around the old Paul home, where Jones's father was a gardener on the local Arbigland estate, in a bid to "reconstruct something of the boyhood of Jones, his economic status, that sort of thing. He rose from relatively humble beginnings to rub shoulders with the aristocracy of France and prominent people in the United States".
Like many of his contemporaries in the Solway community, Jones started acquiring his seafaring skills as a lad, and spent his early sailing years plying between the Cumbrian port of Whitehaven and Virginia. He is said to have made one voyage on a slave ship, but was repelled by the iniquitous trade. However, he could be a hard man himself: on his second voyage in command of a brig, a sailor died following a flogging administered by John Paul. He avoided murder charges on that occasion, but later killed a man during an alleged violent mutiny. Amid concerns about his treatment of crew, he changed his name to John Paul Jones and moved to Virginia to take over the estate of his dead brother.
In 1775, as the first volleys of the American War of Independence were being fired, he offered his services to America's fledgling Continental Navy and became the first person to raise an American flag (the old Grand Union flag, striped but with a British Union Flag in the corner) over an American naval vessel, and was soon harrying British freight and naval traffic.
Strangely enough, despite being venerated today, and having his (supposed) remains entombed in an extravagant marble sarcophagus at the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, Jones, a driven and temperamental man, was irked by the fact that he wasn't promoted to anything higher than a captain in the American navy. When he did finally become an admiral in 1788 it was, ironically, in Russia's Black Sea fleet, at the invitation of the Empress Catherine II.
He was appointed US Consul to Algiers in 1792, but died that year, before he could take up the post, and was initially buried in Paris. And it was in Paris, says David Lockwood, the curator of the cottage museum at Kirkbean, that Jones may well have fathered an illegitimate son. Lockwood points to a death notice which appeared in the Dumfries Standard on 17 July,1844: "At Watch-Hill by Annan, on the 8th inst at an advanced age, William Paul a son of the celebrated Captain Paul Jones."
"I don't think that's widely known," says Lockwood. "Jones never married, but in the late 1780s, when he was living in Paris, he did have a mistress, Thérèse Townsend. She was French, but very likely the widow of an Englishman. Jones took an exceptional interest in a child she had. It's not certain, but a reasonable assumption."
If William Paul was indeed the son of John Paul Jones, he seems to have returned to the Solway coast where his father first honed the seafaring skills that would become so renowned that, following the British victory over the French at Trafalgar, 13 years after Jones's death, Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have commented: "Had Jones lived to this day, France might have had an Admiral."
• John Paul Jones - America's Hero, Scotland's Pirate, is at the New York Historical Society, Central Park, at 7:30pm today. For further information visit the web at www.jpj.demon.co.uk
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