MILES, NELSON APPLETON.  Born at Westminster, Massachusetts, August 8, 1839; entered Union army as volunteer, 1861, attaining rank of major-general of volunteers; enlisted in regular army at close of war, rising grade by grade to major-general, and commander-in-chief, 1895-1903; conducted campaigns against Geronimo and Natchez, 1886; in command of United States troops at Chicago strike, 1884; lieutenant-general, June 6, 1900; retired, August 8, 1903.

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CHAPTER VIII

GREAT SAILORS

We have said that America has produced no soldier of commanding genius, but her sailors outrank the world.  Even Great Britain, mighty seafaring nation as she has been, cannot, in the last hundred and fifty years, show any brighter galaxy of stars.  Just why it would be difficult to say.  Perhaps America inherited from England the traditions of that race of heroes who made the age of Elizabeth, so memorable on the ocean, and who started their country on her career as mistress of the seas—­Raleigh, Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and Howard of Effingham.

Surely in direct descent from these daring adventurers was that earliest of America’s naval commanders, John Paul Jones, well called the “Founder of the American Navy.”  He it was who first carried the Stars and Stripes into foreign waters, and who made Europe to see that a new nation had arisen, in the west.  He it was who first scouted the tradition of England’s invincibility on the sea, and carried the war into her very ports.  He it was who proved that American valor yielded no whit to British valor—­who, when Captain Pearson, of the Serapis, asked if he had struck his colors, shouted back that he had not yet begun to fight, although his ship had been shot to pieces and was sinking; but who thereupon did begin, and to such good purpose that he captured his adversary and got his crew aboard her as his own ship sank.  Truly a remarkable man and one worth looking at closely.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, there lived in the county of Kirkcudbright, Scotland, a poor gardener named John Paul.  He had a large family, and finding it no small task to feed so many mouths, accepted the offer of a distant relative named William Jones to adopt his oldest son, William, named in honor of that same relative.  Jones owned a plantation in Virginia, and thither the boy accompanied him, being known thereafter as William Paul Jones.  None of John Paul’s numerous children, however, would have figured on the pages of history but for the youngest son, born in 1747, and named after his father, John Paul.