My retirement fantasy has long been to tour the world in the wake of Revolutionary War Captain John Paul Jones. I picked up this obsession in the late 1990s when I moved my writing office to the carriage house nestled within the wooden gardens of the John Paul Jones House Museum in downtown Portsmouth. For years I watched the dogwood tree and the tulips bloom before the tourists arrived at the home of the Portsmouth Historical Society on Middle Street. When the historic, yellow, 1758 building closed for the season in October, the only path through the snow all winter was my footprints heading to the office.
As I read and studied the facts, fables, and fake news about the legendary Mr. Jones, my brain began plotting out a journey. It would take years, I knew, and lots of money to retrace the Jones trail from his birthplace in Scotland to the West Indies and to visit his brother’s home in Virginia, to Philadelphia, Rhode Island, and more. No one likes to mention that Jones earned his fortune in the slave trade, a career he soon rejected. I want to see it all and come to terms with this complicated guy, then write a book.
Tributes to Jones are scattered around the globe. Besides our historic house museum here in town, one can visit his birthplace museum in Scotland or see his ornate sarcophagus in a church basement at Annapolis. There are monuments in Washington, DC. in Verginia, in Russia and France where Jones was buried for 114 years. My plan is to tick them off, one by one, year by year — had I but world enough and time. So far I’ve only made it to the John Paul Jones Park in Kittery, where a little obelisk marks the spot from which Jones launched the tall ship Ranger in 1777 on his way to raid the British coastline. That little Kittery memorial, for the record, marks the wrong spot, since it was moved years ago. Such are the strange, varied, and fading memorials to a little known maritime hero.
This one was new to me. The Kirkbean Church in Scotland has a small baptismal font. It was paid for and dedicated in 1946 by US Navy officers and crewmen who had served in Europe during World War II. The caption on the back of this old US Navy Press photo (seen here) says the font was designed by Scottish artist George Henry Paulin, who was famous enough to get his own Wikipedia page. Paulin died in 1962.
The memorial marble font is embedded with six bronze plaques and is dedicated to the “First Commodore of the United States Navy.” No need to quibble about the facts here. There is an engraving of Jones, another of the famous Bonhomme Richard warship, and of a World War II American battleship.
Other Portsmouth residents have made their pilgrimage to the village of Kirkbean, population 634, and I’ve heard their stories. I’ve added the Kirbean baptismal font to my bucket list of Paul Jones’ memorials. It will be a chapter in a book, of course, when I make the journey. The big question is, when I finally get to Scotland, will I ever want to come home?
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
“Lewd Amusements” in Downtown Portsmouth
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