The Bonhomme Richard and the Serapis

On the evening of September 23, 1779, off Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast, John Paul Jones brought the Bonhomme Richard — a worn-out French East Indiaman mounting forty guns — alongside the new British frigate Serapis, fifty guns, under Captain Richard Pearson. The moon rose as they opened fire.

Two of Jones's heaviest guns burst in the first broadside. Outgunned, he closed and lashed the ships together, and for more than three hours they fought muzzle to muzzle, both on fire, while a crowd watched from the cliffs. When Pearson called across to ask if Jones had struck, the reply his lieutenant remembered years later was that he had not yet begun to fight.

Pearson surrendered around ten o'clock. Bonhomme Richard sank two days later. Jones sailed home in Serapis.

The two frigates are locked hull to hull in the lower third of the picture, so close their rigging tangles into one silhouette. Gunfire lights them from the waterline; above, the smoke climbs into a sky the color of old varnish, and a low moon on the left lays a path of light across the swell. The upper two-thirds is almost empty — dark cloud, dark sea — which is what makes the small burning knot of ships feel so far from help.