Jones started on his cruise in the Ranger April 10, 1778, and, after taking several unimportant prizes on the way to the Irish Channel, decided to make a descent upon the town that had served him as headquarters when he was a merchant sailor, Whitehaven, where he knew there were about two hundred and fifty merchant ships, which he hoped to destroy; "to put an end," as he said, "by one good fire, in England, of shipping, to all the burnings in America."

Owing to contrary winds Jones was unable to make the attack until midnight of April 22. His daring scheme was, with the small force of thirty-two men in two small boats, to land in a hostile port, defended by two forts, surprise the sleeping inhabitants, and burn the ships before the people could assemble against him. By the time the boats reached the outer pier, day had dawned and no time was to be lost. The forts were surprised and taken, the guns spiked by Jones with his own hand; but while he was thus occupied his officers had failed to fire the shipping, in accordance with his orders, Lieutenant Wallingford stating as an excuse that "nothing could be gained by burning poor people's property." Jones thought otherwise, however; and although the townspeople were beginning to assemble in consequence of the pistols that had been fired in capturing the forts, he made fire in the steerage of a large ship, closely surrounded by many others, and an enormous conflagration ensued. He stood, pistol in hand, near the burning wreck, and kept off the constantly increasing crowd until the sun was an hour high, when he and his men retired to the Ranger, taking away with them three of the captured soldiers, "as a sample," Jones said, and followed by the eyes of the gaping multitude of English country folk.

Although the amount of property destroyed by this raid was small, the importance of it was considerable, and is well stated by Jones himself, who, if proper allowance is made for the effects of his vanity, is, as a rule, his own best biographer: "The moral effect of it was very great," he writes, "as it taught the English that the fancied security of their coasts was a myth, and thereby compelled their government to take expensive measures for the defense of numerous ports hitherto relying for protection wholly on the vigilance and supposed omnipotence of their navy. It also doubled or more the rates of insurance, which in the long run proved the most grievous damage of all."

On the same day Jones made a descent on the estate of the Earl of Selkirk, near his old home in Kirkcudbright, with the intention of carrying off the earl as a hostage. But the earl was not at home, and Jones consented, he says, to let his men, mutinous and greedy, seize the Selkirk family plate, which Jones put himself at a great deal of trouble and some expense to restore at a later date. This incident is interesting chiefly as it was the cause of a letter illustrative of Jones's character, sent by him to the Countess of Selkirk, who was present at the time of the raid. After stating in rather inflatedly polite terms that he could not well restrain his men from the raid, Jones promised to return the plate, condemned the brutalities of the English, spoke of the horrors of war, boasted of his victory over the Drake the evening following the raid, spoke of the English dead and his chivalrous treatment of them,—"I buried them in a spacious grave, with the honors due to the memory of the brave,"—and then made the following rather amusing statements: "Though I have drawn my sword in the present generous struggle for the rights of men, yet I am not in arms as an American, nor am I in pursuit of riches. My fortune is liberal enough, having no wife nor family, and having lived long enough to know that riches cannot secure happiness. I profess myself a citizen of the world, totally unfettered by the little mean distinctions of climate or of country, which diminish the benevolence of the heart and set bounds to philanthropy. Before this war had begun, I had, at an early time of life, withdrawn from sea service in favor of 'calm contemplation and poetic ease.' I have sacrificed not only my favorite scheme of life, but the softer affections of the heart and my prospects of domestic happiness, and I am ready to sacrifice my life also with cheerfulness if that forfeiture could restore peace among mankind.... I hope this cruel contest will soon be closed; but should it continue, I wage no war with the fair. I acknowledge their force, and bend before it with submission."

Jones was probably sincere when he wrote that letter, although it is full of misstatements. He was not a self-conscious man and did not analyze his motives very carefully. He always posed, with perfect sincerity, as a hero, and when he had to do with a distinguished woman his exalted words exactly expressed, no doubt, his sentiments.

Jones's next exploit was the famous capture of the Drake on April 23. Previous to the attack on Whitehaven, while off Carrickfergus, he had conceived the bold project of running into Belfast Loch, where the British man-of-war Drake, of twenty guns, was at anchor; where he hoped to overlay the Drake's cable, fall foul of her bow, and thus, with her decks exposed to the Ranger's musketry, to board. He did, indeed, enter the harbor at night, but failed after repeated efforts, on account of the strong wind, to get in a proper position to board. Three days later, after the Earl of Selkirk affair, Jones was again off Carrickfergus, looking for the Drake, which, having heard of his devastations from the alarmed country people, sailed out to punish the invader of the sacred soil of England. The two sloops of war were very nearly matched, though the Drake technically rated at twenty guns and the Ranger at eighteen. When they came within range of one another they hoisted their colors almost at the same time, but the Drake hailed:—

"What ship is that?"

Jones directed the sailing-master to answer:

"The American Continental ship Ranger. We are waiting for you. Come on. The sun is now near setting, and it is time to begin."

The Ranger then opened fire with a full broadside. The Drake replied with the same, and the two ships ran along together at close quarters, pouring in broadsides for more than an hour, when the enemy called for quarter. The action had been, as Jones said in his terse official report, "warm, close, and obstinate." There was little manoeuvring, just straight fighting, the victory being due, according to Jones, to the superior gunnery of the Americans. At first Jones's gunners hulled the Drake, as she rolled, below the water-line, but Jones desired to take the enemy's ship as a prize, rather than to sink her, and told his men so.

