Jones despatched an express to the court, at Versailles, and immediately followed it. Upon his arrival he found, that through the intervention of Dr. Franklin, orders had already been issued for the detention of the Alliance, and the arrest of Landais. Journeying was comparatively slow in those days. After the absence of a week Commodore Jones returned. He found that, during the night preceding his arrival, Landais had warped the ship from the inner to the outer harbor, which was called Port Louis. There was still a narrow entrance through which the ship must pass before it could be out at sea. A battery commanded that passage. A boat was sent on board, with an officer, to arrest Landais in the king’s name, and to announce that the Alliance would be sunk should she attempt to leave the port. Captain Landais, standing beneath the Stars and Stripes, and surrounded by his men, refused to surrender himself. The Alliance had been placed by Congress at the disposal of Dr. Franklin. He, as the representative of the Government, was to order all her movements in Europe. This both Lee and Landais knew perfectly well. The French officer now presented to Landais the positive orders of Dr. Franklin to Landais, his officers and his men, to surrender the ship to the command of Commodore Jones. The commodore now had the ship completely in his power. One or two broadsides from the battery would sink her and all her crew in the bottom of the bay. French soldiers were accustomed to obey command. The guns were loaded. The gunners stood ready with lighted matches. At one word of command a storm of balls would pierce the ship, and all France would receive another impressive lesson of the peril involved in disobeying the orders of the king. And yet the madman Landais, reckless of all consequences, was firm in his insubordination. The Alliance was by far the finest ship in the feeble navy of the colonies. It was freighted with stores of inestimable value to our thinly clad, hungry, ill-provided soldiers, struggling against the most formidable military power then upon the globe. A large minority, probably a majority of the sailors were in favor of Commodore Jones. Those who adhered to Landais were assured by Commissioner Lee that they were surely in the right, and that if they abandoned Landais they would be exposed to be hung for mutiny against their lawful commander. All the sailors felt deeply wronged. They could not understand why they received neither wages nor prize-money. They could not know but that the malignant and artful representations of Landais were true; that Jones, with his confederate aristocrats of the court, was squandering, in luxurious dissipation, their hard earnings. Under these circumstance it would have been cruel to consign these poor men to destruction, and our country to so great a loss. Commodore Jones, forgetting his resentment, acted the part of a magnanimous man, for which he merits the highest commendation.