John Jones

The Man.* "Born as the son of a gardner, John Paul appeared like an obscure speck in the middle of the broad canvas of the 18th Century--a canvas streaked with blood, murder, rebellion, greed, and many winds of doctrine." In Scotland, John Paul grew up on a rocky soil, dotted with small hard flowers, flanked by the blue and white banner of the sea. The sea, before long, became his native place; he loved ships and the spin of water under a whirling bow; he once wrote down: "I will not have anything to do with ships which do not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm's way."

John Paul cruised in southern seas, beat a mutinous sailor who later died. A murderer by gossip, John Paul finally set his course northward, took Jones for a last name and came to North America. In 1776 he was made a Captain in command of a flagship. A narrow elegant figure, he stood on the bridge of this vessel and set out to make the world ring with his name.

The exploits that made him the American counterpart of Francis Drake reached their heights in the moonlight encounter between his Bon Homme Richard and the British ship-of-war Serapis; an encounter which began when the British captain, Pearson, cried: " 'What ship is that?' From the Richard came the reply: 'I can't hear what you say.' 'Answer at once,' shouted Captain Pearson, 'or I shall fire.' . . . The Richard's bo'sun leaned out of a port. 'Fire, and be damned to you.' " For a long time guns flashed in the night and the great dark sails, punched by cannon balls, slipped down from the spars and let an unshadowed silver brighten the noisy, bloodstained decks. Finally Jones took Pearson's sword and said to him, " '[You have fought] heroically. I hope your sovereign will suitably reward you.' "

After the revolution, John Paul Jones moved in a dazzling maze of intrigue and outcry. The Duchess of Chartres had helped him fit his ships, and he was a welcome figure in France, where he became an exquisite and a popinjay. Asked to Russia by Catherine the Great, he went there to gain new kudos in naval warfare and to blunder about, a Scottish bull in the china shop of Russian diplomacy. Then, one day, "a girl in her early teens came to his rooms and asked for garments to mend. When the porter had withdrawn, she 'began some earnest and indecent allurements of person.' Jones, 'advised her to beware of such a career, gave her a rouble in charity, and dismissed her.' She refused to go whereupon Jones 'took her gently by the hand and led her to the door.' There she raised an outcry, tore her clothing, and rushing out on the street to a woman she called her mother, screamed that Jones had assaulted her. . . . Jones at first failed to realize that he had been victimized by . . . the . . . 'badger game.' " A scandal ensued and the sailor left Russia.

In Paris, in 1792, 45 years old, John Paul Jones died. Like many another proud man, wit or adventurer, he read Voltaire, not the Bible, on the night he died. Catherine the Great supplied an epitah: " 'This Paul Jones was a very bad character and well worthy of being praised by a rabble of detestable characters.' "

The Book, like most modern biography, wears the gallant armour of fiction rather than the awkward and improbable stays of legend. At the head of each chapter Author Russell has scribbled lines from The Ancient Mariner, and these, in their wild fire, seem to illuminate the career of another careless sailor, pursued by a fate more stubborn than an albatross. Hitherto the life of John Paul Jones has been clothed in mystery or history-book nonsense. Now, when the ancient long-respected knights and statesmen are drawn, quartered and made into sandwiches on wry bread buttered with rancid satire, it has pleased Author Russell to remember one of the old giants whose grotesqueries serve only to make him more magnificent, whose gaieties and gambles with disaster, whose foolish posings and conceited gestures, only make more regrettable the decay of so splendid and so irregular a period as that in which he flourished.

The Illustrations, linoleum cuts by Leon Underwood, define and accentuate the grand flurry of action that the prose describes. Well imagined, brilliantly effected, they make it impossible to think of John Paul Jones without suddenly seeing him, fighting with a sailor at the Island of Tobago, firing a derisive musket in reply to a broadside, standing, like a lord, at the door of a ballroom where several ladies dance and one is bowing.

The Author is a graduate of the University of North Carolina. Travels in Europe, delvings into European information mines produced the news which made possible the scornful iconography of his previous much-heralded work on Benjamin Franklin. From the same sources, he has gathered now for the life of a less intimate hero, the same casual, rapid style, a possibly less accurate body of research, but an even more engaging history.

* JOHN PAUL JONES-- Phillips Russell--Brentano ($5).