Historian wants DNA test for John Paul Jones
Some say the grand state funeral at the Naval Academy on April 24, 1906, for the father of the United States Navy may have been held over the wrong body.
According to Washington College history professor Adam Goodheart, who wrote about Jones in the April issue of Smithsonian magazine, Jones' body may have been dumped in a landfill, used to fertilize vegetables or simply lost forever.
He said modern-day science should be used to determine who is - or isn't - in the crypt.
"They used every technology at their disposal (when the body was discovered) in 1905 to show it was him, and I think they would have supported using DNA today," Mr. Goodheart said in an interview.
But academy officials say they are confident the body resting in the basement of the Naval Academy Chapel is Jones.
"The research that went into the excavation of the cemetery where they found him doesn't leave much doubt," Naval Academy Museum senior curator James W. Cheevers said.
Naval Academy spokesman Deborah Goode said the academy isn't about to open the coffin, either.
"There's no compelling evidence to suggest that anyone's remains but John Paul Jones' are in the crypt," Ms. Goode said. "Speculation alone is not reasonable cause for us to disturb the sanctity of the sarcophagus."
Though Jones never married and left no known direct descendants, DNA samples are available: A braid of brown hair that supposedly belonged to Jones is mounted on the back of a miniature portrait at the academy. Also, one of Jones' brothers is buried in Fredericksburg, Va., and a sister is buried in Charleston, S.C.
Why confusion?
Jones died in Paris on July 18, 1792, at age 45. His body remained in an unmarked grave for 113 years.
The cemetery was closed soon after his death, and had fallen into disrepair.
By 1905, when the body was discovered, parts of the tract had built over by a bric-a-brac shop, several houses and a shed for grain merchants' wagons. Other parts had been dug up and hauled away, or were at various times used as a dung hill and a garden for growing vegetables for market.
"(T)here were whispers that the cadaver brought home in glory might be the wrong one," Mr. Goodheart wrote in Smithsonian. "The whispers have never been completely silenced."
Researchers who located the lead coffin they said contained Jones's remains found a body that was preserved in alcohol and packed in straw, but there was no name on the coffin.
An autopsy, performed from the backside to prevent desecrating the corpse, showed that the person had suffered kidney disease similar to what plagued Jones. Also like Jones, the person in the coffin had suffered from pneumonia and died of congestive heart failure.
Anthropologists compared the cadaver to a portrait of Jones, and found that measurements of the skull bones largely matched busts of Jones. Only, as Mr. Goodheart noted, the busts were artistic renderings and were never meant to be anatomical models.
The researchers, far ahead of their time, compiled a composite photograph by taking pictures of a bust of Jones and of the cadaver, and overlaying them. The corpse had been out of the coffin for three days and had shrunk some, but the photographs overlapped considerably.
Annapolis resident John G. M. Stone was the nephew of Gen. Horace Porter, the ambassador to France who led the expedition to find Jones' remains.
Capt. Stone, who graduated from the Naval Academy in 1917, was 11 years old and visiting in Paris when Gen. Porter summoned the boy to come see America's greatest naval hero.
At least a dozen men were examining the body just removed from a lead casket, Capt. Stone wrote 60 years later.
"Uncle Horace said I could feel his hand," he wrote. "It was soft and pliable. I did not hold it long!"
Capt. Stone concluded, "There was no shadow of doubt but that the body was that of John Paul Jones."