 Human beings don't change. Over the centuries, we are still dealing with the same emotions, the emotions of jealousy, greed, power hungry, and unrequited love. This is why we still study Shakespeare. The stories of Shakespeare are our modern day soap operas. It's days of our lives. It's general hospital. It's all the same stories just held at different times. And our mystery today revolves around a possible love triangle with an artifact that is now missing. But before we go any further, you know what to do. Please hit that subscribe button and give us a like. Also, a very special thank you to all of our patrons who help support this channel. If you would like to help support the channel and become a patron, there is a link down below in the description box. Welcome to SOTaric Atlanta. My name is Bryce. And today on Mystery Monday, we are going to be talking about the missing portrait of Admiral John Paul Jones. This is kind of a fun mystery. I think most mysteries are fun unless you're dealing with murder. But when we talk about artifacts going missing or wondering who certain people were, this is all done in fun. And since it is the day after Valentine's Day, I thought that this mystery was pretty appropriate. But first, I wanted to give a special announcement. As you all know, I go on The Dark Outpost with David Zublik once a week on Tuesdays, where right now we are going through the missing gospels or the banned heretical gospels of the Bible. Tonight on The Dark Outpost, this Monday night, David is going to have a very special guest on. I can't say who this guest is. I know who it is, but I cannot tell you guys who it is. But she is a whistleblower from a very, very, very prominent Illuminati family. Her surname, her family name, is the name that is recognized all over the world. For people who come out who are whistleblowers, I have the utmost respect for them. They are putting their lives on the line to try to tell us the truth about the world that we live in. In my opinion, whistleblowers are doing God's work. We know that every time somebody speaks up and talks about their experiences, they are risking their lives. And for that, they deserve our utmost respect and our prayers for support. So please tune in tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern Standard Time to watch this interview on The Dark Outpost. There is a link in the description box below. I always have a link to David's platform down in the description box below that you can just click on and link over to. Also, thank you guys so much for all the positive feedback on the interview that I did with David here on my channel. We are gonna do a part two, as I said, in the interview, but I'm gonna wait. I have questions that we didn't get to cover, which we will cover when we speak to David again, but I'm also gonna wait until after this interview is complete with this whistleblower he has in case you guys have any more questions or have more questions once you watch her interview that you can email to me at esotericatlantaatgmail.com. Okay, let's get started on this missing portrait of Admiral John Paul Jones. So who was John Paul Jones? John Paul Jones was actually born John Paul on July 6th, 1747 in Scotland. John Paul was a firecracker at 13 years old. He started to work on merchant ships in the ports of the United Kingdom. Now, around this time, his older brother William Paul moved to the colony of Virginia in the New World to start a new life. It was apparent from the age of 13 that John Paul was really, really skilled at the sea. He knew how to run a ship. This would be his life's work. Now, as I stated, his first phase of his life on the sea was working for merchant ships. Unfortunately, of course, that meant some slavery ships that he took across the trans-Atlantic route into the New World. But be that as it may, we can't change history. That is what happened. He started to rise up the ranks. Now, it appears to me that John Paul was a very passionate individual. He obviously liked to have power and sometimes he managed his ships with what would be considered cruelty today. Funnily enough, a lot of people back in those days also thought he was a bit cruel to his crew members. In 1770, John Paul had a crew member flogged because he started what appeared to be a mutiny over getting paid early. Now, as fate would have it, this man ended up dying and John Paul was arrested for causing this man's death. However, it was later proven that the man actually had a yellow fever and that's what got him. However, unluckily for John Paul, this young man was not really a sailor but a son of a very prominent Scottish family. It seems that this young man wanted a bit of an adventure and so he just decided to try sailing for a little while, got caught up in this mutiny, got yellow fever, got flogged and because of who he was, who his family was, things were not looking so good for John Paul in the United Kingdom. While John Paul was out on bail, he was advised to change his name and get the heck out of dodge. He kind of became like an outlaw right at this point. Then once again, while on another boat, he got into a sword fight with another crew member over wages once again and he ended up killing this man as well. At this point, John Paul Jones now, he's added the Jones to his last name. That was his name change. He just put Jones on the in there, decided to flee to the United States. Now, as I said, his brother William Paul had previously already moved to the colony of Virginia where he had established a plantation and he had recently passed away, leaving no heirs to his estate. And so when John Paul, now John Paul Jones, fled over to the United States, it wasn't like he was coming over to this colony empty-handed. He was able to step right into his brother's shoes with some land and some money that his brother had made in the colony. It just so happened around this time as well, the United States or the colonies at that point were getting pretty fed up with England. This was around the time that the men of the colony were starting to declare their independence from Great Britain and going into what we now know as the American Revolution. So needless to say, it was pretty handy that you have this whipper snapper guy