Episode 21: John Paul Jones and the Invasion of England
Just Enough History American Series
The epic fight between the British Serapis and the American Bonhomme Richard.
In the middle of the stormy North Sea off the northeastern coast of England in September 1779 two enemy ships were locked together in an epic struggle worthy of the Battle of the Titans in Greek mythology. The 44-gun British frigate HMS Serapis and the 40-gun American Bonhomme Richard had become stuck when the Serapis’s jib-boom caught the Bonhomme Richard’s rigging in the initial assault. Rather than try to break free and roll the dice with the heavier armed Royal Navy frigate on the open waters, the American captain, John Paul Jones, ordered his motley crew of American, French, Irish, Portuguese, and Scottish sailors to lash the ships together with grappling ropes.
Stuck together like two primordial giants strangling each other, the two ships fired at point-blank range blowing holes in hulls, masts and sailors alike. The men above deck threw grenades and fired swivel guns, pistols and muskets while the gunners below operating the larger artillery launched broadsides as quickly as they could load the cannons. After 3.5 hours of intense struggle, amid the swirling seas and the screams of the wounded, the Bonhomme Richard, named for the American diplomat, scientist and author, Benjamin Franklin, began to take on water. Sensing the initiative had finally shifted, the captain of the Serapis, the veteran Royal Navy officer, Richard Pearson, called out to his adversary demanding his surrender.
“Why, Sir, I have not yet begun to fight,” shouted Jones. The Scottish-born, John Paul, was the son of a gardener who had sought refuge in America to avoid a false mutiny charge in Britain, added the ‘Jones’ surname to hide his identity, and later joined the American rebellion against his mother nation. Amid the smoke and rising water, an American sailor climbed the Bonhomme Richard’s yardarm and dropped several grenades directly onto the Serapis’ deck and ignited a stash of gunpowder. Believing the ship was done for and having accomplished his orders of buying enough time for the 40-ship merchant convoy the Serapis had been escorting to sail away, Captain Pearson struck the white flag.
Continental Navy Captain, John Paul Jones
Despite taking a multitude of direct artillery and grenade hits, the Serapis was in better shape than the Bonhomme Richard which was indeed taking on water at an alarming rate. Before his flagship was lost to Davy Jones’ Locker, the victorious American captain and crew abandoned the Bonhomme Richard, boarded their prize and locked the almost 200 surviving British sailors below deck in the Serapis’ brig. In Pearson’s former Great Cabin, Jones shared a glass of wine with the vanquished captain and ordered his men to set the Serapis’ heading for the tiny island of Texel, part of the neutral country of the Netherlands. It was September 1779 amid the raging War for American Independence and Captain John Paul Jones was the most hated man in Britain.
Background
In 1779 despite entering the 5th year of its war against her 13 rebellious colonies, the mighty British Empire was no closer to reuniting its kingdom. While the conflict had begun as a civil war between the imperial mother country and its breakaway colonies over taxation and western expansion, by early 1778 it had metastasized into a global conflict when France entered the war on behalf of the rebels after news of the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga (October 1777) reached the French court at Versailles (See Episode 15: Benjamin Franklin and the Franco-American Alliance).
“His most Christian majesty,” King Louis XVI, and his advisors had been clandestinely supporting the American rebels by smuggling arms, uniforms and ammunition since the outbreak of hostilities in 1775 watching from the periphery to see if the Americans actually stood a chance of winning. When an entire British Army of almost 6,000 men under the command of General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne had been forced to surrender in the backwoods of New York State near Saratoga in October 1777 to American General Horatio Gates, American diplomat Benjamin Franklin helped negotiate a treaty with France providing aid to the rebels and recognition of their independence.
