by Neil Oliver
It was sunset, the last of the autumn light seeping from the sky like blood, when he judged he was close enough to order flags raised signaling “Form Line of Battle.” Far from obeying the command however, the Alliance and the Pallas—the only vessels of his squadron still in contact with the flagship—abruptly changed direction and left the Bonhomme Richard to face the foe alone. By the time she drew alongside the Serapis, daylight was a memory and the moon was on the rise. There was barely any wind and the sea was sluggish as oil. With the ships just yards apart, Paul Jones drew first blood with a full broadside that tore into the Serapis both above and below the waterline. Pearson’s gunners replied in kind—with more and larger guns. Adrenaline pumping and eyes bright with the thrill of the fight, Paul Jones waited on the quarterdeck for a second broadside to blast forth from beneath his feet. What he heard, and felt, instead was the explosion of two of his own 18-pounders on the gun deck below. The blast killed dozens of his crew and, worse, disabled much of the rest of gun battery.
Battle had only just been engaged and already the Bonhomme Richard was severely disabled, hopelessly outgunned now by a ship that had started out with the upper hand in terms of armament. Undaunted—in fact more committed than before—Paul Jones realized his only hope of victory lay in coming alongside the Serapis and boarding her. Once aboard the enemy ship, he and his men would have to settle the matter with muskets and blades. Barking orders all the while, he sought desperately to bring his vessel alongside that of his enemy. Still the gunners aboard the Serapis were firing broadside after broadside from just a few yards away. But although the Bonhomme Richard was being severely blasted—iron shots tearing through her from one side to the other, lethal wooden shards flying like shell fragments—her men had abandoned the crippled gun deck and were now up top, taking positions on deck and in the rigging and picking off their enemies one by one with muskets and pistols.
High on the cliffs above, the folk of Scarborough looked on in wonder. The moon was fully risen now and casting a light as cold as death over the scene playing out below. The fight was close enough at times to let the onlookers feel the percussion of the big guns ripple their clothes and hair.
After another hellish quarter hour of killing and dying at close range, Paul Jones succeeded in tangling his bow with the stern of the Serapis. Thinking that his foe had lost all control of his vessel—and briefly hoping the time had come for the American to surrender—Pearson demanded to know if he was now prepared to take down his colors in the accepted gesture of defeat.
“Have you struck?” he bellowed into the night, while cannon and muskets tore at the darkness.
And for a reply, from within the hellish chaos aboard his stricken vessel littered with dead and dying, John Paul Jones roared out the line that was to live ever after, repeated time and again by men digging deep for hope and defiance when all seems lost:
“I have not yet begun to fight,” he cried.
All at once, while the words hung in the air, a breath of wind let the Serapis slip free of her tormentor. The Bonhomme Richard moved forward, too, and while Pearson and his crew struggled to get their own vessel into position to rake her with more fire, both ships began a ghastly waltz, slowly turning and turning like exhausted dancers on the point of collapse. When the wind dropped again, both vessels settled alongside one another, bow to stern, the muzzles of their guns touching. Seeing this as a result in his favor, Paul Jones shouted out to his men to ready the grappling irons and prepare to board for a fight to the death, hand to hand.
“Well done, my brave lads,” he shouted. “We’ve got her now!”
So saying, he grabbed part of the Serapis’s collapsing rigging and lashed it tightly to a shattered spar of his own vessel. Musketeers on both sides kept blasting one another at near point blank range, and amid the hail Pearson shouted desperate orders: the lines fixing the two ships had to be cut—for only if they could put some distance between themselves and the American ship could they bring their superior firepower back into play. From below the Serapis’s decks came the shout that some of the lower batteries could be brought back into action. Within seconds the air was filled once more with the sound of nine-pounders blasting yet more rends and tears into the hull of the Bonhomme Richard. Surely now the American must strike his colors?