with some anger issues and some passion who's already an outlaw from the United Kingdom coming into a country that's about to go to war against the United Kingdom. This was a happy happenstance for this man. John Paul Jones quickly made himself a part of the continental Navy. Again, the United States Navy did not exist at this point. It was simply the continental Navy. His skills on the sea would prove to be quite handy for this fledgling new country. As he started to rise in the ranks in this continental Navy and become quite a respected hero of the Revolutionary War, the English people had labeled him a pirate. And piracy back then was quite a serious offense. Although I kind of find it humorous like the England was like, oh, he's an outlaw pirate. And you guys have made him a leader in your Navy basically. But of course, as we know now, the joke was on the United Kingdom. The continental Navy had fewer than 100 ships. And at that point, the United Kingdom was one of the strongest militaries in the world, especially their Navy. I mean, hello, England is an island. And it's an island in a very cold part of the world so a lot of people like to leave England because of that. So at that point, how do you leave? You leave by boat. So they were pretty skilled on the water. And remember, John Paul Jones was trained in the United Kingdom on the merchant boats. So they were calling him a pirate, but they're the ones who trained him. And he's the one that would help take them down. And in fact, with less than 100 ships, John Paul Jones would end up taking down and destroying 200 of Britain's ships. This would leave John Paul Jones to be known as the father of the United States Navy. And in 1778, John Paul Jones ended up capturing seven more British ships. This would leave the British newspaper to put an article titled, Where is the British Navy? I guess the English people were a little confused with their standing with the colonists in this revolutionary war. Now it's no secret that during the American Revolution, the colonists and France were allies. If it was not for France, I don't know if the American Revolution would have been won by the colonists. French sent armies, men over to help the colonists fight against the English. And after the war was over, France and the United States, the new found United States became very strong friends. In fact, during the American Revolution, the French people were having their own revolution as well, getting rid of the monarchy, which we spoke about last week. And we are kind of staying in France for a little while. So this is where our story now looks upon France. Well, being such a strong ally of the United States, the country of France was one of the first countries to formally recognize America as its own sovereign country. At that point, Benjamin Franklin sent John Paul Jones over to France where France was gonna be gifting John Paul Jones with a new ship. They actually ended up giving him seven ships, a fleet. The Flagstaff ship John Paul Jones called Bonhomie Richard, which was named for Benjamin Franklin's book, Poor Richard's Almanac. On September 23rd, 1779, John Paul Jones decided to wage an attack against England coming from France. Now this attack was quite a show and it gave John Paul Jones a run for his money. At one point, viewers of this war, this battle, people standing on the coastline watching it thought that England was going to take down John Paul Jones and his fleet. But nonetheless, John Paul Jones started to fight back. When the head of the British ship yelled across at John Paul Jones, if he had given up yet, John Paul Jones famously responded, I have not yet begun to fight. At that point, he ended up taking down the English fleet. His Flagstaff boat had already gone down. He took over the English fleet and then he brought that boat over to Holland for repairs because now this English boat belonged to him on behalf of the Americans. Now this would start a very interesting relationship with John Paul Jones and the country of France over the last bit of his life. John Paul Jones would be sent back and forth to France to represent the American people. His representation of the American people in France started in 1780 when he was 33 years old where he was sent to Paris to live. Now back in those days, because there was no movie stars or celebrities like we know today, the people who were the celebrities were people from the royal family and from the military. So John Paul Jones became a bit of a lady's man. You know, he had all this power, he had all his fame. He was kind of like, I keep seeing Johnny Depp in my head. Maybe it's because of Pirates of the Caribbean being around the same time and the fact that he was a pirate. I don't know, I just keep seeing Johnny Depp in my head. He was like the Johnny Depp. He was going into all these saloons in France and he was attracting all of these women. Now, these women in France that he was attracting were very powerful women. They came from very prominent families. And one of the big differences between the American culture and the French culture was their views on affairs. The American culture was, at this point, predominantly found in Puritan belief. And so the women of America were a little bit less scandalous in that sense. They didn't, there were scandalous women in America. There are scandalous people everywhere, but they weren't culturally as accepting of affairs as the French women were. And so being a ladies man, John Paul Jones found himself in luck. He got to have lots of affairs with lots of very fancy and sassy and powerful women. In fact, in 1784, Abigail Adams, our second, our first second lady of the United States who would go on to be the second first lady of the United States and mother to another president went to France with her husband for a diplomatic purpose. There she obviously met John Paul Jones because they were both part of the American government in France and she wrote in a letter to her friend regarding John Paul Jones that he was a favorite amongst the French ladies. So it's not like he was trying to hide the fact that he was lustful of all these women. This guy is quite a character in my opinion. He's like murder two people in the past. The English people