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THE FIRST CAPTAIN
 BOOKS BY GERALD W. JOHNSON

ANDREW JACKSON: AN EPIC IN HOMESPUN

RANDOLPH OF ROANOKE: A POLITICAL FANTASTIC

BY REASON OF STRENGTH

THE SECESSION OF THE SOUTHERN STATES

A LITTLE NIGHT-MUSIC

THE WASTED LAND

AMERICA’S SILVER AGE

ROOSEVELT: DICTATOR OR DEMOCRAT?

AMERICAN HEROES AND HERO-WORSHIP

WOODROW WILSON

THE FIRST CAPTAIN: THE STORY OF JOHN PAUL JONES

 Malis

FIRST CAPTAIN
The Story of Fohn Paul Fones
BY
GERALD W. JOHNSON

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Coward-McCann, Inc.
New York
COPYRIGHT, 1947, BY GERALD W. JOHNSON

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must

not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Published simultaneously in the Dominion of Can-

ada by Longmans, Green and Company, Toronto.

Manufactured in the United States of America

 To Those Americans
led by

ERNEST JOSEPH KING

who have lately demonstrated that the
United States Navy has not lost the leg-
acy of skill and valor bequeathed it by
Joun PAUL JONES
A EES Tt Ros CAP
AL AEN
 CHAA PARES:

H’ WAS a gaudy fellow. He swung through the world

raising so much dust and clatter that the people of his
own time could rarely see what he was really like, and
for a century after he was dead the most fantastic lies were
still told about him and are still believed. On the other hand,
the plain truth was not believed for a moment. Perhaps it is
not even yet fully realized, although it is now two hundred
years since his birth.
Red-faced admirals and indignant merchants in England, all
the more wrathful because they were helpless to touch him,
pointed out that his very name was false. He called himself
Jones, but his father’s name was Paul, his mother’s MacDuff,
and even the man whom whispering scandal charged with being
his true father was named Douglas. There wasn’t a Jones in the
family connection; indeed, it is a Welsh name, and this fellow
hailed from Kirkcudbright, Scotland. One would as soon have
expected a man from Kirkcudbright to be named Li Hung-
chang as Jones.
He called himself Jones, shouted the furious British, because
he was wanted by the police under his true name of John Paul;
and he was wanted for murder at that. This was not true. There
was, in fact, a homicide charge against him, but nobody ever
seriously contended that it was murder in the first degree. He
had killed a man in a fight. The worst that could have been
made of it was manslaughter, and those best acquainted with
the facts regarded it as a plain case of self-defense. However,
when he began to play hob with British shipping, to shoot up
British coast towns, and to sink—or even more humiliating, to
1
2 THE FIRST GAPTAIN