Far from it. Filled with defiant rage, the sharpshooters on deck and in the rigging kept up their withering fire. Unable to get close enough to cut the tethers, the crewmen on the British deck, galled by American fire, had retreated below. It was at this moment that the madman Landais, captain of the Alliance, joined the fray for the first time. But instead of coming to his comrades’ assistance, he suddenly and inexplicably fired a broadside of his own into the side of the Bonhomme Richard. Though he would claim later it was a mistake, some reports at the time claimed that he fired not one but three broadsides into his own flagship. The moment of madness seemingly past, Landais wheeled his vessel away and out of range once more.
Some aboard the Bonhomme Richard were certain the ship was on the point of sinking and now set to begging their captain to surrender—but he was having none of it. On his feet and pugnacious as ever, he rallied the survivors with nothing more than the gravel in his gut and the fire in his eyes. A daring Scotsman—inspired by his skipper—shimmied out on a yardarm and managed to drop a grenade into the main hatch of the Serapis’s gunroom. The resultant explosion tore through the ship, killing or disabling at least 40 men. Stunned and horrified, Pearson might have struck his own colors at this point—until a commotion on the deck of the other vessel made him think otherwise. A handful of Paul Jones’s officers, aware that their ship was sinking fast, made fresh appeals for their captain to surrender. Instead of submitting, he silenced the loudest of the protesters by clubbing him to the deck with the butt of his pistol.
Pearson demanded to know if Paul Jones was ready now to ask for mercy before all was surely lost aboard the Bonhomme Richard. The situation aboard the American vessel was clearly beyond desperate. Prisoners captured earlier in the voyage up the coast of England had had to be released from the hold to man the pumps. Many of them were now loose on deck, adding to the mayhem. The water pouring into the hold was several feet deep and the ship was visibly low in the water. Aside from a few nine-pounders, Paul Jones’s only effective firepower lay in the hands of those few doughty sharpshooters still alive. But still he would not yield.
Finally it fell to Pearson to bring the matter to a close. While Paul Jones—pirate, patriot, rebel and warrior—stared with eyes undimmed into the face of the British captain, a shudder ran through the deck of the Serapis. An awful groan came then from the base of her mainmast and, as all looked on in wonder, it snapped and fell like lumber into the black waters of the North Sea. It was the last straw and it broke Pearson’s heart. Driven beyond endurance by the horror and futility of it all, he tore down his ship’s colors with his own hands. He let them fall to the bloodied deck. It was over, and John Paul Jones had scored his greatest, his immortal victory.
Two days later, despite heroic efforts by her surviving crew, it finally became clear the Bonhomme Richard could not be saved. Filled with bitter regret, Paul Jones switched his colors across to the Serapis and took her as his flagship. Eventually he made it back to France. When news of his victory crossed the Atlantic, it was greeted with jubilation.
The captain of the Bonhomme Richard had arguably done no more than what was routine business for British captains at war. And yet there was something altogether greater here. Scarcely a handful of French privateers ever dared attack ships in British waters during the Revolutionary War—and none with the élan of John Paul Jones. More than anything else he had shown what could be done—what should be done by men of spirit, courage and daring.
Later in his career he would fight for the Russian Navy—but never again would his star burn quite so brightly as it had for those few hours off the English coast at Flamborough Head. He died in France in 1792 and was buried o
utside Paris. Only in 1905 were efforts finally made to track down the last resting place of the man who had inspired the creation of a Navy that would one day be the envy of all the world. His lead coffin, containing his body preserved in alcohol, was brought home amid all possible pomp and circumstance and laid to rest in Annapolis, Maryland, at the very heart of the modern US Navy.
“I have not yet begun to fight.” This—the stubborn refusal to submit when all seems lost—is what transcends any marble tomb. This is his epitaph and we do well to remember it.
