The Admiral and the Ambassador: One Man’s Obsessive Search for the Body of John Paul Jones

As the French Revolution gathered steam, the exact location of Jones’s grave–and, in fact, the exact location of St. Louis cemetery in Paris, where he was buried in 1792–was forgotten: information on his death and burial were destroyed in the Paris Commune and the few who had attended his burial had passed away. His body had, though, been preserved in a lead-lined coffin filled with alcohol; theoretically, if the coffin could be located, Jones could be returned to the United States for proper burial. The Admiral and the Ambassador details Porter’s long, unrelenting search for that coffin, first through scraps of archive material and written recollections of funeral attendees, and then beneath the rickety buildings that had been constructed over what he believed to be the graveyard. This book, the only full-length account of the search for and discovery of John Paul Jones’s body, offers a fascinating look into the charismatic, real-life characters who populated the first century of the United States of America.