John Paul Jones, at sea and in the heat of the battle, was
the great American hero of the Age of Sail. He was to
history what Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and C. S.
Forester's Horatio Hornblower are to fiction. Ruthless,
indomitable, clever; he vowed to sail, as he put it, "in
harm's way." Evan Thomas's minute-by-minute re-creation of
the bloodbath between Jones's Bonhomme Richard and
the British man-of-war Serapis off the coast of
England on an autumn night in 1779 is as gripping a sea
battle as can be found in any novel.
Drawing on Jones's
correspondence with some of the most significant figures of
the American Revolution -- John Adams, Benjamin Franklin,
Thomas Jefferson -- Thomas's biography teaches us that it
took fighters as well as thinkers, men driven by dreams of
personal glory as well as high-minded principle, to break
free of the past and start a new world. Jones's spirit was
classically American.
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