By BILL SWANSON
NAS Patuxent River Public Affairs Department

Sept. 23 is already one of the most important anniversaries in U.S. Naval history, being the 223rd anniversary of John Paul Jones’ victory 223 years ago at the Battle of Flamborough Head, the victory that gave the Continental Navy--and the fledgling United States—its first naval hero.

This coming Monday, Sept. 23 may acquire additional significance: it will be the final day of a 16-day effort underway by marine archeologists to find evidence confirming that a submerged wreck lying a mile and half off the English North Sea village of Filey is that of Jones' famous frigate Bonhomme Richard.

Jones, often cited as the "father of the American Navy," is also author of two of the most frequently quoted pieces of rhetoric in 200 years of a Navy history well stitched with them. Asking Benjamin Franklin's assistance in obtaining a ship with which to bedevil the British, Jones requested a fast ship because "I intend to go in harm's way."

What he got was a "loaner" from the French Navy, an aging 40-gun frigate named Duc de Duras and which Jones re-named Bonhomme Richard to honor of Franklin by way of his pen name, the “Poor Richard” of Poor Richard's Almanac.

Jones departed France in Bonhomme Richard in August 1779, in company with several smaller French ships, and for more than a month ravaged British shipping along the coasts of England, Ireland and Scotland, so much so that he was vilified in English newspapers as a pirate. English mothers would threaten their children into behaving by telling them if they were bad, that awful John Paul Jones would come and get them.

On the morning of Sept. 23, a few miles off Flamborough Head and the North Sea fishing village of Filey, Jones' marauding flotilla encountered a convoy of 41 British merchant ships, protected by the 44-gun frigate HMS Serapis, commanded by Capt. Richard Pearson. The two captains and the two ships had each met their match.

What happened next, as recorded in Jones' own words in a report sent to Franklin 10 days after the battle, is as exciting and harrowing as any account of a sea battle ever written, whether fiction or fact. The account includes not only details of the running sea battle but several acts of something mighty like treason, cowardice and betrayal; an incomprehensible incident of "friendly fire," probably the first in U.S. military history; and the subsequent 36-hour effort to extinguish fires and keep both the Serapis and Bonhomme Richard afloat within sight of the enemy’s shores.

Jones and Pearson spent most of the daylight hours of the 23rd maneuvering for position and advantage, Pearson always keeping Serapis between Jones and the convoy Pearson was assigned to protect.

"Earnest as I was for the action, I could not reach [Pearson's] ship until seven in the evening, being then within pistol shot," about 800 feet apart, Jones wrote. "When he [Pearson] hailed the B.H.R. [Bonhomme Richard], we answered him by firing a whole broadside. The battle being thus begun, was continued with unremitting fury."

Several miles away, villagers from Filey lined the shore to watch, and word reached the nearby city of York; soon spectators began to arrive in carriages and carts as the duel unfolded.

While fitting out, Jones had cut three gun ports into each side of the ship on the lower deck near the stern, and installed ancient 18-pounder cannons. In the opening broadside, two of these three guns burst, killing most of their own gun crews. With the surviving lower deck gun crews suspicious of the remaining cannons and refusing to work them, Jones had little choice but to try to grapple and board the Serapis, and fight virtually hand-to-hand and at point-blank range. That's what he did.

For more than two and a half hours the battle raged, full of incident. Sharpshooters in the rigging picked off 11 different men who tried to man the wheel of the Serapis, effectively preventing her from maneuvering. Aboard Bonhomme Richard, 80 of the 144 men serving the main deck guns were killed or wounded, and on the quarterdeck Jones was forced to direct one of his gun crews himself when an officer went down. Burning wading from the cannons firing into each other's ships started many small fires. Both ships were taking on water, and one of the American ship's pumps was shot away.

At one point aboard Serapis a gang of British seaman gathered below deck to prepare to storm Bonhomme Richard; Jones ordered Lt. Edward Stack to lob some grenades down the Serapis' main hatch. On the third try a grenade ignited a pile of cartridges and the resulting explosion killed 50 seamen: no more boarding party.

