Huzzah76 Rules of Command, Rule 7: When You Cannot Disengage Close the Distance
Jones at Flamborough Head, September 23, 1779
August 25, 2026 | AmRev Resurrected
The Bonhomme Richard was sinking.
Not slowly. Not metaphorically. The ship was taking on water through holes the Serapis had put in her hull, the pumps were losing ground, and five feet of water sloshed in the lower decks. Two of Jones’s own 18-pound guns had exploded in the opening broadside, killing their crews and blowing out the deck above them. His own squadron’s frigate, the Alliance, commanded by a captain named Pierre Landais who had lost his mind or his loyalty or both, had fired three broadsides into the Bonhomme Richard in the middle of the fight. Jones was being shot at from both sides simultaneously. The Serapis outgunned him, outsailed him, and was in every measurable sense winning the battle.
The British captain Richard Pearson hailed him. Did he wish to surrender?
Jones’s reply, as recorded by his lieutenant Richard Dale years later: “I have not yet begun to fight.”
Then he lashed his sinking ship to the Serapis and dragged the fight close enough that the enemy’s guns could not depress to aim at him.
He won.
THE SITUATION
By the summer of 1779, John Paul Jones had been given a ship that had no business fighting anyone.
The Bonhomme Richard was a thirteen-year-old converted French merchant vessel, an East Indiaman repurposed as a warship and placed under Jones’s command by King Louis XVI through the influence of Benjamin Franklin. Jones named her after Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, which the French read under the title Les Maximes du Bonhomme Richard. The naming was an act of gratitude and a piece of propaganda: an American ship named for a French translation of a founding father’s pen name, sailing against the British in British waters.
The ship was slow. She was old. Her main armament was a mixed battery of 12-pounders, and Jones’s attempt to arm her with heavier 18-pounders had ended in disaster when two of them exploded in the opening exchange. She carried approximately 380 officers and crew, a mixture of Americans, French marines, and assorted European volunteers of varying loyalty. The Alliance, the most powerful ship in his small squadron, was commanded by a French-born captain named Pierre Landais whose reliability had already been questioned before the squadron left Lorient in August.
Jones’s mission was to disrupt British merchant shipping in home waters, a strategic harassment campaign designed to force the British to divert naval resources to coastal defense and demonstrate that American naval power could reach into the heart of British commerce. He had been at sea for six weeks, taken prizes around the Irish and Scottish coasts, and on the evening of September 23, 1779, off Flamborough Head on the Yorkshire coast, he found what he had been looking for.
A Baltic convoy of 41 merchant ships, loaded with naval stores bound for British dockyards, escorted by the Serapis, a brand-new 44-gun two-decker with a seasoned crew, and a smaller escort vessel. The convoy was the lifeblood of British naval supply. Jones engaged.
THE DECISION
The two ships came within hailing distance at around 6 PM, both initially flying British colors. Pearson suspected who he was dealing with. When he demanded identification, Jones responded with a false ship name. When Pearson remained suspicious and the exchange broke down, Jones ran up the American flag and the ships exchanged simultaneous broadsides.
The opening exchange was catastrophic for Jones. The two 18-pounders exploded. The Serapis’s guns were heavier, her crew more coordinated, and she was sailing a new ship against a converted merchant vessel. After roughly an hour of fighting on parallel courses, Jones was badly outgunned and his hull was failing.
He made the decision that saved him.
He used a fortunate gust of wind to pull ahead of the Serapis, attempted to cross her bow, lost momentum, and the two ships collided. Jones immediately ordered grappling hooks thrown and lashed the Bonhomme Richard to the Serapis, bow to stern, their gun ports so close that the muzzles of the cannon touched. He could not disengage. He chose not to try. He pulled his enemy close enough that the Serapis’s gun decks could not aim downward at his waterline, close enough that his sharpshooters in the rigging could fire directly onto the Serapis’s deck, close enough that the fight became a contest of will rather than a contest of firepower.
