Give Me a Fast Ship

by Tim McGrath

  Before the Confederacy put to sea, Harding accepted an offer from Guichen to join his fleet; the French were going to hunt for Rodney. At the last minute, Harding received a message from Bingham—Congress had finally sent orders for Harding to sail to Philadelphia. While Guichen’s ships sailed into battle, the Confederacy’s hold was filled with sugar and cocoa. The Confederacy left St. Pierre escorting a convoy of merchantmen, firing a thirteen-gun salute to Guichen, who returned the compliment with eleven. Harding was well on his way when, on April 17, Guichen met Rodney off Martinique in a daylong battle that ended in a draw. It was the closest a Continental ship came to participating in a battle between the French and British navies.86

  One day of sailing was all Harding needed to see that luck had not yet returned to the Confederacy. Smallpox broke out aboard ship and the new maintop mast sprung, forcing Harding to sail cautiously, bypassing potential prizes all the way north to Philadelphia. The frigate reached Cape Henlopen on April 25; Harding sent a junior lieutenant and six men in a longboat to retrieve a pilot. Instead, they deserted. It was two days before a pilot came aboard to take the Confederacy up the Delaware.87

  In the split second when John Paul Jones decided to let Pierre Landais take the Alliance to sea, Jones had convinced himself that his decision was a sound one, both professionally and personally. His official reason for letting Landais go, he told Robert Morris, was “to prevent bloodshed between the allied subjects of France and America.” In reality, Jones felt that the price of commanding the frigate was not worth the trouble of confronting the volatile Frenchman or the warring factions of officers and crew of the Alliance and the Bonhomme Richard. Something better had to be in the offing. All the new chevalier need do was let Franklin and Sartine know he was available. He waited in l’Orient for their reply.88

  There may have been another reason for Jones to remain in France. After the Countess of Lowendahl dropped him, he was “on the rebound,” engaged in a series of trysts with the Scottish-born wife of a French count, whom Jones called “Delia,” after the title of a popular song. Whereas the Countess de Lowendahl’s letters were a combination of enticing flirtation and cool rebuff, Delia’s were unfettered by discretion (“I will love you beyond death”) but rife with wild promises (“I have been told that neither you nor your crew have been paid . . . I have diamonds and all sorts of jewelry; I will easily find money”).

  Jones responded as always, with a burst of his poetry (“All Heav’n laments—but Juno shews / A jealous and superior woe”). However, in another, written in Latin, he seemed to show a different side of himself (“Give [show] your rear to men, your arrow to women”). Though Jones had been smitten with Dorothea Dandridge, and perhaps the Countess Lowendahl, he was not about to commit himself to Delia. But with a noblewoman at his feet, all he needed was Franklin’s wise approval of his decision to tarry in France, and Sartine’s gift of a ship-of-the-line or squadron, and everything would be perfect.89

  In early July he heard from Franklin. “If you had staid on board where your Duty lay in stead of coming to Paris, you would not have lost your Ship,” he chastised Jones. It was the letter of an exasperated father to a spoiled son, rebuking Jones for finding fault in everyone, including his friends (“You Complain of your friends who are in no fault. They spare you”) and crew (“Give your officers and friends a little more praise than is their Due, and confess more fault than you can justly be charged with”). Do this, Franklin admonished, and perhaps “you will only become the sooner for it a Great Captain.”90

  The words stung. Franklin was truly a father figure for Jones. The captain had bewailed his lot to everyone of influence, especially to Franklin, these two years. Jones had endured the slings, arrows, snobbery, and other injustices of Dudley Saltonstall, Esek Hopkins, John Langdon, and Pierre Landais. How, Franklin pointedly asked, was Jones any different from them?