It was not that King Louis loved the idea of republicanism or of colonists rebelling against their divinely ordained king. Rather France was out to restore the glory of the French Empire lost in 1763 after the French and Indian War (known as the Seven Years War in Europe) when Britain and her American colonial allies had destroyed the French Empire on the North American continent and humiliated France and her dynastic ally, Bourbon Spain. (See Episode 3: The French and Indian War Goes International)
The French entry into the American War in February 1778 changed everything for London. Britain now had to protect colonial possessions from the French on four continents: Asia, where the British and French had been fighting for decades over their initial footholds in India; off the west coast of Africa where they competed for control of the horrific slave trade; in the West Indies and Caribbean where the empires jockeyed for dominion over the many lucrative sugar islands; and now on the North American mainland itself where the French had just thrown in their lot with General George Washington and the Continental Army. Closer to home, London also now had to protect Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England from a potential French invasion. Even the mighty British Empire did not have the resources to protect that much territory.
Ever since its massive defeat of the combined Bourbon powers (France and Spain) during the Seven Years War which had skewed the fragile balance of power in Europe in Britain’s direction, London had been bereft of European allies. When the American War for Independence broke out in 1775 British diplomats worked feverishly to find new supporters on the continent.
British ministers reached out to Catherine the Great of Russia, the Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II in Vienna, and the Dutch Republic hoping for assistance. However, the kings, queens, and Stadtholders of Europe were quite content to maintain neutrality (or even clandestinely assist the Americans by smuggling war materiel like the Dutch) in order to knock the British down a few pegs and restore the traditional balance of power. The only European support Britain relied on during the entire American Revolution it had to pay for. The assistance came in the form of 30,000 German mercenaries who mostly hailed from the poor, independent west German state of Hesse-Kassel whose prince was more than willing to lend his subjects to King George III for the price of 7 pounds 6 Stirling for each trained soldier with additional stipends if they were killed.
Empress Catherine the Great of Russia was a German princess who married the grandson of Russian Emperor Peter the Great. Despite her Germanic roots, she learned fluent Russian, converted to Orthodoxy, assumed the throne and greatly expanded Russia’s borders sparking fear in many European courts.
Then in June 1779 the Empire of Spain declared war on Great Britain. Joined by a series of alliances collectively known as “the Pacte de Famille” which bound the two Bourbon nations to provide defensive and offensive aid to one another for both their home nations and colonial possessions abroad, Spain entered the war with clear goals. Madrid was seeking to retake its territories of Gibraltar, Menorca and East and West Florida, all of which had been lost to Britain during the Seven Years War. Notably, Spain entered the war only as an ally of France and not the Americans as King Charles III did not want to support a colonial rebellion against a divinely anointed monarch. Unbeknown to the Americans who were thrilled to receive help from anywhere it came regardless of motive, French and Spanish diplomats secretly agreed that when the war concluded the new nation’s borders would not extend past the Mississippi River.
Charles III of Spain did not care about assisting the American rebellion against Britain but wanted to retake Gibraltar, Menorca and the Floridas which were lost to Britain during the Seven Years War
The combined Bourbon fleet of Spain and France was larger than the entire Royal Navy, a third of which was already in the West Indies protecting British islands like Jamaica and Barbados whose slave-operated plantations were more profitable for the British crown than all 13 American colonies combined thanks to the massive profits of the sugar trade made off the backs of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. Much of the rest of Britain’s mighty navy was patrolling the North American coastline, hunting down American privateers, or protecting Gibraltar and British possessions in India and Africa.
With Spain’s entry into the war London went into crisis mode fearing that a joint Franco-Spanish invasion of the home islands was in the works. Spies indeed did pick up signals from the continent that an invasion was being planned to land in southern England with a feint attack on Ireland. Navigation devices were removed from the major rivers in England and lighthouses along all the coasts were extinguished. The British were right to be fearful. Even though Spain did not declare war until June of 1779 it had already signed a clandestine pact with France in April agreeing to a joint invasion of England, codenamed “The Descent.”
