Captain John Paul Jones wrote in 1778, “I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way.” When he penned those words Paul Jones had nearly 20 years of professional experience with sailing vessels. He signed an indentured apprenticeship on board the brig Friendship at age 13, commanded his first trading ship at age 20, and by 1778 had already served in the Continental Navy for three years. During that time he had command of three different vessels and superintended the construction of one of them. He knew ships. He also knew what he liked in the sailing qualities of vessels.
More than 200 years have clouded the record of the ships that John Paul Jones enjoyed and made famous. Now through the pencils, pens, and brushes of a remarkable marine artist and historian, William Gilkerson, we are able to share a visual experience with the past; to see the decks that Jones walked, the sails he ordered set, and the guns he trained on the enemy; and to appreciate the skills and hardships that the great Revolutionary naval hero and his crews had to master and conquer. From the trading brig Friendship to the Russian flagship Vladimir, Gilkerson has studied and drawn them all, including the seven ships Jones commanded in the American Revolution. Their names are embedded in the floor encircling his tomb in the crypt of the U. S. Naval Academy Chapel—the Providence, the Alfred, the Ranger, the Bonhomme Richard, the Alliance, the Ariel, and the America.
Gilkerson the artist received his first commission to render likenesses of Paul Jones’s ships 20 years ago. Soon discovering that little accurate pictorial evidence or written testimony of the ships had survived or ever existed, Gilkerson the historian emerged. He began collecting and sifting through whatever clues he could find. He examined the art of his predecessors with mistrust and skepticism, for none had been eyewitnesses, and they had used artistic license in delineating both ships and the relative position of the ships in battle. He had to read the documents of the period, including the logs of ships. reports and narrative accounts of battles, and the extensive correspondence of Jones and his contemporaries.
In some cases, plans survived of sister ships to those sailed by Jones. For most vessels the rigging and armament were the easy part, but the hulls presented puzzles. Some gems of information emerged from the reports of British and Tory spies. As he got more data the artist did sketches to refine each detail toward the final target, the full ship in its best-researched image.
The most enigmatic of Jones’s ships proved to be his most famous, the Bonhomme Richard. Having been built as a French East Indies trading ship, quickly converted by Jones to a man-of-war, and having sunk in the North Sea two days after her great battle, very little documentation about her ever existed. It was only through full-fledged collaborations with Anglo-American historian Peter Reaveley, the distinguished French naval architectural scholar Jean Boudriot, and the dean of America’s designers of historic ship replicas Tom Gillmer that Gilkerson was able to achieve his goal with the Bonhomme Richard.
William Gilkerson’s efforts to produce the most accurate picture of each of John Paul Jones’s ships have led to nearly 100 works of art, two new books, several magazine articles, and a major exhibition at the U. S. Naval Academy Museum. Jones, a very vain man, would have relished all the attention.
To support the museum exhibition Gilkerson also wrote a full narrative account of each ship and designed the illustrated book. The Ships of John Paul Jones (U. S. Naval Academy Museum, the Beverley R. Robinson Collection, and the Naval Institute Press, 1987), which served as the exhibition catalog.
A first-rate historical marine artist combines a keen sense of nautical observation with a propensity to pursue historical evidence in archives, libraries, museums, and private collections. As William Gilkerson would attest, it can take years of doggedly searching for shreds of proof to produce an accurate and satisfyingly beautiful rendering of even one historic ship. And after all the research is done and the paper or canvas is barely dry, new evidence and new interpretations will arise. But each effort such as Gilkerson’s extends and enriches our knowledge.