A Fighting Sailor
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
A Fighting Sailor John Paul Jones. By Samuel Eliot Morison. Little, Brown. 453 pp. $6.59. Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Former Chairman, Department of English, Brooklyn College IN THE...
...On the Bonhomme Richard, having better junior officers, he did better...
...Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Former Chairman, Department of English, Brooklyn College IN THE INTERVALS of writing a two-volume life of Columbus, a 14-volume naval history of World War II, and a score of shorter works, Samuel Eliot Morison has found time to study and appraise all the fact and fiction about John Paul Jones...
...A man incapable of giving himself completely to a friend or a mistress, but who identifies himself completely with his cause—Pro Republica...
...But Jones" colossal egotism was proof against it...
...This was sage advice from a great statesman who truly wished him well...
...Jones' place in the history of the American Navy, he says, is comparable to Nelson's in the British...
...He lacked the Nelson touch which makes subordinates proud of serving in a taut ship...
...Criticizing and censuring almost every one you have to do with, will diminish friends, increase enemies, and thereby hurt your affairs...
...but even so, Morison compares him to "a temperamental orchestra leader who enrages almost every musician under him, yet produces a magnificent ensemble...
...He was brilliant and heroic...
...Scanning the features revealed in Houdon's famous portrait bust, Morison sums up: "It is the face of a man who exacts everything that is due to his rank and his accomplishments, but is ungenerous even to the women whom he loves and discards...
...In short, a great fighter, but not a beloved one—a George Patton, not a Robert E. Lee...
...Why were his victories productive of squabbles and ill-feeling...
...Biographers ran the gamut from idolatry to sneers, and even added forgery to their other arts...
...Pre-eminence in the latter art belongs to Augustus C. Buell, whose two-volume Life was published in 1900...
...But Morison is primarily concerned with Jones, not with his biographers, and about Jones as a fighting sailor he has no reservations whatever...
...such Americans as Samuel Adams and Arthur Lee hated his guts...
...Franklin, who knew better than most what suavity can accomplish, planted his diplomatic finger squarely on Jones's weak spot: "Hereafter, if you should observe an occasion to give your officers and friends a little more praise than is their due, and confess more fault than you can justly be charged with, you will only become the sooner for it, a great captain...
...Nothing on board ship was ever right enough for Captain Jones...
...Although he never had Nelson's opportunities for fame, I have no doubt that, given them, he would have proved himself to be a great naval tactician and strategist...
...Librarians, Morison says, should reclassify Buell's work as fiction...
...But why, then, was Jones so often hampered in his endeavors to get ships and crews...
...He "was never deeply interested in anybody except Paul Jones...
...His crew of New Hampshire fishermen and farm boys on the Ranger were openly mutinous...
...Officers and seamen were offended by his unpredictable outbursts of temper and harassed by his perfectionism in rigging, upkeep and maneuver...
...In the board-to-board, hand-to-hand sea fights in which he did engage, he was without peer...
...Morison's answer, in brief, is: Because he was John Paul Jones...
...Many British adimired him...
...From 1778, when his raids in Irish and Scottish waters set British ballad-mongers to rhyming, Jones was a partisan celebrity...
...Moreover, he belongs to the old school of historians who believe that good writing and sound scholarship can coexist, and he goes out of his way to explain sailing-ship tactics to modern land-lubbers...
...But partisan lines were not necessarily national...
...he was also hot-tempered and self-centered...
...Fact and fiction are so mingled in the Jones story that only constant vigilance can unravel them...
...Not satisfied just to invent, as novelizing biographers do, Buell made up stories and then faked documents to support them, attributing the fakes to non-existent sources in the serene confidence that if the footnotes looked impressive no one would bother to verify them...
Vol. 42 • October 1959 • No. 37
