“The moon was rising, the weather being clear, the surface of the great deep being perfectly smooth, even as in a millpond,” an American midshipman will remember. Snipers hide in the topsails of both ships, muskets cocked. Jones orders his men first to kill the enemy sharpshooters and then to turn their guns on any man scurrying about the Serapis’s main deck. If anything, the forty American snipers have a little extra courage, thanks to the double order of grog Jones has hoisted up to them.4
“What ship is that?” Capt. Richard Pearson of the Serapis cries out. The vessels are close—“pistol shot,” as Jones will describe the range—and the British skipper’s voice carries easily in the night. The sight of the British flag on the Bonhomme Richard makes Pearson reluctant to fire on her first.
Pearson, forty-eighty, is every bit Jones’s equal as a navigator, having fought in several major sea battles and having once piloted a ship through a hurricane. During one engagement, his ribs were shattered by a blast of grapeshot, but he refused to leave his post until the battle was won. But John Paul Jones does not know that. What he does know is that twenty brand-new eighteen-pounders are taking aim at his ship. British gun crews are famous for training relentlessly and striving to load and fire their weapons as quickly as possible. The Americans do not have that option, because of a shortage of powder. As a result, the rebel gunners are far less proficient with their aging French cannon.
Finally, a response comes from the Richard: “The Princess Royal.”
It is not Jones who does the talking, for his well-known Scottish brogue would give him away. Instead, it is the ship’s master, Samuel Stacey, who replies.
“Where from?”
This time there is no answer. Stacey’s voice has been no more effective than Jones’s might have been, considering that his accent, from Massachusetts, sounds nothing like that of a British sailor.
Pearson is insistent. “Answer immediately, or I shall be under the necessity of firing into you.”
Yet, even as he yells across the smooth seas, Jones orders the British colors struck. The American flag is quickly raised in its place. It is one of many different designs in use by the Continental Army and Navy, but one and all on both vessels recognize the ensign as it instantly reveals the Bonhomme Richard’s true colors. In the tops (the “topsails”), a nervous American sniper can’t help himself: knowing that battle is near, he squeezes off a round.
Only then does Jones give his response.
“We answered him by firing a whole broadside,” Jones will later write to his friend and patron Benjamin Franklin. “The battle being thus begun was continued with unremitting fury.”
The Americans may have struck first, but within moments, two of the Richard’s aging eighteen-pounders explode from misuse—killing the gun crews. The Serapis’s own big guns soon destroy the rest of the Americans’ eighteen-pounders, leaving the Bonhomme Richard with only a handful of lightweight cannon on the main deck. The moon is now completely risen, a full amber globe shining down on the mangled corpses splayed across the decks and dangling in the rigging, many of them old salts with years of experience at sea, but also among the dead are young boys between the ages of eight and sixteen. Fire rages through the lower deck as saltwater seeps in through the holes blasted by cannon. More than a hundred prisoners captured in previous raids are locked belowdecks; many now scream for their release as the Richard takes on water. Also below, men crowd into the office of the ship’s surgeon, their faces blackened by burns and their maimed limbs soon to fall victim to the necessities of the bone saw. Scores more sailors and marines are already dead, decapitated by the hot metal of grapeshot, ammunition similar to the canister shot used by the army. Bonhomme Richard’s situation is grave.
“Has your ship struck?” Captain Pearson calls out over the screams of the burned and maimed, wanting to know if Jones has lowered his colors in defeat.
At last, the British will have their day with John Paul Jones.
The Bonhomme Richard is barely able to maneuver. In fact, she will soon sink to the bottom of the North Sea.
“Surrender be damned,” Jones yells back across the water. He is exhausted, having slept just one hour the night before, and quite aware he will not sleep at all this evening.
“I have not yet begun to fight.”5
* * *
The Serapis crashes hard into the Bonhomme Richard, fouling her bow into the thick rigging at the rear of the American ship. Thinking quickly, John Paul Jones races up a ladder to the poop deck to rope the two ships together. He succeeds, but the bond is tentative. Calling for a thicker rope, he is subjected to a barrage of swearing from ship’s master Stacey, frustrated that the Richard is disabled and barely able to maneuver.
