Lieutenant Thomas ap Catesby Jones of Virginia had only recently been promoted as a reward for bravery during an attack on the lair of notorious pirate Jean Lafitte, when, late in the War of 1812, he was placed in command of five U.S. gunboats set in place to repel a British attack on New Orleans.
In November 1814, the British aimed an expeditionary force—62 vessels led by HMS Tonnant—across the shallow waters of Lake Borgne (Half-Blind Lake) at the bayous behind the New Orleans’ defenses.1 The waters of Lake Borgne proved too shallow for the frigates, however, so the attack force embarked in long boats, 42 of them, each carrying a carronade at the prow with 20 armed sailors at the oars. They rowed all night on 13 December and by morning were nearing a spot on the lake just out of range of Jones’s gunboat squadron.
In all, Jones had only 182 men under his command, and each ship had only four or five guns, with a total of no more than 23 among them. Of the mismatch, a British historian wrote: “Jones had to deal with a force five times the size of his own, and to escape he had only to run his boats on shore; but he prepared very coolly for battle.”2
At about 1100 on the 14th, the British attacked, rowing fiercely toward Jones’s gunboats. Commander Nicholas Lockyer of the sloop Sophie led the attack, and three of his 3 longboats grappled with Jones’s flagship, No. 156, in some 15 minutes of wild gunplay. Resistance proved too strong, and Lockyer retreated.
A second wave of gunboats attacked the U.S. flagship; this time British marines seized the deck. Jones fired at one of the attackers, but as that man fell, another rose behind him and fired. The bullet caught Jones in the left shoulder and knocked him onto the deck. As several crew members carried him below, the rest of Jones’s men repelled the attack. But a third wave of gunboats surrounded No. 156 and quickly gained control. The British longboats then turned on the remaining U.S. gunboats and subdued them one by one. When the smoke cleared, 41 Americans and 94 Britons had been either killed or wounded. Both commanders had been shot, but the British took Jones prisoner and transported him in the hospital ship Gorgon to Bermuda, where he remained until the following April after the war was over.5 Jones returned to Louisiana, where he recuperated from his wound but never regained the use of his left arm. The bullet in his shoulder lodged between his clavicle and rib and bothered him for the rest of his life. A court of inquiry convened to investigate Jones’s loss of his five gunboats at Lake Borgne found that his gallantry and that of his crew more than atoned for the loss.4
Both Jones and Lockyer were commended for gallantry. Although Lockyer won a local victory—he cleared the lakes—the overall campaign was a disaster. Jones paved the way for a victory of U.S. arms but suffered irreparable personal loss. The overwhelming odds he faced did not alter the fact that he had not won. And he was ever after sensitive to criticism, which seemed to follow him to his dying day.
After a brief period of convalescence, Jones spent two years in the Mediterranean Squadron and served a stint as Superintendent of Ordnance at the Washington Navy Yard. In 1826, he was sent to the Pacific Squadron because of a January 1824 mutiny on board the Globe, a whaling ship that had been seized by a crew of mostly unattached seamen who previously had been living the carefree life on the tropical island of Oahu. At the time, the Hawaiian Islands were overrun by sailors, many of them deserters. Every new ship that arrived in port usually lost a few men who were replaced by others picked up on the islands.5
The New Bedford whaling interests already had petitioned President James Monroe to do something about this large number of unattached sailors, and the Navy sent Lieutenant John (“Mad Jack”) Percival in the sloop Dolphin to track down the Globe. But Percival simply sailed to Honolulu, antagonized the Hawaiian chiefs with his overbearing manner, and angered the missionaries there who had forbidden young Hawaiian women to visit the U.S. warship. After his men rioted and attacked missionary leader Hiram Bingham, Percival left the islands.