The battle continued for another two and a half hours in that locked embrace. The Serapis fired both gun decks through the Bonhomme Richard’s lower decks, virtually cutting her in half. Jones’s men fought back from the upper decks and the rigging. An American sailor crawled out along a yardarm above the Serapis’s main hatch and dropped a grenade through it. The grenade landed near a rack of powder charges on the gun deck below and ignited them. The explosion killed dozens of British sailors. The Serapis’s mainmast began to fail. Pearson struck his colors at approximately 10:30 PM.
Jones had won with a ship that was below the waterline on one side, on fire in multiple compartments, and had been fired on by his own squadron. He transferred his flag to the Serapis. Two days later, the Bonhomme Richard sank. Jones sailed his captured prize to neutral Holland.
He had closed the distance when he could not disengage, and the distance was what won him the fight.
THE FORMATION BEHIND THE DECISION
John Paul Jones was born in 1747 in a cottage on the Arbigland estate in Kirkbean, Scotland. His father was the head gardener of the estate, which means his father tended other men’s grounds and his family lived on property that belonged to someone else. He was born without a surname of his own. John Paul. That was all.
He went to sea at thirteen as a ship’s boy. He served on merchant vessels and for a period on slave ships, an experience he later described with disgust as an abominable trade and quit as soon as he could. By his mid-twenties he was a ship captain. In 1773, in Tobago, a mutinous sailor attacked him in his cabin. Jones drew his sword in self-defense and killed the man. Rather than face a trial he did not believe would be fair, he fled to the American colonies. He added Jones to his name to conceal himself. He arrived in Virginia as a fugitive who had renamed himself and had no legal standing in any country he had previously called home.
He chose a revolution as the ground to rebuild on.
That formation matters for Rule 7 because it describes a man who had already been stripped of every conventional anchor: name, country, legal standing, and institutional backing. He had rebuilt entirely on the strength of his own will and competence. When Jones looked at the Serapis in the opening exchange and calculated that he was losing, he did not have the option of retreat that a man with something to return to might have considered. He had chosen this war deliberately, from the outside, as a man who had nothing else. The ship might sink. The fight would not stop.
Jones had also spent years fighting at a disadvantage and winning by closing the distance. In April 1778 he had raided the English port of Whitehaven in a night operation with a small force, spiking guns and burning a ship in the harbor of a town he had sailed from as a boy. The audacity of the operation, an American naval officer attacking a British port on British soil, sent a shock through the country. He had learned what he would confirm at Flamborough Head: a smaller force that gets close enough to the enemy eliminates the enemy’s range advantage and turns the fight into something else entirely.
His formation was the formation of a man who had no birth, no name, no country, and no safe harbor. What he had was the sea and the willingness to close with whatever was in front of him.
THE CHARGE
You are in a fight you appear to be losing.
You know which one. The competitor with more resources who is beating you at range, on ground that favors their advantages. The relationship where the other person holds the stronger position and you keep trying to negotiate from distance. The market where you are being outspent and outgunned and your response has been to play on their terms and wonder why it is not working.
Jones had a sinking ship, a treacherous squadron, and a better-armed enemy. He closed the distance. He lashed himself to the problem and turned a firepower contest into a contest of will, which he was always going to win.
Where is the distance you have been maintaining that is costing you the fight?
The competitor you have been trying to beat by playing their game has advantages at range that disappear when you get close enough. Close the distance. Be in the room instead of sending the email. Have the conversation directly instead of managing it through intermediaries. Take the meeting they did not expect you to request. Get close enough that your advantages matter and theirs do not.
Jones was asked if he had struck his colors. He had not yet begun to fight.
Neither have you.
Value for Value
Send this to one man you know who is losing a fight he has been trying to win at range. The distance is the problem. Tell him to close it.
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~ Brett Hahn, AmRev Resurrected 🇺🇸
Brett Hahn is the founder of AmRev Resurrected and the creator of Freed. He is a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, Anthony Halberstadt Chapter, descended from Thomas Murphy of the 2nd Regiment, Salem County New Jersey Militia. His books Forge the Son and Made for the Mountains*, Volumes One and Two of The First Republic Series, are available on Amazon. His app* Freed is live at freedbyjesus.com.
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Where this first appeared
First published on AmRev Resurrected on August 25, 2026. Read it there.