The plan was to overwhelm the British Channel Fleet which in the summer of 1779 consisted of only 30 ships of the line (the largest ships which carried the heaviest guns), seize the Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England, and land a 30,000-man invasion force at Portsmouth. It was hoped that after this vanguard unit landed safely on English soil, King George III and his advisors would sue for peace. Despite the French and Spanish hatred of their British imperial rivals, Kings Louis and Charles did not seek the complete destruction of Great Britain. The Comte de Vergennes, King Louis’s most trusted foreign advisor, recognized that France and Spain may require British assistance someday against the Russian Empire which was already massive in size and rapidly expanding westwards with the First Partition of Poland in 1772 and southwards into central Asia consuming Ottoman territory at a frightening rate.
By June, 30 French ships of the line plus many smaller auxiliary boats, were anchored off the northwestern coast of Spain awaiting the arrival of the Spanish fleet which was delayed due to unfavorable winds. While waiting, disaster struck in the most awful of 18th century ways before inoculations as typhus, scurvy, dysentery and smallpox decimated the French sailors, rendering many of them unfit for duty while they were confined in close quarters on unsanitary boats for weeks. It took almost a month for the Spanish fleet of 36 ships of the line plus supporting vessels to rendezvous with their French counterparts at Corunna and it was late July before they were finally ready to set sail for the English Channel. By then disease had spread to the Spanish sailors and there were severe shortages of fresh water and food as well.
18th century portraits of British ships of the line engaging with their French counterparts.
While the French and Spanish fleets suffered and delayed throughout June and July off the coast of northwest Spain, the invasion force of 30,000 men, including the Marquis de Lafayette, one of George Washington’s most trusted aides, was amassing at two camps in northern France. Despite his aristocratic upbringing, indeed Lafayette was one of the richest men in France, he had left home in 1777 to go to America to volunteer for the Continental Army, chartering a boat with his own money and leaving behind a pregnant wife. Once in America the Frenchman endeared himself to his American colleagues with his zest for their cause, and most especially to Washington who treated the 21-year-old French noble whose father had been killed by the British on the continent during the Seven Years War, like a surrogate son.
Lafayette had returned to Paris in early 1779, sent by Washington to lobby King Louis for increased aid and more troops for the Continental Army. Shunned at first by his king who was still angry with Lafayette for disobeying his order that no French nobility be allowed to leave the country to fight for the Americans, Louis’ Queen, the beautiful Marie Antoinette, whose gambling habits led many to ridicule her as “Madame Deficit” helped broker a peace between the two men. She invited Lafayette to attend the theater with her to break the ice and by May Lafayette was in Versailles helping plan the invasion of Britain in which he was to play a key role.
Despite the crippling diseases and supply issues, the combined Bourbon fleet was the biggest threat to the British islands since the Spanish Armada of 1588 when the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I had reigned and the Spanish King Philip II had set out to reclaim Albion for the Catholic faith and to put a stop to English privateers like Sir Francis Drake robbing Spanish ships carrying back gold and silver from America. When the Bourbon fleet entered the English Channel in mid-August, tossing out hundreds of dead sailors whose corpses littered the channel without a shot being fired, panic gripped all of Britain. For the first time in centuries, London did not control the channel and the nation braced for the inevitable invasion.
The Spanish Armada of 1588 still haunted British policymakers in 1779 who feared another attempted invasion of the home islands. In this contemporary portrait the desperate English launched fireships to try and deter the Spanish which combined with bad weather helped deter the invasion.
Luck, however, was on Albion’s side again in late August of 1779 when an enormous storm blew in and dealt the coup de grâce to the already ailing Bourbon fleet. From being within sight of their strategic goal of Portsmouth, England, the entire naval squadron was blown westwards out of the Channel and into the open waters of the Atlantic. The Descent had been averted and by September 3rd had been called off completely.
Back in Paris, Benjamin Franklin who represented America’s interests in France, had been huddling with Continental Navy Captain, John Paul Jones throughout the summer of 1779. When the American Revolution broke out in 1775, America had not even had a navy as it had always relied upon the Royal Navy for protection. However, in October 1775 after the decade of arguments over taxation and western expansion turned deadly at Lexington and Concord, the British burned the port of Falmouth, Maine (which was then a part of Massachusetts) to the ground for supporting the American rebellion. Over 3,000 incendiary cannon shots were fired at the small town of 140 homes, almost all of which were incinerated at the onset of a New England winter. Outraged the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia immediately created the Continental Navy to try and provide some protection to American port towns and to prey on British cargo ships.