“Mr. Stacey, it’s no time to be swearing now,” Jones says lightly, seeking to calm the veteran sailor. “You may be the next moment in eternity, but let us do our duty.”
Thus far in the battle, Captain Pearson has outfoxed Jones. He now orders his vessel to drop anchor, believing that if the Serapis stands fast, the disabled Richard will simply float away on the current, whereupon the British ship’s big guns will fire at will and finish the job.
Pearson has no reason to doubt that this bold gambit will succeed. The Serapis is one hundred tons lighter, and thus more mobile. She has a protective copper bottom that allows her to sail faster; she also has the advantage in firepower.
But Jones’s ropes are holding. The Richard remains bound to the Serapis. If anything, the vessels now press closer together. Jones’s only chance for victory is to immobilize the enemy ship and send his men onto her decks to engage in hand-to-hand fighting. The Americans throw grappling hooks at the Serapis, further tangling the vessels. The fighting becomes savage—to the death.
In a scene of chaos, sailors leap onto enemy decks armed with swords, pistols, pikes, and grenades. The ensuing battle is terrifying and bloody, a free-for-all on the high seas. Some men drown, some lose limbs to the blade of a cutlass. Point-blank pistol shots blow off men’s faces.
Jones orders his French Marines to clamber up the Richard’s three masts and into the topsails to join the ship’s marksmen. One by one, those crew members of the Serapis unlucky enough to be roaming her exposed upper deck are raked by gunfire.
Belowdecks, however, the Serapis’s domination continues as her gunners unleash devastating broadsides with their big eighteen-pounders. Cannonballs enter one side of the Richard and exit the other, until the American ship’s gun decks are coated in a thick river of blood.
On board the Serapis, the young boys known as “powder monkeys” race back and forth to the magazines, ensuring a constant supply of gunpowder. The gunners know to limit the amount of powder near the cannon, for fear that a spark could ignite an explosion, but as the battle continues for hour after hour, the gun deck becomes littered with powder and cartridges.6
Fire and water, the two terrors of a sailor’s existence, soon begin to take their toll. The Richard is listing, and no amount of emergency hand-operated pumps can stop the incoming sea. The concern about fire is so great that fighting is halted for a time when the sails of both ships are ablaze—only to resume again when the flames are extinguished.
Every moment of the action can be seen by the crowds lining the distant shoreline. More than a thousand spectators cheer lustily after each cannon blast by the Serapis. They discern the two ships by the color of their topsides—black for the American ship and yellow for the Serapis.
“The fire of their cannon, especially the lower battery, which was entirely formed of 18-pounders, was incessant,” Jones will write. “My battery of twelve pounders on which I had placed my chief dependence was entirely silenced and abandoned.”
The Richard has just three cannon remaining—lightweight nine-pound deck guns. When the gunner in command suffers a head wound, Jones personally takes charge of the battery. He helps the gun crew maneuver the cannon from one side of the deck to the other. Remarkably, the commodore is not wounded in
any way. Refusing to go below for his own safety, as Pearson has done aboard the Serapis, Jones stands at the cannon, ready to fire.
He orders his deck gunners to aim high, hoping not only to cut through the enemy’s rigging, but also to kill the British sharpshooters in the opposing tops. Meanwhile, American and French marksmen continue to rain fire down on the Serapis’s main deck. The Americans control the upper decks, and the British below. Once Jones sees that the decks of the Serapis are clear, he orders those manning the cannon to switch their aim to its wooden mainmast. Three feet thick and painted bright yellow, it holds the key to disabling the Serapis. Should the one-hundred-fifty-foot column topple, the British ship’s sails will also fall into the sea.
At 10:00 p.m., four hours into the fight, American sailor William Hamilton lobs a series of grenades, hollow iron spheres filled with gunpowder ignited by a fuse, onto the Serapis. The first few grenades explode with little effect. But one lucky toss finds an open hatch. The grenade tumbles straight down to the gun deck, igniting the powder and cartridges surrounding the big guns.
