John Paul Jones: The Scot who saw off the Sassenachs

The prospect of watching the British Navy handing out a drubbing to the Americans was too good to miss for the Yorkshire gentry on the night of 23 September, 1779. The great and the good processed in their carriages under a harvest moon to Flamborough Head where, for a time, they were not disappointed by the spectacle of a 50-gun British frigate, Serapis, inflicting terrible damage on Bonhomme Richard, a rebel US vessel intent on distracting Britain from the War of Independence.

But no one had reckoned on the commodore at the helm of the US vessel that night; nor on his rallying cry, which is inscribed indelibly in US naval history and remembered to this day in schoolrooms across America.

John Paul Jones, a Scottish-born gardener's son who had fled to America to escape British justice, was down to his last reserves of ammunition when, with his vessel ablaze and beginning to sink, the British inquired if he was ready to surrender to them. "I have not yet begun to fight," he retorted, before proceeding to trounce Serapis and record one of the US Navy's most improbable victories.

Jones took care to board the Serapis and make prisoners of her crew before watching the Richard - irreparably damaged with "a hole the size of a coach and six" punched through her side by cannon fire, according to one contemporary report - sink to the bottom of the North Sea.

Though he made off in the moonlight and into legend as the man considered, to this day, to be the Father of the American Navy, Jones' trusty 42-gun craft has been marooned at the bottom of the North Sea ever since her hour of glory and her elusiveness has turned the search into the Holy Grail of American marine historians.

The search may soon be over. This week, in an appropriately intense transatlantic tussle, the British and Americans are doing battle off the Yorkshire coast to find and resurrect the Richard, barnacles and all.

Robot mini-submarines will first be laid beneath waters, 15 nautical miles or so off Flamborough, by the Connecticut-based Ocean Technology Foundation (OTF) - a group for whom, in the words of the mission's project manager, the Richard is "as important as Nelson and Victory are to the British." But OTF is not alone. A rival US group, the Arizona-based National Underwater and Marine Agency (Numa), founded by the thriller writer and naval archaeologist Clive Cussler, is also looking off Flamborough Head, while a third, British team - the Filey Bay Initiative - claims a head start.

Sponsored by the US National Geographic Society, the Filey team are investigating a wreck further inshore, the major part of which was located 30 years ago and which they are convinced is the Richard. Each team denies any kind of rivalry, but the OTF mother ship is sailing from an unidentified southern port to avoid attention and the exact date of its mission is confidential.

"We are keen not to give too much detail to avoid curious eyes" said Melissa Ryan, OTF's project manager. "But this is much more than looking for a shipwreck. Jones gave the American people a hero when they needed one and showed the world that the young Continental Navy was a force to be reckoned with. If we were to discover the wreck of the Bonhomme Richard it would be sensational."

Such a clamour to find the rather ramshackle vessel which Jones captained would have been hard to predict when he pitched up in the US in 1775, on the eve of the American Revolution. That Jones should have been in America at all was the result of a mysterious and mildly suspicious incident in the port of Tobago, where he was previously stationed.

In 1773, while captaining a merchant ship there, he killed a mutinous seaman in self-defence but rather than face a judicial system (which would probably have cleared him) he fled to America where there was no system for repatriating wanted men back to the British West Indies. Jones immediately took up against the British, sinking eight of their merchant ships as they crossed the Atlantic, before pounding the coasts of Scotland in 1777 on the sloop Ranger, much to the delight of the French, who relished the damage he was inflicting.

Jones was aged only 32 and commander in chief of the American Squadron in Europe when he took command of his next vessel, a French East Indiaman bought by Louis XVI and turned into a battleship. Jones named her Bonnehomme Richard in homage to the American statesman and scientists Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the US who conceived the idea of a United States and whose book Poor Richard's Almanac had just appeared in a French translation as Les Maximes de Bonhomme Richard.

There was an inauupicious start to Jones' fateful mission from Brest to England's north-east coast, where he intended to sail into Newcastle upon Tyne and destroy the collier fleet which supplied London's fuel. The French captains who were supposed to help (part of Louis XVI's gleeful efforts to cause Britain maximum discomfort) proved none too keen and when Jones spotted the 41-ship British convoy which Serapis was protecting, his three accompanying French vessels decided to part company with him, leaving his slow, small ex-merchant vessel to go it alone. Jones, realising that the only way to assail his rich prize was through hand-to hand combat, rather than a long-range cannon duel, endeavoured to manoeuvre nearer to Serapis but it took so long to move the craft that she took an immense hit from the Serapis's cannonry.