  And yet, in another letter, Franklin announced he had procured another frigate, the Ariel. Jones was to fill her hold with the supplies for Washington that Landais and Lee had abandoned on the docks of l’Orient. “You have Ariel; for heaven’s sake load her as heavily as she can bear, and sail!” Franklin ordered. Despite Franklin’s call for urgency, it took all summer for Jones to refit her, reducing her from twenty-six 9-pounders to sixteen, tinkering with her masts, taking on stores. His romance with Delia was interrupted by trysts with the elderly James Moylan’s seventeen-year-old bride; in one instance his officers entertained the American agent aboard the Ariel while Jones was in Moylan’s own boudoir.91

  One more thing kept Jones from sailing to America: the money still owed him and the men of the Bonhomme Richard. The Serapis and the other ships had been sold, and Jones demanded to know from the minister of foreign affairs “with certainty in what banker’s hands in Paris the money will be lodged.” He despaired of any American getting his just due. Just before leaving port, he hosted a grand regalia for the officers of the French navy and l’Orient dignitaries, complete with food, wine, fireworks, a reenactment of Flamborough Head, and a tent aboard the Ariel that Jones had decorated to resemble a bordello. “Neither cash nor pains were spared,” a frugal Fanning recollected years later, still unpaid for his services aboard the Bonhomme Richard.92

  On October 7, the Ariel, with several passengers and too much weight in her hold, headed for the Bay of Biscay. That evening, “Wind fell very moderate and the Weather was very Serene,” Richard Dale noted. It was the calm before the storm.

  At two a.m. the wind returned, building slowly, steadily into an enormous gale. By daybreak the rain was coming sideways, pelting the crew while the wind whipped at their clothes. For three years, Jones had sailed the Bay of Biscay; he had experienced its storms before—but nothing like this. All day and into the night Jones and his men took the storm’s blows, changing course, running under bare poles, manning the pumps. The crew was bone-weary, but there was no rest—all hands were needed to fight the storm.93

  The Ariel was between l’Orient and Brest when the winds began driving her towards the treacherous Penmark Rocks. She was soon sailing on her beam ends. When it looked as if nature would win this battle, Jones sent his strongest hands to starboard to drop the best bow anchor, running out its cable to the bitter end. The tempest was so strong that the anchor could not bite into the sea floor. Jones ordered his men to splice another cable to the first one. At the same time, he ordered the carpenter and his mates, axes in hand, to cut down the foremast. As it fell, the anchor grabbed sand; but in securing itself, the ship now threatened to break apart from the overwhelming pressure between the immovable anchor and the irresistible force of the storm. A series of harsh, grinding sounds came from below deck—the mainmast had unstepped itself. To Dale, it “reeled like a Man Drunk”; everyone aboard knew it would finish the job the storm had started, and destroy the Ariel.94

  Jones now played the last card left him, sending the axmen to cut the loosened shrouds holding the mainmast. They were making their way across the slippery deck just as the gale pulled the chain plates securing the mast out from the bulwark. The mainmast immediately went over the side, taking the mizzenmast with it. Still, the movement of the ship “was so quick and violent,” Fanning recalled, “that the most expert seamen on board could not stand upon their legs.” For the next two days and nights the Ariel rode up and down the tempest’s mountains and valleys, tethered by one anchor.95

  Once the monstrous waves fell to bearable heights, Jones sent the carpenter and mates to jury-rig a foremast and yard, then bent a staysail and jib. Shortly after midnight on the eleventh, Jones had the anchor cable cut. Slowly, timidly, the Ariel inched its way back to l’Orient, most of the goods in her hold ruined, but all of her crew alive. Sailing along the coastline, Jones’s men beheld one ship after another, wrecked against Penmark Rocks or the battered shore. The Ariel reached port on October 13.96

  People crowding the waterfront thought they were looking at a ghost shi
p. The Ariel was believed lost, but here was Jones, successfully returning in his battered frigate. One passenger wrote Franklin that Jones gave all aboard “a delivery from death.” Jones, with understated bravado, summed up the trial thusly: “Never before had a vessel been saved in such circumstances.” It sounds like bragging, but both landsmen and old salts recognized what he had done. Years later, Fanning described him best: “He was an excellent seaman.”97

  While the Ariel underwent repairs, and praise was lavished on Jones for bringing in one of the few ships that made it into port after the great storm, he returned to his habit of angling for something better than what he had. But with French fleets in action against their ancient enemy, Sartine gave little or no thought to the captain’s requests. Franklin, still nettled at Jones for letting the Alliance escape his command, was hobbled with the gout and in no mood to resume the role of mentor and savior. By mid-December the Ariel was repaired. With her hold full of gunpowder and secret dispatches in his sea chest, Jones bid adieu to Delia, Franklin, and dreams of another glorious raid.

