Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history, and i love history,
and if you love history too this is the channel for you.
There are a lot of great untold stories about the American Revolution,
it was a long war, eight years long, fought over a broad geography. But one of the most
interesting is one that's little remembered and that's the fact that the war was not just
fought here in the colonies, but America actually managed to bring the war to the shores of England
herself, and it is a story worth remembering.
The adventure begins with this fellow, John Paul Jones. Now today John Paul Jones is generally
considered to be a hero and acknowledged as one of the fathers of the United States Navy, but he was
actually a somewhat controversial figure in his time. Born in 1747 in Scotland, with just the name
John Paul, he began his maritime career just the age of 13, signing up aboard a merchant
vessel and sailing out of the english port of Whitehaven on the northeast shore of England.
He had a successful merchant career and by 1768 was captaining merchant vessels,
but things went wrong when he shot a sailor in a dispute. The man was politically connected and so
Paul did not want to face a trial, and felt compelled to relocate to the United States,
where he added the surname Jones to the end of his name and became John Paul Jones. He quickly became
an american patriot, and when the american colonies went to war with England in 1775,
he immediately signed up for the newly formed continental navy. Now Jones was one of the few
commanders in the continental navy who actually found success, capturing several british merchant
vessels around Nova Scotia while commanding the sloop Providence. He was so successful that he
was promised command of one of the larger frigates that the continental congress had authorized and
which were under construction. But Jones tended to have an abrasive personality and he got into
a dispute with Commodore Isaac Hopkins, the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Navy,
and so instead of the larger frigate he was given command of the smaller sloop of war, USS Ranger,
and sent to sea with the vague order to, assist the american cause, in whatever way possible.
Now typically that would mean capturing or sinking british merchant vessels, and that was
something at which Jones had shown some skill, but John Paul Jones had bigger plans in mind.
The Ranger was a sloop of war that mounted 18 six-pounder cannons and had a crew of about a
hundred and forty. Its first mission was to sail to France and bring dispatches to the
American Commissioners in France, telling them of British General John Burgoyne's surrender at
Saratoga. And on the way, Jones did successfully capture a couple of british merchant ships.
In April of 1778, Jones was ready to leave France and engage in his audacious plan
to invade the shores of mother England herself.
His idea was to sail to his old home port of Whitehaven, where he knew the defenses and he
knew, way up on the northeast coast near Scotland, they would not be expecting an attack. And there
he was going to burn their shipping and stores, and show that England herself was vulnerable.
The night of April 23rd, the Ranger was anchored offshore from Whitehaven and Jones headed out
with two longboats and about 30 volunteers for the town. He commanded one of the longboats
himself and the other longboat was under the command of a Continental Marine Lieutenant.
Jones sent the second boat to go start setting fire to the ships,
and he took his crew to go take on the fortification that defended the harbor.
He was able to scale the wall of the fortification by climbing on the shoulders of one of his sailors
and he found the fort's entire garrison asleep in their bunks. They surrendered without firing
a shot. And then he set about spiking the fortress's cannon, that means driving a nail
into the hole that is used to set off the powder, and thus rendering the cannon useless.
Now Jones had hoped that by the time he was done spiking the cannons he would come out to see that
the harbor was already on fire, but it turns out the second boat hadn't fulfilled its mission.
By the time they got to shore their lantern had burned out and they didn't have anything to start
a fire. And so they had apparently gone to the local tavern to get a light and ended up getting
drunk instead. Jones was able to bring his people back to order and they did set fire to one boat,
the brand new Thompson, which was carrying a load of coal, and they hoped that that
would then set fire to the other ships. They were then able to escape in their longboats
because of course the cannons had been spiked, and so the town could do nothing to stop them.
The town fire brigade managed to put the fire on the Thompson out before the ship
sank and before it spread to other ships, so the damage was reasonably light,
and yet though, Jones had proved his point. That England was vulnerable to
attack. The local Whitehaven paper, which was called the Lloyd's Evening Post, lamented,
“The scene was too horrible to admit”. And Jones himself said that if he could have gotten to shore
just two hours earlier, he thinks he probably could have sunk every ship in the harbor.
But Jones wasn't finished, he sailed up to Scotland to the Island of Saint Mary, with
the plan of kidnapping the Earl of Selkirk. Jones thought that if he could take the high-profile
man hostage, he could trade him for sailors that had been impressed into the British Navy.
But it turns out when they got to the house, that the earl wasn't there,
and so Jones had to make do with stealing the Earl's silver set.
Jones then sailed across the Irish Sea and attacked a british warship that he knew was
at anchor, the 20 gun HMS Drake. The duel with Drake was interesting because the two ships
were relatively evenly matched. The Drake had 24-pounder guns and the Ranger had 18 six-pounder
guns. And the captain of the Drake knew that Jones was in the area and so he had made a plan,
taking extra volunteers on board which he thought he could use in a boarding party. But Jones had
managed to catch a small reconnaissance boat and found out about the plan, and so during the battle
he never got close enough for them to be able to board. In a fight of about an hour and 10 minutes,
the gunnery of the Ranger prevailed, and they'd done so much damage to the rigging on the Drake
that it could no longer maneuver, and they were forced to strike their colors and surrender.
Jones had taken on a british war vessel, in british waters, and captured her.
Now in many ways you would say that Jones's raid in 1778 was really a failure. He did light damage
to Whitehaven, he didn't manage to kidnap the Earl of Selkirk, and while it was a great coup
to capture the Drake, since it wasn't a merchant vessel, it didn't have any cargo that could be
sold for value. And yet it had an enormous impact in England, where the people feared
that the British Empire could not even protect its own shores, or its own seas even with the
might of the British Navy. The cost of insuring merchant vessels in England doubled overnight,
and countries started raising up militia units to try to fortify its coastal defenses all over the
country. In Europe, Jones became an international sensation, in France and Holland and across the
continent, as they talked about his exploits. And in America, that small victory over the Drake,
was a rare victory for the American Navy, and a great boost to morale. Now Jones would get
more fame later as he was given command of larger ships, including the Bonhomme Richard, but really
you might say that his career peaked there in 1778, when he proved that even the mighty British
Empire could not defend itself from the lowly colonies. And that is a story worth remembering.
I'm the History Guy. I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history five to ten minutes long. If you did enjoy
then please go ahead and click that thumbs up button it's there on your left.
If you have any questions or comments, then feel free to write them in the comments section and
I will be happy to respond. And if you'd like five minutes more forgotten history,
all you have to do is click the subscribe button that's there on your right.