“On the quarterdeck Jones assembled his lieutenants and gave them precise instructions for destroying the enemy. Jones’s heaviest guns were the six 18 pounders, three on each side , that poked out of the gun room on the ship’s lower deck. They were to send their cannonballs smashing directly into the hull of the British warship. On the gun deck, the twenty-eight 12-pounders, fourteen to a broadside, were to fire double-headed shot into the enemy’s rigging, seeking to disable her. Jones wanted to be able to board the enemy, if necessary. In any case, he knew the British man-o-war could sail faster and outmaneuver his old Indiaman; he wanted to slow her down. On the quarterdeck, the six 9-pounders were also to be used to cut up the enemy’s sails and rigging. Jones stationed a heavy contingent of marines on the Bonhomme Richard’s antiquated poop deck, which enjoyed one residual advantage over the enemy’s sleeker modern design: it provided a good field of fire down on the enemy’s quarterdeck. Below decks, the ship’s armory was unlocked so that, at the right moment, boarding parties could be handed cutlasses, axes, pikes, and pistols. From the tops, Jones put no fewer than forty marines and assorted seamen. That was an unusually large force. Jones was a pioneer in using small arms marksmen high in the ship’s rigging. Some captains, most famously Nelson, feared that soldiers blazing away with flintlock weapons would ignite the highly flammable rigging and sails. But Jones wanted all the extra firepower he could get, whatever the risk. The marines and seamen were sent aloft with a small arsenal, armed with swivel guns, blunderbusses, and coehorns, a kind of small mortar to lob bombs, as well as baskets of grenades which could be tossed down to the deck below. Be ruthless and methodical, Jones instructed the officers. First, clear the British tops of men. Then aim down at the British decks and sweep them clean as well. The three tops were commanded by midshipmen. Fanning was in his early twenties, but neither of the others “exceeded 17 years of age,” Fanning recorded. “The captains of the tops,” Fanning noted, “drew up into the tops a double allowance of grog for their men.” At 6 P.M., as the sun was dipping down behind the cliffs at Flamborough Head, Jones could see the two British ships coming about and heading west toward the shore, keeping themselves between the merchantmen and the American marauders. Jones brought about the Bonhomme Richard to go straight at them and signaled “Form Line of Battle.” Perhaps it was the dusk and not outright disobedience that caused his other three ships to sail off on their own. [Landais, ever the contrarian would subsequently maintain that Jones ignored his hail and that he never saw Jones’s signal.] But, for whatever reason, Jones suddenly found himself alone. The British ship swung open her gun ports. Jones grimly took the measure of the black iron muzzles that thrust out: among her forty-four guns, HMS Serapis had a battery of twenty 18-pounders, ten to a side.*[Going into battle, the Serapis outgunned the Bonhomme Richard by forty-four guns to forty. The British ship carried twenty 18-pounders, twenty-two 9-pounders, and two 6-pounders; it could fire a broadside of 285 pounds. The American ship had six 18=pounders, twenty-eight 12-pounders, and six 9-pounders; it could fire a broadside of 265 pounds.] At close range, a cannonball from one of these guns could smash through the thickest bulkhead of a warship and keep on going right through the other side, if it did not obliterate a man or a gun in the way. Jones had his doubts about the reliability of his own half-dozen 18-pounders, which were old. French cannon had a bad reputation for bursting. Surveying the quarterdeck of the enemy warship with his spyglass, Jones could see his opposite, in the blue coat and black tricornered hat of a British captain, doing something peculiar. The tall staff on the stern holding up the British ensign, the white flag with the red St. George’s cross, had been hauled down. The captain was bending over the long wooden pole, wielding hammer and nails, like an ordinary carpenter’s mate. Actually, Captain Pearson was nailing on a new flag, an enormous blood- red Royal Navy ensign. The message from Captain Pearson was clear to the warship’s crew and equally to their foe: no one would surrender his ship by striking this flag, nailed to its staff by the captain himself. As darkness fell, the combatants drifted across a tableau of serene beauty. The stars were beginning to show. In the east, a harvest moon was rising , orange and huge in the low haze. Yellow light spilled from each gun port. The crews of the two ships could clearly see each other as they stood outlined by their guns, which were primed, loaded with shot, ready to fire. “The surface of the great deep,” Fanning recalled, was “perfectly smooth, even as in a millpond.” Captain Pearson’s voice sounded across the narrowing gap of sea: “This is his majesty’s ship Serapis. What ship is that?” [Fanning recalled that Pearson’s voice was “hoarse and hardly intelligible … in true bombastic English style.”] Jones played for every advantage, trying to edge as close to the British ship as possible. Jones instructed the sailing master to reply, “Princess Royal.” [ The Princess Royal was a British East Indies merchantman about the same size as the Bonhomme Richard.] Pearson called across again, “Where from?” Jones pretended not to hear, Pearson barked, “Tell me instantly from whence you came and who you be, or I’ll fire a broadside into you!”
Excerpted from “John Paul Jones”, author, Evan Thomas. Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER, Rockefeller Center, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
To be continued: Islander.