Jones’ Diary
When I started this blog a few months back, I decided to stick to short essays on language, writing, rhetoric and arguments, in the spirit of George Orwell’s old hypothesis that there is a meaningful correlation between writing, thinking and politics.
However, I also figured that I’d need some kind of imagery to break up the visual monotony of text. Hence my series on handwriting. So far I’ve featured samples from Charles Darwin, Frederick Douglass, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, Charlie Guiteau, Pablo Picasso, Orville Wright, John French Sloan, Alexander Calder and Emma Goldman. I’ve also vetted dozens of others who you might imagine have interesting hands.
But none of them have the penmanship of this guy:
It’s a letter from John Paul Jones to Jean Luzac, editor of ‘Nouvelles Extraordinaires de Divers Endroits,’ AKA the Gazette de Leyde, dated November 11th, 1779. From an online exhibit at the Nimitz Library at the United States Naval Academy. Story goes that Luzac had got hold of an extract from Jones’ journal and used it as an account of a battle between Jones’ Bonhomme Richard and the HMS Serapis the previous September – the same battle in which Jones is remembered to have uttered his “I have not yet begun to fight.”
Jones was worried that Luzac’s readers might think his account too self-aggrandizing. He writes:
It gives me great Pain to see that the translation which has appeared in your Gazette of the extract of my Journal is preceeded by an Observation which leaves room to suppose that it has been my intention to augment the merits of my Own Services by diminishing those of others.
That’s how they used to say “Fuck you,” I guess.
The next year Jones would be honored as Chevalier of France.
