Transatlantic Romance and the Curse of Home

Across 1778–79, the Galloway-born sailor John Paul Jones mounted a series of raids around the British coast as a privateer under the flag of the Revolutionary United States. This included a cruise up the Solway Firth, during which Jones went ashore not far from his own birthplace in an attempt to take the Earl of Selkirk hostage. This chapter examines the proliferating literary mythology of this naval captain and/or pirate, whose actions provided the nineteenth century with a test case for questions of loyalty and belonging in the face of migration and war. With attention to novels, the chapter focuses particularly on Allan Cunningham’s overlooked Paul Jones (1826), which uses Jones’s perceived abandonment of home to intensify the influential handling of regionalism in Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels. This is contrasted with James Fenimore Cooper’s positioning of Jones as a symbol of (provisionally American) maritime liberty in The Pilot (1824).