Little John Paul had a short childhood, for as soon as he could handle a line, he was put to work with the fishermen on Solway Firth to help earn a living for the family.  By the time that he was twelve years old, he was a first-class sailor, and had developed a love for the sea and a disregard of its perils which never left him.  Securing his father’s consent, he shipped as apprentice for a voyage to Virginia, and visited his brother, who was managing his adopted father’s estate near Fredericksburg.  The old planter took a great fancy to the boy, and offered to adopt him also, but young John Paul preferred the adventurous life of the ocean to humdrum existence on a Virginia plantation.  For the next fifteen years, he followed the sea, studying navigation and naval history, French and Spanish, and fitting himself in every way for high rank in his profession.

On the seventeenth of April, 1773, John Paul anchored his brig, the Two Friends, in the Rappahannock just below his brother’s plantation, and rowed to shore to pay him a visit.  He found him breathing his last.  He died childless, and John Paul found himself heir to the estate, which was a considerable one.  Resigning command of his vessel, he settled down to the life of a Virginia planter, adding to his name the last name of his family’s benefactor, and being known thereafter as John Paul Jones.

Events were at this time hurrying forward toward war with Great Britain; Virginia was in a ferment, and Paul Jones was soon caught up by this tide of patriotism.  When, in 1775, the Congress decided to “equip a navy for the defence of American liberty,” Jones at once offered his services, and was made a senior first lieutenant.  It is amusing to run over the names of those first officers of the American navy.  As was the case with the first generals, out of the whole list only two names live with any lustre—­Paul Jones and Nicholas Biddle.

Paul Jones was the first of these officers to receive his commission, John Hancock handing it to him in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, shortly after noon on December 22, 1775.  Immediately afterwards, the new lieutenant, accompanied by a distinguished party, including Hancock and Thomas Jefferson, proceeded to the Chestnut street wharf, where the Alfred, the first American man-of-war was lying moored.  Captain Saltonstall, who was to command the ship, had not yet arrived from Boston, and at Hancock’s direction, Lieutenant Jones took command, and ran up the first American flag ever shown from the masthead of a man-of-war.  It was not the Stars and Stripes, which had not yet been adopted as the flag of the United States, but a flag showing a rattlesnake coiled at the foot of a pine-tree, with the words, “Don’t tread on me.”