It was there in the half-dark of the crypt that I became consumed by John Paul Jones’s adventurous life, maybe as close as America got to producing a Byronic hero. At the time I was taking a seminar in “Pyscho-History” (it was the 70s) and being an early adopter of Cockburn’s maxim to “waste no experience that can be turned into copy” I used my new-found obsession with Jones to write a 50-page psychological profile of the American corsair as my class project, viewing his life through the lens of Erik Erikson’s theory of personality.