think he's a freaking pirate. He's now become the father of the United States Navy and who knows if he actually believed in the foundation of the revolution or if he just wanted to go to war. Who knows? He's taken down these huge English fleets and now he's living in Paris with all these French women openly having affairs with powerful people. What a character indeed. Definitely sounds like something that would come out of one of Shakespeare's stories but alas, this was real life. Now there was one woman in particular that John Paul Jones had his eye on. This was the 26 year old Charlotte Marguerite de Bourbon. Now I try to research Charlotte as best as I could. I couldn't find a whole lot on her. All we know is that she was a countess. Her husband was very powerful and she was herself presumably born from a very noble family. Now she was of the house of Bourbon. I'm assuming this is the same house that Henry IV came out of as well. I can't be 100% sure though because again there's not a whole lot on her history available online but it does seem like a pretty accurate assumption seeing that she was Charlotte Marguerite de Bourbon or of the house of Bourbon. John Paul Jones met Charlotte when they were together at a saloon in Paris and again he was very interested in her. She was only interested in him in the sense that she wanted to network with him. That's what we call it today, networking. You see her husband was unemployed and even though they were a powerful family she wanted to advance his career in the military. She thought being friends with John Paul Jones would make that happen. Not too crazy of an assumption. We again still do this today. Again this is called networking. My grandfather used to say it's not what you know, it's who you know. Well in order to try to get her husband into a good job, while they were at visiting the palace of Versailles right outside of Paris, Charlotte decided to paint a miniature portrait of John Paul Jones in his naval uniform. She presented this miniature picture to John Paul Jones as a gift as he was getting ready to go back out to sea. Now apparently at this time culturally in the United States painting or having a miniature painting done of someone was a sign of affection. It was a romantic gesture. Kind of crazy right? Like today if a guy is interested in you he'll just text you like sup, S-U-P, what's up, what's up. Back then they used to have miniatures painted, portraits painted of the people they were interested in and then present those miniatures to their crush, they're the person they were lusting after as a gift. So let's set the scene. Here this guy is John Paul Jones. He's a bit of a ladies man and he's had this crush, this longing for this 26 year old Countess who is pretty powerful and he gets on his boat and she hands him this gift of this miniature painting. Now back where he's from, where he now is from, not originally from but now is from the United States. This is seen as a romantic gesture. He's like over the moon that this woman that he's been interested in is also interested in him as well or so he thinks. On June 7th, 1780, John Paul Jones writes a letter to Charlotte to profess his mutual love for her as well and in this letter, he writes that he is very sad to leave Paris for the glorious cause of freedom is the only thing that could have torn him away from her. He said, you have made me in love with my own picture because you have consented to draw it. He also decides to send her a clipping of his hair. I know that that was done back then a lot. Like I know people find like clippings of hair and their great-great grandparents memory boxes and stuff but I find that kind of creepy today even though that was what they did back then. So he writes her back this letter professing his love cuts off a piece of his hair and sticks it in the letter and says, if I could send you my heart itself or anything else that could afford you pleasure it would be my happiness to do it. Now when Charlotte receives this letter with this clipping of hair, she is absolutely horrified. She thinks that maybe John Paul Jones meant to send that letter to somebody else and not to her because see Charlotte was never interested in him romantically and it seems that in Paris the painting of miniatures where something friends would do for each other too it was not necessarily a romantic gesture and oddly it seems that Charlotte was pretty devoted to her husband. So she sends John Paul Jones a letter explaining that she does not want to be his lover she merely sees him as a friend and perhaps maybe she sent her the wrong letter and some letters got mixed up between her and this other girl. Well John Paul Jones starts to backpedal in his embarrassment and he writes her another letter almost gaslighting her a little bit and he says, as friendship has nothing to do with sex, pray what harm is there wishing to have a picture of a friend. So now he's like, no, no, no, I just want you to be my friend too and you're crazy if you thought that I was actually giving you my hair because I'm in love with you. Anyway, suffice it to say the relationship between Charlotte and John Paul Jones ended there. Her little maneuver to try to get her husband work with John Paul Jones ended up backfiring her as he obviously thought that she wanted to be the one in giving John Paul Jones the work, not her husband. John Paul Jones died on July 18th, 1792 at the age of 45. He died in his apartment of kidney failure sadly at a very young age. His servants came in and just found him in the bed and again, there was something going on with his kidneys. That probably could have been fixed in modern times but again, this was the late 1700s. The American ambassador to France at the time was a man named Governor Morris and he was not too fond of John Paul Jones. He's probably a little jealous of John Paul Jones if I had to guess but I don't know, I wasn't there at the time. Anyway, because he was not a fan of John Paul Jones he did not give any money for John Paul Jones burial. But fortunately for John Paul Jones he did have a lot of friends in France who were obviously again very wealthy. He hung out with a lot of the nobility. And so the friends of France did pay for his burial expenses. So