Posted on 04/18/2006 6:06:09 AM PDT by robowombat
Historian wants DNA test for academy's John Paul Jones By EARL KELLY, Staff Writer
Who's buried in John Paul Jones' crypt at the Naval Academy?
This isn't a trick question.
Some say the grand state funeral at the Naval Academy on April 24, 1906, for the father of the United States Navy may have been held over the wrong body.
According to Washington College history professor Adam Goodheart, who wrote about Jones in the April issue of Smithsonian magazine, Jones' body may have been dumped in a landfill, used to fertilize vegetables or simply lost forever.
He said modern-day science should be used to determine who is - or isn't - in the crypt.
"They used every technology at their disposal (when the body was discovered) in 1905 to show it was him, and I think they would have supported using DNA today," Mr. Goodheart said in an interview.
But academy officials say they are confident the body resting in the basement of the Naval Academy Chapel is Jones.
"The research that went into the excavation of the cemetery where they found him doesn't leave much doubt," Naval Academy Museum senior curator James W. Cheevers said.
Naval Academy spokesman Deborah Goode said the academy isn't about to open the coffin, either.
"There's no compelling evidence to suggest that anyone's remains but John Paul Jones' are in the crypt," Ms. Goode said. "Speculation alone is not reasonable cause for us to disturb the sanctity of the sarcophagus."
Though Jones never married and left no known direct descendants, DNA samples are available: A braid of brown hair that supposedly belonged to Jones is mounted on the back of a miniature portrait at the academy. Also, one of Jones' brothers is buried in Fredericksburg, Va., and a sister is buried in Charleston, S.C.
Why confusion?
Jones died in Paris on July 18, 1792, at age 45. His body remained in an unmarked grave for 113 years.
The cemetery was closed soon after his death, and had fallen into disrepair.
By 1905, when the body was discovered, parts of the tract had built over by a bric-a-brac shop, several houses and a shed for grain merchants' wagons. Other parts had been dug up and hauled away, or were at various times used as a dung hill and a garden for growing vegetables for market.
"(T)here were whispers that the cadaver brought home in glory might be the wrong one," Mr. Goodheart wrote in Smithsonian. "The whispers have never been completely silenced."
Researchers who located the lead coffin they said contained Jones's remains found a body that was preserved in alcohol and packed in straw, but there was no name on the coffin.
An autopsy, performed from the backside to prevent desecrating the corpse, showed that the person had suffered kidney disease similar to what plagued Jones. Also like Jones, the person in the coffin had suffered from pneumonia and died of congestive heart failure.
Anthropologists compared the cadaver to a portrait of Jones, and found that measurements of the skull bones largely matched busts of Jones. Only, as Mr. Goodheart noted, the busts were artistic renderings and were never meant to be anatomical models.
The researchers, far ahead of their time, compiled a composite photograph by taking pictures of a bust of Jones and of the cadaver, and overlaying them. The corpse had been out of the coffin for three days and had shrunk some, but the photographs overlapped considerably.
Annapolis resident John G. M. Stone was the nephew of Gen. Horace Porter, the ambassador to France who led the expedition to find Jones' remains.
Capt. Stone, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1917, was 11 years old and visiting in Paris when Gen. Porter summoned the boy to come see America's greatest naval hero.
At least a dozen men were examining the body just removed from a lead casket, Capt. Stone wrote 60 years later.
"Uncle Horace said I could feel his hand," he wrote. "It was soft and pliable. I did not hold it long!"
Capt. Stone concluded, "There was no shadow of doubt but that the body was that of John Paul Jones."
Jones' life
He was born John Paul, son of a Scottish estate gardener. He joined the British Navy at age 12 and commanded a ship by age 21.
In the 1770s, he found himself in America avoiding trial in England for killing a sailor, the second time such allegations had been leveled against him.
John Paul added Jones as a surname as a result of the incident.
Congress created a navy in 1775 and named John Paul Jones as senior first lieutenant. He went on to achieve the highest rank, commodore.
Jones proved adept at harassing the British on their own shores and on Sept. 23, 1779, Jones' ship, Bon Homme Richard engaged the HMS Serapis in the North Sea off Famborough Head, England.
The British blasted Richard with broadsides but when the Serapis commander asked Jones if he wanted to surrender, Jones supposedly replied, "I have not yet begun to fight!"
By the next day, the British commander had surrendered, the Richard had sunk and Jones was commanding the Serapis.
Jones went on to become an admiral in the Russian Navy. He was a vain, high-strung self-promoter and he left Russia under a cloud, accused of raping a young girl. His admirers say the charges were trumped up by enemies to get rid of him.
When he died in Paris, Jones was awaiting a commission from the United States, which wanted to exterminate pirates operating off the Barbary Coast.
The excavation
There was hard evidence to support the claim that the body was Jones', said Wright State University anthropologist Nikki Rogers, who has written scholarly articles about him.
