The Billy Ruffian, The "Bellerophon"
and the Downfall of Napoleon:
The Biography of a Ship of the Line, 1782-1836

Biographies need not be of people only. This is the life story of one seventy-four-gun warship in the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars. Nicknamed the "Billy Ruffian" by sailors who found her proper name, "Bellerophon," hard to pronounce, she was designed by Sir Thomas Slade (considered the finest ship designer of his day) and born in a small shipyard in 1782. She would be commanded by fourteen men over the course of her life, and the morale and fighting spirit of her crew would become legendary.

She played a conspicuous part in three of the most famous of all sea battles. The first was the Glorious First of June (1794), a battle which the British won. This was the first sea battle in the prolonged war against France that would culminate at sea with the battle of Trafalgar (1805). Bellerophon's second major engagement was the battle of the Nile (1798) which halted Napoleon's eastern expansion from Cairo, Egypt.

Afterwards, she spent several years cruising the Mediterranean Sea and blockading the French coast. She then spent two years in the Caribbean before engaging in her third major battle. This occurred off Cape Trafalgar, near the Straits of Gilbraltar. Here Horatio Nelson died and British naval supremacy was established for the next one hundred years. Bellerophon's crowning glory came six weeks after the Battle of Waterloo (1815) when Napoleon surrendered to her captain.

Of the 126 74- and 64-gun ships built in British yards between 1755 and 1783, 122 of them died slow, lingering deaths. The Bellerophon was one of these. The majority of these ships were hulked; that is, they were decommissioned, their crews were paid off, their masts and guns were removed, and they were used in the various royal dockyards as hulks. Bellerophon played out her remaining years as a prison (or convict) ship. In 1836 she was sold and broken up by John Beatson's yard in London. She was fifty-four years old.

David Cordingly used primary source materials, such as diaries, ship's logs, and personal letters and has written a fascinating and eminently readable account of one ship's life story.