“Holed several times below the waterline, the Bonhomme Richard was slowly settling. The carpenter, John Gunnison, descended into the hold and sank to his chin in water. He could hear the screams of a hundred British prisoners, taken off the Bonhomme Richard‘s prizes, and locked in the hold. Sure that they were going to drown, they begged to be set free. Gunnison climbed back up on deck looking for an officer. He found the gunner’s mate, Henry Gardner. “We’re sinking,” he told Gardner. The two men made their way aft and climbed the ladder to the quarterdeck on the port side, away from the fighting. They saw that the Bonhomme Richard’s ensign staff on the taffrail was gone. Dazed, frightened, unable to identify Captain Jones [he was on the starboard side, bent over a 9-pounder], the two men assumed that the captain was dead. First Lieutenant Dale was nowhere to be seen. Gardner, an Englishman, determined that he was the senior surviving officer. He decided to end the slaughter before the ship sank or blew up. Raising his voice to be heard amidst the din, he cried the word for surrender: “Quarters! Quarters!” The two master’s mates turned and started for the mainmast, where they intended to lower the broad pendant flying at the peak, thus striking the last American flag. Jones was concentrating on slowly cutting down the enemy’s mainmast with barshot from his 9-pounder when he heard someone on the quarterdeck cry”Quarters!”. In a rage, he wheeled, shouting, “Who are those rascals? Shoot them! Kill them!” He lunged across the deck at Gardner and Gunnison. The two men took one look at the gleaming eyes of their captain and the pistol he was drawing from his belt and made a dash for it. Jones tried to shoot Gunnison, but when he pulled the trigger, he heard only a click. He had forgotten that he had already discharged the weapon at the Serapis‘s quarterdeck, hoping to wing an officer, earlier in the battle. In a fury, Jones gripped the pistol by the muzzle and hurled it at Gardner’s head, just as the gunner tried to scramble down the ladder. Knocked cold, the man collapsed into the ship’s waist. Aboard the Serapis, Pearson, too, had heard the cries for “Quarters” aboard the Bomhomme Richard. Were the stubborn Americans at least relenting? The British captain came to the quarterdeck rail and yelled across, “Have you struck? Do you call for Quarters?” Jones response, delivered as his ship was sinking beneath him, has become his most enduring legacy. In his official reports, Jones wrote that he answered Captain Pearson “in the most determined negative.” Some forty-five years later, an aging Lieutenant Dale {Captain Richard Dale, USN Ret.} told an early Jones biographer that the captain had shouted defiantly, “I have not yet begun to fight!” Those words became immortal, but they are probably not the exact ones he used. In a memoir Jones wrote to Louis XVI, Jones reported replying, “Je ne song point a me rendre, mais je suis determine a vous faire demander quartier”–literally translated, “I haven’t as yet thought of surrendering, but I am determined to make you ask for quarter.” Even by eighteenth-century standards, that is a mouthful for a man standing at the brink of doom. One contemporary account suggested a pithier exclamation: “I may sink, but I’ll be damned if I strike.” Jones was beset on all sides. The master-at-arms, John Burbank, took pity on the crying prisoners, trapped in the hold while the water rose around them. He set them free, and a hundred Englishmen clambered up onto the deck. Jones was suddenly faced with a potential prisoner revolt. That many men, if determined enough, might have overwhelmed Jones’s bloodied and dwindling crew. Fortunately for Jones, the freed prisoners were so terrified, and so grateful to be gasping fresh air, that they proved docile. Jones and Dale were able, with a wave of their pistols, to convince the Englishmen to man the pumps, lest they all drown together. Through the crack of musket fire and the continual pounding of the Serapis‘s heavy guns, Jones heard a cry go up and saw a commotion toward the bow. The British were boarding. A gang of twenty or thirty seamen and Royal Marines scrambled over the bulwark and, armed with cutlasses and pistols, ran down the Bonhomme Richard‘s gangway along the waist to the quarterdeck ladder. There they were met by Jones, wielding a boarding pike, supported by his seamen, some of whom remembered their recent confinement in a British jail. Steel met steel, clanging and jarring; men grunted and yelled; pistols popped. The fight was vicious but brief. Rather than die where they stood, the outnumbered and exhausted redcoats and tars scrambled back to their ship.”
Excerpted from “John Paul Jones” author Evan Thomas. Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER, Rockefeller Center, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY. 10020.
Islander.