The Admiral and the Ambassador

by Scott Martelle

  The workers, using picks and shovels, began digging through the packed earth at the surface. After the hole reached a depth of a few feet, the workers erected a hand-cranked winch to haul up buckets full of dirt, rocks, and whatever other material they might find as they gouged their way deeper. They used wheelbarrows to ferry the excavated dirt and rocks to rapidly growing piles, first in the courtyard and then in the street. The project meant the removal of tons of material, but there was no place on the property to store it until it was time to refill the holes. So Weiss and Porter rented a vacant lot two miles away and the earth was carted off on horse-drawn wagons.

  It was a poor site for construction, Weiss quickly concluded. The eight feet or so of earth that had been brought in decades ago to level the cemetery with the original fruit garden had never been compacted or otherwise prepared to hold the foundations of buildings. Thus, below the surface compaction, the earth was loose and crumbled easily, and the workers had to use timbers and rocks to stabilize the shaft walls. Weiss discovered that the building foundations themselves were shallow and “did not rest upon the natural soil consisting largely of gypsum, which forms the substratum of the region, but upon made earth.”16

  The street outside Mme Crignier’s property, with a pulley (right) hauling earth from one of the vertical shafts dug to explore the abandoned cemetery.

  Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Horace Porter Collection, Manuscript Division

  Anxious to proceed quickly, Porter authorized Weiss to have men work the site from early morning until late into the evening, employing two shifts of diggers. Porter was confident that the research was correct, that he had found the old Saint Louis cemetery, but he was still waiting for proof. It came quickly. At a depth of about eight feet, right where they expected, the nature of the earth changed. The loose fill gave way to a denser, more compact mix of dirt, gypsum, and rock, the natural soil makeup of the region. They kept digging, ever deeper, slowed now by the firmness of the earth itself. And soon the pickaxes were striking not rocks but bones. Countless human bones. “Nowhere were any vaults of masonry, analogous to those in cemeteries of the present, discovered,” Weiss later reported. “All the bodies had been interred directly in the earth.” The discovery affirmed an observation Porter had found in his research: an 1804 inspection of the site reported that there were no headstones and that most of the dead had been buried in trenches rather than individual graves.

  Porter felt vindicated by the lack of evidence that the cemetery might have been disturbed over the years and the bodies hauled away with others from cemeteries around Paris to join the subterranean city of the dead in the Catacombs. The first shaft, he reported to Hay, “proved that the dead had never been disturbed. Their skeletons were lying close together in two layers, one above the other, and in some places there were three. But there were few vestiges left of the wooden coffins.”17

  The men kept digging until they ran out of bones, at a depth of about sixteen feet. Then, like moles, they turned northward and “a gallery was run penetrating beneath the laundry and carried as far as the old wall of separation” between the cemetery and the garden. Everything, Porter noted, was right where the research had suggested it would be. Porter had indeed found the cemetery.

  Now he had to find the right body.

  15

  The Dig and the Discovery

  THE WORK PROCEEDED IN ghoulish tedium. A second shaft was sunk through the street in front of the laundry, followed shortly afterward by a third shaft in the street near the entrance to the courtyard behind the granary. Two more shafts were then dug, one through the floor of a granary shed and the last in the courtyard near what would have been the back wall of the cemetery. Each shaft, beginning with the first one, was given a letter in order: Shaft A, Shaft B, and so on. The site was a hive of activity. And it was difficult work. The soil reeked of the long dead—“mephitic odors,” Porter called them—and groundwater seeped in at such a pace the workers had to install pumps.

  The tunnels at first were extended like exploratory tentacles, which meant they dead-ended, a design that created poor air circulation. Because of the instability of the earth, the men installed squared wooden girders to hold up a protective wooden roof and to brace sideboards that kept the crumbling dirt walls from closing in. They worked by dim candlelight amid the stench, the slop at their feet, the chill, and the stagnant air. As the men dug, they unearthed massive red earthworms, bones, leering skulls—visions they were apt to revisit in their deepest sleep.

  Once the first tunnel reached the old garden wall, the workers backtracked a bit and struck out in perpendicular directions, roughly paralleling the wall. In the basement of the laundry, another crew went to work in the back corner, digging an open pit in search of coffins. The crew digging Shaft B out in the street was aiming to tunnel into the property and meet up with the crews working off Shaft A. There was a logic to the scramble. Combined, the three work sites would cover the entire front section of the old cemetery, the place where Porter thought Jones’s body was most likely buried.

  In the first few days, they struck a cluster of corpses from a mass burial. There were three layers of skeletons, dozens of them, stacked in a crisscrossing pattern like cordwood, “some lying facedown, others on their sides.” The searchers were confused at first. Then Porter recalled journalistic paintings by Etienne Bericourt that detailed the loading onto carts of the Swiss Guardsmen killed just three weeks after Jones’s death. As Protestants, the Swiss soldiers would not have been buried in any of the Catholic cemeteries. These stacked bones, Porter concluded, were the remains of those men, and he interpreted the discovery as “another proof that although the cemetery was closed soon after [Jones’s] death there was plenty of room left for his coffin at the time of his burial, for the reason that so many bodies were interred there afterward.”

