The examples of the past can offer validity in the present. Today’s U.S. Navy, the world’s largest, has tried to find historical precedents for its modern dominance. In the process, early American naval leaders such as John Paul Jones have been practically beatified at the U.S. Naval Academy, where each new class of midshipmen is required to learn the Jonesian “Qualifications of a Naval Officer” by heart. This preoccupation with the heroic Jones persists despite his general absence from the seminal works of that great maritime prophet Alfred Thayer Mahan. The reality is that, regardless of Jones’s exploits, the only truly influential battle fought during the Revolutionary War by an American naval force occurred not on the high seas, but on a lake.