Give Me a Fast Ship
Page 25
The Raleigh and the Alfred entered l’Orient just as other American ships were following Vergennes’s orders to leave France. From Saint-Malo, Lambert Wickes wrote Henry Johnson, glad to hear Johnson had “liberty to depart” France, hoping the two of them would be sailing home together along with the still-leaking Dolphin. She would soon be another captain’s problem: the commissioners had purchased the frigate Lyon, renamed her the Deane, and turned her over to Sam Nicholson. The Dolphin went to Francis Brown.87
Wickes was fed up with the French Admiralty, which refused his requests for gunpowder while attempting to confiscate his guns and even his rudder to ensure that he would not attack from a French port. He demanded to know from Franklin et al. whether he was sailing home or not. He was, and continued overseeing repairs to the Reprisal, including replacement of his sawed-through beams.88
Logistics prevented the Lexington from joining him. Before raising sail to depart Saint-Malo on September 14, Wickes sent Johnson one last letter, telling him the Reprisal would swing by Morlaix before heading out to the open sea. If fate did not permit them to sail together, then he hoped to meet Johnson in Portsmouth, where “I hope to have the Pleasure of Seeing you If not Sooner.” 89
His letter finished, Wickes dropped some candle wax on the letter’s fold and turned it over for delivery. The Reprisal and the Dolphin waited off Morlaix for several hours: no sign of the Lexington. Wickes was anxious to avoid another diplomatic imbroglio, so he sailed away.
By the time the ships reached Ushant it was obvious the Dolphin could not survive the voyage. Wickes put his French pilot aboard her and sent her back to France. After wishing Brown well, Wickes made for the English Channel, the first leg in the long voyage home.90
The Lexington departed Morlaix three days later, her pilot sending her into the channel under clear skies and fine winds. Johnson, too, looked forward to getting home. His muster rolls carried more French names than either he or the French government liked; in fact, most of them had learned their destination was les États-Unis once the brigantine made the channel—and they were none too happy about it. As if in answer to their discontent, the winds died.91
It took two days for the Lexington to reach Ushant, where her mastheader spied a small sail on the horizon in the early hours of September 19: a cutter, the Alert, Captain John Bazeley. The Lexington was larger and had the cutter outgunned. Nonetheless, the Alert made straight for her. Within two hours they were abreast of each other, both flying British colors. Bazeley, convinced he had caught a smuggler, fired a small gun to bring her to, and asked where she was from.
“Guernsey,” Johnson replied before hauling down his false colors, raising the Grand Union, and opening his gun ports. A withering broadside shook the Alert, but instead of being cowed and sheering off, Bazeley returned fire.
The cutter was faster, and had one more advantage over the Lexington: her hull was sheathed in copper, while the brigantine’s bottom badly needed cleaning. For the next two hours the ships exchanged broadsides, damaging each other’s rigging as they jockeyed for position in the still water. This was not the fight Johnson had anticipated; several of his men were dead, including Marine Lieutenant John Connelly and Jeremiah Holden, who had been the Lexington’s sailing master since John Barry’s days as captain.
Further damage to his ship and more casualties would only make it harder to sail out of British waters, so Johnson ordered the sweeps manned. Rowing fiercely, the Lexingtons took their ship out of the fight. By ten a.m. they were out of range, and Johnson set his men to repairing the rigging.
Aboard the Alert, Bazeley ordered the gun crews to join their shipmates in repairing the cutter’s rigging. A florid-faced young man with a double chin, Baze- ley was not ready to give up the fight. Once the rigging was sufficiently operational, he cried, “After them!” and the Alert gave chase.
