The Admiral and the Ambassador (17 page)

It was august company into which Dewey was propelled. But he also found fame among everyday Americans as Deweymania grew amid the jingoistic fervor of war. Street vendors ordered up buttons bearing Dewey's face, and cities renamed streets for the war hero even as the fighting raged on in Cuba. Enterprising restaurateurs changed Spanish omelets to “scrambled eggs à la Dewey,” and in Chicago, a theater troupe hastily put together a revival of the play
Paul Jones,
then tacked on a reenactment of the Battle of Manila Bay as an added feature.

Newspapers filled their front pages and features sections with stories about Dewey, and as the details of the Battle of Manila Bay were explored, so too did the newspapers revisit the past successes of Farragut, Decatur, and Jones. As the nation's first American naval hero, Jones received an inordinate amount of the attention. Newspapers and magazines retold the dramatic story of Jones's “David versus Goliath” battle against the
Serapis;
others ran short biographies of the diminutive, long-dead Scotsman.

The comparisons of Dewey with Jones echoed long after the end of the war itself, and with the comparisons came questions about monuments to heroes. Decatur's body was in Philadelphia. Farragut was buried in New York. But where was Jones's body? Tucked away in a forgotten grave somewhere in Paris? Mixed in with the countless skeletons in the famous Catacombs below the city itself? Spirited away to Scotland?

Exactly where were Jones's bones?

J
OHN
P
AUL
J
ONES AND
his crew spent the rest of the fall and early winter of 1779 holed up in the Texel harbor, working to refit their ships while a British naval squadron waited offshore for the Americans to put back to sea. The Dutch were neutral in the war between the colonies and Britain, so the British did not pursue Jones into the port itself. They made regular demands for the Dutch to turn over the
Serapis
and the
Scarborough—
demands the Dutch resisted.

While the diplomatic drama played out, Jones's crewmen fumed at being stranded without money in a port town that offered little in the way of diversions. It made for a long and boring stay, one in which small frictions could quickly escalate into confrontations and fights. And Jones himself bristled at being in command of a small fleet but not of his own fate.

In early November, the British changed diplomatic tactics and began demanding that the Dutch expel Jones. Of course, sending Jones out to sea would mean directing him into the guns of the waiting British warships.
The French stepped in, arguing that Jones had set sail from Lorient, on the south coast of Bretagne, and was under French protection and thus not to be touched for fear of insulting Louis XVI. The Dutch seemed to fear the British more than the French and began wavering. As winter settled in, they ordered Jones to leave. The French ordered him to stay. Significantly, Jones had no orders from Franklin in Paris or from the Continental Congress.

Jones, for his part, kept crews working on getting the ships seaworthy after the intense battle off Flamborough Head. He was losing patience with the French as protectors, particularly after they asked him to accept a letter designating him a French privateer, a maneuver he found insulting. He saw himself as a captain in the US Navy and not some pirate or floating opportunist. Jones had no intention of hiding behind a French letter, turning himself over to the British, or making a suicidal run against the blockade. He could be a patient man, and sometimes the weather rewarded those who waited.

Jones's hand was played for him in mid-November when the French told him they were taking control of all the ships except the
Alliance,
part of a maneuver rooted in diplomacy. The French were trying to forestall a rift between the Dutch and British, which occurred a short time later anyway, leading to war. For the moment, though, the French preferred that the Dutch remain neutral, as that made it easier to move and trade goods. Jones obeyed the order, transferring his flag and crew from the
Serapis
to the
Alliance,
and continued refitting the ship, which Landais—called to Paris by Franklin over his actions during the battle with the
Serapis
—had left a mess, including a rat infestation of seemingly biblical proportions.

For much of November and into early December, Jones couldn't have left port if he had wanted to. Persistent westerly winds made it nearly impossible to sail out of Texel. Jones knew his moment would come, however, and it finally arrived in the form of a stiff gale from the east, which drove the British blockade some miles off their line. On December 27, on the strength of the fresh wind, the
Alliance
slipped out of port and, hugging the coast, sailed southwest, shadowed by a couple of British warships that several times looked as though they were ready to attack but then veered away. In detailing those encounters, Nathaniel Fanning wrote that Jones and the
crew presumed the ships were uncertain of starting a fight they feared they would lose to the captain who, from the deck of his own sinking ship, had forced the surrender of the
Serapis.
And the British ships could not match the
Alliance
for speed; it zipped along at an average of ten knots per hour for much of the run along the British coast, past the cliffs of Dover and at least two anchored British squadrons, which could only watch helplessly as the ship sped by at a distance. Jones had made his escape.
¹

According to Samuel Eliot Morison, the
Alliance
was not “a happy ship.” Landais was a poor captain and had countenanced a fractious crew. Many of his men remained aboard, augmented now by Jones's surviving
Bonhomme Richard
crew—the same crew that had been fired upon by the duplicitous Landais and his men. It made for a tense voyage, marked by spats and the occasional fistfight among the crew, and a threatened duel or two among the officers from the two ships. The
Alliance
took a couple of minor prizes and then put in at Coruña, Spain, for fresh water and other supplies.