"The alert fellows," he said in a letter to Joseph Hewes, "instantly took this hint and began firing as their muzzles rose, by which practice they soon crippled the Drake's spars and rigging, and made her an unmanageable log on the water. I am persuaded that if I had not advised them to this effect, my gunners would have sunk the Drake in an hour! As it was, we had to put spare sails over the side after she struck, to keep her afloat, and careen her as much as we could the next day to plug the holes they had already made between wind and water."

The Drake, indeed, was almost a wreck, while the Ranger was little injured. Jones lost only two men killed and six wounded, to the enemy's approximate loss of forty-two killed and wounded. It was the first battle of the war which resulted in the capture of a regular British man-of-war by a ship of equal if not inferior force. The Drake belonged to a regularly established navy, not accustomed to defeat. Perhaps that fact inspired her commander with overconfidence, but McKenzie's statement of the cause of the victory is no doubt correct: "The result," he said, "was eminently due to the skill and courage of Jones, and his inflexible resolution to conquer." That resolution, which was indeed a characteristic of Jones, reached on at least one occasion, that of the later battle with the Serapis, a degree of inflexibility which amounted to genius.

The effect of this bold cruise was great. Jones had not, however, been the only American captain, by any means, to render good service in destroying the commerce of the enemy and in annoying the British coast. Before the French alliance more than six hundred British vessels fell a prey to American cruisers, mainly privateers. There were, likewise, captains in the regular United States navy who had before this cruise of Jones's borne the flag to Europe. The first of these was the gallant Wickes, in the summer of 1777. Though Jones was not the first captain, therefore, to make a brilliant and destructive cruise in the English Channel, he was nevertheless the first to inspire terror among the inhabitants by incursions inshore. The cruise of the little Ranger showed that the British, when they ravaged the coast of New England, might expect effective retaliation on their own shores; and the capture of the Drake inspired France, then about to take arms in support of the American cause, by the realization of what they themselves had longed to do—to worst England on the high seas—with increased respect for their allies. It filled Great Britain with wild, exaggerated, and unjust condemnation of Paul Jones, who has been looked upon for more than a hundred years, and is even to-day in England, by sober historians, as a bloody-handed, desperate buccaneer. The persistent charge, often of late refuted, hardly needs refutation, in view of the well-authenticated fact that Jones never served on a war vessel except under a regular commission. Moreover, he was a man too ambitious and too sensible to hurt his prospects by being anything so low and undistinguished as a pirate.

After the battle with the Drake, Jones saw that he would have to bring the cruise to a close. His crew of 139 men had, through the necessity of manning the several merchant prizes and the Drake, been reduced to eighty-six men, and he consequently put into Brest, reluctantly, on the 8th of May, 1778. He was there met by the great French fleet, then actually at war with England, and he and his prize were admired by visiting French officers. From that time Jones, hated in England, was a hero in France, fÊted whenever he was at the capital, and favored by fair ladies.

He was a hero, however, with a thorny path all through life. He arrived at Brest with a miserably clothed, wholly unpaid, discontented, and partly mutinous crew. During the voyage his first lieutenant, Simpson, had stirred up dissatisfaction among the men, and had refused to obey orders, for which Jones had him put in irons. The unpaid men, not assigning their troubles to the true but unseen cause, the poverty of the government, easily believed that their captain was responsible for all their ills. Under no conditions, however, was Jones likely to be popular with the greater number of his men, for the energetic man was bent on making them, as well as himself, work for glory to the uttermost, and the common run of seamen care more for ease and pelf than for fame. Jones's unpopularity with the crew of the Ranger is attested by a passage from the diary of Ezra Green, one of Jones's officers, on the occasion, at a later period, of the Ranger's sailing back to America: "This day Thomas Simpson, Esq., came on board with orders to take command of the Ranger; to the joy and satisfaction of the whole ship's company."

With the impulsive inconsistency which, in spite of his shrewdness, sometimes marked his conduct, Jones alternately demanded a court-martial for Simpson and recommended him to the command of the Ranger, he himself hoping for a more important vessel; it was Jones's own conduct, as much as any other circumstance, which finally resulted in the sailing away of the Ranger under the mutinous Simpson. With the frankness customary with him when not writing to anybody particularly distinguished, Jones wrote Simpson, at one stage of their quarrel: "The trouble with you, Mr. Simpson, is that you have the heart of a lion and the head of a sheep."

Even more annoying to the imperious and high-handed Jones than the trouble with Simpson was the manner in which, on his arrival at Brest, the commissioners refused to honor his draft for 24,000 livres. He held a letter of credit authorizing him to draw on the commissioners for money to defray necessary expenses; but instead of dealing with the regular American agent at Brest, he placed his order with a Brest merchant, who, when Jones's draft was returned dishonored, stopped his supplies. Jones thereupon wrote the commissioners: "I know not where or how to provide food for to-morrow's dinner to feed the great number of mouths that depend on me for food. Are then the Continental ships of war to depend on sale of their prizes for the daily dinner of their men? Publish it not 'in Gath'!"

He then, without authority, but very possibly forced by the necessities of his crew, sold one of his prizes, with the money from which he paid the Brest merchant. Of this act he said: "I could not waste time discussing questions of authority when my crew and prisoners were starving."

The point of view of the commissioners is tersely expressed in a letter from them to the French Minister of Marine, de Sartine, June 15, 1778: "We think it extremely irregular ... in captains of ships of war to draw for any sums they please without previous notice and express permission.... Captain Jones has had of us near a hundred thousand livres for such purposes [necessaries]."

The frugality of Benjamin Franklin, the most important commissioner, is well known, and also the financial straits of the country at that time. That Jones was in a difficult position at Brest is certain, and he perhaps asked for no more than he needed. But that he was naturally inclined to extravagant expenditure there can be no doubt,—a fact that will appear saliently in a later stage of this narrative.