The ship's decrepit carcass is ablaze, a floating funeral pyre. Captain John Paul Jones’ best guess is that she is less than an hour from sinking. 
     The carnage is unspeakable. A bloody soup of seawater severed limbs and bilge water sloshes over his boots.  
     “Captain Jones, Sir,” the First Officer shouts, “The ship is past saving, Sir. Shall I give the order to strike our colors and lower the flag?
     Jones feels a familiar calmness come over him, as it often does when the odds against him are hopeless. Time pauses, as if death is giving him the opportunity to take one last look around. 
     He reflects on all the lives he has sacrificed during his thirty-three years on earth. Ten-year-old cabin boys five thousand miles from their homes. Countless sailors, and the shattered families they have left behind. He questions how history will remember him, if at all, in the years to come. There is so much still left undone. 
     He looks up at the Lieutenant, who is still awaiting instructions, and his tranquility fades away, to make way for an explosion of defiance. 
     His normally soft voice transforms into a shout so loud that every man on deck can hear him above the noise of the cannon fire and the howls of dying men.
     “Our flag will remain aloft! There will be no surrender!”