capture—British warships, naturally the British were not in-

clined to take any lenient view of his past.
Besides, that past was pretty dubious, especially if one takes
into account the way people looked at things in the latter part
of the eighteenth century. Respectable gentlemen in England
regarded the stage with contempt, and this man had been an
actor. They regarded the best of seafaring men as pretty tough,
and this one had been certainly a slaver and possibly a pirate.
They regarded colonists in general as troublesome and suspi-
cious characters, and this man had joined a group of rebellious
colonists. Many of them agreed with Dr. Samuel Johnson that
any Scotchman was a low fellow, and this was certainly a Scot.
He outraged the fox-hunting squires in other ways. They
looked upon him as horribly un-English. He wrote poetry and
courted the ladies, both with a success that Englishmen thought
no honest sailor should achieve. He got along well with French-
men. He could be eloquent, especially on such subjects as liberty
and the rights of man. He enchanted successively a duchess and
an empress. He whipped successively the British and the Turks,
both rated as first-class fighting men. He liked to talk, and it can-
not be denied that he liked to strut a little, too. In all these ways
he was the antithesis of the British ideal, and it is no wonder
that they loathed him.
But before Americans laugh too loudly at the British, they
will do well to consider their own attitude toward the man. Oh,
it is quite correct at present. We have entombed his body—or
what we think is his body—in a lordly sepulcher in a crypt un-
der the chapel at the United States Naval Academy, and we have
erected his memory into a sort of tutelary genius of the Navy.
We laud him to the skies and counsel every midshipman who
enters the Academy to study John Paul Jones and emulate him.
He is one of our mighty heroes—now.
But it was not always so. While he lived we treated him, to our
shame, more injuriously than the British. He was the great
enemy of their nation, but all they could do to him was curse
 THE FIRST CAPTAIN 3
him. He was the great friend of our nation, and we gave him
praise in plenty. Praise costs nothing. But we never paid him a
penny of his salary for seven’ years, we never gave him his due
rank, we took even his prize money from him and used it to pay
a lot of job holders in government offices, and, worst of all—a
thing to make us writhe even after a hundred and fifty years—
some of his men, the sailors who won his greatest victory for him
in the Bon Homme Richard, we brought back to this country
chained in the hold of an American ship, chained by an officer
who held a commission in the United States Navy!
No, in view of the record it doesn’t lie in our mouths to speak
slightingly of the British. The curious American treatment of
this man did not end even with his life. Long after the fighting
was over, long after John Paul Jones was laid in an unmarked
grave in Paris, long after everyone who knew him was dead,
American writers and historians were still taking their cue from
the British and speaking of him slightingly. When he had been
dead nearly a hundred years a man who was himself to be Pres-
ident of the United States could find no better description of
him than “the daring corsair, Paul Jones.” * Since “corsair” is
merely a politer word for “pirate,” this description is, to say the
least of it, faint praise; in a British writer it might be expected,
but what a word it is for an American to apply to a man regu-
larly commissioned as a captain in the United States Navy!
The British attitude is easily understood. In addition to
everything else, this man cost them a fabulous amount of money,
what with losses of merchant ships and cargoes, losses of war-
ships and their crews, expenditures of time and stores in fruit-
less chases, maintenance of equally fruitless blockades, and a
terrific increase in marine insurance rates. Their reasons for hat-
ing him are plain enough.
But the attitude assumed by Americans—not all Americans,
by any means, but a large and influential group—is something
* This was Theodore Roosevelt, in his life of Gouverneur Morris, published in
1888. Jones had died in 1792.
4 THE FIRST CAPTAIN
more than scandalous. It is queer. What excuse did they have
for hating him, they whose battles he fought brilliantly and
whose cause he served loyally?
The explanation is a long and somewhat complicated story,
but it is not impossible to understand. It is not even difficult to
understand, if one takes into account human nature as it was in
1747, when John Paul Jones was born, as it is in 1947, and as it
presumably will be for many centuries to come.
The Captain was inconvenient. This may appear to be a tri-
fling charge, but it isn’t. It is one of the deadliest charges that
can be brought against a man, especially if he appears at all in
public life. He was full of ideas, and his ideas were new and usu-
ally good. If an idea is good it will be accepted, soon or late. But
if it is new it will force people to abandon their old ideas, and
there is nothing that men resent more bitterly than being com-
pelled to think along new lines.
John Paul Jones had been dead for many years before his
most important contribution to this country began to take real
effect. Even then only a few people realized that it was his idea,
and most of us continued to praise him for what were, after all,
minor matters. He won naval battles that were of material help
in winning the War for Independence. He laid the foundation
of our prestige on the high seas. He devised strategical and tac-
tical expedients that served us well until steam displaced sails.
He designed better ships, he designed better gunnery practices,
he designed better rules and regulations for the Navy.
But in addition he designed something else more important
than all these things put together. He designed the modern
American naval officer, who in turn has served as a model in
important respects for the officers of every other great service,
the British included. |
It is the fact that this contribution has been so generally over-
looked that justifies another book about John Paul Jones. When
Jones appeared upon the scene there was no such thing as a
naval officer who was just that and nothing more, with no
expectation or desire of being anything more. The navy was not
 THE FIRST CAPTAIN 5
a career, in this or any other country; at best it was one avenue
to a career. If a man were a success as a naval officer, he might
expect as a reward to be raised to a position of real dignity and
importance. When Rodney swept the seas, his reward—which
he, like everyone else, regarded as just and fair—was to be taken
out of the navy and put into the House of Peers as a baron. As
great a man as Nelson was prouder of being a lord than of being
an admiral.
On the continent of Europe naval officers for centuries were
regarded primarily as soldiers serving afloat. Medina-Sidonia,
who commanded the Spanish Armada, was given the job because
he was a duke, a kinsman of the King, and had had a not too
disgraceful career in the army. In France noble birth was a pre-
requisite for a commission; ability to sail a ship had nothing to
do with it. There were sailing masters who took care of all that,
and it was rather beneath the dignity of an officer to know much
about it. Younger sons of noblemen served in the navy only until
they could get a really good job in the army or at court.
The navy was a stepladder, useful only because it enabled a
talented man to reach something better. It was this Scotch-
American who first perceived clearly that the navy is, or ought
to be, a career in itself, and that part of the necessary equip-
ment of a first-class officer is a firm belief that to be a really great
admiral is achievement enough for the most ambitious.
That is accepted today, not only in the American navy, but in
every service that has amounted to much for the past two genera-
tions. An American admiral today may go into politics after he
has retired from the service, as Admiral Hart did, but rather to
round off his career than to crown it. One office only could add
to the dignity of a high-ranking admiral, and that office is Pres-
ident of the United States, which is a thing apart from all
lesser dignities. Even the Secretary of the Navy, although techni-
cally outranking all admirals, is far less considerable in the
minds of his fellow citizens than is the man who has commanded
a fleet successfully.
But John Paul Jones did not Hinplan this idea in the minds
6 THE FIRST CAPTAIN
of American sailors by argument alone. He preached it inces-
santly and forcefully; but he lived it, too, and that is what made
it irresistible. In living it, he left a startling, meteor-like trail
across history that is not only spectacular in itself but casts light
upon many curious events and still more curious men in the
company through which he moved. Gaudy is the word for him;
but his colors were those of fireworks, not tinsel, and it took
stone and steel to withstand his heat.

