Bonhomme Richard defeats HMS Serapis
On the evening of September 23, 1779, Captain John Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard closed on HMS Serapis off Flamborough Head, Yorkshire. It was the fourth year of the American War of Independence, and Jones had spent months raiding British waters with a small Franco-American squadron. The Serapis was a new 44-gun Royal Navy frigate under Captain Richard Pearson, escorting a convoy of some forty Baltic merchant ships loaded with timber and iron. The Bonhomme Richard was an old French merchant vessel, loaned to the Continental Navy and renamed by Jones in honor of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. She was outgunned from the start.
The ships exchanged broadsides at close range from around six in the evening, and within an hour the Richard was badly mauled. When the British captain called on Jones to surrender, he is said to have answered, “I have not yet begun to fight.” The ships collided and became locked together, bow to stern, their sides grinding in the swell. For hours the crews fought with muskets, pistols, and grenades at point-blank range. The turning point came when a Scottish seaman crawled out along the Richard’s mainyard and dropped a grenade through the Serapis’s main hatch. It landed among loose powder cartridges on the lower gun deck, and the explosion killed over twenty men and put the deck out of action. Captain Pearson struck his colours around half past ten. Jones transferred his crew to the captured Serapis; the Bonhomme Richard, with five feet of water in her hold, sank two days later.
Jones became a hero on both sides of the Atlantic, and the battle entered the folk tradition through songs like Paul Jones, which follows the action broadside by broadside. The Stately Southerner celebrates his earlier exploits in the Ranger off the Irish coast.