After a couple of weeks, Jones ordered the crew to get ready to set out once again, but the men balked, angry over their lack of pay and the lack of proper clothing for winter sailing in the North Atlantic—most had lost their possessions when the
Bonhomme Richard
went down. Jones, with the support of his lieutenants, finally persuaded the men to return to work so they could head for Lorient. Once at sea, the tensions between Jones and the crew increased when word flitted around the ship that, rather than making straight for Lorient and a payday, Jones intended to cruise for three weeks looking for more prizes.

After some two weeks of fruitless cruising, the
Alliance
encountered a British warship, and Jones ordered the crew to get ready to take her. “But our crew swore they would not fight, although if we had been united we might have taken her with a great deal of ease,” Fanning wrote. When Jones was told of the rank-and-file insubordination, he gave in. “Our courses were dropped, and we in our turn ran from her, and made all the sail we could, by his order. All this time he appeared much agitated, and bit his lips often, and walked the quarter-deck muttering something to himself.” Three days later, on February 13, the
Alliance
anchored at Lorient.
²

The
Serapis
and other prizes taken by Jones's crew were already in port, sailed there from Texel under the French flag. Jones received orders from
Paris—presumably, from Franklin—to ready the
Alliance
for a transatlantic voyage to carry crucial communications from Europe to the Continental Congress. The
Alliance
was in miserable condition despite the refitting at Texel. Part of the issue was an oddly imagined placement of ballast—ordered by Landais—that made it hard to control the ship as tightly as Jones liked, a crucial lack of flexibility given the likelihood of more sea battles. Jones had the crew and port carpenters set to work, on the United States government's bill, to ready the ship, a project that would take several months.

But the captain managed to squeeze in some fun too. One afternoon the American agent at work in Lorient, James Moylan, boarded the ship to conduct some business with the ship's purser; Jones went ashore leaving strict orders that no one was to leave the ship—including Moylan, an Irish-born man nearly sixty years old—until Jones returned. Moylan was “very rude in his manners … and he was what people commonly call a homely man, but rich in the good things of this world. His present wife was only about seventeen years of age, very handsome, and a little given to coquetry.”
³
According to Fanning, Moylan had caught Jones in compromising positions with his wife before. This time, there would be no interrupting: Jones went straight to Moylan's home, where he spent the afternoon and evening with Moylan's young wife. The crew, meanwhile, got Moylan drunk and poured him into a berth, where he spent the night. The next day, gossip about Jones's “gallantry,” as Fanning described it, swept through the port. On another occasion, Jones swept up the wife of a Lorient man and kept her in his cabin during a short cruise of a couple of weeks.

In mid-April, Jones traveled to Paris, where he was received as a hero and presented at the royal court. Louis XVI gave him a gold-and-jewel sword. Jones also attended the opera with Marie Antoinette and was the guest of honor at a series of dinners and parties, despite his inability to speak or understand much French. (He would later gain some fluency.) Jones saw Franklin regularly, as well as a steady stream of women. The king also recommended that the French legislature bestow upon Jones the Cross of Military Merit, a first for a non-Frenchman. This would eventually lead to Jones being recognized as a chevalier, a title Jones clenched as though it was his key to the palace door. The Freemasons swore him into the elite Lodge of the Nine Sisters and then commissioned Jean Antoine Houdon,
the premier sculptor of the day, to carve a bust of the naval hero. Jones trimmed his long hair by eighteen inches and sat for the artist, and once the bust was completed, contemporaries declared it an exact likeness. Jones was so pleased he ordered extra copies sent to George Washington, who kept it on display at Mount Vernon; Thomas Jefferson; and his friend Robert Morris in Philadelphia. Eventually he distributed about sixteen of the statues.
⁴

The trip to Paris wasn't all pleasure, though. Jones was trying to pressure the French to sell the
Serapis
and other prizes so he could collect the money needed to pay his crew members, who were becoming mutinous again as they heard “of Jones's gay doings in Paris…. While the Commodore was making love to countesses and sleeping with scented courtesans, they hadn't enough money to buy a drink or command the services of such poor trollops as a seaport provided for enlisted men.”
⁵
Jones was also pushing plans for a joint American-French naval attack on British waters.

Jones was frustrated on both fronts, and by late May was back at Lorient empty-handed and overseeing the final reconditioning of the
Alliance.
Landais surfaced in the port town by early June, though he largely stayed away from the wharf and out of sight, according to Fanning. He had booked passage to America, where he was to stand court martial, but he was hardly a chastened man and in fact was making plans for yet another act of duplicity. On the afternoon of June 23, Jones was ashore for a social call, and his officers were below deck eating, when they heard shouts from above. Scrambling topside, they found their ship freshly manned, and Landais striding back and forth. As soon as Jones's officers were assembled, Landais claimed that his commission by the Continental Congress gave him command of the
Alliance,
and neither Franklin, in Paris, nor Jones could countermand that. He was taking control of the ship and would sail it to America. And, he said, if any officer aboard could not accept his captaincy, the officer was to go ashore immediately. The crew was given no option. All but one of the officers left the
Alliance.