He was born on July 6, 1747, at Arbigland, a country estate

near Kirkcudbright, Scotland.
He was the son of John Paul, a gardener in the service of the
laird of Arbigland, and his wife, born Jean MacDuff. John Paul
was a Lowlander, but his wife’s ancestors are said to have come
from Argyllshire, although her family had lived near Kirkbean,
not far from Kirkcudbright, for generations.
Biographers have amused themselves, if not always their
readers, with intricate speculations as to the effect on the sailor
of this mixture of canny Lowland blood with the mystical and
romantic Highland strain. It is a fact that one son of this union
was a canny businessman and yet sometimes wildly romantic,
and it is not impossible that he inherited these traits from his
parents; but there was another son and two daughters who were
not remarkable in any way.
The dull truth seems to be that when you have said that John
Paul Jones was born of poor but honest parents you have said
about all there is to say. The senior John Paul was a worthy
man and no doubt a competent gardener, since he held the job
to the end of his life. Scotland has always produced excellent
gardeners, so it could hardly have been for lack of competition
that he retained his post at Arbigland; it is a fair assumption
that he knew his business and attended to it faithfully. But that
there was anything inspiring, or even especially noteworthy
about him, is past belief, for he seems to have made little im-
pression of any sort upon his illustrious son. When the father
died the son was careful to erect a proper headstone at his grave.
 THE FIRST CAPTAIN 7
Every reference to the father in the son’s papers is respectful
but unemotional, and there are few such references. The evi-
dence indicates that he had nothing in the world against his
father, nor very much in his favor. Paul was probably, like the
father of many another famous man, simply an unobjéctionable
nonentity.
Jean MacDuff was a somewhat more impressive personality.
She outlived her husband by many years and held her son’s af-
fectionate interest to the end. Her comfort was his first care
through his most tempestuous years, and by deed as well as by
word he acknowledged his debt to her many times. But it would
be going beyond the record to say more of her than that she
was a good mother who loved her children and did her best for
them and was, in turn, loved and respected by them. This is, to
be sure, high praise, perhaps the highest praise, but it throws
no light on the way in which genius is produced. There were
thousands of good mothers in Scotland who had no sons like this
one.
In what little we know of heredity there is nothing more
certain than that a union of two undistinguished persons oc-
casionally results in extraordinary children. Yet although it has
happened countless times, the world is reluctant to believe it.
Whenever a man of genius comes from an obscure home, there
are those who are ready to explain that he was not the son of
his putative father. For example, Lincoln’s paternity has been
attributed to at least half a dozen distinguished men, simply
because neither his father nor his mother was brilliant. Similar
stories about John Paul Jones floated around after he became
famous. His paternity, too, was attributed to various people, the
favorite being the Earl of Selkirk, who owned an estate near
by. As a matter of fact, Selkirk came into possession of the prop-
erty long after the boy was born, and there is no evidence that
he had ever seen Jean MacDuff before.
Some of his biographers have been embarrassed by certain
indications that Jones himself half believed this story. Of course,
he never said so explicitly, but he did exhibit a curious and
8 THE FIRST CAPTAIN

