Jones refuses to strike, and takes Serapis by lantern light
Off the Yorkshire coast on the evening of September 23, 1779, John Paul Jones brought the USS Bonhomme Richard alongside the British frigate HMS Serapis, guarding a merchant convoy near Flamborough Head. When Captain Richard Pearson called for surrender, Jones answered, "I have not yet begun to fight," and ordered his crew to lash the two ships together, canceling out Serapis's speed and turning the fight into a close-range brawl. After roughly four hours, an American grenade set off gunpowder on Serapis's lower deck, and Pearson struck his colors around 10:30 p.m. Bonhomme Richard, burning and taking water, sank two days later; Jones sailed his prize to the Dutch Republic.
The line, "I have not yet begun to fight," became the founding boast of the American Navy, still recited at Annapolis two centuries later. Jones proved that a scratch squadron of borrowed French ships could beat the Royal Navy at sea, a claim that helped convince French backers the alliance was worth continuing.
QWhy was the Bonhomme Richard named after an almanac?
Jones named his flagship in honor of Benjamin Franklin, who was serving as America's envoy in France and had secured the ship for Jones's squadron. Franklin's wildly popular "Poor Richard's Almanack" had made the pen name Poor Richard a household phrase in the colonies, and Jones translated it into French as a tribute. The ship itself had begun life in 1765 as a French East Indiaman called Duc de Duras, a merchant vessel never built for combat. Its conversion into a 42-gun warship left it slower and structurally weaker than a purpose-built frigate like Serapis, a mismatch that shaped nearly every decision Jones made once the fighting started.
QWhat kept Countess of Scarborough out of the main fight?
Captain Thomas Piercy, commanding the smaller British ship Countess of Scarborough, traded fire with USS Alliance early on but then pulled back rather than risk hitting Serapis by accident. The two British vessels were operating close together to guard the Baltic merchant convoy, and once Alliance and Countess of Scarborough separated, Piercy's ship played almost no further role in deciding the main duel between Bonhomme Richard and Serapis. Two other American ships, Pallas and Vengeance, also held back for most of the opening phase instead of joining Jones. The result was that the war's most famous naval duel was fought largely between two ships out of the six involved.
QHow badly outnumbered were the sailors by the time Serapis struck?
Bonhomme Richard's crew had already been worn down from roughly 400 men to about 320 by earlier raids on British and Irish shipping before Serapis ever came into view. Serapis, newer and more heavily built, could throw a broadside of about 300 pounds of shot compared with Bonhomme Richard's reduced weight of around 250 pounds after she lost two of her heavier 18-pounder guns early in the fight. Losses on both ships during the battle ran close to half their crews. Those numbers explain why Jones needed the grapple, the grenade, and sheer stubbornness rather than firepower to force Pearson's surrender.
