“The last assault came from Jones’s dubious ally. Captain Landais, a little after 10 P.M. Once more, the Alliance glided by the two ships in their desperate clinch and unloaded an indiscriminate blast of grapeshot. The moon was bright, and Jones’s signals, hung after the last assault, were hard to miss. The topsides of the Serapis were yellow; those of the Bonhomme Richard, with its high poop deck, were black. But the men of the Bonhomme Richard could only scream and wave their fists as Landais sailed off again, to sit out the battle’s climax. The end came with surprising suddenness. In the maintop, a roughly fifteen-foot-by fifteen-foot platform some forty feet above the deck, Midshipman Fanning, fifteen marines, and four sailors had been plinking away at the British marines, dropping them one by one from their platforms high in the rigging above the Serapis, then shooting at anything that moved on the deck below. Fanning’s position was precarious. The Bonhomme Richard‘s mainmast had been shot through by an 18-pound ball at its base; the mast was held up largely by the rigging. The sails and tarry ropes around the maintop kept catching on fire. Having exhausted a large tub of water, Fanning’s men were using their clothes to snuff the flames. “The coat on my back was partly burned… together with the blackness of my face with powder, I had more the appearance of a runaway negro than that of an American officer,” Fanning recalled. Still, the Bonhomme Richard had won the battle of the tops. Indeed a nimble sailor was able to crawl out onto the mainsail yard, which extended out over the deck of the Serapis: a perfect bombing platform. The sailor was a Scotsman named William Hamilton. As the battle entered its fourth hour, around 10:15 P.M., Hamilton edged out along the footropes of the mainyard carrying a lighted slow-match and a leather bucket of grenades. These were small bombs, about the size of baseballs. When lit, their fuses burned for about twenty seconds before detonating. Hamilton saw a half-open hatch on the deck below and began lobbing grenades, hoping one would drop through to the gun deck below. On the second or third try, he succeeded. The grenade glanced of the coaming around the hatch and tumbled below. Hamilton waited and listened. He heard a loud bang—then in rapid succession, a series of thunderous explosions. He had caught the British navy in an uncharacteristic moment of carelessness. It is a time -honored rule of the gun deck never to leave powder cartridges lying around, for the obvious reason that they are flammable and explosive. But during the course of the long and wearying struggle, the powder monkeys, the small boys used to ferry the cartridges from the magazine in the bowels of the ship to the gun deck, had gotten ahead of the exhausted gun crews. Cartridges haphazardly lined the deck behind the great guns. Hamilton’s grenade came bouncing down the hatchway ladder, its fuse sizzling. The explosion set off a chain reaction among the loose powder cartridges with devastating effect. Two-ton guns were blown from their carriages, men were ripped apart and scorched. A flash fire raced the length of the gun deck, which was packed with sweltering men. Some, their lungs seared, their hair on fire, leapt through open gun ports into the sea. Pearson had lost five guns from his battery. He could see the mainmast begin to sway and lean to port, held up only by the web of rigging. Jones’s 9-pounder had done its work, virtually chopping the 150 mast off at its base. The British captain had lost half his men, his ship was on fire in a dozen places, It was now 10:30 P.M.; he had fought gallantly. His duty was done. Pearson climbed up the ladder to the quarterdeck and walked to the rail. Spotting his nemesis still hunched over the 9-pounder twenty yards away, he called, “Sir, I have struck! I ask for quarter!” Jones looked up at this apparition in a blue coat. The commodore wondered: could he really be hearing a plea for surrender? He demanded: “If you have struck, haul down your ensign!” Pearson walked, stiff-backed to the taffrail and began ripping down the giant red ensign, now shredded by musket balls and grape, nail by nail from its staff.”
Excerpted from “John Paul Jones”, author, Evan Thomas. Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER, Rockefeller Center 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY. 10020.
Islander. To Be Contined: