Jones having arrived at Brest in May, 1778, with his prize, the _Drake_, sought a larger command. He had to wait a year for it. After many strivings, one was found in the _Duc de Duras_, a fourteen-year-old East Indiaman, which was bought, fitted as a man-of-war, and renamed the _Bonhomme Richard_ in compliment to Franklin as being the nearest approach in French to the “Poor Richard” of the famous almanac. The ship was far from meeting requirements, being slow and weakly built, so that she finally carried twenty-eight 12 and 9 pounders instead of 18’s on the gun deck, eight 6’s on the forecastle, and on the after part of the lower deck six 18’s, forty-two guns in all. She was provided with a mixed crew of Americans, French, English, a few Scandinavians, and eighty-three Irish and Scotch, Jones himself being of the latter by birth. Of the first there were in the beginning but seventy-nine, chiefly exchanged prisoners. Later, owing to mutinous conduct of the British element, many of these were discharged and replaced by forty-three newly arrived Americans just released from prison, and thirty Portuguese. The total was 227 officers and seamen, besides 130 French soldiers placed aboard to serve as marines. Jones’s ideas were large: they included the fitting out of a large French squadron to act in concert and carrying a considerable number of troops to make an attack upon the English coast. This, however, fell through, and a squadron was organized of the _Bonhomme Richard_, 42; the _Alliance_, 32; the _Pallas_, 32; the _Cerf_, cutter, 18, and the _Vengeance_, brigantine, of 12 guns. The _Alliance_ had arrived at Brest, twenty-three days from Boston, carrying Lafayette, on February 6, 1779. She had an unreliable crew, with many English and Irish, and a still more unreliable captain, Landais, who had been an officer in the French navy. He had been appointed a captain in the American service on the recommendation of Silas Deane, who seemed to have a faculty for making errors of the kind. Landais was to give much and continuous trouble. The squadron did not finally get off until August 14, 1779. Its orders, prepared by Franklin, with the advice of Sartine, the French Minister of Marine, were to cruise to the north of the British islands and after six weeks to go into the Texel, Holland. There were varying incidents of capture of prizes, designs to attack Leith, insubordinations of the French captains, etc., but on September 23d, when a convoy of forty vessels accompanied by two men-of-war was discovered off Flamborough Head, a prominent point a few miles south of Scarborough, England, Jones’s moment had come.