Seeing his plan partly frustrated, Captain Jones hastened back to the water-front, and with his own hands built a fire on a large vessel in the midst of the fleet, using a brand which he had snatched from the breakfast fire in the kitchen of a nearby house. To increase the flames, he broke open and spilled a barrel of tar over the light-wood he was firing. Meantime the deserter had been alarming the town. “The inhabitants began to appear in thousands.” There must have been not less than 1,200 sailors alone among the 150 ships lying there. As the flames mounted in air above the burning ship the men of the town came down _en masse_, but Jones stood between them and the fire, and, with pistol in hand, “ordered them to retire, which they did with precipitation.” Men in a crowd numbering hundreds fell over each other to get out of range. A more amusing instance of the power of a resolute man over a mob will rarely be found in history. For fifteen minutes John Paul Jones, single-handed, held at bay more than a thousand men. Then he entered his boat and rowed away, leaving the townsmen to fight the fire and shed tears of gratitude over the deserter who had saved them from destruction at the hands of fifteen men armed with cutlasses and flint-locked, single-barrelled, shoot-if-you-are-lucky pistols! When Jones was well out in the bay the people found a couple of cannon which Jones had overlooked. These they loaded and fired. And Jones, recalling the time when a frigate had chased his brig in the Canadian waters, fired a pistol in return. From Whitehaven Jones sailed over to the Isle of St. Mary, landed with a force of men, and surrounded the house of the Earl of Selkirk. It was the avowed object of this landing to carry away the earl, “and to have detained him until, through his means, a general and fair exchange of prisoners, as well in Europe as in America, had been effected.” It was to ameliorate the condition of the Americans, held in jail and deliberately starved, that Captain Jones landed. [Illustration: _Pub. by_ A. PARK, _47 Leonard S^t._ _Tabernacle Walk, London._ “Paul Jones the Pirate.” _From an old engraving in the collection of Mr. W. C. Crane._] Finding that the earl was not at home, the men in the landing party called on their commander to take the silverware from the castle as fair plunder and but a just revenge for the acts of British sailors in America, who had not only looted the homes of the rich, but had driven off the one cow and the one pig of the laborer. Captain Jones permitted them to do so. The following is the British account of the affair, taken from Dodsley’s “Annual Register” (London) for 1778. On page 177 it says: “Edinburgh, April 27. The following are the particulars of the plundering of Lord Selkirk’s house by the crew of the _Ranger_, American privateer.