The cutter was still far behind two hours later when Johnson’s luck changed. The wind returned, a veritable gale bringing rain and the Alert down on the Lexington. Soon the fighting resumed. Johnson was a fearless man; whether he was low on ammunition or his French hands refused to fight on, we do not know. With inordinately high casualties, he decided further resistance was futile, and struck his colors to the smaller ship.92
Seven of his men were dead, and a handful of his wounded required amputation of their shattered limbs. The storm’s winds propelled both ships to Dover, where Johnson and his men were hauled off to Mill Prison. Among them was Richard Dale, the young officer captured by Goodrich’s navy, then by John Barry, and now the British again. They arrived just as the new “Black Hole” was finished. Another American sailor, William Ford, became its first occupant.93
News of the Lexington’s capture was hailed throughout England. “The Lexington appears to be one of the three which did the Mischief in the Irish Seas,” the London Daily Advertiser proclaimed, adding how she struck to “the Supreme Valour of the Dover Boys.” The Admiralty sent word to Dover officials: find out how many of her crew were French, and get the tally to Stormont.94
Americans in Paris took the news hard, finding solace that with just forty-eight Americans among “such a Motley Crew”—a not-so-subtle swipe at the brigantine’s Frenchmen—Johnson “made so Gallant a Resistance.” At least the Reprisal was heading home.95
On November 3, a French ship was passing the Newfoundland Banks when the crew spotted some debris far off in the water. Taking up his spyglass, the captain saw it was a gangway ladder, with a man floating on top of it. He immediately sent his ship to save the castaway—if he was still alive.
The poor wretch, a fellow Frenchman, had been clinging to the ladder for three days, not knowing if he would ever see another ship or soul again. Through sunburned, cracked lips, in a barely audible croak, he told his rescuers that a horrific storm had overtaken his vessel, and three titanic waves “pooped” the ship—crashing over the stern and filling her with green water, each one further breaking the already weakened ship apart. The third wave carried her and all hands underwater.
Only he and another seaman made it back to the surface, where the gangway ladder became their life raft. For two days they shared it until the other man’s strength failed, and he slid silently into the watery abyss. The Frenchman was the only survivor. When asked his name and that of his ship, he whispered: Nathan Jaquays . . . ship’s cook . . . Continental ship Reprisal.96
Days before that storm sank the Reprisal it had been howling down the entire New England coast. Ship departures were postponed, but most captains wisely accepted the delays as part of a seaman’s life.
But this nor’easter did not bring out the best in John Paul Jones. Months earlier, when he had arrived in Portsmouth to take command of the Ranger, he anticipated sailing in the summertime. Now winter was just weeks away, and he was nearly stir-crazy to get to sea. Unlike earlier setbacks, this time his mood was not the result of his innate restlessness or desire for action. Nor had his orders changed; he was still bound for France. But he had recently been given an added task: to be “the welcome Messenger at Paris of the Joyful and important news of Burgoyne’s Surrender” at Saratoga. Jones knew full well that such tidings would go a long way towards making France an open ally to America.97
In the face of Washington’s twin defeats at Brandywine and Germantown and the loss of Philadelphia, Congress became so anxious to ensure that France learn of this momentous news that every ship bound there was given detailed reports of Gates’s victory for delivery to the American commissioners. Jones, being Jones, wanted to be the first to deliver the news, even though he had but one set of sails aboard. Nevertheless, he assured the Marine Committee that he would “go out of my Course” to make the speediest way to France, “Unless I see a fair Opportunity of distressing the Enemy.”98
Before leaving Portsmouth, Jones wrote letters to Robert Morris and Joseph Hewes. Both dispatches interspersed his difficulties in obtaining supplies b
etween near-paranoid passages regarding the humiliation of being superseded in rank by captains beneath him in both patriotism and ability, while informing them he had made them executors of his will. Good weather had returned on November 1, and the Ranger stood down the Piscataqua. As she departed, Jones had his fife-and-drum band play a tune for the onlookers at the docks while he doffed his hat to the ladies in the crowd. With “one suite of sails” and “less than thirty gal[lons] of Rum for the whole crew,” Jones was finally back in his element.99
Storms beset the Ranger, giving Jones the chance to confirm his suspicion that she was over-masted (she was) and carried too many guns (how Thomas Thompson would have loved that problem!). The combination of the two made the Ranger “crank”—she heeled far to one side in heavy weather. Rolling over high seas in one gale, the ship’s tiller rope broke. Unable to steer her until repairs were made, the helmsman and other hands grappled with the wheel as the Ranger threatened to “broach to”—putting her on her beam ends as the ship veered to windward. Days later, a sailor was washed overboard, then saved when his comrades threw him a rope and hauled him up the side. Jones also found his new best friend, Major Frazer, “different from what I thought him,” often intoxicated and “utterly incompatible” with Jones’s vision of a proper officer.100
Three weeks into the voyage Jones captured his first prizes: two brigantines, part of the Gibraltar fleet. On November 26 he gave chase to another, only to come into view of the Invincible, a seventy-four-gun ship-of-the-line. His crew’s lust for another prize turned to alarm; Jones used the situation to show his men what he was made of. Shouting orders across the water to his prize-masters to follow his lead, the three ships brazenly joined the convoy. The Invincible’s captain determined they were part of his fleet, and the Americans sailed with the enemy until nightfall.