  Porter showed up regularly at the work site, seeking updates or just watching, even as official duties kept his calendar full. Less than two weeks before the tunneling had begun, a group of about three thousand unarmed protesters in Saint Petersburg had marched toward the Winter Palace to deliver a petition to Tsar Nicholas II. They were met by the Imperial Guard, which opened fire, killing (depending on the source) anywhere from one hundred to one thousand people. The violence set in motion the events that led to the unsuccessful Russian revolution later that year, and the eventually successful Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

  The political violence wasn’t limited to Russia—the tsar’s gunning down of his own people inflamed anarchists and revolutionaries across Europe and the United States. In Paris, presumed anarchists placed a bomb against the outside wall of the home of Prince Troubetzkoy, a member of the Russian aristocracy and a long-standing attaché to the Russian embassy. A policeman spotted the device and snuffed the fuse before it could explode. That same night, as a meeting of anti-tsarist socialists was breaking up, someone tossed a nail-laden bomb into a throng of police officers, injuring two of them and three civilians. The attacks, along with a wave of hoaxes, set off fears that the city was headed toward another “dynamite club” era, a cycle of bombings and assassinations.

  Final layout of the excavation site, within the bounds of the old cemetery. Silhouettes indicate where the first three lead coffins were found.

  Original excavation plans in Charles W. Stewart, John Paul Jones: Commemoration at Annapolis, April 24, 1906 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907); adapted by James Spence

  The French were dealing with their own political crises as well. A domestic showdown pitted aristocratic and conservative supporters of the Roman Catholic Church against liberals who sought a separation between church and state. And a growing number of scandals surrounding reported abuses by French officials in Africa emerged: beheading tribal chiefs, executing a tribesman by strapping a stick of dynamite to his back, and force-feeding human flesh to tribal prisoners, among other atrocities. Porter’s job was to watch out for American interests amid the turmo
il, and there was much to keep track of with war still raging between the Russians and the Japanese in the Far East, high-level international financial deals being negotiated in Europe, and run-of-the-mill trade issues.1

  Porter had personal business to tend to as well. On the evening of March 2, a Thursday, the “great rooms” of the ambassador’s residence, closed since Sophie’s death, were opened once more for a party, a rare social celebration in Porter’s life as a widower. And there was indeed something to celebrate: Porter’s daughter, Elsie, was to marry Dr. Edwin Mende the next morning in a small civil ceremony, to be followed Saturday—which was also Sophie’s birthday—with a public ceremony at the American Church. The focal point of the party, beyond the food and the drinks, was the presentation of gifts, and it was immediately clear that the gifts bestowed on an ambassador’s daughter and her wealthy beau were not the traditional household items. The French government sent over a monogrammed Sevres tea set from the government’s famous porcelain factory. George J. Gould, the railroad tycoon and son of financier Jay Gould, gave a sapphire ring. Secretary Hay and his wife sent a silver tray; Prince von Radolin, the German ambassador, and his wife gave gold bonbonnieres (small boxes); Porter’s old friend General Winslow and his wife gave a gold chocolate service. The parents of the couple were even more generous. Porter gave them a car. The elder Dr. Mende gave them a house in Bern, sealing the couple’s decision to give up on their plans to move to New York City and instead settle in Mende’s home country—a decision that Porter received with “shock,” given that he had predicated his retirement on the idea that the family would be reunited in Manhattan.2

  The wedding was the event of the season. An international array of government officials, high society expatriates, and European business leaders filed into the American church, decorated for the day with spring-like arrangements of foliage and flowers. The choir was rounded out with such voices as Bessie Abbott, the young American prima donna of the current Parisian opera season. The bridesmaids wore “dainty green and pink costumes, with broad-bred hats and sweeping plumes,” the New York Times reported. Elsie wore a white satin dress “trimmed with lace and sprays of orange blossoms.” The two-hour reception followed at the ambassador’s residence in what turned out to be the last big party of his six-year stay in the City of Light.3

  Meanwhile, Porter was planning his own departure. The White House had announced on February 10 that while Porter would likely remain in France for a few months, Robert McCormick, the current US ambassador to Russia, would be replacing him. Porter was also watching for news from Washington about Roosevelt’s request for Congress to pay for the search for Jones’s body. On February 13 he wired an update on the excavations and a query to Hay: “Sunk shaft. Found rows of dead undisturbed in cemetery at depth seventeen feet. What action taken on my recommendation of John Paul Jones appropriation?” He received a response from Francis Loomis, the assistant secretary of state: “The President sent message to Congress today recommending thirty five thousand dollars for John Paul Jones.”

