Captain Paul

WHEN I was a boy I spent part of each year in Annapolis, Maryland, and that sleepy little town, with its houses of rose brick, became the closest link in my imagination with the American Revolution. I was at the age when historical novels meant more to me than everyday life. Night after night I used to drift off to sleep thinking of one particular hero, whose body, after a hundred years of concealment, had been unearthed in Paris, shipped across the Atlantic, and now lay entombed in the chapel of the Naval Academy. I knew that this man was thin (as I was) and that he never grew taller than five feet six; I knew that he wasn’t handsome, and yet ladies loved him and some men would have followed him anywhere; I knew that he was the son of a Scotch gardener, that he had been a midshipman in the British Navy, and that he proved himself the most daring naval officer we had in the Revolution. His name was John Paul alias Jones. He assumed the alias in 1773 — after having killed a mutineer with his own sword.

John Paul Jones is an inexhaustible subject for romance — inexhaustible not only because of his known exploits but equally because of those lessknown stages in his career, the years at the French Court, the service under Catherine the Great, and the pathetic closing years — be burned himself out at forty-five — about which we are always hoping to discover fresh material. Fenimore Cooper, Dumas, Melville, Winston Churchill, James Boyd — each has given us his own version of Captain Jones. Six new novels have been written about him since 1925 — the last and best of which is this hefty romantic full-length portrait by Commander Edward Ellsberg.

Captain Paul is first and Foremost a partisan story. The narrative conies to us through the eyes of a Nantucket youngster, Thomas Folger, who runs off to sea in a whaler, meets young Captain Paul in the harbor of Tobago, feels his spell on the instant, and becomes a member of his crew as soon thereafter as circumstances will permit. Tom is a good seaman, and an honest heroworshiper, and with his help we are given the most plausible explanation of the killing of Jack Fry, the ‘theft’ of the Selkirk silver, the indignities heaped upon the Captain by Congress and the Commissioners, and the unimpeachable courage and skill with which John Paul Jones fought his ships.

Yet, for all this ardor, much of the enigma still remains. With the best intentions in the world, I confess I cannot understand why there had to be such insubordination in the ships which came under Captain Jones’s command. I cannot reconcile the passionate loyalty of a man like Tom Folger with the equally sullen rebellion of the French and American subordinates in the battle between the Bonhamme Richard and the Serapis. Great fighter that he was, there seems always to have been some defection in Jones’s leadership.

There are two ways of writing the romance of history. One is to reproduce, as closely as one can approximate, the quaint diction and detail of the period. The other is to translate the thoughts and speech of the characters directly into a modern idiom, with only a word here and there to give the flavor of an earlier time. I myself prefer the second choice, and because of this preference I am less than satisfied with the conversations which Commander Ellsberg attributes to his Captain Paul. There is a flowery rhetoric in his dialogue which I simply do not believe in. It may be true to the written language of the day, but, it William Hickey’s Memoirs are any test, it is not true of how men spoke in the heat of action.

What really recommend this book are the pages of action — the brutal awesome struggle with the bull whale, every detail of which stands out as clearly as if one had lived through it; the canny and courageous battle in which the little Ranger, with a complement of ninety-odd men, overcomes her larger British adversary, the Drake, and the bulldoggish hang-on-to-it-iveness with which Jones refuses to surrender the Bonhomme Richard — here are superb seascapes painted by a sailor who knows.

EDWARD WEEKS

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