The Navy then sent Captain Isaac Hull to restore some order in this important trading center. Although the Navy expected the commander of the Pacific Squadron, in the flagship United States, to carry out such a diplomatic mission, Hull sent Jones, a lieutenant commanding, in the stoop-of-war Peacock.6
In Honolulu, Jones’s first problem was to keep commercial interests and the British consul from ejecting the U.S. missionaries from the islands. With the help of Prime Minister Kalanimoku, Jones set up a system of wages, work rules, and payments, so the people of Hawaii would share in the commercial advance of the nation, not work as the servants (or slaves) of the chiefs. At that time, the principal product the Hawaiians had to sell was fragrant sandalwood, which was in great demand.
Finally, Jones concluded a treaty with King Kamehameha III, the Queen Regent, and the chiefs of Hawaii, establishing U.S. trading rights in the islands and securing the promise of the Hawaiians to run a more orderly government and to return all deserters to the ships or consuls of their own countries. It was the first treaty ever concluded by Hawaii with a foreign nation. The U.S. Senate never ratified it, but it sufficed for ten years until a proper treaty negotiated by U.S. diplomats succeeded it.
The U.S. missionaries date the success of their mission in Hawaii from the arrival of Lieutenant Jones.7 But his diplomacy during the months of negotiations was never recognized, because arguments with the British consul persisted. And commercial interests in the islands blamed him for trouble in the sandalwood trade, even though problems did not develop until after Jones had left.
Not until 1842 was Jones sent to the Pacific again, this time as a captain and a commodore, there to protect U.S. interests while the British continued pressure to gain control of California and possibly Oregon, as well.
In 1841, Captain Jones had been ordered to command the U.S. Pacific Squadron, with the frigate United States as his flagship. The era of colonization was in full swing, and France established protectorates over the Society Islands (Tahiti and the Marquesas). In the same year, Britain seized Hong Kong at the end of a three-year Opium War, and South American nations along the Pacific coast were having civil problems after gaining independence from Spain. The United States was using Callao, Peru, as a home port, while the Pacific Squadron was under orders to carry out the mandate of the Monroe Doctrine, which warned European nations to keep their hands off the American continents—both North and South—and seemed automatically to place the U.S. squadron in opposition to the French, British, and Russian squadrons. The most serious threat to the U.S. presence in the Pacific, however, came from the British fleet—five ships led by the 50-gun frigate Dublin, commanded by Rear Admiral Richard Thomas.
The United States and the Dublin happened to be in port at Callao in September 1842, when the problem became clear. Jones had just extended the usual courtesies of inviting the British admiral to dinner and had been invited for a return of courtesies, when Thomas abruptly hoisted anchor and sailed out of port under secret orders.8 Jones had just received clippings from a Boston newspaper indicating Britain’s interest in taking over California. The British would exchange debts that Mexico owed British bond holders for title to the territory of California. Furthermore, fighting along the Texas border with Mexico, along with undiplomatic letters from the Mexican Foreign Minister to U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster, led many diplomats to believe that war between the United States and Mexico was imminent, if not actually under way. Fears mounted that Britain might take advantage of the unrest and seize California anyway, claiming right of discovery.
Jones sailed the United States out of Callao and headed north with the 18-gun sloop Cyane for Monterey, hoping to establish himself ashore and use the guns of the Mexican fort with his own to ward off any British attempt at a takeover. Upon arrival, Jones turned the United States broadside to shore, demanding the surrender of the port. In a short time, a group of officials—with Thomas O. Larkin as translator— came on hoard to receive the terms of surrender.
Jones sent an armed party ashore to nail down his conquest and followed the next day in person. At the town hall, he read recent papers and discovered that there was no war with Mexico, and furthermore, Admiral Thomas had gone elsewhere—never having shown up at Monterey. So Jones “retroceded” all of California to Mexico. He wrote several long explanatory letters to Washington, fully expecting to be recalled because of his error. But months went by without a word from Washington. He sent the United States to Honolulu for supplies, while he boarded the Cyane and sailed to Los Angeles to explain the situation to the newly arrived governor of Alta California, General Miguel Micheltorena.
