How valuable all the prizes that have been mentioned were to the struggling colonists cannot be told here, but the reader will remember that at this time the American forces were wholly dependent on foreign sources for both powder and great guns. The Congress had, indeed, taken steps to manufacture muskets of “three-quarters of an inch bore, and of good substance at the breech, the barrel to be three feet eight inches long, the bayonet to be 18 inches in the blade.” But there was no factory for making these weapons, and the individual gunsmiths employed could do very little toward supplying an army. There was, in short, no sort of military supplies that was not lacking among the American forces and no sort that these captures of the Yankee naval vessels did not to a greater or less extent supply. And what was of equal importance to the American success was the injury done to the enemy. During the year 1776 the Yankees captured 342 vessels, all told, “of which forty-two were recaptured, eighteen released, and five burned.” But the story of the fortunes of the navy during the first year of its existence is not yet completed. The early adventures of John Paul Jones are yet to be told. It is to the credit of Commodore Hopkins that at the end of the cruise of his fleet he appreciated and admired the first lieutenant of the service. As already told, he ordered Lieutenant Jones to the command of the twelve-gun brig _Providence_ on May 10, 1776. Having no blank commissions, Commodore Hopkins wrote the new commission on the back of the old one that Jones had received as a lieutenant from the Congress. For a time the _Providence_ was used for carrying troops and convoying merchantmen along shore, and so successful was her new captain in eluding the vigilant cruisers of the enemy that he attracted the notice of Congress, and was promoted to the rank of captain, of which act he received notice on August 8, 1776. With the notice that he had been promoted came orders to cruise for prizes “between Boston and the Delaware.” Captain Jones was now fighting, not for the commercial privileges of oppressed colonists, but for a new nation struggling for recognition. There is no doubt that since July 4, 1776, he had performed his duty with a better heart than before that date, because there was greater honor in helping to establish a nation than in seeking justice for a colony, and with men of his class honor is all of life. In his eager search for the enemy after his promotion, Captain Jones stretched the territory that had been assigned to him so that he reached the neighborhood of the Bermudas.