Captain Paul

John Paul Jones was Scottish by birth, American by choice, celebrated in France, employed by Russia, and died in a Paris apartment in 1792 at forty-five, waiting for a naval commission that never arrived. In between, he had renamed himself, reinvented himself, and commanded the Bonhomme Richard against HMS Serapis in one of the most savage sea battles of the eighteenth century - fighting from a burning, sinking ship until the British captain surrendered to him, then transferring his flag to the captured vessel as his own went under. The phrase attributed to him in that battle - that he had not yet begun to fight - entered American mythology before the smoke had cleared.Alexandre Dumas published Captain Paul in 1838, before The Three Musketeers and before The Count of Monte Cristo, in the period when he was still establishing what kind of writer he was going to be. The novel he built around Jones - thinly renamed, richly imagined - sets his story against the Breton coast and the North Sea, adding the personal and romantic dimensions that historical record declines to supply, and connecting the American Revolutionary hero to a French landscape and a French audience that had their own reasons to find him sympathetic. Jones had been received at Versailles, feted in Paris, and celebrated across the country that had financed the revolution he fought for; he was never, from a French perspective, simply a foreign naval officer.What Dumas found in Jones was the type he had always been drawn to: a man who had crossed and recrossed the boundaries of national identity, who had made himself by refusing the role that origin assigned him, who pursued a personal code of honor in collision with every institutional structure he encountered. The sea was the right setting for such a man - the one environment where the rules of the landed world held least securely, and where what a person actually was mattered more than what they had been born.Vivid, propulsive, and grounded in one of the eighteenth century's most extraordinary lives - Dumas before the masterpieces, already entirely himself.