USS Ariel
John Paul Jones assumed command of Ariel in France. He changed her rigging to improve her sailing qualities and removed 10 of her 26 guns to make room for more cargo. However, loading the ship and the need to obtain other vessels to carry the surplus cargo which Ariel could not hold delayed her departure. Ariel — accompanied by merchantmen Luke and Duke of Leinster, which Benjamin Franklin had chartered to take care of the surplus supplies — departed L'Orient on 5 September, but contrary winds held them up in Groix Roads for over a month. The trio finally put to sea on 7 October. However, the next day one of the most severe storms in the history of the French coast broke and wreaked great havoc in the area, destroying many ships. Ariel lost all of her masts, sprang leaks, and suffered much other damage. Only Jones' superb seamanship enabled her to stay afloat and then to limp back into Groix Roads under a jury rig on the morning of 12 October.
Luke—faster and less damaged than Ariel—also managed to get back to port, but sailed independently before Ariel's repairs could be completed; a British warship then captured Luke. No record has been found of Duke of Leinster after her departure on 7 October, so it is quite possible that she foundered during the hurricane.
More than two months passed before Ariel was again seaworthy. She finally got underway again on 18 October. Jones left much of Ariel's armament in France so he followed a southern route in the hope of avoiding encountering the Royal Navy.
Still, when Ariel had reached a point some 200 miles north of the Leeward Islands, a lookout reported a large ship which soon began to approach Ariel. Rather than risk his only partially armed ship and the vital cargo and dispatches which she was carrying, Jones reluctantly had Ariel take to her heels. Jones hoped that she would shake off her pursuer during the night, but the stranger was in full sight when daylight returned the following morning, closer than she had been when last seen the previous evening.
Jones then decided to try to pass Ariel off as a British warship. When his pursuer reached hailing distance, Jones demanded that her captain identify himself and his ship. The stranger was the 20-gun British privateer Triumph commanded by John Pindar. Jones then ordered Pindar to come on board Ariel with documents to verify his statements. When Pindar did not do so, Jones opened fire and forced his surprised enemy to surrender following a short and one-sided struggle. However, after Triumph had struck her colors, Pindar maneuvered his ship to Ariel's weather bow while the latter was lowering a boat for a prize crew and then quickly sailed away.
This engagement was John Paul Jones' last battle in the cause of American freedom, but he soon had to deal with trouble of another sort, a budding mutiny. After uncovering a plot to take over the ship by the English seamen whom he had enlisted from among British prisoners of war in France to fill out a crew built around survivors from Bonhomme Richard, he put the troublemakers in irons. The rest of her voyage was uneventful; Ariel finally reached Philadelphia with her badly needed military stores—which included 437 barrels of gunpowder, 146 chests of arms, a large quantity of shot, sheet lead, and much medicine—on 18 February 1781.
At the beginning of March, Ariel—still in port discharging her cargo—fired a salute to celebrate Maryland's ratification of the Articles of Confederation activating the new nation's first central government.
Early in June 1781, Jones turned Ariel over to Anne-César, Chevalier de la Luzerne-the French minister to the United States—who manned her with a French crew for the voyage back to France.
Read more about this topic: HMS Ariel (1777)