Investigators knew that Jones had been buried in Cimetiere St.-Louis, a small graveyard reserved for foreign-born Protestants.
Gen. Porter's men tunneled through the old graveyard, at times digging into spots of mushy black soil filled with fat red worms.
Jones was known to have been buried in a lead casket, a distinction reserved for the prominent, and investigators found five.
Three of the caskets had name plates that identified the occupants, and a fourth was too tall to be Jones, who was a short man. That left one coffin.
It contained a man's body that fit the description of Jones perfectly, down to the long hair for which he was known.
"You don't have anything that says it is a mix-up; everything points to this being Jones," Ms. Rogers said.
Final burial
The remains were treated to a huge public procession in Paris in the summer of 1905, and arrived in Annapolis that July, where they were put in a temporary brick vault at the Naval Academy.
The state funeral there was held in the new armory that would later be named Dahlgren Hall.
The funeral featured notables such as Gov. Edwin Warfield and President Teddy Roosevelt.
Construction of the chapel was running behind schedule because of a shortage of funds, so the body was stored under the front steps of Bancroft Hall, the academy's dormitory, according to Mr. Cheevers.
In 1913, the peripatetic remains finally found a home, when they were interred in the crypt, inside a sarcophagus made of 21 tons of Grand Pyrenees marble.
And that's where the body is likely to stay.
But John Wilson, a John Paul Jones interpreter at the Naval Academy, asked the rhetorical question that is in the back of many a mind: "What if it isn't John Paul Jones?"
And you're already backing off your original position that historical interpreters=America bad.
Look, they're interpreters, not lecturers. Their job is to make history "come alive" for tourists. If you want "facts so you can form your own opinion," there are whole libraries out there for you. If you want to take the kids and let them see what it used to look like, you go see a historical interpreter at a historical site. Now, do you have some specific example of an historical interpreter giving an anti-American message, particularly this guy, since he's the one who kicked off your rant?
I'd like to think the folks that went over there did the right thing and didn't grab the first Abby Normal they came across..
So your position, never having seen this guy apparently, is that because he's an historical interpreter at Annapolis, he's delivering an anti-American message?
Thanks for the tautology. It's more useful to say that reenactors are people who do it for their own amusement, at special events and with spectators a happy by-product, while interpreters work within an institutional setting and with a more educational focus.
It could. Jones' DNA would have specific markers unique to Scotsmen. If the body has those markers, it could be him and not some frog. If it doesn't have those markers, odds are it ain't him.
Correction: I meant Smithsonian mag.
Why hasn't anyone said that John Bonham is buried there?
Who else could it be?
Note: this topic is from . Thanks robowombat.
In 1899 General Horace Porter, the U.S. Ambassador to France 1897-1905, and a team of researchers started a six- year investigation for the remains of Admiral John Paul Jones. This was a deeply personal search for Porter because in his own words, "I felt a deep sense of humiliation as an American citizen in realizing that our first and most fascinating naval hero had been lying for more than a century in an unknown and forgotten grave..." The team discovered the site of Saint Louis Cemetery's Protestant section and unearthed Jones' lead coffin in 1905. On April 7, 1905, the Jones' remains were positively identified during a post-mortem examination. The research team determined that the mummified body belonged to a man who was between 40 and 50 years old, and was about 5'7" inches tall, all of which was consistent with Jones at the time of his death. The body was clothed in a linen shirt, and his long brown hair, about 30 inches long, was covered in a linen cap that was monogrammed with the letters "J" and "P."
The return of a Revolutionary mummy | By strangeremains on February 15, 2014
Maryland “Freak State” PING!
Wow,that is a blast from the past. Twelve years ago. I thought something seemed familiar about the material.
JPJ reputedly said “Give me a fast ship as I intend to go in harm’s way “
The last SecNav Ray Mabry said bring
me ships to fill with queers,trannies and feminazis.
Yep...he was given No Quarter after being Trampled under Foot at The Epic Battle of Evermore but they spared his loyal companion the Black Dog
His Dancing Days are gone forever
It’s a real Heartbreaker
Guess his soul will just have to Ramble On and he never got to chase Moby Dick with his new ships command which he was unable to Bring it Own Home
The funeral Celebration Day was held Down by the Seaside and his favorite dessert Custard Pie was served
It was definitely a Good Times Bad Times for the old Rover
After a lifetime of ribald and notorious behavior as a seaman he escaped the Gallows Pole that always haunted him and finally found his .....drum roll....Stairway to Heaven
(Corny but fun )
Dreadnought was the British term, driven by the name of the first such. So yes and no, as the term battleship already existed, but the Dreadnought was a big change in approach. Eventually the more general term won out again as the “new” approach became the norm.
What happened to the French burying Jones in a copper coffin filled with alcohol and the US search for his grave in 1906 revealing a copper coffin filled with alcohol?
Did you make that up?
PS...Hope you are recovering well.
Yes
Late night stents brain at work
This topic was posted , thanks again robowombat. Updating, not pinging.
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