At Los Angeles, Jones discovered that he was expected to sign a document abjectly apologizing for the Monterey affair and offering damages to the Mexican government for destruction of uniforms and band instruments. Supposedly, such depredations occurred during a grand march in which Micheltorena led his troops to repel the North Americans at the risk of his own life. (The general actually had marched south from Los Angeles.) Jones received this document at a grand ball held for all the American and local gentry. But he refused to sign, retired early, and left the next morning for the Cyane.9
Rumors of the Jones incident flew around Pacific ports with every incoming ship. Admiral Richard Thomas had heard of this wild man who had sought to fight the British at Monterey and wrote to London asserting that he would need another ship if he were to defend the British position in the Pacific theater.10
On the Hawaiian front, British Consul Richard Charlton had taken home leave and stopped at Valparaiso on his way, seeking help from Thomas in pressing claims to some choice land he said King Kamehameha II had given him some years earlier. But Kamehameha III, the young king who was only 11 years old when Jones had been negotiating in Honolulu in 1826, but who was now in his 30s and developing a strong hold on the power of government, was not recognizing the claim. He had followed the usual custom of the islands—that gifts of land were returned at the death of the sovereign.
Charlton’s demands were more complicated than that, of course, and the British sent a commissioner to try to settle the dispute. But in the meantime, Lord George Paulet arrived in Honolulu in the British frigate Carysfort, seized the islands (February 1843), and threatened to bombard Honolulu if his demands were not met." For five months the Hawaiian Islands were run by a commission appointed by Paulet.
Jones, who had a special feeling for Hawaii since 1826, must have heard rumors of structural instability in the islands when the United States returned from a port call there. Honolulu was buzzing with speculation that some great power, either France or England, would take Hawaii and maintain order. In any event, on 21 June, Jones left Callao and hastened to Hawaii at just about the same time Thomas set out from Valparaiso for Honolulu. Jones arrived in Hilo first, where he spent 11 days reprovisioning his ship, giving sailors leave to “go to the volcano” and preaching to the natives about the sins of drunkenness.
Meanwhile, Thomas arrived in Honolulu and found the islands in administrative disarray, countermanded Paulet, and returned the islands to Kamehameha III in a provisional retrocession. The British never admitted that U.S. pressure had anything to do with Thomas’s sudden reversal of Britain’s intentions in Hawaii. During the five months that Paulet’s commission ruled in Hawaii, U.S. opposition had become more and more apparent. Commodore Lawrence Kearny, commander of the U.S. East India Squadron, had protested Paulet’s high-handed action when he arrived in his flagship, the 36-gun frigate Constellation, returning home by way of Hawaii.
The Constellation was still in port when Jones arrived. Honolulu was in the midst of the islanders’ celebration of freedom from British rule. If Jones had intended to fight the British in Honolulu as he had intended in Monterey, the cause for such a fight was gone. Jones could not even justify his sudden rush to Hawaii in order to save it from the British, for, as far as the world could see, Thomas had countermanded Paulet and returned the islands to King Kamehameha voluntarily. Jones was now in the position of having run away from the next commander of the Pacific Squadron.
Jones felt he had done his duty as commander of the Pacific Squadron by coming to Hawaii to confront the British. As in Monterey, whether he had to fight or not depended on circumstances when he arrived. In the case of Honolulu, Thomas had anticipated his action. In explanation, Jones wrote to the Secretary of the Navy:
The first and second day after my arrival in Oahu Roads were occupied in exchanging the usual visits of ceremony on shore and afloat. I found the inhabitants of the town under high excitement: all, except the English, rejoicing at the restoration, although that joy was far from being unalloyed. Many were the unredressed wrongs and grievances complained of by the Natives, Americans, French and all foreigners not owing allegiance to Great Britain. Our own Acting Consul, too, had his official complaints against Lord George Paulet. . . .
Not more as a matter of duty than from inclination and sound policy, my first efforts were directed to an inquiry into and an adjustment of the difference between our Acting Consul, Mr. W. Hooper and Lord George Paulet. . . . Suffice it to say that these two Gentlemen first met at my dinner table; this was followed by an invitation from Lord George Paulet to Mr. Hooper to meet Admiral Thomas, myself and others, at dinner on board HBM Ship Carysfort. Lord George Paulet having previously waited on Mr. Hooper on shore, he accepted the invitation at my desire, and accompanied me to the Carysfort laying in the inner harbour of Oahu.
