The Fugitive Who Gave America Its Navy

On September 23rd, 1779, off Flamborough Head, England, Captain John Paul Jones fought the Royal Navy frigate Serapis to a standstill aboard a sinking, undergunned Bonhomme Richard — and won, even as his own ship went down beneath him two days later. This episode traces Jones’s full, complicated life: a fugitive from a killing in Tobago who reinvented himself in America, the raid he led on the very English port where he’d apprenticed as a boy, a stolen victory in Russia’s Black Sea fleet, an unresolved scandal that ended his career, and the 113 years his body spent lost beneath a Paris laundry yard.