  Besides duty, Jones had yet another ulterior motive in returning to America. “My Friends here tell me the new 74 Gun Ship, called the America at Portsmouth will be reserved for me,” he wrote Robert Morris.98

  When the summer of 1780 came to an end there were four Continental ships in Philadelphia: the frigates Confederacy, Trumbull, and Deane, and the sloop-of-war Saratoga. The Board of Admiralty originally intended for them to sail as a squadron under James Nicholson, but the Confederacy’s repairs took too long for her to return to sea until the end of the year. Only the Saratoga was ready to sail.99

  When completed that summer the Saratoga was 94 feet, 2 inches long with a 29-foot beam. Captain John Young had recently completed a successful cruise with other privateers under John Barry’s command. The Saratoga’s second-in-command was Lieutenant Joshua Barney, who had been exchanged after being captured aboard the Virginia. He had recently married the young daughter of politician Gunning Bedford. Congress was happy to see Barney go. Ever since his arrival in Philadelphia he had assailed congressmen, demanding better pay for naval officers. For his top marine, Young enlisted Abraham Van Dyke, at sixty-one the oldest officer in the corps, but recommended highly by General Washington. Francis Lewis, de facto head of the Admiralty, knew Young from their days in New York before the war, and had been Young’s champion and mentor in Congress.100

  Having sent the Trumbull and Deane on an earlier cruise, Lewis hoped to send the Saratoga out with them upon their return. But as the dog days of August waned, he found another responsibility for Young: escort the Mercury Packet into the Atlantic. She was taking Congressman (and former president of Congress) Henry Laurens of South Carolina to Holland, in hopes that he would secure a loan of ten million dollars from the Dutch.101

  The Saratoga and the Mercury Packet were standing down the Delaware when Congress received a dispatch from Washington, then in New York. Charles Henri-Louis d’Arsac, Admiral de Ternay, had arrived in Newport with seven ships-of-the-line and a small French army under General Jean Baptiste Rochambeau. Now Ternay suggested that a Continental ship sail to Santo Domingo and ask Admiral de Guichen to send four of his ships to reinforce Ternay’s fleet. If Guichen sent them, Ternay told Washington, he “could transport your army to Long Island the beginning of October, and finally decide the fate of America this year.” What Ternay proposed was music to Washington’s ears—a chance, at long last, to settle his old score with the British army in New York. Washington immediately agreed, and sent the request to Congress. On August 19, it sent a sealed dispatch to Henry Fisher, containing their orders and Washington’s directives for Young to carry out Ternay’s plan. With Rochambeau’s troops and Ternay’s strengthened fleet, Washington might end the war.102

  But Ternay’s brainstorm became one more “what if” of the war. By the time Congress’s courier reached Fisher at Cape Henlopen, the Saratoga and the Mercury Packet were well out to sea. En route, Young also passed the incoming Trumbull and Deane, both short on water. The run of bad timing did not end there. Once at sea, Laurens asked Young to keep the packet company for a few more days. While the packet sailed quickly, the Saratoga plodded—her ballast was incorrectly stored. The Mercury constantly had to slow down to allow the Saratoga to catch up. Finally, Laurens was convinced that his ship was far enough from the British warships forever prowling the coast, and sent Young off on a short cruise.

  Days later, the Mercury Packet was captured by the British frigate Vestal. Laurens weighted down his secret orders and threw them overboard, but the package did not sink. A British sailor picked it out of the water, and Laurens’s new destination became the Tower of London. The Saratoga returned from her cruise too late to sail on Washington’s mission.103

  While the Saratoga was on her shakedown cruise, the Board of Admiralty was besieged with political tempests. Since Ternay’s arrival in America, he had been after Washington to place the remaining Continental ships under French command, a proposition that both Francis Lewis and William Ellery opposed. After a series of requests for funds from the Eastern Navy Board, Lewis informed them that Congress was “entirely destitute of cash” regarding the dwindling navy. Some representatives wanted to sell the Confederacy and Saratoga just to continue financing the Trumbull, Deane, and Alliance, and let the unfinished ship-of-the-line America and the frigate Bourbon remain on their ways in New England.