At the appointed hour as we [were rowed to] the English ship, her yards were manned; and two salutes—the first of 13 [guns] the second of 9—were fired, the American Ensign flying at her Fore. It is scarcely necessary to add that neither of the visitants on this occasion being entitled to the honor of manned yards, that part of the ceremony was construed, as it doubtless was intended, as a peace offering to all Americans residing in Oahu as well as to our country at large. Our countrymen on shore, however, though pleased with this public manifestation of respect to the American Flag, were not all of them fully appeased, nor will anything but time eradicate all the feelings of bitterness engendered by the transactions of Lord Paulet. . . .”12
At this point, in what seemed to be a time of triumph for the 53-year-old Jones, Acting Consul W. Hooper already had received a report from Lahaina, Maui, that “Herman Mellvile (sic)” and three others were deserters from the whaling ship Acushnet.13
Author Herman Melville may have thought of himself as a gentleman adventurer, but his record to that point does not support him. He had failed in business, and his work as a schoolteacher had been unrewarding. He had gone to sea in a whaler probably for the same reason Ishmael did—to avoid an overwhelming sense of malaise and frustration. But the captain of the whaling ship he chose was so cruel to his men that Melville deserted at Nukaheva, lived for a time among cannibals, escaped, found his way to Hawaii, and took a job in Honolulu with an English firm. On 1 June 1843, he signed a contract for one year. He approved fully of Paulet’s action and had nothing but contempt for the U.S. missionaries and the native Hawaiians.
The commodore continued his efforts to smooth the ruffled feelings of missionaries and U.S. businessmen. To the Navy Department, he reported:
My exertions were unremitting in endeavours to restore harmony, with which view, I invited every respectable person in Oahu, without distinction of nation or sex, as well as the British Admiral and all his Officers, to meet the King at lunch, on the 12th of August; of course, the Officers of our own three ships were [invited], while preparations were made to entertain two hundred persons. The affair went very well; the King left (as he had been received) under a salute of 21 guns, with yards manned on board all the men of war. . . .”14
One of the people not invited to this affair was Herman Melville, who did not board the frigate United States until 17 August, when he resumed his sea career, suddenly, with no indication that he had canceled his year-long contract in Honolulu. He never said why he changed his plans.
Here is where the conflict between Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, one of the highest-ranking officers in the U.S. Navy, and Herman Melville, ordinary seaman, begins. Either Jones ordered him picked up, or, possibly, a Hawaiian turned in his name in accordance with the terms of the treaty of friendship Jones concluded with the Hawaiians in 1826. Either way, it would not have made Jones very popular with Melville.
The events of the next few years, as well, did not make Jones a more respected officer. His sudden rush to Hawaii did not give him an opportunity to add a victory to the embarrassing error at Monterey. Even though, in retrospect, the “attack” on Monterey heavily influenced British intentions toward California and Hawaii, many Americans did not believe it, and the British never believed they had been out- maneuvered by an American commodore.
When Jones returned to the United States he never had an opportunity to explain his exploits in Hawaii, for the nation was still concerned about his “capture” of Monterey. And since relations with Mexico were not good, largely because of the fuss over Texas, Jones was asked to say nothing about his trip to the Pacific. That left the illusion among historians that Jones had done nothing to wrest Hawaii away from the British in 1843, that his trip was simply an attempt to keep his job as commander of the Pacific Squadron.
Actually, Jones had been giving detailed accounts of his movements around Cape Horn, to Monterey, and then to Honolulu and Tahiti to Secretary of the Navy Abel Upshur for two years. But while Jones was in the Pacific, Upshur had been shifted to the State Department, and Thomas Gilmer had replaced him at Navy; both were killed by the explosion of a huge gun on the deck of the experimental Navy ship Princeton on 28 February 1844.