lasting interest in the Earl, an interest hardly accounted for by

the fact that he was a nobleman and a neighbor.
Yet if this half belief could be proved, it would indicate little
more than that the man carried into adult life a romantic tend-
ency almost universal among imaginative children. What boy
or girl hasn’t at some time had daydreams of being really a
foundling of high birth, to be revealed someday as the rightful
prince or princess? Yet pride of birth has diminished enor-
mously since the first half of the eighteenth century. The tend-
ency to indulge such fancies must have been vastly stronger two
hundred years ago than it is now; so if it is still strong enough
to be common, it must have been almost universal then.
It is a safe assumption that this boy, known to have been men-
tally alert and highly imaginative, built such air casties. He
would have been abnormal had he not done so. If there is any-
thing unusual in his case, it is merely that he continued to cher-
ish his fancies somewhat longer than most boys do. The embar-
rassment of the biographers, therefore, is somewhat misplaced.
If John Paul Jones half believed, even half hoped, that he was
a natural son of the Earl of Selkirk, he was no doubt indulging
in folly, but it was a very common and a very natural folly, con-
sidering the time and the place.
The time and the place probably counted for a great deal
more in the production of this genius than heredity—or, rather,
it is much easier to trace the influence of time and place. The
time was forty years after the Act of Union, combining Scot-
land and England, had become law, and one year after the bat-
tle of Culloden had made it fact. The boy grew up, therefore,
as the last waves of the last prodigious storm in Scottish history
were gradually subsiding. Scotland was definitely a part of the
United Kingdom when he was born; but she had been held in
it by force, and by force applied with a ruthlessness that had
nade the very name of Cumberland, son of the King, a hissing
and a byword in Scotland. After Culloden there was never
again any question of a revolt; but it was many years before
 THE FIRST CAPTAIN 9
Scotch opinion of the House of Hanover changed. In John Paul
Jones's boyhood it was bitter and contemptuous. The Duke of
Cumberland, English commander at Culloden, won a battle;
but his employment of the drumhead court-martial and the gal-
lows after the fighting was over lost the peace for a generation.
Thus when the boy had grown to be a man and found him-
self among a people in revolt against this same House of Han-
over—for the quarrel of the American revolutionists was with
the King, not with the English people, and the king of that time
was a nephew of the infamous Cumberland—all his childhood
memories were of a kind to make him sympathize with the re-
volt. The remarkable thing was not that a Scot joined the colo-
nists, but that, even among those who were in America, some
failed to do so.
The place had as obvious an effect as the time on the devel-
opment of the boy. Kirkcudbright—which its inhabitants in-
comprehensibly pronounce “Kerr-cood-bree’’—lies on the north
shore of the Solway Firth, the wide and rather shallow estuary
that divides England and Scotland along their western shore
lines. Kirkcudbright itself is not directly on the Solway, but a
little way up from the mouth of the river Dee and protected by
St. Mary’s Isle in the river. It thus had an excellent harbor for
the relatively light-draft ships of two hundred years ago.
Across the Solway, on the English side, lies Whitehaven,
which has more water and can accommodate larger vessels than
Kirkcudbright. Today both have sunk to the level of fishing
villages, for the huge, ocean-going ships of modern times can
reach either only with difficulty, if at all; but in 1747 Kirkcud-
bright still had some foreign trade and Whitehaven was a port
of considerable importance, boasting a number of mercantile
firms that traded all over the world.
A few miles northeast of Kirkcudbright the last outposts of
the Highlands come tumbling down to sea level, so in the shire
the three conspicuous characteristics of Scotland, Highland,
Lowland, and Border, are jammed closely together. Fighter,
10 THE FIRST CAPTAIN