How curiously the course of one’s life may be turned
Show me a man who says he never once dreamed of being a lone hero overcoming all foes by guts and genius and I’ll show you…a man who’s not being entirely honest, not least with himself. In fact, any boy who didn’t spend at least part of a long summer vacation running down grassy slopes and sand dunes while wielding an imaginary sword or firing an invisible tommy gun must have had a deprived childhood. The acid test is the feeling in your gut when you catch a glimpse of a Bowie knife. If you don’t instantly remember wanting to own a Bowie knife when you were about nine years old, then it’s quite possible that you are in fact a girl.
Manly men carry within them, unmarked by the years and with the dreams still burning brightly, the boys they once were (and to some extent still are). Boys will always worship action men. It’s as natural as breathing. They will idolize the figures in comic books and the movie characters on the big screen. But the passage of years teaches us the difference between fact and fiction and somewhere along the line we realize the real heroes are not supermen gifted with supernatural powers. The best of them are just men, pure and simple.
Although Lieutenant Scott had impressed Markham, he was not the number one choice for a pilgrim to cast light into that southern darkness, to cross its mountains barred by snow. Our Con was placed only at number six on the list.
A year after being commissioned as a sub-lieutenant he was posted to the Pacific, and then to the Mediterranean. By 1891 he was back in England, often visiting the family home at Outlands. He completed a two-year course aboard the torpedo-training ship Vernon and the first-class certificates he received in his final exams showed he was emerging as a talented officer.
In spite of his successful career there was a large black cloud on Scott’s horizon during those years. In October 1897 his father died of heart disease at the age of 66. The family had no money to speak of—far from it. Three years before John Scott’s death they had had to give up their home at Outlands in favor of more humble digs nearby. John’s death only made matters worse. He left neither savings nor life insurance and his widow and daughters had to move again. Two of the girls rented rooms above a shop in Chelsea in London and their mother moved in with them. It fell upon the two sons—Robert and Archie—to try to support their mother.
For a young officer like Scott, this was a severe financial handicap. The means to entertain, and to furnish oneself with the best of clothes, were important considerations if the right impression was to be made and social advancement achieved. Scott was living only on his modest officer’s salary and though he never begrudged his mother a penny of the support he was able to provide for her, he felt the best things in life were passing him by.
He had no way of affording the social life enjoyed by many of his fellow officers, and the expense of taking a young woman out on a date was completely out of his reach. During this time Scott withdrew into himself, retreating into the reticence and shyness that were always part of his nature.
Another man in such circumstances might not have been overly bothered, might have been content with his lot—but it burned Scott. He had within him the desire to be someone, to matter in a bigger story. Lacking either the money or the social status to rise to prominence, he would need to find another way.
A further spur came in the form of his younger brother Archie’s sudden and unexpected death from typhoid fever in 1897. In a letter to his sister Ettie he wrote:
…it is easy to understand that he died like a man…It is a strange chance that has taken him who perhaps of all of us found the keenest pleasure in life…I saw that despite his health he was not strong and I meant to have a long talk with you about it. Too late—doesn’t it always seem the ending of our wretched little mortal plans?
When he wrote to his mother about Archie, he praised her for the job she had done of raising good men:
Don’t blame yourself for what happened, dear. Whatever we have cause to bless ourselves for, comes from you. He died like the true-hearted gentleman he was, but to you we owe the first lessons and examples that made us gentlemen.
Scott correctly identifies another of the ingredients important in the making of manly men—good mothers. While it’s true that brave and manly men have come from backgrounds lacking in family love of any kind, there is no doubting the value of a loving mom in the shaping of a hero.
Scott’s tendency toward depression, or at the very least a kind of lethargy, seems close at hand in his words to his sister. But there’s also an awareness that life is short and might be snatched away at any time. For Scott, the time for action to shake himself out of his doldrums was at hand.
In the summer of 1899 his path crossed that of Markham, who told him in person about the plans for an Antarctic expedition. After years of research, preparation and salesmanship, the wily campaigner had got the go-ahead from both the Royal Society and the RGS. All at once there was a need to appoint an expedition leader.
