Flamborough Head


A stirring battle from the Age of Sail*
A stirring battle from the Age of Sail

Flamborough Head is a tongue of land jutting out into the North Sea from the east coast of Yorkshire. There is nothing particularly striking about the promentory, but it does attract many migrating birds in the autumn and it is a sparsely inhabited and attractive feature on the coast.

In 1779 the American privateer (a polite term for government sponsored pirate) John Paul Jones encountered the British warship HMS Serapis and in an epic three-hour battle (though some accounts claim that the fighting went on for longer) managed to capture the Serapis just before his own ship, badly damaged in the fighting, sank.

The battle is memorable for Jones' answer to a summons to surrender from Captain Pearson of the Serapis. Jones' large canon in his lower deck had just exploded, being worn-out old French guns, and it really did seem as if surrender was all that he could do. Defiantly Jones shouted back, "I have not yet begun to fight!"

Jones managed to run the Bonhomme Richard alongside the Serapis and tie the two ships together, then armed his men with lances with which they stabbed the British sailors as they tried to work their guns. Eventually his superior numbers told and he was able to carry the British ship by boarding, but it was a very close-run thing.

Jones was not helped by the equivocal actions of his consort, Alliance, which at first took no part in the fight and then returned to fire on Jones!