What Became of John Paul Jones?

John Paul Jones*

Many people are aware that John Paul Jones was the one great naval commander to serve in the Continentail Navy during the American Revolutionary War.  His exploits in British waters as captain of Ranger and then of Bonhomme Richard are the stuff of legend.

Fewer people are aware of his earlier life.  Born on the southeast coast of Scotland in 1747, John Paul went to sea at an early age as a merchant sailor.  As master of his own vessel in the 1770s, he killed a member of his crew, a mutineer.  He claimed it was self-defense, but feared that a court in Tobago would find him guilty nonetheless.  So he fled to America, added "Jones" to his name, and for several years managed the Virginia estate of his deeased brother. Frustrated by the life of a gentleman farmer, he decided to join the navy.

Few people are aware, however, of what became of Jones after the Revolutionary War.  He remained in Paris, a city much to his liking and where he was revered, until he grew restless for action.  To quote from my novel For Love of Country:

"He [Richard Cutler] was referring to the rank of Rear Admiral bestowed upon Jones by her most Catholic majesty, the Tsarina of Russia, Catherine the Second. Three years ago, fed up with Congressional reluctance to invest in a navy, Jones had accepted the invitation of the Empress Catherine to join her Black Sea fleet in an attack against the crumbling Ottoman Empire. That fleet was under the titular command of a Romanov prince, Admiral Potemkin, vested with wresting Constantinople away from the Muslim Turks who had occupied the city for three centuries. Having liberated the Christians there, the Empress expected to receive, as just compensation for doing God’s work, a warm water port for her navy and an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea.

Once aboard the Russian flagship, Jones quickly concluded that Potemkin had no future as a naval commander. It took considerable effort and tact to convince Potemkin that Russia would be better served were he to hand over the reins of commander-in-chief to Jones, advice the reluctant prince finally accepted. At the Battle of Liman, having secretly reconnoitered the enemy fleet the night before from a rowboat, Jones destroyed fifteen enemy warships while killing three thousand Turks and taking sixteen hundred prisoners – all at the cost of one Russian frigate and eighteen Russian sailors. When reports of the stunning victory reached the capital, all Russia rejoiced except for one man, Prince Potemkin, who, stung by what he deemed a usurpation of his rightful glory, publicly accused Jones of molesting a ten-year-old girl selling butter in a St. Petersburg. square. Disgusted and disillusioned, Jones left Russia when the charges were dropped and returned to Paris, where details of his adventures were widely published."

Jones died in Paris in 1792.  In 1906 his remains were brought aboard the USS Brooklyn.  With three other cruisers acting as escorts, the "father of the U.S. Navy" sailed home on his final vovage.  Today, his coffin rests, appropriately, in Bancroft Hall at the United States Naval Academy.

*Painting by Charles Wilson Peale, c1781, published in the US before 

1923 and public domain in the US.