Thinking Bonhomme Richard was sinking, and almost certainly in a panic, one of Jones' officers deliberately let loose some 200 British prisoners Jones had collected during the previous six weeks. These men were prevented from taking over Bonhomme Richard only by a young lieutenant and a handful of men armed with a few muskets.

The Serapis had shot away the Bonhomme Richard's flagstaff, so Jones had no flag he could lower, even if he had wanted to surrender. Several American officers, though, apparently hailed the British ship and appeared to be shouting surrender negotiations. It was at this point that Pearson called out to Jones to ascertain if he was indeed surrendering after all. It was then Jones uttered his immortal reply, "Sir, I have not yet begun to fight!"

Jones omits the exact wording of this reply in his own report, but his telling is perhaps even better:

“The enemy were, as I have since understood, on the instant of calling for quarters, when the cowardice or treachery of three of my under-officers induced them to call to the enemy. The English commodore asked me if I demanded quarters, and I having answered him in the most determined negative, they renewed the battle with double fury; they were unable to stand the deck, but the fire of their cannon, especially the lower battery, which was entirely formed of 18-pounders, was incessant, both ships were set on fire in various places, and the scene was dreadful beyond the reach of language.”

The two ships, grappled together and thoroughly entangled, continued to fight for another half an hour. And then one of the smaller French ships in Jones' flotilla, Alliance, commanded by a Capt. Landais, pulled near. Let Jones tell it:

“At last, at half past 9 o’clock, the Alliance appeared, and I now thought the battle was at an end; but, to my utter astonishment, he [Landais] discharged a broadside full into the stern of the B. H. R. We called to him for God’s sake to forbear firing into the B. H. R.; yet he passed along the off side of the ship and continued firing. … Every tongue cried that he was firing into the wrong ship, but nothing availed; he passed round, firing into the B. H. R.’s head, stern, and broadside, and by one of his volleys killed several of my best men, and mortally wounded a good officer on the forecastle.

“My situation was really deplorable. The B. H. R. received various shot underwater from the
Alliance; the leak gained on the pump, and the fire increased much on board both ships. Some officers
persuaded me to strike [surrender], of whose courage and good sense I entertain an high opinion. My treacherous master-at-arms let loose all my prisoners without my knowledge, and my prospect became gloomy indeed. I would not, however, give up the point. The enemy’s mainmast began to shake, their firing decreased, our [firing] rather increased, and the British colors were struck [Serapis surrendered] at half an hour past 10 o’clock.”

After three and a half hours of fighting, Jones had won, but the situation was no less desperate: “I had yet two enemies to encounter far more formidable than the Britons; I mean fire and water. The Serapis was attacked only by the first, but the B. H. R. was assailed by both: there was five feet [of] water in the hold, and though it was moderate from the explosion of so much gunpowder, yet the three pumps that remained could with difficulty only keep the water from gaining. The fire broke out in various parts of the ship, in spite of all the water that could be thrown to quench it, and at length broke out as low as the powder magazine, and within a few inches of the powder. In that dilemma, I took out the powder upon the deck, ready to be thrown overboard at the last extremity, and it was 10 o’clock the next day, the 24[th], before the fire was entirely extinguished.”

Jones--now in command of the captured Serapis--and his crew, aided by several of his French ally captains, spent the next seven hours just surveying the damage to the two ships. Serapis had lost her mizzen as well as that shaky mainmast, and could barely move. Bonhomme Richard was rudderless and shot to pieces. Jones was determined to save Bonhomme Richard if he could, despite the unanimous opinion of all his surviving officers and advisers that the job was impossible. All that next night the repair crew struggled to keep her afloat but “… the wind augmented in the night and the next day, on the 25[th], so that it was impossible to prevent the good old ship from sinking. They did not abandon her till after 9 o’clock: the water was then up to the lower deck; and a little after ten, I saw with inexpressible grief the last glimpse of the B. H. R.”

