The race to find the Bonhomme Richard still on

Independent:

The prospect of watching the British Navy handing out a drubbing to the Americans was too good to miss for the Yorkshire gentry on the night of 23 September, 1779. The great and the good processed in their carriages under a harvest moon to Flamborough Head where, for a time, they were not disappointed by the spectacle of a 50-gun British frigate, Serapis, inflicting terrible damage on Bonhomme Richard, a rebel US vessel intent on distracting Britain from the War of Independence.

But no one had reckoned on the commodore at the helm of the US vessel that night; nor on his rallying cry, which is inscribed indelibly in US naval history and remembered to this day in schoolrooms across America.

John Paul Jones, a Scottish-born gardener's son who had fled to America to escape British justice, was down to his last reserves of ammunition when, with his vessel ablaze and beginning to sink, the British inquired if he was ready to surrender to them. "I have not yet begun to fight," he retorted, before proceeding to trounce Serapis and record one of the US Navy's most improbable victories.

Jones took care to board the Serapis and make prisoners of her crew before watching the Richard - irreparably damaged with "a hole the size of a coach and six" punched through her side by cannon fire, according to one contemporary report - sink to the bottom of the North Sea.

Though he made off in the moonlight and into legend as the man considered, to this day, to be the Father of the American Navy, Jones' trusty 42-gun craft has been marooned at the bottom of the North Sea ever since her hour of glory and her elusiveness has turned the search into the Holy Grail of American marine historians.

The search may soon be over. This week, in an appropriately intense transatlantic tussle, the British and Americans are doing battle off the Yorkshire coast to find and resurrect the Richard, barnacles and all.

...

Such a clamour to find the rather ramshackle vessel which Jones captained would have been hard to predict when he pitched up in the US in 1775, on the eve of the American Revolution. That Jones should have been in America at all was the result of a mysterious and mildly suspicious incident in the port of Tobago, where he was previously stationed.

In 1773, while captaining a merchant ship there, he killed a mutinous seaman in self-defence but rather than face a judicial system (which would probably have cleared him) he fled to America where there was no system for repatriating wanted men back to the British West Indies. Jones immediately took up against the British, sinking eight of their merchant ships as they crossed the Atlantic, before pounding the coasts of Scotland in 1777 on the sloop Ranger, much to the delight of the French, who relished the damage he was inflicting.

Jones was aged only 32 and commander in chief of the American Squadron in Europe when he took command of his next vessel, a French East Indiaman bought by Louis XVI and turned into a battleship. Jones named her Bonnehomme Richard in homage to the American statesman and scientists Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the US who conceived the idea of a United States and whose book Poor Richard's Almanac had just appeared in a French translation as Les Maximes de Bonhomme Richard.

There was an inauupicious start to Jones' fateful mission from Brest to England's north-east coast, where he intended to sail into Newcastle upon Tyne and destroy the collier fleet which supplied London's fuel. The French captains who were supposed to help (part of Louis XVI's gleeful efforts to cause Britain maximum discomfort) proved none too keen and when Jones spotted the 41-ship British convoy which Serapis was protecting, his three accompanying French vessels decided to part company with him, leaving his slow, small ex-merchant vessel to go it alone. Jones, realising that the only way to assail his rich prize was through hand-to hand combat, rather than a long-range cannon duel, endeavoured to manoeuvre nearer to Serapis but it took so long to move the craft that she took an immense hit from the Serapis's cannonry.

The Richard was actually half sinking, her pumps unable to cope with the volumes of water she was shipping, by the time Jones finally managed to lock his ship against the Serapis and take control of his last supply of nine-pound cannon-fire. The cannons and Jones' doughty combat fighters panicked the British captain, Richard Pearson - whose inquiry had prompted Jones' legendary defiant reply - into a surrender of his own after three and a half hours of battle.

The Richard sank soon after her moment of glory and since there is no exact record of where the vessel went down and she may have drifted for up to 36 hours before descending to the ocean floor, it is anyone's guess which of the three salvage teams are most likely to find her.

...

There is much more on the actual hunt for the hulk. Jones was an interesting character and his crypt is in a special room at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. It is an impressive sight. He was a very audacious fighter and the battle where he lost his ship is a good example. There is no record of whether the French fleeing the battle was the first such episode in their assistance to the US. It clearly was not the last.