How John Paul Jones's pirate raid on Cumbria sank wartime morale
Portrayed as a war criminal, slave trader and murderer, the man who burned Whitehaven in 1788 struck a major blow for US Independence
Rat-at-tat!!
It was three o’clock in the morning on Thursday April 23, 1778.
RAT-AT-TAT-TAT!!
A burly figure ran through the streets of Whitehaven. He knocked on doors and warned the sleeping residents to get up and save their ships from burning. An eerie orange glow lit up the sky over the town. Whitehaven’s harbour was a forest of masts. At that time the port ranked equally in importance with London, Liverpool, Newcastle and Bristol.
Dozens of townspeople, still groggy with sleep, stumbled onto Merchant’s Quay. To their horror a brand new deep-bellied collier called The Thompson was well alight at the stern. It was one of the finest wooden merchant ships ever built. But now flames were leaping towards the sails and rigging as the vessel lay helplessly beached at low tide. A column of smoke ascended from the cargo hatch.
It towered high above the 100-foot-long ship. Four hundred tons of high-quality coking coal were inside. It was mined in Whitehaven pits, bound for Irish iron works. Panicking residents ran towards the blaze. The fire was a terrible threat to another 150 vessels that lay in neat rows on the muddy harbour floor.
Each one was brimming with two to four hundred tons of fuel. But there was a further complication. A man wearing an unfamiliar blue and white uniform with a red sash around his middle stood between them and the burning ship, his pistol drawn. They could not identify his nationality until he ordered them in his Scottish brogue to flee or be shot. Most backed off immediately.
Long minutes passed as the suited figure stood stock still watching the flames climb the Thompson’s main mast. As the sky grew brighter, the gunman’s rough-looking armed accomplices grabbed several of the cowering locals. Using them as human shields, the raiders backed towards two boats tied up by the pier. As they clambered in, they released all but three of the captives.
The leader boldly remained on the quay brandishing his gun until he was sure the fire had taken a satisfactory grip. He looked to the heights above the town. Thousands of amazed inhabitants were watching the raid.
As Lloyd’s, the industry paper, later reported: “all the shipping in the port was in the most imminent danger” from the “unprecedented,” “diabolical” and “infernal” attack. At last, the blue and white clad figure jumped into the front of one of the launches. He instructed his men to “pull hard.”
As soon as it was clear the attackers’ boats were heading out of the harbour, the Whitehaven men ran to the Old Fort. There, they discovered that the raiders had overpowered the dozing sentries, locked them in their own guardroom and had spiked all thirty-six cannons in the battery.
The impact of the strange and puzzling incident went far beyond the limited damage to one ship.
They had driven heavy nails into their touchholes. After much difficulty, the townspeople managed to fire a couple of guns. But in their panic, they aimed wildly and the cannonballs splashed harmlessly behind the retreating raiders. The attackers mockingly replied by firing their own swivel gun and pistols into the air. By half past six, the action was over and the assailants were back aboard their pirate ship.
Fire engines appeared and the port’s managers got the blaze under control. But the impact of the strange and puzzling incident went far beyond the limited damage to one ship. What might have seemed a small American naval success created irrational dread across the British Isles. Britons brought up to believe Royal Navy patrols made their coasts inviolable had their illusion shattered.
The “wooden walls upon our seas” that poet Robert Burns claimed would stop “haughty” foreigners posing an invasion threat had been overcome. Maybe Britannia as the patriotic song said, did not “rule the waves” after all? Families appeared to be at risk of capture in their own homes by invading foreigners.
The Royal Navy’s Admiralty headquarters in London quickly worked out that the attack had been perpetrated by a Scottish-American commander named John Paul Jones as part of the United States’ three-year-old War of Independence from Britain. Jones the “pirate” had pulled off the first major example of a new phenomenon: psychological warfare, attacking the British mind rather than merely their navy. The overall destruction Jones caused to the British fleet was insignificant but he did immense harm to the British will to fight.
The raid delivered a blow to Prime Minister Lord North’s Government from which it never recovered and boosted liberal claims that the American war was unjust. The critics said that, by bringing danger to British shores, the war was shown to be insufferable.
“We are in a bustle here, from the late insulate attack of the provincial privateer’s men. I hope it will rouse us from our lethargy.”
Amid official pandemonium, Ministers issued blanket orders for troops to protect all British seaports and coastal towns that might tempt Jones. The tough Penrith Fencibles regiment was drafted in to strengthen Whitehaven’s defences the next day adding to the two that had already rushed there. One Whitehaven resident wrote: “We are in a bustle here, from the late insulate attack of the provincial privateer’s men. I hope it will rouse us from our lethargy.”
Public money began pouring into rebuilding and strengthening the ramparts, forts, batteries, and castles guarding virtually every coastal community. Officials pulled down street signs, name plates and all other distinguishing marks near coasts that might help hostile navigators. All horses were taken inland to prevent their seizure and naval officers were posted in high places such as church spires to monitor the enemy fleet and raise the alarm. People living near the coasts sent wagonloads of personal valuables and business treasures to banks, storehouses, and inland locations of relative safety.
Pamphlets appeared portraying Jones as a bloody pirate armed to the teeth and driven by a cold-blooded ruthlessness reminiscent of the savage Vikings immortalised in literature. The mere mention of Jones’s name caused terror. He replaced the infamous Captain Kidd as the favourite bogeyman that parents used to frighten their children. In the popular imagination Jones was an unscrupulous marauder because he had raided Whitehaven in a vessel disguised as a merchant ship and had descended on a sleeping town under cover of darkness.
To the British authorities the real threat was that his well-judged attack had damaged Britain’s inner core - the empire’s economy. The value of the trade that Britain sent overseas by ship in 1778 was worth £16 million (equivalent to £1.3 billion pounds in 2023). After the Jones raid, Britain’s maritime insurance companies instantly put up their rates from one and a half per cent of a cargo’s value to five percent. That pushed the potential annual insurance bill up from £240,000 to £800,000 overnight.
John Paul told the Paris commissioners who ran the European wing of the American war afterwards that he was “pleased that in this business we neither killed nor wounded any person”…and that the raid had shown “that not all their Navy can protect their own coasts.” Once the news reached America, exaggerated descriptions of Jones’s exploits circulated, one report claimed he had “burned all the ships in the harbour.”
Whitehaven’s Cumberland Chronicle presented an entirely different view, telling of a half-drunken rabble of ill-disciplined pirates who headed for the town’s alehouses instead of accomplishing their mission.
They described John Paul as a gangly youth last seen years before in Whitehaven who even then had little to distinguish himself but a talent for quarrelling and insubordination. It reported that Jones was “found guilty” in a London court of the murder of a ship’s carpenter but had “made his escape” to America. Other British newspapers contributed to the public’s hysteria.
They wondered how the hard-up American Congress could have set up such a terrifyingly effective spy and sabotage network that they obviously must have in Britain. So, much of this story is mysterious. It is easy to see why an ambitious sea captain whose young country was facing impossible odds in a war with mighty Britain might launch such a daring raid. But why did Jones come all the way from America to attack Whitehaven of all places? What was his relation to Cumberland ? Was he really an escaped murderer? If he was such a desperado, why did he go around knocking on people’s doors to warn them?
In fact, this “pirate” had a lot more to do with Whitehaven and Cumbria than appears at first sight.
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