Fast-forward nearly two hundred years. The man who discovered what many consider to be the wreck of Bonhomme Richard is John Adams, a commercial fisherman and commercial diver from Filey, who was hired in 1975 to help a fellow fisherman clear his nets from an underwater snag. When Adams dove nearly 100 feet underwater to clear the trawl, he discovered it was entangled in what appeared to be an 18th century wreck. Over the next two decades, Adams did his homework, rummaging through old archives to discovery what ships might have gone down in Filey Bay. By process of elimination as much as anything else, it became clear to him the wreck had to be Bonhomme Richard. Over the years Adams began to interest other people in his discovery, and finally five years ago formed the Filey Underwater Research Unit.

Not the least of the obstacles Adams faced was the problem of interesting British authorities in what was, essentially, not only an enemy ship, but THE enemy ship that had wrought such havoc on the North Sea coast that her captain was now touted as “the father of the Continental Navy,” the man whose name was used to scare little children.

Enter marine archeologist Donald G. Shomette of Dunkirk, Md., one of America’s foremost naval and nautical historians. A diver and archeologist as well as author of more than a dozen books, Shomette is under contract with the Navy to carry out the largest federal historic shipwreck inventory ever undertaken: a review of all U.S. Navy as well as foreign military vessels lost along the mid-Atlantic seaboard of the United States.

Shomette created and led the team that found the remains of Adm. Joshua Barney’s gunboat flotilla scuttled in the vicinity of Jug Bay in the upper Patuxent River, not far from the present-day Rt. 4 bridge near Wayson’s corner, and he is the foremost authority on Barney’s 1814 Battle of St. Leonard Creek, fought across the Patuxent River virtually within sight of the northwest shore of NAS Pax River.

In 2000 Shomette went to Filey Bay and dove on the wreck with Adams, and became principle investigator of the identification project. Almost no excavation or retrieval work was done, and divers were and are able to study only the exposed parts of the wreck, which is constantly being covered and uncovered by the shifting bottom conditions. Most of the wreck is still under the sea floor.

Shomette soon produced a detailed 212-page report on his findings. Chief among them were these: the wreck was broken into at least three pieces; the largest was about 120 feet long by 20 feet wide (the Bonhomme Richard was 152 feet long). Radio-carbon-dating showed the wreck went down between 1776 and 1800. She was a two-decker and ballasted with shingle (basically rocks), as was Jones’ ship. She was outfitted with iron knees (bracing to hold up the decks), as was Bonhomme Richard.

There were strong indications of extensive fire damage. The hull appeared to be cleanly snapped about 20 feet below a deck that was burned; one could easily speculate this could have happened if the vessel had been subjected to extensive point-blank cannon fire from an enemy’s lower-deck battery, calling to mind Jones’ statement that “the fire of their cannon, especially the lower battery, which was entirely formed of 18-pounders, was incessant.”

And again by elimination, Shomette, too, determined that there were no other known shipwrecks or sinkings of ships of that era within sight of Filey.

What was missing was the proverbial “smoking gun,” a conclusive piece of evidence such as the ship’s bell or name board with “Bonhomme Richard” engraved on it. Such a smoking gun is almost certain not to exist, but there might be something almost as good. Still buried under the seabed is something that looks like a metal tube, probably iron. The tube was broken in such a way as to suggest it might be a damaged cannon barrel that had burst, maybe one of the ancient 18-pounders that had burst. Or maybe not.
At the time, Shomette now says, he was at least 75 percent sure the ship was indeed the Bonhomme Richard. Now, after two more years of study and research, he is certain.

