Battle at Sea

The Continental Navy's best-known fight came on the night of September 23, 1779, off Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast. John Paul Jones, in the Bonhomme Richard, an old French merchantman converted into a warship, closed with HMS Serapis, a 44-gun warship escorting a convoy.

The moon rose around half past eight, nearly full. The ships collided, then the Serapis's anchor caught the Bonhomme Richard's stern and the two were locked side by side, guns almost touching. The fight went on for about three and a half hours. A little after 10:30, Captain Richard Pearson called for quarter. The Bonhomme Richard sank two days later.

The line everyone knows, "I have not yet begun to fight," comes from Lieutenant Richard Dale's recollection, published in 1825. Jones's own report words it differently, and no other account confirms it. What the record does show is that Jones lost his own ship and ended the night in command of the other.

The picture does not name its battle, but it shows that kind of night. An officer in a blue coat and buff waistcoat stands bareheaded on a crowded deck, sword at his side, with fallen men at his feet and gunners behind him. A burning ship fills the right side of the frame, its gun ports lit orange, and a dull red moon hangs through the smoke.