A series of explosions rock the Serapis. More than one hundred pounds of gunpowder detonates. Twenty sailors are killed instantly. Dozens more are maimed and severely burned.
“Humanity cannot but recoil from the prospect of such finished horror and lament that war should be capable of producing such fatal consequences,” Jones will later write of the grisly scene.
At 10:30 p.m., the decks of both ships are a scene of “carnage, wreck and ruin,” in Jones’s words. Captain Pearson strikes his colors. It is an act of utter humiliation, for Pearson had been so intent on not surrendering that he had personally nailed the flag to the rail so that it would become a permanent part of his ship.
“Sir, I have struck,” Pearson yells over to Jones. Their ships are still locked together. From Pearson’s position high on his quarterdeck, he is just twenty yards from Jones, who is still preparing to direct another cannon shot.
John Paul Jones can clearly see the red British ensign still dangling limply from the taffrail, barely fluttering in the slight nighttime breeze. It has been shredded by the battle but is still a symbol.
“If you have struck, haul down your ensign,” the commodore barks at Pearson.
Pearson rips down the flag, its fabric tearing loudly as it separates from the nails holding it in place.
The Serapis is boarded.
“Have you struck, sir?” a shocked British lieutenant asks Pearson.
Pearson admits his surrender, then sends the officer below to order a cease-fire.
Captain Pearson makes the surrender official by offering Jones his sword. Almost three hundred men have died tonight; both sides have suffered equally. The losses are all the more staggering for the sight of corpses littering both decks. The deaths are not neat bullet holes or single stab wounds, but appear to be the work of a butcher—faces blackened by the soot of battle and the smoke of fire, arms and legs chopped away by canister. The bodies of these fallen men will soon be unceremoniously dumped over the side.
Disturbing as the sight may be, there is a formality among opponents that must be observed. John Paul Jones ends the hostilities on a civil note, asking Captain Pearson to join him for a glass of wine in what remains of his cabin.7
* * *
The danger is not past, however. The Bonhomme Richard bobs listlessly just off the English coast, easy pickings for other British warships. The crowds on the shore know that the Serapis has lost the battle, so it is only a matter of time before Jones is confronted by another British vessel. Jones desperately tries to save the Richard, but she begins to sink lower and lower into the North Sea. Her gun ports are soon breached by the waves. Cutting the ropes, Jones reluctantly orders all hands transferred to the Serapis, prisoners included. She no longer has a mast, so as the Richard finally settles below the waves, John Paul Jones orders his crew to rig makeshift sails, and the Serapis sets sail. For ten long days, she travels east, evading British patrols. Finally, Jones maneuvers her toward the safety of the Dutch port of Texel.
* * *
Benjamin Franklin responds to a letter from John Paul Jones, written upon the commodore’s arriving safely in Texel. “For some days,” Franklin writes on October 10, 1779, “scarce any thing was talked of at Paris and Versailles but your cool conduct and persevering bravery during that terrible conflict.”
* * *
In London, George III has no public response to the embarrassment John Paul Jones has caused Great Britain. But in Parliament, the antiwar voices grow more vocal and numerous by the day.
The king has no intention of losing the war to the Americans. In fact, he and his war council are set to release a new weapon—but this one is not made of steel. It is a human being named Banastre Tarleton.
23
MONCKS CORNER, SOUTH CAROLINA
APRIL 14, 1780
3:00 A.M.
Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton does not trust his horse.
The proud commander of the British Legion canters silently through the swamps of South Carolina astride an inferior beast. The officer is twenty-five and brown haired, his strong jaw and aquiline nose just a shade too large for his narrow face. Tarleton’s own mount, and those of his men, did not survive the rough sea passage from New York City to Charlotte, South Carolina, four months ago. So, he now rides into battle on a stolen horse, in total darkness, unsure of whether his new mount will spook at the sound of gunfire.
