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| https://www.usna.edu/PAO/faq_pages/JPJones.php |
Recently after finishing Napoleon by Emil Ludwig (1924), I read part of Grant by Ron Chernow (2017). I’m now reading Samuel Eliot Morison, John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography (1959). Can “Pride of the Yankees” (1942) be far behind?
Two years earlier, when I was about six, my great aunt Carol gave me King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, as told by Roger Lancelyn Green, in the Penguin edition. That was a bit over my head at first, but I liked the illustrations, and eventually read it - and kept it.*
Earlier this spring I wrote about King Arthur, and the High Feast of Pentecost on which the knights would gather around the table and relate their adventures of the past year. What I wondered would this year’s feast look like? Would we be gathered again round our common table?
Now I wonder, as I read the praises of famous men, how we are measuring up? How are we individually doing? John Paul Jones was the first American naval hero, deservedly, as we’re told, for his captaincy, his admiralcy (if we allow him that word), his strategy, and his farsighted visions for the future and the good of the navy.
He was a pill, otherwise: always complaining, always looking out for his own best interests; that is, moderated by an overwhelming patriotism, his chief fault, along with bad luck ashore. Jack ashore, Jack at sea: two differing creatures, in habit and pursuit. And yet we honor him. In the room beneath the chapel at the U.S. Naval Academy, reminiscent of the tomb of Napoleon at Les Invalides, is the tomb of John Paul Jones.
Houdon carved his likeness; the bust is there. He looks like Putin.
Who probably wishes he was Napoleon.
Guess he’s never read War and Peace.
What Jones was admired for was not just cannonading the enemy but how he sailed his ship and how he trained his men, so they would be ready for the encounter and the emergency of battle. That famous victory over Serapis owed as much to sailing and to sharpshooters in the tops as it ever did to big guns (the British had bigger). He prevailed, also, because he persisted.
Even when any other captain would have struck his colors and surrendered, and the pragmatical Capt. Pearson of the Serapis did just that, Jones “had only just begun to fight”.
Perhaps Grant in his way could be said to do the same, to persist; even when his army career was in ruins, something in him stayed strong, his heart stayed strong, and his self-belief, so that when the time came he climbed steadily and surely through the ranks to the summit of power.
* Later she gave me a deluxe edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. I’ve read and kept that too. When I was eight she gave me The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, celebrated author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. ("There were things that he stretched, but mostly he told the truth.")
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