The first American navy, however, was a meager one, consisting of only 64 converted merchantmen with artillery placed on them, woefully inadequate to compete with British ships of the line. To captain one of their ships, Congress commissioned John Paul Jones in December 1775 who was an experienced mariner. John Paul was born in Kirkbeam, Scotland, the poor child of a gardener, and went to sea as an apprentice at 13 years of age. When a mutiny broke out on his ship, the young John Paul wanted no part in it and even killed a mutineer to demonstrate his loyalty. However, fearing that British authorities would not believe the word of a teenager, he fled to America, added the surname “Jones” to hide his identity and later joined the Continental Navy to fight for American freedom from his birth nation.
Captain Jones prowled the Atlantic preying upon British ships and captured or destroyed 16 “prizes” in 1776 alone (a naval prize is an apprehended enemy ship). Ships that were not destroyed were sailed to a friendly port to be sold for profit with Jone’s crew sharing in the prize money. In 1778 Jones sailed the 3,000 miles to Britain and attacked the town of Whitehaven in northwestern England setting fire to the harbor and blowing fear through every British port. Insurance rates immediately skyrocketed, the harbor towns demanded more money for port defense and Captain John Paul Jone’s name became infamous throughout Great Britain.
By 1779 Captain Jones was itching to help play a role in The Descent and bring the war home to the British people. Forced by the court of Versailles to wait in Paris until the attack had commenced, Captain Jones met frequently with Benjamin Franklin who had been in France since late 1776 and had negotiated the Franco-American treaties. Franklin was also helping run the war from Europe lobbying France for greater aid, meeting foreign officers like the German Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben and the Pole, Casimir Pulaski, who wanted to offer their martial experience to the American uprising, and securing public favor for the rebel Americans.
Benjamin Franklin was an inventor, diplomat, and author who played a key role in the American Revolution from his base in Paris where he lobbied for greater aid, garnered public support and sympathy for the rebellion and met with foreign officers who were eager to join the American cause.
Franklin and Jones talked about his plans to circumnavigate Britain with the goals of disrupting shipping, sewing fear and drawing the Royal Navy away from the Bourbon invasion fleet. Jones set sail in mid-August just as the French and Spanish were entering the Channel, hoping that some of the Royal Navy would chase after him rather than the French or Spanish.
By September Captain Jones’ Bonhomme Richard had sailed past Ireland, rounded Scotland and had arrived on the northeastern coast of England, when it spotted a large convoy of merchant ships being escorted back to England by a 44-gun-frigate called the Serapis carrying Baltic Oaks and other naval material for the Royal Navy. Targeting the Serapis Captain Jones immediately ordered his crew to arm the guns and strip the ship of all non-essential wooden items like cabinets and bulkheads which would become shrapnel if hit by cannon fire before navigating straight towards the Serapis. One of the most titanic naval battles of the American Revolutionary War had begun.
When the wounded British Royal Navy frigate the Serapis, now commanded by American Continental Navy Captain, John Paul Jones, pulled into port at the small island of Texel in the Netherlands after its infamous 3.5-hour fight, it was the only bright spot of what had been the grand Bourbon invasion plan of England. The Descent was a complete failure due to weather, disease and supply shortages. The war, however, would drag on for more than three years and because of his heroics under fire against the Serapis, John Paul Jones, became one of the most famous Americans on both sides of the Atlantic with many hailing him as the Father of the American Navy.
For further reading and more in-depth analysis please see:
Atkinson, Rick. The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780. Crown Publishing. New York. 2025.
Taylor, Alan. American Revolutions: A Continental History: 1750-1804. Norton. New York. 2016