  Roosevelt himself wrote to Porter the next day, thanking him for his work as ambassador. “I appreciate all that you have done in your post; and you can not be more pleased at being connected with my administration than I am at having you under me. But I understand thoroughly the pressing personal reasons you set out in your letter to Secretary Hay, which made it obligatory to leave.” Roosevelt said he toyed with asking Porter to stay on into the summer but decided to accept his resignation effective April 30, a date that meshed with other anticipated diplomatic shuffles.4

  Porter then apparently fell out of the loop of communications about his successor. In the weeks after Elsie’s wedding, press accounts reported that McCormick would be heading to Paris sooner than anticipated, a development that seemed to catch Porter unaware. “I saw by press dispatch that McCormick is instructed to proceed to Paris at once and assume charge at early day,” he wired Hay on March 25. “The President having written me that my resignation was accepted as of April 30, I made arrangements accordingly both here and with McCormick. What foundation for above rumor? Porter.”5

  Throughout the private and public wedding celebrations, Porter’s conversations with his superiors in Washington about when he could come home, and the daily diplomatic distractions, Weiss’s work crews continued their search. Parisians gathered daily at the site, sometimes joined by Porter, even though there was little for the public to see—most of the work was happening underground. On the surface, workers came and went, and loads of dirt were moved to the street and then loaded onto carts to be hauled away to the storage field. Journalists occasionally popped in, but the newspapers had little to show for it. In fact, the Parisian press largely ignored Porter’s project, and reports from the American foreign correspondents rarely mentioned the dig.

  Porter had left strict orders that he was to be summoned at the first sighting of any lead coffins, and on the afternoon of February 22, nearly three weeks after the first dirt was turned, Porter received the call. He hurried from the embassy to the excavation site, crawled down the ladder (probably Shaft A), and made his way to the discovery.

  The location of the coffin was encouraging: it was near where the old steps descended from the gate between the orchard and the cemetery, meaning the grave could have been one of the last to be filled, which Porter had speculated would be the case for Jones’s body. The condition of the coffin itself was discouraging. It was lead, but it had been heavily damaged—the rounded “head” of the coffin had been sheared off, along with the skull of the corpse. The damage was old, and Weiss’s excavators also found the remnants of a wooden barrel at the head of the coffin. Porter and Weiss surmised it had been sunk below ground as a catch basin to hold runoff rain to water a garden, damaging the coffin as the barrel was sunk into place. With the coffin split open, its contents exposed to the subterranean moisture, worms, and bacteria, the decapitated remains had been reduced to rotted flesh on bones.

  The lead coffin was buried inside a wooden casket, which bore a rusted copper nameplate “so brittle that when lifted it broke and a portion of it crumbled to pieces.” Working gingerly in the flickering candlelight, Porter tried to discern shadows of letters beneath the crusted green patina. None were legible. He carefully wrapped the shim of metal in his handkerchief, tucked it into a coat pocket, and climbed the ladder back out of the growing maze of tunnels. In his time in Paris, Porter had come to know the proprietor of M. André et Fil, an art-restoration business, and he headed there, where he asked the craftsman to work quickly but gently to uncover the name beneath the rust.

  That night, Porter delivered a previously scheduled speech to the American Club in Paris and talked about his quest to find Jones’s body. The tenor of the speech made it sound more political than historical, and it is hard to imagine that he was not counting on the foreign correspondents in attendance to wire his words to their newspapers back home. He detailed for the expatriate business leaders his efforts scouring records to find the cemetery in which Jones was likely buried, the more recent negotiations to obtain the right to dig for the body, and the need for Congress to approve the president’s request to pay for the exhumation. Oddly, the Washington Post story on the speech did not mention that the dig had already begun, though that was clearly known both among the expatriates and the foreign correspondents. And it muddled the detail about the first shaft, implying that it had occurred a year before, at the onset of the negotiations with Crignier. If the money wasn’t approved by Congress, the paper reported Porter as saying, the options would lapse and the opportunity would be lost—which was not the case.

  “While other nations are gathering the ashes of their heroes in their Pantheons, their Valhallas, and their Westminster Abbeys, all that is mortal of this marvelous organizer of American victories upon the sea lies like an outcast in a squalid quarter of a distant city, in a neglected grave, where it was placed by the hand of charity to keep it from the potter’s field,” Porter told
his fellow Americans. “What once was consecrated ground is desecrated by vegetable gardens, a deposit for night soil, and even the burial of dogs. It is fitting that an effort be made to give him an appropriate sepulcher at last in the land of liberty which his efforts helped make free.”6

  The search for John Paul Jones’s body, during which workers made their way through layers of skeletons and large red worms, was not for those with weak stomachs. Note the skulls embedded in the earthen wall (left).