John W. Mason was Secretary of the Navy when Jones reported in at the Department in May 1844 and was told to say nothing more about Monterey because of the delicate situation with Mexico. In 1845 a new Secretary of the Navy, George Bancroft, appointed Jones to work on a commission to establish the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. (Jones had wanted to see the Academy on Virginia soil, near Norfolk, but he was outvoted.) And in 1846, Jones was working on founding Lewinsville Presbyterian Church, a few miles from his home in the rolling Virginia countryside west of Washington, D.C. His church connections probably explain his willingness to negotiate with the Hawaiians, a colored race, on the basis of equality at a time when such an approach was bound to be un- popular at home.
But the seaman in the maintop of the United States on her voyage from Honolulu back to the East Coast was under no compulsion to be quiet. Melville wrote at some length about his visit with the cannibals, his escape to other islands, and various stories about life among the South Sea islanders. He brushed off the efforts of the U.S. missionaries in Hawaii and assumed a completely British attitude toward Captain Paulet’s seizure of Hawaii. In Typee, published in 1846—two years after returning on board the United States, Melville wrote:
No transaction has ever been more grossly misrepresented than the events which occurred upon the arrival of Lord George Paulet at Oahu. During a residence of four months at Honolulu, the metropolis of the group, the author was in the confidence of an Englishman who was much employed by his lordship [Paulet). . . . He deems it, therefore, a mere act of justice towards a gallant officer briefly to state the leading circumstances connected with the event in question.
It is needless to rehearse all the abuse that for some time previous to spring of 1843 had been heaped upon the British residents especially upon Captain Charlton, Her Britannic Majesty’s consul general, by the native authorities of the Sandwich Islands. High in the favour of the imbecile king at this time was one Dr. Judd, a sanctimonious apothecary-adventurer, who, with other kindred and influencial spirits, were animated by an inveterate dislike of England. The ascendancy of a junto of ignorant and designing Methodist elders in the councils of a half-civilized king, ruling with absolute sway over a nation just poised between barbarism and civilization. . . .15
Melville’s book, White Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War, was published in 1850, detailing life on the frigate Neversink, with “the commodore” as one of the principal characters.16 He describes the routines of sailing and the personnel that kept the ship going. Some characters are made up, some events are real, and some are invented. Commodore Jones was not on board the United States during the time Melville describes, but Melville needed a commodore to complete his story about life in a flagship of the U.S. Pacific squadron, so he invented one.
Melville was appalled by the punishment of flogging, then prevalent in the British and U.S. navies, in fact in all navies. A holdover from the days when slaves manned the oars of naval vessels, and continued when crews were conscripted from the grog shops and byways of port cities, flogging was deemed necessary by most commanders to keep a crew in line. Most commanders were aware of how easily a ship could be lost at the hands of a few determined mutineers, and frigates were not responsive to wind and wave without great effort on the part of the crews. Immediate obedience to commands was essential. Melville, a neophyte at sea who cared nothing about a commander’s problems and everything about the rights of the ordinary seaman, launched a devastating attack against the rights of the commander and the Navy’s Articles of War and the flogging of seamen, thus raising great sympathy for the poor swabs who kept the great ships going. Since it was a time of peace for the United States, there was no allowance for the demands of patriotism. But it fit in nicely with the mood of the day: develop steam power to replace the manpower and sails of the Navy.
The fact is, the Old Navy was dying just for that reason, and Jones would have to bear the brunt of the sins of the Old Navy until the transition could be made after the Civil War.
