Pebbles and cliffs on the beach below Sewerby, near Bridlington in North Yorkshire. It was here that Jones’s fighting force of five secretly gathered, with their intended victims - more than fifty trading vessels - massed at Filey on the other side of Flamborough Head, visible in the distance. Jones’s ships and their captains were all French; their crews were a mixture of French seamen, captured British sailors forced to fight against their will, and mercenaries.
IN September 1779, John Paul Jones,* an officer in the American Continental Navy, led a makeshift flotilla of French ships around Scotland and down into the North Sea, harassing commercial shipping as far as Bridlington.
There, on September 23rd, Jones spied a convoy of over fifty trading vessels bound for the Baltic, with only HMS Serapis and a smaller escort for bodyguards. His own five ships burst out expectantly from behind Flamborough Head, but suffered the worst of it until a grenade scored a lucky hit on Serapis’s gunpowder store. Seeing the convoy already safe in harbour, Serapis’s captain, Richard Pearson, surrendered to save further bloodshed.
Given Jones’s advantage in numbers and surprise, his failure to trouble the convoy, and the fact that his own ship sank, any victory he might claim was of the Pyrrhic kind.* Nevertheless, news that his adversary had received a knighthood rankled. “I’d like to meet him on the high seas again” growled the American. “I’ll make him a lord!”
Rear Admiral John Paul Jones (1747-1792), a Scotsman in the service of the American revolutionaries. He had adopted the surname Jones in an attempt to mask an unsavoury reputation, which he had earned during a career that some felt had bordered on piracy. He had spent a year in the service of the Russian Empire, until British naval advisers to Catherine the Great threatened to resign en masse if he remained in it. On Britain’s contribution to the Russian navy, see Samuel Greig.
See the story A Pyrrhic Victory.
Précis
On September 23rd, 1779, an American revolutionary named John Paul Jones led five French ships in an attack on a convoy of some fifty trading vessels near Bridlington. Although the convoy was successfully defended by two British warships including HMS Serapis, the captain of Serapis was forced to surrender – a tactical victory for the Americans, but a strategic draw. (59 / 60 words)
