Filey Bay Wreck

If the identification is right, the vessel began as the French East Indiaman Duc de Duras, built around 1761 and later used as an armed transport. France gave the old ship to American commander John Paul Jones in 1779. He renamed her Bonhomme Richard after Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard writings and armed her with about 42 guns. Jones's mixed squadron cruised around Britain during the American War of Independence. On 23 September it met a British Baltic merchant convoy guarded by Captain Richard Pearson's new warship Serapis and the smaller Countess of Scarborough off Flamborough Head.

Bonhomme Richard and Serapis opened fire that evening. The British ship's heavier, faster fire tore through Jones's hull, and one or two of his own large guns burst, killing or burning much of their crew. Jones closed the distance and the ships became locked together, allowing marksmen and men on deck to fight while their guns fired at almost touching range. The American Alliance also fired through both ships, causing further deaths. Pearson surrendered after about four hours because his convoy had escaped and his ship was burning and shattered. Jones moved his people and prisoners to Serapis, but pumps could not save Bonhomme Richard; she sank on 25 September.

The exact number killed aboard Bonhomme Richard is not known. Jones reported 150 killed and wounded from a company of 322 but did not separate the dead from the injured. Pearson reported 49 dead and 68 wounded on Serapis, while later accounts claimed higher British losses. Those figures belong to the battle, not a later drowning: survivors and prisoners were moved before Bonhomme Richard went down. John Paul Jones and Richard Pearson both survived. These people can be connected to the Filey Bay site only if its identity is eventually proved; no human remains there have been identified as members of either crew.

A local diver found the site in 1974 while freeing a trawl net. It lies in 23 to 28 metres of water on a flat seabed where sand can cover or expose 30 centimetres in one tide. Surveys found scattered but well-preserved frames, hull planking, a long internal timber, copper-alloy fastenings, an iron anchor-cable pipe, iron and lead objects and brick fragments. Fishing gear may have shifted some remains. The construction fits a late eighteenth-century ship, but no cannon or named object ties it to Bonhomme Richard. The 300-metre protected area created in 2002 restricts diving and disturbance.

The battle protected Jones's reputation and gave the young United States a powerful naval victory, even though his own ship was lost. The wreck's possible link therefore gives Filey Bay both local and international importance, but the doubt is part of the story, not a detail to hide. Filey divers carried out decades of work, formed a research group and gained public funding to investigate the site. Their surveys show that it is valuable even without a famous name: it is an unusually good survival of a French or American-style wooden vessel of the period, threatened by moving sand and trawling and still capable of answering who it really was.