Reviewers generally hailed White Jacket as a great story of life at sea, revealing the abuses of the Navy in detail—with at least one exception. A review in The Boston Post for 10 April 1850, reported on by Willard Thorp in the “historical note” accompanying the Northwestem-Newberry edition of White Jacket, is sharply critical. Thorp wrote:
The long “Literary Notice” of White-Jacket in the Boston Post for April 10, 1850, is important because it takes issue with Melville’s attacks on naval abuses, a feature of the book which had been almost invariably praised. ... It does indeed contain many passages of excellent writing, but on the whole, White- Jacket assumes to be a didactic rather than an ‘ornamental’ book and must be judged accordingly. Melville abuses the Navy so very heartily as to make one doubt ‘the soundness and knowledge of such a wholesale reformer, such a venomous upholder of abstract right, against that singular mixture of right and wrong, which always has prevailed, and ever must prevail, to some extent, in the administration of terrestrial affairs, whether of religion or government, of ships or armies.’ Because a man can produce a spirited and beautiful romance like Typee, or an autobiography like Redbum, running over with a Defoe naturalness and verisimilitude, it does not follow that he is competent to discuss the fitness or unfitness of the ‘Articles of War,’ the propriety or impropriety of flogging in the Navy, or the whole system of government and ceremonials of our ‘National Marine.’ Discussion of these great practical subjects requires practical men—men of character, wisdom and experience—not men of theories, fancies and enthusiasm. Let the cobbler stick to his last. Stem as this long review is, it is not a mere personal attack. Mr. Melville has a right to his opinions. The trouble is that his opinions are wrong.17
The name of Commodore Jones was attached to White Jacket from the beginning. But the reviewer in The New Bedford Mercury (1 April 1830) put it more directly when he said positively that the book told of Melville’s “service on board the frigate United States, returning as the flag ship of the Pacific squadron, from Callao to Norfolk.”18
On a third trip to the Pacific station, Jones commanded the Ohio, a 72-gun ship-of-the-line. But he arrived on the West Coast just as the Mexican War was ending. The crews were eager to return home at first, but word that gold had been discovered in California incited wholesale desertions. With California eager for statehood, questions arose about the jurisdiction of the Navy in territorial waters, while the treaty fussed about naval funds being spent in a U.S. home port. Desertions became epidemic, and before anything was settled in California, Jones was accused of fraud in his handling of Navy funds, of oppression in his handling of his men, and of many other indiscretions the Secretary of the Navy failed to spell out. A court martial found Jones not guilty of fraud and only vaguely guilty of oppression, threw out all other charges, but fined him anyway.19
While Commodore Jones tried to have the Navy reverse the sentence of the court-martial, the publications of Herman Melville continued to call attention to the problems of the great sailing ships; symbols of a period in seagoing history that was coming to an end. The tremendous cost of an economic system that built its profits on cheap labor were just beginning to be felt in the maritime industry. Arguments in the Senate over flogging showed that adequate pay for hard work was still a problem faced by the growing U.S. democracy.
Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi argued on the Senate floor in 1850 that abolishing flogging in the Navy was no solution to the problem. He declared that “punishment” itself was not sufficient on board a ship to achieve absolute obedience. He said the Navy must go to the other extreme: “You must go to the system of rewards,” he said. “The manner by which it can be done is to increase the pay of the sailor of the navy of the United States to something materially over the pay he could get upon any marine vessel, so as to make it a punishment, and a severe punishment, to dismiss him from the navy.”20
The country was hastening toward a war to solve the ultimate problem of cheap labor—slavery—when the Senate eventually took up a bill (S. No. 122) for the relief of Captain Thomas Ap Catesby Jones. A debate rang through the Senate, only to be tossed aside and brought up a month later, when the senators resumed, asserting that Jones was a gallant sailor but refusing to change the decision of the court-martial. Eventually, Senator Judah Benjamin of Louisiana noted that Commodore Jones “was the captain of the fleet of gun boats that defended the city of New Orleans in the War of 1812 . . . and was wounded in battle there.”21 The bill passed the Senate but never made it to the House of Representatives. Jones died two months later, broke, having spent much of his money in support of his naval operations in Hawaii. He explained in his will that his country owed him more than enough money to cover his debts, but that helped neither his creditors nor his estate.
Commodore Jones never gave up the fight. He argued to the end that he was not guilty of fraud or oppression. He never violated the Articles of War, and he reduced many sentences of courts martial whenever he could. He seemed destined to take the blame for the inadequacies of his times, and never to share in the acclaim for a job well done.
