Friday, January 26, 2007

SB Caught Me Looking....

....on this day in history. I think he wanted to remind me that despite all my MG Rick Lynch nonsense lately, he knows ........... I'm a Navy girl. LOL I am. SouthieBoy knows everything.

The casket of John Paul Jones was finally re-interred in the crypt of the U.S. Naval Academy Chapel on 26 January 1913.

John Paul Jones (1747–1792), American Revolutionary War naval hero, often called the “Father of the American Navy,” was born in Kirkbean, Kirkcudbright county, Scotland, on July 6, 1747. He died in Paris in 1792.
General Horace Porter was a man obsessed with the desire to locate the grave of John Paul Jones.
Appointed American Ambassador to France in 1899, Porter's painstaking search lasted six years. He knew he was looking for a "leaden coffin." Jones did not die broke, but his investments (his heirs inherited over $30,000) took some time to collect. Gouverneurr Morris, afraid he would be liable for the funeral costs, ordered a cheap coffin. But a French admirer of Jones donated 462 francs, three times the price of an average funeral, to pay for a top-of-the-line coffin. Col. Blackden had confirmed that fact in a letter written in 1792 to Jones' heirs. The intention, Blackden wrote, was to preserve the body in case America decided to one day reclaim its war hero. But where was the he buried?

The site of the burial of John Paul Jones was rediscovered by Ambassador Horace Porter in 1905. After a grand procession through Paris, the coffin went first by train to Cherbourg, then by torpedo boat to the USS Brooklyn. The transatlantic crossing took 13 days and French ships joined the USS Maine and others making a total fleet of 11 military vessels

No comments: