John Paul Jones

Samuel Eliot Morison's biography follows John Paul Jones from his birth as plain John Paul in July 1747 in Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland, through an apprenticeship at sea that put him aboard merchant ships and, for a period, a slave ship, and through the killing of a mutinous sailor in the Caribbean around 1773 that sent him fleeing to Virginia, where he added Jones to his name and settled among the colonists. It follows him into the new Continental Navy in 1775 and through his early commands of the Providence and the Ranger, his 1778 raid on Whitehaven, the English port from which he had first sailed as an apprentice, and his capture of HMS Drake off the Irish coast. The book's central set piece is the battle Jones fought as commander of the Bonhomme Richard against the more heavily armed British frigate Serapis on September 23, 1779, a fight Jones won by lashing his sinking ship to his opponent's and taking her by boarding rather than gunnery, even as the Bonhomme Richard went down under him afterward. Morison treats the exchange, when a British officer called on Jones to surrender, with real care, noting that the line most often quoted, that Jones had not yet begun to fight, rests on later retelling rather than a contemporary record, and that his own report describes a shorter, blunter refusal to strike his colors.

The biography follows Jones afterward into a navy without ships for him to command, and into Russian service under Catherine the Great in 1787, where he rose to rear admiral and won a campaign against the Ottoman fleet at the Black Sea port of Ochakov before court intrigue, including an accusation of assaulting a young girl, drove him from Russian service. It closes with his death in Paris in 1792, his burial in an unmarked grave, and, more than a century later, the identification and reburial of his body at the United States Naval Academy in 1913, a mark of how completely his reputation had grown after his own uncertain last years.