One of Jones’s sailors wrote home about this display of cool audacity, calling Jones “a Gentleman of COURAGE and CONDUCT,” and “deserving of the best Ship in America.” Three days later another gale propelled the Ranger into the Bay of Biscay. She dropped anchor in Nantes on December 2, where Jones learned that a Massachusetts brigantine had beaten him to France with the news of Burgoyne’s surrender—by just one day.101
Word of Saratoga thrilled Americans both stationed in Europe and imprisoned in Europe. Franklin’s grandson, Temple, wrote that Frenchmen celebrated the victory as if Frenchmen had won it; one lady of the king’s court composed a march to be played when Burgoyne rode off into captivity. In Mill Prison, American sailors were stealthily digging a tunnel for their escape when they learned that Philadelphia had fallen. The guards discovered their burrowing on November 28, but the punishment for their attempted escape was offset by the hope given them ten days later when they, too, learned about Saratoga.102
“The Year of the Hangman” ended with the Continental Army freezing in Valley Forge, Philadelphia in British hands, and the Continental Navy in disarray. Of the original thirteen frigates, two were sunk, two were burned, two were captured, and four were still bottled up in harbor. Three captains were prisoners, two faced losing their commissions, and one intrepid hero lay at the bottom of the sea. And yet, for all that, glory lay ahead—glory mixed with farce and tragedy.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“UNDER THE VAULT OF HEAVEN”
The account they gave of themselves was this—that they were quartered in the captain’s cabin, and thrown into the water without receiving any hurt. But they could give no account by what accident the ship blew up.
—BROADSIDE, “ENGAGEMENT BETWEEN CONTINENTAL NAVY FRIGATE RANDOLPH AND H.M.S. YARMOUTH”1
While the news about the victory at Saratoga was greeted rapturously by the American commissioners in Paris, it was equally welcomed by one Frenchman, the Comte de Vergennes.
Throughout the war, he had been assiduously rebuilding a French navy that had been decimated by the French and Indian War. By the end of 1777, there were more than 250 ships in Louis XVI’s navy, including 50 ships-of-the-line. Like his king, Vergennes held no love for France’s ancient enemy across the English Channel. He saw Burgoyne’s surrender not just as a perfect opportunity for an alliance with the Americans, but also as a chance for France to recoup her losses from the last war—in the New World and around the globe. Vergennes even dreamed of the fleur-de-lis flying over India.2
In Nantes, all John Paul Jones wanted was the ship that had been promised him upon his arrival in France: l’Indien, a Dutch frigate under construction at Amsterdam, recently purchased by the French. Upon learning that word of Saratoga was already speeding its way to Paris, Jones awaited a formal invitation from the American commissioners, busying himself in making the Ranger a better sailer. He wanted to shorten her masts, lighten her deck by removing two guns, add more ballast to her hold, and clean her foul bottom—changes that would both stabilize her and increase her speed. To amuse himself, he set out to purchase the French goods he had promised Mrs. William Whipple.3
He was pleased to discover that he had an acquaintance in Nantes, John Young, captain of the sloop Independence. They had met during the summer of ’76 in Philadelphia. Jones not only got to know Young’s family but also enjoyed a brief romance with a friend of theirs. Young possessed skill, pluck, and at number 23 on the Captains List, an even lower rank than Jones: he was the perfect captain for Jones to cruise with.4
Jones put work and pleasantries aside once the commissioners summoned him to Paris, unaware that he was not at the top of the officers’ list of the American commissioners that Christmastide. Franklin spent the holiday with Charles-Henri, Comte d’Estaing, one of France’s ablest admirals, whose hatred of the British was legendary.5
