Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (29 page)

He fared very differently with Delia, Comtesse de Nicolson. She came from a Scottish family and had married Count William Murray, also a Scot. They had a château near Pontoise and a house in a fashionable part of Paris. Jones met her in May 1780 and spent five passionate days with her at Hennebont, a few miles from the port of Lorient. Several of her letters to Jones have been preserved, and indicate the strength of her love for him:

My angel, my adorable Jones! When shall we meet never to be separated? . . . I feel that I never lived except those five days which passed, alas, like a dream . . . I have little thought of my fortune. I cannot render you happy with it, nor live with you in an opulent manner; for me a cabin and my lover, and I would be too happy!
⁴

When she learned that Jones was having difficulty raising the money to pay his crew, she offered to help: “In the name of all the love with which I am consumed, command me if I can be useful. I have diamonds and effects of various kinds; I could easily find a sum: command your mistress, it would make her happy.” And in another letter, she said that rather than lose him she would willingly be the lowest member of his crew. While Jones returned her love with affection, he was still besotted by the beautiful Madame de Lowendahl, and his affair with the Comtesse de Nicolson ended when he put to sea in September. These two love affairs did not prevent him from dallying with other women. While his new command, the
Ariel,
was being outfitted at Lorient, he spent a night with the pretty seventeen-year-old wife of James Moylan, an elderly Irish merchant. On another occasion, he took a prostitute to the theater and then went back to her lodgings. He also kept up the naval tradition of generous hospitality by organizing a “Grand Entertainment” on board his ship, which was attended by a prince, three admirals, and numerous ladies of quality.

The pleasant interlude in France came to an abrupt end on September 5, 1780, when Jones sailed from Lorient in the
Ariel.
Fierce gales forced him to spend a month anchored in Groix Roads, and when he finally put to sea on October 7, his ship was dismasted in a gale and nearly wrecked on the Penmarch Rocks. He put back in to Lorient for repairs and then sailed across the Atlantic to the West Indies, where he had an abortive encounter with a British privateer. From the Caribbean, he sailed north and arrived in Philadelphia on February 18, 1781. However successful Jones was as a man of action, he lacked the diplomatic skill necessary to win influential friends and secure the promotion he felt he deserved. He also failed to gain command of the newly built ship
America,
which he dearly wanted. After much lobbying, he did persuade his masters to send him back to Europe to recover the prize money due to the officers of the
Bonhomme Richard, Alliance,
and
Ranger.
Congress agreed to his request, and he sailed from Philadelphia on November 10, 1783.

Back in Paris, he found a place to stay in Montmartre and renewed his political and social contacts. He met the French minister of marine and the French foreign minister. He was presented to the King again, and he saw a great deal of Benjamin Franklin, who was minister plenipotentiary. He was still regarded as a hero in French society, and while carrying out the lengthy negotiations for the prize money, he was entertained by a wide circle of people. Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, often dined with him and thought she had never met a more modest man: “It was impossible to make him talk about his great deeds; but on any other subject he conversed freely with great wit and without affectation.”
⁵
He also had an affair with a lady he refers to in his memoirs as Madame T—, who claimed to be the daughter of King Louis XV but is now known to have been a Mrs. Townsend, the widow of an Englishman. She was to be his mistress for the next few years and gave birth to a son during this period, probably his although he never publicly acknowledged this.

Unlike Nelson, whose life ended in a blaze of glory at Trafalgar, the life of John Paul Jones went steadily downhill following his first triumphant visit to Paris after the heroic action off Flamborough Head. His second visit to Paris lasted three years, but however pleasant his social life, his naval career was effectively at an end. All his efforts to achieve the rank of admiral in the American navy and the French navy came to nothing, and he was never given command of another ship in the navies he had served so well. He was eventually recommended to Catherine the Great of Russia, who appointed him rear admiral of the Imperial Russian Navy in 1788. He traveled to St. Petersburg to meet the Empress and then on to the Black Sea, where he raised his flag on the Russian ship
Vladimir
and took charge of the squadron there. He was then forty-one, and in spite of the disappointments of the preceding five years, he made a good impression on the Russian seamen. One sailor said, “He was dressed like all of us, but his weapons were excellent. He was of brave appearance; his hair was a little gray but he was still strong, fit for work and full of keen understanding of our task.”
⁶