Enter now a host of jurisdictional problems. All U.S. Navy shipwrecks and crashed aircraft remain the property of the U.S. government, in Navy custody, no matter how old or seemingly abandoned, nor wherever in the world they may be located. This is not only established in the property clause of the U.S. Constitution, it is verified by international maritime law, and isn’t even controversial; foreign navies claim ownership of their vessels, too. Only Congress can formally declare a Navy ship to be “abandoned,” even if the commanding officer at the time had already pretty much done exactly that. “Abandon ship!” doesn’t mean “abandon claim.”

The Navy unit that has jurisdiction in such cases is the Naval Historical Center, headquartered at the Washington Navy Yard. The first problem with the wreck in Filey Bay is she hasn’t yet been proved to be Bonhomme Richard, although a preponderance of circumstantial evidence is stacking up that way. So the Navy and its Naval Historical Center, while very interested and closely monitoring the situation, does not yet have “clear title” to the wreck.

Second, the wreck lies in somebody else’s waters. This, too, is not insurmountable; most nations cooperate with each other in these matters. One of the most notable cases is that of the Civil War Confederate raider Alabama, which was sunk in Cherbourg, France, by the Union ship Kearsarge. France has allowed the U.S. Navy unfettered access to the wreck, even though it is in “their” waters, right in the middle of Cherbourg harbor.

The third problem is the actual ownership of the vessel. Is she technically still owned by France? Here’s a challenge for a good Philadelphia lawyer: a French ship loaned to an American Navy sunk well within British territorial waters.

While this gets sorted out, the real problem is what to do about the wreck in the meantime. Local divers have begun to show an interest in exploring the wreck--and probably looting her. At the request of Adams and local authorities, and in a gesture of friendship toward the United States, the British government went to court to obtain an order protecting the site and issuing a license to only one organization to explore the site non-invasively. That permit went to Adams’ FURU group.

The issuing agency is the Ministry of Arts, headed by Arts Minister Baronness Tessa Blackstone. Shomette takes great pleasure in noting the date Blackstone went to court to initiate the proceedings: July 4, 2002.

The protective order is a one-year emergency order which Blackstone must review before the end of this year. Fortunately, Adams and his group were prepared to take advantage of it. Soon after the 2000 survey, Adams and Shomette began organizing a second survey, the one that began Sept. 8. Sheltered under the single permit given to FURU are British archeologist John Buglass of the Nautical Archeology Society; the Archaeological Dive Unit of St. Andrews University, Scotland, led by Martin Dean; a team of underwater archeologists of the U.S. National Park Service’s Submerged Cultural Resource Center, based in Sante Fe, N.M., and led by archeologist Daniel F. Lenihan (recent co-author, along with actor Gene Hackman of the novel The Wake of the Perdido Star); and a team from the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. Even the Filey Town Council as well as the Maryland Department of Tourism and Economic Development have a small piece of it. The National Geographic is the primary financial sponsor, and Shomette has written articles for them in the past.

One might ask, if the Bonhomme Richard is “owned” (or perhaps, might someday be “owned”) by the U.S. Navy, what is the National Park Service doing getting involved in an overseas shipwreck it will never “own”? According to Larry Murphy, head of the Submerged Cultural Resource Center, the Park Service was brought in at the request of National Geographic, and the rationale circumvents many of the jurisdictional questions.

No matter who technically “owns” the wreck (if she is indeed Bonhomme Richard), the fact remains that John Paul Jones and much of the crew were Americans, and the historic event and its location are clearly of interest to the United States. Murphy said his agency was also persuaded to accept the National Geographic request because of Shomette’s reputation, the quality of his previous work as well as his 2-2-page report, and the plan he was then assembling for this phase of the identification project.

No excavation is yet permitted at the site, and the majority of work is being done by sidescan sonar and magnetometers. In additional to the wreck itself, the team believes it has discovered the “debris field” of the battle, and its aftermath, which is also protected under international law. It is possible that cannon jettisoned overboard by the Bonhomme Richard to lighten the ship might be found in this area.

Or, perhaps, they may find that smoking gun, still smoking after 223 under the North Sea. What a terrific anniversary present that would be.