No port of call, or even London itself, could have prepared Jones for the extremes that awaited him in Paris. The majesty of the Champs-Élysées and its endless rows of elm trees were blocks away from some of the worst slums on earth. Nôtre-Dame, the Louvre, and the Palace of Versailles—beautiful monuments that dazzled the eyes—were mixed with an assault on a visitor’s sense of smell. “The sewers of every city on earth meet in Paris,” one visitor wrote. The streets and the Seine were filthy. Coachmen heedlessly ran down child and adult alike.6
Once in Paris, Jones headed to Passy, a neighborhood of estates where the commissioners lived. Their headquarters was the Hôtel Valentinois, owned by Jacques-Donatien Leray de Chaumont, a Benjamin Franklin look-alike and former slave trader. A novel’s worth of characters lived under the hotel’s roof: diplomats, mercenaries, mistresses, and spies, including Franklin’s own secretary, Edward Bancroft. The son of a New England tavern keeper, he had a flair for self-promotion and an insatiable desire to rise in society—someone Jones could easily relate to, if one exchanged patriotism for espionage. Whereas the captain’s maritime skills provided his means of social ascent, Bancroft used his talents in science, including experiments with electric eels.
Franklin promised Jones a taste of the French high life, dining in a hotel chambre decorated with paintings by Rembrandt and Rubens and featuring the best meats, vegetables, fruits, and exotic desserts, washed down with fine wine and champagne, interrupted by conversations either indirectly or directly concerning sex, all spoken in French. Jones did not understand the language, but he easily understood the gestures that accompanied the bantering. From l’Orient, Thomas Thompson wrote Jones, hoping he would “Enjoy much Satisfaction in the pleasantries which paris afourds.” Doubtless Jones did.7
By the time Franklin met Jones, he had his routine as frontier rustic/diplomatic genius honed to perfection. Surrounded by the most effete culture of dress, Franklin’s drab Quaker clothes and coonskin cap were an anomaly in King Louis’s court. Jones was instantly beguiled by the old man’s wisdom and unpretentiousness. Franklin could work a room just by standing in it. Their mutual love of Scottish reels cemented their relationship; as we shall see, Franklin would become a Henry IV–type father figure to Jones’s Prince Hal.8
Jones soon learned that l’Indien was not to be his after all. Word of this proposal had reached Lord Stormont from Bancroft, who wrote his message in invisible ink (a washing agent made the text reappear), and Stormont raised enough diplomatic hell to keep the Dutch from selling her. As 1778 dawned, Stormont was completely convinced that the Franco-American alliance was a fait accompli. “The Treaty between this Court and the Rebels . . . is actually signed,” he informed Lord Weymouth.10
L’Indien might not be Jones’s, but that did not stop Lieutenant Simpson from expecting the Ranger to be his. Simpson sent word to Jones that although the men had colds and “were infested with Vermin,” Simpson kept their spirits high, thanks to a gill of brandy served at breakfast and dinner. But soon there was not enough liquor aboard to take the men’s minds off the pestilential lice, the bitter cold, the snow coating the deck, and the ice floes running down the Loire, banging into the Ranger’s hull while French aristocracy wined and dined their captain. Jones was rumored to have even taken a mistress: his host Chaumont’s wife, Thérèse. The gills of brandy were accompanied by Simpson’s own invective against the Ranger’s captain. A Scotsman was as foreign to his fellow New Englanders as a Frenchman—or their British enemies, for that matter.11
In fairness, Jones was not simply living the good life and making love to Madame de Chaumont. His mind, as always, was burning with plans—not just to annoy the British but to strike fear into them. But first he had to provide for his men, and protect his command and authority from Simpson’s plotting. As best as Jones could, he managed both. First he informed the commissioners that, for him “to Strike a Stroke upon the Enemy,” his crew needed to be paid. All Congress gave him was assurances that it would recommend a “generous Gratification”—after their next cruise.12