I'm gonna read a little bit from an article about his burial and his death. The article will be listed in the description box below but it says because of his Scottish Calvinist background Jones was buried in the Protestant section of the St. Louis Cemetery. Jones body was preserved in alcohol and interned in a lead coffin which was interned placed in a wooden coffin so that his body would be easily identifiable when the United States got around to claiming his remains. But four years after Jones' death France's revolutionary government sold cemetery property and all the bodies buried were there forgotten. The article goes on to say in 1899 General Horace Porter, the US ambassador to France from 1897 to 1905 and had a team of researchers starting a six year investigation for the remains of Admiral John Paul Jones. This was deeply personal search for Porter because in his own words, I felt a deep sense of humiliation as an American citizen and realizing that our first and most fantastic naval hero had been lying for more than a century in an unknown and forgotten grave. The team discovered the site of the St. Louis Cemetery's Protestant section and unearthed Jones lead coffin in 1905. On April 7th, 1905, the Jones remains were positively identified during a postmortem examination. This research team determined that the mummified body belonged to a man who was between 40 and 50 years old and was about five, seven inches tall, all of which was consistent with Jones at the time of his death. The body was clothed in a linen shirt and his long brown hair about 30 inches long was covered in a linen cap that was monogrammed with the letters J and P. Jones body was immediately transported back to the US aboard the USS Brooklyn. On April 24th, 1906, Jones coffin was installed at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. During the ceremony, President Theodore Roosevelt gave the eulogy. On January 26th, 1913, the Admiral's remains were interred in an ornate bronze and marble sarcophagus in the Naval Academy. And again, that article was from a site called Strange Remains and I will be linking that article down below for anybody who's interested in seeing his burial site now you can go and see it. Now, John Paul Jones was rumored to have been obsessed with being famous in his life. Of course he was, he was a pirate and a naval admiral and a ladies man. So of course he was obsessed with being famous. In fact, he is actually quoted as saying, my desire for fame is infinite. Now, yes, he still is famous for his part in the American Revolution. He's very respected amongst our founding fathers for his work in the American Revolutionary War. He was a very important part of that Revolutionary War. But he's also very, very, very famous for this little love triangle, this unrequited love that he had with Charlotte from the House of Bourbon. Now the mystery is where is this painting? Nobody quite knows where the miniature of John Paul Jones is that Charlotte painted. Yes, there are lots of miniatures available of John Paul Jones because apparently he had lots of admirers. But there's one particular miniature that meant so much to him because it was painted by a woman that he lusted after is nowhere to be seen. In 1973, the Smithsonian thought that they had found the painting, but now they're not so sure because a photograph surfaced, a photograph that was from the descendants of John Paul Jones' siblings that appeared to show a tiny painting of their great, great, great whatever uncle that was titled to be from the palace at Versailles. But of course we don't know for sure. Now for me personally, I don't care if we ever find this painting. It's a very interesting story and it does bring a lot of humility to his story and it connects us because we've all had that unrequited love. We've all been in his shoes. We've probably also all been in Charlotte's shoes as well. And if some of his descendants, some of his siblings' descendants since he didn't have children are in possession of the painting, I don't believe that they need to necessarily turn it in over into the Smithsonian or anything. You know me, I don't really trust the Smithsonian anyway, but that's their relic. That's from their past. We have a lot of old medical documents and stuff from my family, from my ancestry, letters, all sorts of stuff. And even though it's been suggested that maybe they should be turned over to a museum to be shown to the world, I think no because it's personal, right? It's about your lineage. It's about your DNA. It's about where you come from. So if his siblings' descendants still own or still have that painting, I think they should just keep it. I felt like this was a kind of a fun story to tell the day after Valentine's Day because Valentine's Day is obviously the holiday of love and people who are single usually are not happy over Valentine's Day. So I hope that was kind of a comical, a comedy of errors about an unrequited love that maybe make your day a little bit brighter. If you didn't miss our Valentine's Day episode, I did release it on Saturday about the pagan origins of Valentine's Day. I will include a link down in the description box below so you can watch that as well. Once more, do not forget to sign into The Dark Outpost tonight at 10 p.m. to watch David's interview with a big-time whistleblower and also don't forget to sign into The Dark Outpost Tuesday night, tomorrow night to see our episode as we go even further into the gospel of the Holy 12. On Wednesday, I will be releasing part six and seven of my reading on this channel. And then going forward, we're actually gonna take the section, section by section, so then the next week we'll do just section eight because there's so much there. We don't wanna miss anything and we don't wanna draw the episodes out too long so that we have the patience to sit and really listen and understand what these heretical gospels are trying to tell us. All right, guys, I hope you have a fantastic week ahead of you. Thank you again to Josh McKay for doing our opening song. If you would like to purchase the song, please click on the link down below. And again, thank you to Todd Broderick for helping me get this video out to you guys. And I will talk to you soon. Bye.