The moon is waxing, but a thick tree canopy allows Tarleton’s six hundred fifty men to travel undetected. Tarleton’s men enlisted in America, and the ranks include both American- and British-born Loyalists eager to be of service to the king, formed into a new combined corps of cavalry and infantry. At this moment the soldiers are exhausted and famished, having already marched five hours with little food and water in the dead of night.
LEGEND HERE
That hardship will soon end—or so they hope. The five-hundred-man American outpost at Cooper River is near. Once the battle against the rebels is won, there will be plenty of time to sate their needs from the abundant American supplies and to enjoy hard-earned sleep.
* * *
Seven hundred fifteen miles north, in Morristown, New Jersey, Gen. George Washington and the soldiers of the Continental Army are enduring the coldest winter of the eighteenth century, even colder than the winter spent in Valley Forge two years ago. “The oldest people now living in this country do not remember so hard a winter as the one we are now emerging from. In a word, the severity of the frost exceeded anything of the kind that had ever been experienced in this climate before,” Washington recently wrote.
In all, twenty-eight snowstorms will ravage this winter encampment, with one particularly devastating January blizzard leaving behind snowdrifts taller than the six-foot-two Washington.
The haphazard log huts of Valley Forge have been replaced here in Morristown by neat rows of housing for officers and enlisted men. But appearances are deceiving. Food and clothing are once again in short supply, morale is at a low, and desertion is rampant. Of those who remain in camp, some are more likely to mutiny than reenlist. Indeed, a New Year’s Day insurrection by soldiers from Pennsylvania led to the shooting death of a young captain. One week later, when spies informed British commander in chief Henry Clinton of the incident, he boldly sent a messenger to Middletown, offering cash to those men on the American side willing to defect and fight for the English.
The soldiers from Pennsylvania refused, a fact that did not prevent Lt. Col. Alexander Hamilton from writing to a fellow officer about the sad state of American independence: “Our countrymen have all the folly of the ass and all the passiveness of the sheep in their compositions. They are determined not to be free and they can neither be frightened, discouraged nor persuaded to change their resolution.”
This is by far the lowest point in the war for Washington and his army. For Hamilton, however, the Morristown encampment is a boon. His social life has taken
on new meaning—he is quite fond of dancing, parties, and the pursuit of the fairer sex.
It is common for local society to visit Morristown for an occasional evening of dancing and making merry. It was on one such occasion, in February, that Alexander Hamilton met and fell in love with a brunette named Elizabeth Schuyler, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Gen. Philip Schuyler. The twenty-three-year-old Hamilton is utterly smitten, and for the first time in years, he has turned his intense focus from the war. The man who still believes that “a soldier should have no other wife than the service” now finds room in his life for affairs of the heart. In the words of Lt. Col. Tench Tilghman, his roommate at Morristown and another of General Washington’s bright young aides, “Hamilton is a gone man.”
Writing to his good friend Lt. Col. John Laurens (son of Henry Laurens), who is now among the men battling to save the city of Charleston, Hamilton describes Elizabeth in typically precise detail: “She is a good-hearted girl who I am sure will never play the termagant;1 though not a genius she has good sense enough to be agreeable, and though not a beauty, she has fine black eyes—is rather handsome and has every other requisite of the exterior to make a lover happy. And believe me, I am lover in earnest, though I do not speak of the perfections of my mistress in the enthusiasm of chivalry.”
Hamilton’s letters to Elizabeth, whom he calls Eliza, are more romantic. “I have told you and I told you truly that I love you too much. You engross my thoughts too entirely to allow me to think anything else.… I meet you in every dream and when I wake I cannot close my eyes again for ruminating on your sweetness.”
The turn in Hamilton’s romantic life has begun to strain his relationship with George Washington. After almost three years of serving side by side, each has seen the other at his best and worst. Hamilton now longs not just for the favors of Elizabeth, but also to command men in battle—an honor Washington has already bestowed upon Hamilton’s good friend Laurens, who is just twenty-five, and also on the Frenchman Lafayette, a man two years younger than Hamilton and who has been commanding American troops in battle for years. Elizabeth, in fact, has saved Hamilton from the deep despair that enveloped him when Laurens was ordered south to join the fighting.
Killing England Page 20
