Bonhomme Richard vs. Serapis

Who John Paul Jones was, and what a French-financed squadron under American colors was doing off the Yorkshire coast. The Continental Navy never tried to fight Britain for the sea; it tried to make the sea expensive and embarrassing, and Jones, the difficult, brilliant captain who had already raided England once, looped the whole archipelago scattering panic until he collided with a Baltic convoy at the elbow of England.

An outgunned old ship grapples a new one and makes the two a single burning raft. Two guns burst at the first fire, a sailor's grenade tears open the enemy's gun deck, the Richard's own consort sails around and fires into her, the gunner cries for quarter, and the ship is sinking under Jones's feet, and still it is the Englishman who strikes first.

What Jones actually wrote, what the 1779 newspapers printed, and how the line every American knows arrived forty-six years late from an old man's memory. Then the honest ledger: the captured frigate that sank under its victor, the Englishman who lost his ship and was knighted for it, and the news that crossed an ocean and became propaganda gold.