The Richard was actually half sinking, her pumps unable to cope with the volumes of water she was shipping, by the time Jones finally managed to lock his ship against the Serapis and take control of his last supply of nine-pound cannon-fire. The cannons and Jones' doughty combat fighters panicked the British captain, Richard Pearson - whose inquiry had prompted Jones' legendary defiant reply - into a surrender of his own after three and a half hours of battle.

The Richard sank soon after her moment of glory and since there is no exact record of where the vessel went down and she may have drifted for up to 36 hours before descending to the ocean floor, it is anyone's guess which of the three salvage teams are most likely to find her.

OTF is looking at five wrecks 30 miles out and 200ft deep, which were found using a computer model based on eyewitness accounts of the battle, reports on how the ship handled and wind and current movements. "We are fairly optimistic", said Ms Ryan. "We won't find a 'Pirates of the Caribbean' wreck sitting on the seabed. At best there will be debris, non-organic objects like cannon or ballast stones. Anything organic would have rotted away long ago. We would need a large quantity of identifiable material to show it is the Richard. For instance, we have her weapons manifest, so we could identify any cannon we find."

The OTF team also fosters hopes that some of Jones' personal effects may be intact. He did not get all of them off the craft before jumping on to Serapis in the moonlight.

Cussler, one of the world's most tireless Richard hunters who also spent £50,000 on his quest in the 1970s, is equally confident. "We are aware of the other groups' existence, but have no specific knowledge of their operations," said his son, Dirk. "We are searching in an area not far from the battle site. We have detected numerous wrecks and will take a hard look at the records during the off-season to determine whether any warrant further investigation."

The Filey Bay team is phlegmatic about the rival US investigators. "If they find the Bonhomme Richard we hope they will tell us first, so we can be the first to congratulate them," said Tony Green, one of the team. But the British contingent are banking on an oak hull discovered back in 1976 by their team leader John Adams, 60, a local fisherman. Tantalisingly, carbon dating of the hull dates it at circa 1779 and, significantly, its construction looks French. Many of the timbers are burned - as the Richard's most certainly were.

Mr Adams was trying to free snagged trawler nets, 100ft below the surface of the sea at an undisclosed location three miles off the coast, when he stumbled upon the remains and, since making the discovery, has become accustomed to seeing off American raids. Five years ago, the arts minister at the time, Lady Blackstone, issued an emergency order barring any approach to the wreck after rumours that an American diving team was preparing to raise artefacts from it.

But, despite years of searching around the site of the original find, there is still no conclusive proof that the wooden hull was the Richard's and the team has been focusing in the past year on a trail of debris, including timber, iron and copper, extending four miles to the south from the wreck site. This could hold vital clues - such as cast iron ballast, or the cannons which John Paul Jones is known to have dumped overboard in the ship's last desperate hours. One very large anchor has also been found by the British team, buried in silt, as has a piece of blackened timber with a copper fixing.

"We are looking in a different place because a lot of the contemporary reports are contradictory and some were written over 60 years later. Its like plaiting fog," said Mr Green. "But John Adams is an experienced seaman. He knows how the tides run and how they don't always do as the experts say they should."

The symbolic value of some of Jones' personal effects would have incalculable symbolic value for an American nation which still remembers him at the US naval academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where his remains have been kept since 1915. (Jones transferred to the Russian fleet after Flamborough, as an admiral in Black Sea operations against the Turks, after the US rebels' victory meant a navy was no longer a priority for the Americans. He died in Paris in 1792, aged 45.)

Perhaps most coveted relic would be a fragment of the first stars-and-stripes flag seen in Europe, which he hoisted up the Richard's flagpole. The flag, transferred to Serapis as the Richard foundered, was allegedly made from the dyed silk underwear of Jones' succession of lovers.

None of the search teams is likely to benefit financially if they make a discovery which is authenticated. Since the Americans took the Richard on loan from the French and never bought it outright, France may have a claim on any find.

But this will not diminish the intensity of the search for the wreck. "It's like a detective story in a way," said Mr Green. "The search is perhaps more interesting than finding it."