In June 1788, he led the Russian fleet into action against a Turkish fleet at Liman at the mouth of the Dnieper River. The first battle of Liman was indecisive. Two weeks later, the second battle took place. In a confused and bloody mêlée in which many of the Turkish vessels ran aground, the Russian fleet gained a decisive victory. The Turks lost fifteen vessels, with 3,000 men killed and 1,673 taken prisoner. The Russians lost only one frigate, with 18 killed and 67 wounded. The victory owed much to the strategy of John Paul Jones, but it was a Russian admiral who got the credit. It was Jones's last action. He was awarded a minor order and shortly afterward retired to St. Petersburg. There he lived in some style. He took an apartment in a house near the Admiralty building and made social calls and went to parties. His household consisted of an interpreter, a manservant, a Russian seaman orderly, and a peasant coachman. Then in April 1789, his world fell apart when the police reported that he had attempted to rape a ten-year-old girl, Katerina Goltzwart. She was the daughter of a German immigrant who ran a dairy nearby, and she delivered milk to Jones's apartment and other houses in the neighborhood. The numerous versions of the story have been meticulously examined by Jones's most distinguished biographer, Samuel Eliot Morison. His conclusions are that Jones did have sexual contact with her but not full sexual intercourse, and that Jones's protestations that he would not use force on a woman and did not take her virginity are likely to be the truth. In a remarkably frank statement to the chief of police, Jones admitted that she had come to his house several times before, and he had always given her money: “I thought her to be several years older than Your Excellency says she is, and each time that she came to my house she lent herself very amiably to do all that a man would want of her.” Whatever the truth of the matter, Jones found himself spurned by most of his friends and acquaintances in St. Petersburg.

He had a final audience with the Empress in June 1789, and in August he left Russia and traveled via Warsaw, Vienna, Amsterdam, and London to Paris, where he took an apartment at 52 rue de Tournon, near the Palais de Luxembourg. Many of his aristocratic friends had fled the country, which was in the grip of revolution. The King and Queen had been ejected from Versailles by the Paris mob and were confined to the Tuileries. John Paul Jones spent his time writing letters, almost alone in the city that a few years earlier had fêted him as a hero. He suffered from jaundice, contracted bronchial pneumonia, and on July 18, 1792, died at the age of forty-five. A quiet funeral took place two days later in a nearby cemetery. The coffin was preceded by a detachment of grenadiers from the gendarmerie. It was perhaps all that could be expected in view of the conditions in Paris at the time, but it was in stark contrast to the magnificent funeral that was staged for Nelson after his death at the Battle of Trafalgar.

T
HE MOST FAMOUS
of all sailors' women must surely be Lady Hamilton. Her very public affair with Admiral Nelson delighted the gossipmongers of the day and provided a rich subject for the cartoonists. It has continued to be a source of fascination and has been the inspiration for numerous books, a distinguished play, and several films, notably
That Hamilton Woman,
in which the part of Nelson was played by Laurence Olivier and that of Lady Hamilton by Vivien Leigh. In the process, the love affair has been romanticized and has taken on a mythic quality that it never had at the time. The fact is that when Nelson and Lady Hamilton met in Naples after the Battle of the Nile, they could scarcely have been more different from the attractive figures portrayed in
That Hamilton Woman.
⁷
Nelson was only thirty-nine years old, but he was exhausted by pain and the responsibilities of command. His hair was gray, his cheeks were sunken, and he rarely smiled. His right arm had been amputated, and he had the empty sleeve of his coat pinned across his chest. “He looks very old,” wrote Lord Elgin, “has lost his upper teeth, sees ill of one eye, and has a film coming over both of them.”
⁸
A German observer thought he was one of the most insignificant figures he had ever seen, “a more miserable collection of bones and wizened frame I have yet to come across.”

Lady Hamilton was no longer the young woman whose face and figure had attracted the attention of princes and aristocrats and had inspired painters and poets. She was thirty-three and had put on a great deal of weight. A Swedish diplomat remarked that she was the fattest woman he had ever laid eyes on but thought she had the most beautiful head. James Harris, a young English aristocrat who saw her when her affair with Nelson had become common knowledge, considered her to be “without exception the most coarse, ill-mannered, disagreeable woman I ever met with.”

