Serapis was barely six months old when she met her destiny. Built by Randall and Company at Deptford on the Thames and launched in March 1779, she was a two-decked fifth-rate carrying 44 guns - a fresh, well-armed ship under Captain Richard Pearson. On 23 September 1779, off Flamborough Head on England's Yorkshire coast, she fell in with the American captain John Paul Jones and his worn, ageing Bonhomme Richard. What followed was carnage. Jones's ship was the larger but the weaker, and as Serapis shot away his firepower, Pearson called on him to surrender. Jones's reply became one of the most famous lines in naval history: I have not yet begun to fight. He meant it. He lashed the two ships together so Pearson's heavier guns could not be brought to bear, and for three hours the crews fought hull to hull in the dark.

The fight ended in a strange reversal. Bonhomme Richard was sinking beneath Jones even as he won; a ship from his own squadron had been firing wildly into both vessels, and Pearson, tied fast to his enemy and unable to aim at the real threat, finally struck his colours and handed Serapis over. Jones abandoned his doomed flagship, stepped aboard the prize, and sailed his battered new command to the neutral Dutch Republic. There the politics turned absurd: the Dutch did not recognise the infant United States, so to avoid charges of piracy a hastily improvised flag - the so-called Serapis flag - was entered into the records, and the ship and her consort were eventually declared French captures. Both British captains, though they had lost their ships, had succeeded in shielding a valuable convoy, and both were rewarded for it. A defeat, in the strict accounting of war, that was also a kind of victory.

Her last chapter was not a battle but a trade run gone wrong. The French navy commissioned the captured ship as Serapis and loaned her to a civilian master named Roche, who meant to harry the British in the Indian Ocean. On 31 July 1781 she lay at anchor off Madagascar, trading spirits and arak - a strong distilled liquor - for rice, when the load master had candles taken from their fire-proof lanterns. The naked flames found the alcohol vapour pooling in the hull, and the ship caught fire. Her crew fought it for two and a half hours, but the flames ate through the wall of the spirit locker and reached the powder magazine. The explosion tore the stern clean off the ship. Eight men died in that fiery end; 215 survived, plucked from the water and carried by the privateer Daliram to nearby Ile Sainte-Marie. A warship that had withstood John Paul Jones was undone by her own cargo.

Ile Sainte-Marie - Nosy Boraha to the Malagasy - was a fitting grave. The long, narrow island off Madagascar's east coast had been one of the great pirate havens of the Indian Ocean, a refuge in the late 17th and early 18th centuries for the likes of William Kidd and Olivier Levasseur, whose weathered, skull-carved tombs still lean in the island's old cemetery. Serapis settled into that storied water and lay forgotten for more than two centuries. Then, in November 1999, the American nautical archaeologists Richard Swete and Michael Tuttle located her remains on the seabed off the island - the scattered, salt-eaten wreck of a ship whose three hours off Flamborough Head had echoed far longer than the two years she sailed afterward. The duel made her famous. The candle made her a wreck. The pirate island keeps her still.