trader, and raider are inextricably mingled there, so there is

nothing odd in the circumstance that the region produced a man
who was all three and eminently successful in each role.
Some writers have been inclined to deny that John Paul Jones
was a true Scot simply because his career was colorful and ro-
mantic, and the world is strangely reluctant to admit that that
sort of thing belongs to the Caledonian character. But it does.
The Scots have always been extremists, and if they have the
opposite reputation it is because the sane majority have always
been extremely sane. When one does go mad, however, he is
the craziest thing in Bedlam. Religious fanaticism has been a
specialty among them throughout their history, but other fanat-
icisms are no less strong. In Scottish love of liberty, for ex-
ample, there is no hint of sweet reasonableness. From William
Wallace and Robert the Bruce down, they have supplied mar-
tyrs to human freedom without number. Especially for the
last three hundred years there has hardly been a battle fought
for liberty anywhere in the world that did not spill some Scot-
tish blood. Other fanaticisms have been scarcely less conspicu-
ous, and frequently they have been attached to persons who
were much more gay than admirable. Bonnie Prince Charlie,
for example, he whose revolt against the King precipitated the
disaster at Culloden, was by all accounts a charming fellow, but
it was wild insanity to fight to install as head of the state a noto-
rious drunkard.
Because Jones’s acts frequently had the effect of a thunder-
clap, he has been denied the character of a true Scot, for the Scot
is supposed to proceed cannily. But that is not always true. Per-
haps the most perfect illustration of the Scottish tendency to
adhere to the doctrine ‘everything in excess” was the forcible
exit of that Lord Darnley who was briefly the husband of Mary
Stuart. The entire episode of Mary, Queen of Scots, who would
be better described as “‘Scarlet Sister Mary,” could hardly have
happened in any other country than Scotland, but it is all
summed up, not in the fact, but in the way that Darnley de-
parted this life.
 THE FIRST CAPTAIN 11
He was a poor creature, to be sure, lying, treacherous, cow-
ardly, and so stupid that he was a constant danger to the Queen
and to the throne itself. The elimination of a husband so incon-
venient is nothing unique in history. Since chronicles began to
be written, queens of all nations have relieved themselves of
such encumbrances in a great variety of ways, but when the Scot-
tish nobles undertook the favor to their queen they chose a char-
acteristic method. They touched off three barrels of gunpow-
der in the cellar of the house where Darnley was sleeping!
Not the eradication of the nuisance, but the manner of its
doing illuminates the Scottish character. In England the eradi-
cation of Mary herself, and afterward of Charles I when he be-
came an intolerable nuisance, was accomplished ceremoniously,
with the headsman’s ax. Only the Scot went out with a bang that
jarred the whole city of Edinburgh; only Scots would have
planned it that way; and not even John Paul Jones ever did any-
thing louder.
Yes, the Scot is colorful, but not in pastel shades. Even his
primary colors are awesome—the yellow of molten metal, the
blue of brimstone set alight, the red of blood and fire. Yet the
world persists in looking upon him as drab and dour, and when
one appears rainbow-hued, as John Paul Jones did, he is set
down as something extraordinary, not a typical Scot at all.
The typical Scot, according to prevalent fashion, was rather
John Paul’s employer, William Craik, laird of Arbigland. Wil-
liam Craik left upon history no very deep impression of any sort;
but he was conspicuously a man of sense. True, his good sense
could not be called excessive, for it did not prevent his becom-
ing involved in an unauthorized love affair that resulted in a
natural son, and this son achieved enough eminence to perpetu-
ate the memory of his father’s indiscretion. He studied medi-
cine, came to America, joined the revolting colonists, and rose
to be chief surgeon in Washington’s army. He was the Dr. James
Craik who attended Washington in his last illness—a dubious
distinction, since it is the opinion of medical men today that
his doctors probably did more than his disease to kill Wash-
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