illed and six wounded, to the enemy's
approximate loss of forty-two killed and wounded. It was the first
battle of the war which resulted in the capture of a regular British
man-of-war by a ship of equal if not inferior force. The Drake belonged
to a regularly established navy, not accustomed to defeat. Perhaps that
fact inspired her commander with overconfidence, but McKenzie's
statement of the cause of the victory is no doubt correct: "The result,"
he said, "was eminently due to the skill and courage of Jones, and his
inflexible resolution to conquer." That resolution, which was indeed a
characteristic of Jones, reached on at least one occasion, that of the
later battle with the Serapis, a degree of inflexibility which amounted
to genius.

The effect of this bold cruise was great. Jones had not, however, been
the only American captain, by any means, to render good service in
destroying the commerce of the enemy and in annoying the British coast.
Before the French alliance more than six hundred British vessels fell a
prey to American cruisers, mainly privateers. There were, likewise,
captains in the regular United States navy who had before this cruise of
Jones's borne the flag to Europe. The first of these was the gallant
Wickes, in the summer of 1777. Though Jones was not the first captain,
therefore, to make a brilliant and destructive cruise in the English
Channel, he was nevertheless the first to inspire terror among the
inhabitants by incursions inshore. The cruise of the little Ranger
showed that the British, when they ravaged the coast of New England,
might expect effective retaliation on their own shores; and the capture
of the Drake inspired France, then about to take arms in support of the
American cause, by the realization of what they themselves had longed to
do--to worst England on the high seas--with increased respect for their
allies. It filled Great Britain with wild, exaggerated, and unjust
condemnation of Paul Jones, who has been looked upon for more than a
hundred years, and is even to-day in England, by sober historians, as a
bloody-handed, desperate buccaneer. The persistent charge, often of late
refuted, hardly needs refutation, in view of the well-authenticated fact
that Jones never served on a war vessel except under a regular
commission. Moreover, he was a man too ambitious and too sensible to
hurt his prospects by being anything so low and undistinguished as a
pirate.

After the battle with