Melville on “The Commodore”
Our Commodore was a gallant old man, who had seen service in his time. When a lieutenant, he served in the late war with England; and in the gun-boat actions on the Lakes near New Orleans, just previous to the grand land engagements, received a musket- ball in the shoulder; which, with the two balls in his eyes, he carries with him to this day.
Often when I looked at the venerable old warrior, doubled up from the effect of his wound, I thought what a curious as well as painful sensation it must be to have one’s shoulder a lead mine.
On account of this wound in his shoulder, our Commodore had a body-servant’s pay allowed him, in addition to his regular salary. I cannot say a great deal, personally, of the Commodore: he never sought my company at all; never extended any gentlemanly courtesies.
But though I cannot say much of him personally, I can mention something of him in his general character, as a flag-officer. In the first place, then, I have serious doubts, whether, for the most part, he was not dumb; for, in my hearing, he seldom or never uttered a word. And not only did he seem dumb himself, but his presence possessed the strange power of making other people dumb for the time. His appearance on the quarter-deck seemed to give every officer the lockjaw.
Another phenomenon about him was the strange manner in which everyone shunned him. At the first sign of those epaulets of his on the weather side of the poop, the officers there congregated invariably shrunk over to leeward, and left him alone. Perhaps he had an evil eye; maybe he was the Wandering Jew afloat. The real reason probably was, that, like all high functionaries, he deemed it indispensable religiously to sustain his dignity; one of the most troublesome things in the world, and one calling for the greatest self-denial. . . .
From White Jacket or the World in a Man-of-War, Chapter Six, “The Quarter Deck Officers.”
1. William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present, Volume VI, (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, and Co.) pp. 148-150.
2. Daniel Patterson to Secretary of the Navy W. Jones, 19 December 1814, Commanders Letters 1804-1886; eyewitness report of George Marshall, staff surgeon, to Patterson, dated 17 December 1814. Both on microfilm M147, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
3. Clowes, op. cit.
4. Testimony from the Court of Inquiry on the loss of gunboats at New Orleans, 14 December 1814, held at Naval Arsenal of New Orleans, 15-19 May 1815. National Archives.
5. Edwin P. Hoyt, The Mutiny on the Globe (New York: Random House, 1925).
6. Hull to Jones, from frigate United States in Callao Bay, 25 May 1826; to Thomas ap Catesby Jones, Exec. Doc., H. Rep. No. 108, 29th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 13-14.
7. Albertine Loomis, Grapes of Canaan: Hawaii 1820, The True Story of Hawaii’s Missionaries (Honolulu: Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society, 1951).
8. ”Taking Possession of Monterey,” House of Representatives Executive Document No. 166, 27th Congress, 3rd Session., pp. 1-93.
9. “Visit to Los Angeles in 1843,” Reprint (1960) of an Unpublished Narrative of Commodore Thomas ap C. Jones by The Daily Alto Californian.
10. Admiralty Letter dated 4 February 1843, to Honorable Sidney Herbert, Secretary of the Admiralty, to be laid before the Lords Commissioners. ADM 30/228 Vol. 199, journal of Rear Admiral Richard Thomas, Public Record Office, London.
11. Ralph S. Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, Volume I, 1778' 1854, Chapter 11, “The Paulet Episode” (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1938).
12. Jones to Upshur from Valparaiso, 21 November 1843. Pacific Squadron Letters, M89, National Archives.
13. Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), pp. 163, 166.
14. Jones to Upshur, op. cit.
15. Melville, Typee appendix, first published in 1846.
16. Melville, White Jacket or the World in a Man-of-War, Chapter 6, “The Quarter Deck Officers.”
17. White Jacket, Volume V of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1970).
18. Ibid., pp. 434-435.
19. Court Martial of Thos. ap C. Jones, Senate Exec. Doc. No. 45, 31st Congress, 2nd Session, Vol. V.
20. The Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, First Session, Senate, 28 September 1850, p, 2059.
21. Globe, 35th Congress, Special Session, Senate, 9 March 1858.