Cyrus Brady - Commodore Paul Jones

Near the close of the fifth decade of the eighteenth century, George I reigned in England, by the grace of God and because he had succeeded in putting down the rebellion of 1745; Frederick the Great was tenaciously clutching the fair province of Silesia which Maria Theresa, with equal resolution but with faint prospect of success, was endeavoring to retain; Louis XV (the well beloved!) was exploiting the privileges and opportunities of a king with Madame de Pompadour and the Parc aux Cerfs ; and the long war of the Austrian succession was just drawing to a close, when there was born on July 6, 1747, to a Scots peasant, named John Paul, and to Jean MacDuff, his wife, a son, the fifth child of a large family. 1 1 Among the gross slanders by which envy strove to blacken the fame of the great commodore in after years-the foulest, because it attempted to rob a virtuous woman of her crown of honest motherhood and question the legitimacy of Jones' birth-was one which ascribed his paternity to the Earl of Selkirk. To the English snob of that day it may probably have seemed impossible that so much greatness could spring from so plain a stock, and in a left-handed descent from Lord Selkirk was sought an explanation of Jones' fame. The calumny was refuted not only by its antecedent incredibility, but by the testimony of persons in position to affirm as to the high personal character of Jean MacDuff Paul and by the loving and tender family relationship she ever sustained to her husband and children. The family was well known and highly respected. It may be noted, by the way, that the Earl of Selkirk was not conspicuous for ability or anything else, and if it had not been for a subsequent exploit of Jones' he would have been forgotten long since.

The youngster was duly christened John Paul, Junior, after his sire. He is the hero of this history. He first saw the light on the estate of Arbigland, in the parish of Kirkbean, in the county of Kirkcudbright, a province once called the Royal Stewartry of Kirkcudbright (pronounced "Kircoobree"), because it had been governed formerly by a steward or deputy, appointed by the crown, of which the county had been an appanage.

The father of the subject of this memoir filled the modest situation of a master gardener, a precursor of the modern and scientific landscape gardener, or engineer, in a small scale, in the employ of a Scots bonnet laird named Craik. His remote family-peasants, yeomen always-had come from the ancient lands of the Thanes of Fife, whence his grandfather had removed to Leith, where he kept a mail garden or wayside inn-in short, a tavern. It is to the credit of Master John Paul, Senior-evidently a most honest and capable man in that humble station in life into which it had pleased God to call him-that he forsook the tavern and clung to the garden. When he had finished his apprenticeship as gardener he removed to Arbigland, where he married Jean MacDuff, the daughter of a sturdy yeoman farmer of the neighboring parish of New Abbey, whose family had been established in their present location from time immemorial.

The marriage was blessed with seven children, the two youngest sons dying in infancy. The first was a boy named William; the next three were girls, named Elizabeth, Janet, and Mary Ann; and the fifth and last, considering the death of the infants, the boy named John, after his father. En passant , there must have been something favorable to the development of latent possibilities in gardeners' sons in that corner of Scotland, for in the neighboring county of Ayr, a few years later was born of similar bucolic stock the son of another tiller of the soil, known to fame as Robbie Burns!

The cottage in which young Paul made his first appearance was a little stone building in a verdant glade in a thriving wood hard by the north shore of the Solway. In front of the cottage whose whitewashed walls were in full view of the ships which entered the Firth there was a patch of greensward. The country of that section of bonnie Scotland in which is the parish of Arbigland is rugged and broken. To the east and to the west, huge, craggy mountains shut in a thickly wooded plateau, diversified by clear, rapid streams abounding in fish. The fastnesses in the hills even then were covered with romantic ruins of decayed strongholds of feudal times, reminiscent of the days of the Black Douglasses and their men. The coast line, unusually stern and bold, is broken by many precipitous inlets, narrow and deep. At the foot of the cliffs at low tide broad stretches of sand are exposed to view, and the rapid rise of the tide makes these shelving beaches dangerous places upon which to linger. The water deepens abruptly beyond the beaches, and vessels under favorable circumstances are enabled to approach near the shore.

Amid such scenes as these the childhood of young Paul was passed. Like every thrifty Scots boy of the period, he had plenty of work to do in assisting his mother and father. The life of a Scots peasant of that time was one of hard and incessant toil; his recreations were few, his food meager, his opportunities limited, and the luxuries absent. Young John Paul ate his porridge and did his work like the rest. It would probably now be considered a sad and narrow life, which the stern and rigid austerity of the prevailing form of Calvinism did nothing to lighten. That gloomy religion, however, did produce men.

It was the parish school which shaped and molded the minds of the growing Scots, and it was the Kirk which shaped and directed the schools, and the one was not more thorough than the other. I doubt if anywhere on earth at that day was the standard of education among the common people higher and more universally reached than in Scotland. During the short school year Paul was sent religiously to the nearest parish school, where he was well grounded in the rudiments of solid learning with the thoroughness which made these little schools famous. No demands of labor were allowed to interfere with the claims of education. On Sunday he was religiously and regularly marched to the kirk to be duly inducted into the mysteries of the catechism, and thoroughly indoctrinated with the theory of predestination and its rigorous concomitants.

Of him, as of other boys, it is veraciously stated that he conceived a great fondness for the sea, and it is related that all his plays were of ships and sailors-a thing easily understood when it is remembered that his most impressionable hours were spent in sight and sound of the great deep, and that the white sails of ships upon the horizon were quite as familiar a picture to his youthful vision as the tree-clad hills and valleys of his native land. It is evident that he had no fancy for the garden. A man of action he, from his bib-and-tucker days. His chroniclers have loved to call attention to the fact that even as a lad he manifested the spirit of one born to rule, for in the sports and games it was his will which dominated his little group of comrades-and the Scotsman, even when he is a child, is not easily dominated, be it remembered. His was a healthy, vigorous boyhood.

His desire for the sea must have been stronger than the evanescent feeling which finds a place sooner or later in the life of most boys, for in 1759, with the full consent of his parents, he crossed the Solway to Whitehaven, the principal port of the Firth, where he was regularly bound apprentice to a merchant named Younger, who was engaged in the American trade. He was immediately sent to sea on the ship Friendship, Captain Benson, and at the tender age of twelve years he made his first voyage to the new land toward whose freedom and independence he was afterward destined to contribute so much. The destination of the ship happened to be the Rappahannock River. As it fortunately turned out, his elder brother, William, had some years before migrated to Virginia, where he had married and settled at Fredericksburg, and by his industry and thrift finally amassed a modest fortune. Young Paul at once conceived a great liking for America which never faltered; long afterward he stated that he had been devoted to it from his youth.