Captain Jones was a prolific chronicler of his own doings and left invaluable records of his truly brilliant achievements. This is mentioned not in the least to detract from the credit so justly due him (for it is the more to his honor that, in the rough-and-tumble calling he espoused, he found time to cultivate one of the “polite arts,” then generally deemed unnecessary in his profession), but to explain why it is that so little is known of what his brother captains accomplished in the same period. Our navy officers of the Revolution were bred, as a rule, in the hard school of experience, and, to most of them, the task of writing was about as distasteful as taking a dose of unpalatable medicine. The result has been that, while the world for one hundred and twenty-five years has been fully informed of the superb heroism of John Paul Jones, it has been kept in comparative ignorance of what his contemporaries accomplished. This is regrettable for more reasons than one, chief among which is that, while Jones will be found to have suffered nothing by the comparison, these humbler heroes of his day have not received the recognition so justly due them. Of the twenty-nine officers who held the rank of naval captain in our service during the Revolution, only a few emerged from obscurity. They, like the great majority in all services, were destined to perform that hardest of all professional work, the monotonous routine duty incident to the carrying on of naval war. There were a few, however, who had the good fortune to emerge from the oblivion of naval drudgery, and, perhaps, the greatest of these is Nicholas Biddle, of good Pennsylvania stock. He commanded the _Andrea Doria_ in the first naval expedition of the war, Captain Jones (then a lieutenant) serving in the same squadron aboard the flagship _Alfred_. Jones shortly afterward won the immortal distinction of taking the _Serapis_ while his own ship went down. A year before the _Bonhomme Richard_-_Serapis_ fight, Biddle had the unique distinction of both “going up” and “going down” in his ship, the thirty-two gun frigate _Randolph_, in her engagement with the ship-of-the-line _Yarmouth_. Jones’ bravery of Flamborough Head was superb, but it does not equal the patriotism and noble sacrifice of Biddle, who, in order to save his convoy of seven rich merchantmen laden with goods indispensable to the American cause, unhesitatingly ran alongside the monster ship-of-the-line and was blown up, 311 of the _Randolph’s_ complement of 315 perishing, including Biddle—but the convoy was saved. This was the noblest act of self-sacrifice on a large scale, in the annals of the American navy. Earlier in the war Biddle, while in command of the _Andrea Doria_, in a cruise of four months captured ten English vessels, which, with the exception of two, reached port in safety—two of the prizes containing 400 soldiers of a Highland regiment.