John Paul Jones has earned enduring fame in American history for his sailing and fighting exploits during the American Revolution. His influence on the war, however, went far beyond his alleged immortal words while engaging the HMS Serapis with his vessel, the Bonhomme Richard. For a period in 1778, the mere mention of his name caused terror within the very consciousness of the British nation. Jones’s successful employment of psychological warfare influenced many future commanders. He calculated that as Great Britain became more and more overextended by a global conflict there would be fewer military resources to defend the home island.
For the first three years of the American Revolution, as James Thomson’s 1740 patriotic poem proclaimed, Britannia literally did rule the waves with its vast Royal Navy. The British Isles felt firmly secure behind their fleet’s “wood walls” of protection. The last time any foreign power had mounted a victorious amphibious landing on English soil was over a century before. During the Second Anglo-Dutch War, in 1667 the Dutch raided and burned the fortifications at the Southeastern Kentish port of Sheerness on the river Medway, including the humiliating capture of the mighty British eighty-gun warship Royal Charles. In 1778 a daring young transplanted Scotsman named John Paul Jones wanted to carry America’s struggling war effort to the very doorstep of King George III. Jones’s vision for innovative use of the fledgling American navy won the endorsement of influential members of the Continental Congress.
