The Admiral and the Ambassador by Scott Martelle

duplicitous Landais and his men. It made for a tense voyage, marked by spats and the occasional fistfight among the crew, and a threatened duel or two among the officers from the two ships. The
Alliance
took a couple of minor prizes and then put in at Coruña, Spain, for fresh water and other supplies.
    After a couple of weeks, Jones ordered the crew to get ready to set out once again, but the men balked, angry over their lack of pay and the lack of proper clothing for winter sailing in the North Atlantic—most had lost their possessions when the
Bonhomme Richard
went down. Jones, with the support of his lieutenants, finally persuaded the men to return to work so they could head for Lorient. Once at sea, the tensions between Jones and the crew increased when word flitted around the ship that, rather than making straight for Lorient and a payday, Jones intended to cruise for three weeks looking for more prizes.
    After some two weeks of fruitless cruising, the
Alliance
encountered a British warship, and Jones ordered the crew to get ready to take her. “But our crew swore they would not fight, although if we had been united we might have taken her with a great deal of ease,” Fanning wrote. When Jones was told of the rank-and-file insubordination, he gave in. “Our courses were dropped, and we in our turn ran from her, and made all the sail we could, by his order. All this time he appeared much agitated, and bit his lips often, and walked the quarter-deck muttering something to himself.” Three days later, on February 13, the
Alliance
anchored at Lorient. 2
    The
Serapis
and other prizes taken by Jones’s crew were already in port, sailed there from Texel under the French flag. Jones received orders fromParis—presumably, from Franklin—to ready the
Alliance
for a transatlantic voyage to carry crucial communications from Europe to the Continental Congress. The
Alliance
was in miserable condition despite the refitting at Texel. Part of the issue was an oddly imagined placement of ballast—ordered by Landais—that made it hard to control the ship as tightly as Jones liked, a crucial lack of flexibility given the likelihood of more sea battles. Jones had the crew and port carpenters set to work, on the United States government’s bill, to ready the ship, a project that would take several months.
    But the captain managed to squeeze in some fun too. One afternoon the American agent at work in Lorient, James Moylan, boarded the ship to conduct some business with the ship’s purser; Jones went ashore leaving strict orders that no one was to leave the ship—including Moylan, an Irish-born man nearly sixty years old—until Jones returned. Moylan was “very rude in his manners … and he was what people commonly call a homely man, but rich in the good things of this world. His present wife was only about seventeen years of age, very handsome, and a little given to coquetry.” 3 According to Fanning, Moylan had caught Jones in compromising positions with his wife before. This time, there would be no interrupting: Jones went straight to Moylan’s home, where he spent the afternoon and evening with Moylan’s young wife. The crew, meanwhile, got Moylan drunk and poured him into a berth, where he spent the night. The next day, gossip about Jones’s “gallantry,” as Fanning described it, swept through the port. On another occasion, Jones swept up the wife of a Lorient man and kept her in his cabin during a short cruise of a couple of weeks.
    In mid-April, Jones traveled to Paris, where he was received as a hero and presented at the royal court. Louis XVI gave him a gold-and-jewel sword. Jones also attended the opera with Marie Antoinette and was the guest of honor at a series of dinners and parties, despite his inability to speak or understand much French. (He would later gain some fluency.) Jones saw Franklin regularly, as well as a steady stream of women.