  To add to the board’s woes, James Nicholson returned to being James Nicholson. As he sailed the sluggish frigate Trumbull up the Delaware, he beheld the larger, rakish frigate Confederacy for the first time. It was lust at first sight, and he made his craving known to Congress. After all, as “Senior officer in the American service . . . I think myself entitled to one of the largest Ships in the Navy but instead of that I have one of the smallest.” He also returned to pressing sailors off incoming privateers.104

  Last but not least, the board received the first detailed reports about the arrival of Landais and the Alliance in Boston. Once the frigate was in the Bay of Biscay, Landais put the officers from the Bonhomme Richard—including Marine Captain Mathew Parke—in irons. As the ship neared the Grand Banks, the American sailors requested permission to fish—fresh seafood being healthier than the spoiling meat stored below. Landais refused. One day, without explanation, he changed course repeatedly. When he threatened his puppetmaster, Arthur Lee, with a carving knife at dinner, even Lee had enough. Landais was practiced at subterfuge, but he was dealing with a master. Behind his back, Lee organized a mutiny, convincing Lieutenant Degge to wrest the ship from the Frenchman’s command. Landais was confined to his cabin, and Degge sailed the frigate to Boston instead of Philadelphia.

  The Alliance’s arrival gave everyone headaches. Washington was furious at the paltry supplies delivered as opposed to the larger amounts promised. Lee immediately made for Philadelphia, where he joyfully returned to savaging Franklin. For three days Landais refused to leave his cabin until his former marines carried him, kicking and screaming, down the gangplank and to the Navy Board’s headquarters, where he haunted the hallways and slept on the floor. Abigail Adams wrote her husband John how “that poor vessel was the sport of more than wind and waves.” In l’Orient, Jones also heard that “Captain Landais and the officers quarreled on the Passage, and they took from him the Command and carried him to Boston a Prisoner!” Concerned that his archenemy might be found innocent, Jones demanded to know who would be named to Landais’s inquiry and who would lead it. “Who are the Men authorized to sit on that Court?—I have seen such Courts Chiefly composed of mere sailors & Fishermen.”

  A court of inquiry had to be appointed, and a captain had to be named for the Alliance. The trial would require a savvy leader who could navigate through the political chevaux-de-frise of an American mutiny against a French captain commanding an American frigate. The latter required an officer capable of restoring order and purpose to a ship with a h
istory of bad luck, unhappy circumstances, and bad experiences under two very flamboyant commanders.

  One man was the answer to both needs. The board sent for John Barry.105

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “SEND THAT SHIP TO SEA”

  It will always give me Pain to know that the Public Service has been delayed by private Bickerings and Animosities.

  —ROBERT MORRIS1

  On February 11, 1781, the Alliance was standing down Nantasket Road under John Barry’s command, heading for l’Orient. At the same time, the Ariel was nearing the Delaware Capes, having left l’Orient on December 18. She reached Philadelphia exactly two months later.

  John Paul Jones had sailed her south before taking the northeast trade winds. In January, he was a hundred miles northeast of the West Indies when the Ariel’s mastheader sighted a sail: the Triumph, a twenty-gun British privateer. Her captain, John Pinder, immediately began giving chase. With the delayed but valuable cargo of supplies for Washington in his hold, Jones sought to shake the Triumph in the dead of night. But dawn found Pinder closing in, looking for a fight, and Jones decided to accommodate him. After what Jones called a “brief resistance,” Pinder struck his colors.

  The Ariel’s launch was lowered to bring Pinder aboard. The boat was alongside the Triumph when Pinder quickly ordered “Make Sail!” and fled before the wind. The weighted-down Ariel had no chance to catch the Triumph, and Jones begrudgingly continued on his voyage to Philadelphia.2