With the urge to seize the day burning strongly inside him, Scott applied at once. In June 1900 he was appointed to the job—despite protests from members of the Royal Society, who’d wanted a civilian scientist for the role. Markham had argued that only a services man like Scott could provide the kind of backbone required for such an expedition.
Always honest about the way in which he had been drawn into the adventure that would shape and define his life, Scott freely acknowledged the role of fate and serendipity. As he wrote in The Voyage of the Discovery, “…how curiously the course of one’s life may be turned.”
The random hand of kismet presents the situations to be faced in life, but men are judged by the way they respond when the moment comes. Some of that response is determined by the expectations of others, and Scott lived in a world that demanded a certain kind of behavior from its boys and men.
Those expectations were clearly outlined in, among other places, the tales of other men’s lives. As well as hearing about how British men had behaved when faced with life’s challenges, Scott would have grown up knowing about the wars and exploits of men of other nations too.
By 1868 the French were still licking their wounds after an ill-fated attempt to establish an empire in Mexico. It had been an exploit the French government probably wanted to forget. But for one group of men, none of them French, it would never, ever be forgotten.
The Demons of Camerone
Les Invalides in Paris was once a hospital for the care of France’s wounded soldiers. For most of its existence it has been a resting place for her honored dead. The body of Napoleon Bonaparte was interred there in 1841, having been repatriated from its first grave, in exile on the island of St. Helena in the South Atlantic. Les Invalides is a place of memory and remembrance. High on one wall is a word inscribed in letters of gold. It reads: “Camerone.” In the town of Aubagne is the Legion Hall of Honor, dearest of all places to the men of the “La Légion des Etrangers”—the French Foreign Legion. Inside, in a place of the highest honor, rests a carved wooden hand.
On the morning of April 30, 1863, just 62 non-commissioned officers and men of the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion of the French Foreign Legion were fit for duty. Their normal complement was three officers, 112 NCOs and other ranks, but illness had taken its toll. They had been in Mexico just a few weeks, supporting efforts to establish a French colony under the puppet-rule of one Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph von Habsburg, an Austrian aristocrat handpicked
for the job by Napoleon III, Emperor of France. Maximilian would be accompanied by his new Belgian wife, Marie Charlotte Amélie Léopoldine, taking on the Mexican form of her name to make her the Empress Carlota.
The Americas offered the hope of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, and with a civil war occupying the attentions of the inhabitants of the north of the continent, opportunist European nations were making inroads into the disputed and turbulent lands of the south. Mexico had also run up debts with several foreign powers, and by 1861 a coalition of British, Spanish and French troops were in occupation in the country in hope of getting their money back. The three proved incapable of agreeing on a strategy and within months both Britain and Spain had abandoned the operation, leaving the French in sole occupation.
Although a French Expeditionary Force had been in action in Mexico from the start, the Legion had had to petition Napoleon himself for permission to join them on the campaign. Two battalions under the command of Colonel Jeanningros had landed in Vera Cruz on March 28, 1863, but their arrival had not been a happy one. Having expected to march toward the city of Puebla, the main seat of local opposition to the French invasion, instead they suffered the indignity of being placed on escort duty, babysitting supply convoys in the east of the country. The low-lying marshlands sweated and stank, and the Legionnaires were succumbing in the main not to bullets and bayonets but to cholera, typhus and yellow fever. It was a miserable posting enlivened only by the constant threat from snipers.
Puebla had been besieged by the French since the middle of March but there was no sign yet of victory. On April 29, a month or so after the Legion’s arrival, word reached Jeanningros that a hugely valuable convoy was to be sent by road from Vera Cruz to the besieged city. Along with vital equipment and rations, the wagons would be carrying 3 million francs’ worth of gold bullion for the soldiers’ pay. It would be the job of the Legion to ensure its safe passage.
