"I may sink, but I'll be damned if I strike"...

On today's date (September 23rd, 1779) John Paul Jones, American Captain of the 42 gun Bonhomme Richard defeated the British HMS Serapis in a particularly nasty sea battle....

In 1779, Captain John Paul Jones took command of the 42-gun Bonhomme Richard (or as he preferred to call it, Bon Homme Richard), a merchant ship rebuilt and given to America by a French shipping magnate. On August 14, as a vast French and Spanish invasion fleet approached England, he provided a diversion by heading for Ireland at the head of a five ship squadron including the 36-gun Alliance, 32-gun Pallas, 12-gun Vengeance, and also the 12-gun Le Cerf. Jones was also accompanied by two privateers, Monsieur and Granville.
When the squadron was only a few days out of Groix, Monsieur separated due to a disagreement between her captain and Jones. Several Royal Navy warships were sent towards Ireland in pursuit of Jones, but on this occasion, he continued right around the north of Scotland into the North Sea, creating near-panic all along Britain's east coast as far south as the Humber estuary.
On September 23, 1779, the squadron met with a large merchant convoy off the coast of Flamborough Head, East Yorkshire. It was Jones's intention on taking the merchant vessels as prizes. However, the 50-gun British frigate HMS Serapis and the 22-gun HMS Countess of Scarborough placed themselves between the convoy and Jones's squadron, allowing the merchants to escape.
Shortly after 7 p.m. the Battle of Flamborough Head began. The Serapis engaged the Bonhomme Richard, and soon afterwards, the Alliance fired, from a considerable distance, at the Countess. Quickly recognizing that he could not win a battle of big guns, and with the wind dying, Jones made every effort to lock Richard and Serapis together. His famous quotation (though it has been questioned if he indeed said the words), "I have not yet begun to fight!" was uttered in reply to a cheerful British taunt to surrender during an odd stalemate in this phase of the battle. The stalemate ended about and hour later however, when Jone's deck guns and his Marine marksmen in the rigging began clearing the British decks. The American Alliance sailed past and fired a broadside, doing at least as much damage to the Richard as to the British Serapis. Meanwhile, the Countess of Scarborough had enticed the Pallas downwind of the main battle, beginning a separate engagement. When Alliance approached this contest, about an hour after it had begun, the badly damaged Countess surrendered.
With the badly damaged Bonhomme Richard burning and sinking, it seemed that her ensign was shot away; a British commander asked, if they had indeed struck their colours. Jones later remembered saying something like "I am determined to make you strike", but the words allegedly heard by crew-members and reported in newspapers a few days later were more like: "I may sink, but I'll be damned if I strike."
An attempt by the British to board Bonhomme Richard was thwarted, and a grenade caused the explosion of a large quantity of gunpowder on Serapis's lower gun-deck. Alliance then returned to the main battle, firing two broadsides. Again, these did at least as much damage to friendly Richard as it did to the enemy Serapis. However, the tactic worked to the extent that, unable to move, and with Alliance keeping well out of the line of his own great guns, Captain Pearson of Serapis accepted that prolonging the battle could achieve nothing, and surrendered. Most of Bonhomme Richard's crew immediately transferred to other vessels, and after a day and a half of frantic repair efforts, it was decided that the ship could not be saved, so it was allowed to sink, and Jones took command of Serapis for the trip to neutral (but American-sympathizing) Holland. Huzzah to Captain John Paul Jones....The father of our American Navy.....



Painting of John Paul Jones By Charles Wilson Peale