So what did these two people see in each other? Nelson's outward appearance may have been unimpressive, but he had a simple directness in his speech, a boldness in his manner, and a lively animation of countenance that charmed both men and women. The son of a Norfolk parson, he had gone to sea at the age of twelve and had seen active service in the West Indies. While a young captain stationed in the Leeward Isles, he had met and married Fanny Nisbet on the island of Nevis. She was a twenty-seven-year-old widow with a young son. The daughter of a judge, she would have made an ideal wife for a lawyer, a doctor, or a parson (indeed she was to get on famously with Nelson's father). She was poised and ladylike with refined good looks and a genteel air, but she was not the most suitable wife for a sailor, particularly one with a genius for battle and a thirst for glory. She was lonely and unhappy when Nelson was away at sea and frequently urged him not to put his life in danger: “I sincerely hope, dear husband, that all these wonderful and desperate actions such as boarding ships you will leave to others.”
⁹
This was a reference to Nelson's actions at the Battle of Cape St. Vincent in 1797, when he made his name in spectacular fashion by his unorthodox tactics. As commodore of the 74-gun ship
Captain,
he had pulled his ship out of the line of battle to prevent the escape of the Spanish ships. He ranged his ship alongside the 80-gun ship
San Nicolas,
led a boarding party that succeeded in capturing her, and then took his men across her decks to the huge Spanish ship
San Josef,
which had become locked alongside. At the fierceness of his attack, her officers surrendered, and the action became immortalized as “Nelson's patent bridge for boarding first-rates.” His daring exploits were rewarded with a knighthood and promotion to rear admiral in command of the British fleet in the Mediterranean.

The following year, he tracked down the French fleet that was anchored in a strong defensive position in Aboukir Bay near the mouth of the Nile. In the late afternoon of August 1, 1798, he sighted the French masts. Instead of conducting a reconnaissance and preparing to attack the next morning, he sailed headlong into the bay and caught the French off guard. The battle began around 6:30
P.M.
, and within two hours five of the French ships had surrendered. At ten o'clock, the French flagship
L'Orient
blew up, and the battle continued until the early hours of the next morning. Nine French ships of the line were captured, and only two escaped. It was one of the most complete and devastating naval victories of all time. Nelson was wounded above his blind eye and thought his hour had come. “I am killed. Remember me to my wife,” he said as he was led below to the surgeon.
¹⁰
But the wound proved to be relatively minor, and he was able to dictate a report of the action to his superiors.

News of the victory resounded across Europe and was received with relief and joy in Naples. Lady Hamilton, who had met Nelson briefly some years before when he was an unknown captain, was so overcome with emotion that she fell to the ground. When she recovered, she dashed off a letter to the admiral. Her eccentric spelling betrayed her lack of formal education but her sentiments shine through:

My dear, dear Sir,
    How shall I begin, what shall I say to you. 'tis impossible I can write, for since last Monday I am delirious with joy, and assur you I have a fervour caused by agitation and pleasure. God, what a victory! Never, never has there been anything half so glorious, so compleat. I fainted when I heard the joyful news, and fell on my side and am hurt, but well of that, I shou'd feil it a glory to die in such a cause. No, I wou'd not like to die till I see and embrace the Victor of the Nile. . . .
¹¹

And embrace him she did. Nelson's flagship, the
Agamemnon,
arrived in Naples three weeks after the battle, and Lady Hamilton and her husband were among the first to greet him. They were taken out to the anchored flagship in a boat. As soon as they were alongside, Lady Hamilton hurried aboard and fell into Nelson's arms exclaiming, “Oh, God, is it possible.” She was dazzled by his fame and wanted nothing more than to share in his glory. And the welcome Nelson received that day was like the victorious homecoming of a Roman general. The whole town turned out to greet the conquering hero. The local people let loose flocks of birds from wicker cages as a traditional celebration of victory, and the bay echoed with the stirring sounds of bands playing their own versions of “Rule, Britannia!” and “God Save the King.” The King of Naples came out to greet Nelson in his royal yacht, which was decorated with colorful awnings and emblems. Dozens of local craft filled the bay, with people on board cheering and hailing Nelson as their liberator.