Slow start, building to emotional farewell.

Not a bad book, the subtitle is a crude attempt to have a famous name tow the unfamiliar one of this ship into the would be reader's consciousness which rather sells the central idea short - which is that this is a biography of a ship the Bellerophon ,a 74 gun ship of the line, from construction to deconstruction, her moment of fame was that she was the ship that carried Napoleon to Britain after Waterloo, where he was transferred to the Northumberland which took him to St.Helena. This kind of title suggests both a lack of confidence on the part of author (or the publisher?) in the intrinsic interest in the story or, or maybe and, an absence of confidence in the buying public whose dulled senses need to be whipped into buying through the mention of some famous name  at which I suppose we're lucky that the title didn't allude to the possibility of Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton, making adulterous yet patriotic love on her decks . However the biography of this ship, the Bellerophon, which also saw action, at Trafalgar & the Battle of the Nile among other battles, as well as undertaking other duties during the long wars against France - the book takes us through those, the descriptions of the battles I thought a real strength from how the ship was readied for action to the physical damage she endured (masts downed, rigging and sails ruined) has much to commend it to the curious reader. On the downside Nelson and Napoleon were distractions from the ship, (likewise that George III saw a theatre piece about Joan of Arc), if one wants to read about Nelson & Napoleon, one has I suspect, no immediate shortage of books to turn to, on the other hand if you want to know about a typical ship of the line of the period, then this is pretty much it. Although not relevant to the life-story of the ship, I did like Cordingly's description of Collingwood, who took command of the fleet after Nelson's demise, unable to tell any of the officers that Nelson was dead, for fear of also presenting them with the sight of his own inconsolable grief - all the fleet captains instead were left to infer the news - a reminder that we are just at the tail end of the era of the man of feeling. Perhaps such a sense of man's emotions as bottomless chasms, required a fine surface performance of sang froid?

Anyway back to the ship, Cordingly traces her birth, from imaginative conception on the drawing board, to contract (to be constructed at a private yard, round the corner from the royal docks at Chatham  now open as a museum  the process of scouring the countryside for suitable oak and elm, felled, carted to navigable rivers and hauled downstream, sawn into timbers  private yards didn't go in for seasoning the lumber for a year or more, on cost grounds which were constructed into a hull. She than sat on the river Medway 'in mothballs' until called in to service when she was fitted out with guns and masts and rigging at Chatham and was ready to do her duty from 1786 to 1815 when she was converted into a prison hulk  ie the thing which Magwitch escapes from at the beginning of  Great Expectations until she was sold to a scrap yard for £4,030 in 1836, sadly the story ends there, we don't learn what became of the bulk of the hulk as she was reduced into her constituent parts.

On pages 209-212 there is a discussion of the make-up of the ship's crew, broken down into country of origin (22% of the crew were Welsh, there was one black man (country of origin unknown), the average height of the sailors was five foot five (being short an advantage at sea as there wasn't much headspace between decks), the oldest sailors were in their fifties, the average age thirty, curiously the captain also logged details about eye colour results not detailed in the bookand tattoos (also not detailed), sadly Cordingly doesn't put the composition of the crew in much of a context other than explaining the prevalence of men on board due to having been seized by press gangs and thus the mixture of trade backgrounds on board  there was one lawyer as well as men from various manual trades backgrounds. I would have been glad to have read more on the typical crew of a ship in this period and less about Wellington's victories in India and the Iberian Peninsula.

Still quite fun, and the frequency that she had to be repaired in dock was remarkable, not just after battle but due to storm damage, and wear and tear too, while all the work was done by hand with the assistance of some cranes (and occasionally a dry dock). The ship's name came, allegedly, at random from Lempriere's classical dictionary, though since one of the hospital ships was named the Charon I wondered if some malicious humour wasn't also involved, at least at times. However the crew tended to pronounce Bellerophon as Billy Ruffian (hence the title of the book), or variants thereof.

There is a chapter on her life as a prison hulk off the north Kent marshes, haunting the imagination of young Dickens. Life on aboard the prison hulk was a parody of naval life, the prisoners were divided into messes of about eight, each of which shared one cage, they slept in hammocks which at dawn were stowed in lockers on deck, as in the service, one man from each mess had to fetch their rations to the mess, though they drank cocoa rather than grog, and they were supposed to work and learn chunks of the bible by heart in the belief that such knowledge of the tricks of the biblical patriarchs or the wars, bloodshed, and polygamy of the kings of ancient Israel would convert the depraved criminal into a decent Victorian. Unfortunately men and boys were mixed in the cells and the boys were prey to crimes ' to horrible to mention', under Prime Minister Melbourne there was a move to reduce the use of hulks in favour of transportation to Australia instead  the hulks were also damp and physically unhealthy with inadequate workshops  there's no such thing as a free lunch after all and lacking chapel facilities. Such was the life of a warship.

Delightful. The biography of a ship which is a newer way of addressing Naval history. Some line of battle ships saw more history than Captains or their crew. The Bellerophon (Billy Ruffian) fought in the glorious 1st of June, the Nile, Trafalgar and carried Napoleon away from France on his final trip into exile.

What a history, what a ship!! This book followed the ship from construction to dismantling.

The narrative was strained at times and it was a little wordy.

The final chapter was full of too many Dickens quotes. Just give us the historical info and your impressions. The quotes didn't really fit in the final chapter, they were forced.

And excellent book

Easy reading book about one of the great 'wooden walls', which enabled Britain to maintain its edge against France and Napoleon. HMS Bellerophon, a 74, fought in some of the most important battles of the period, including the Glorious 1st of June, the Nile, and Trafalgar. Under her captains she served faithfully until 1815, when she achieved fame as the ship to which Napoleon surrendered himself after Waterloo. He spent three weeks aboard her on the trip to England where he hoped to be allowed to settle since he could not be allowed to go to America.

This chapter is quite interesting as it reveals a world now at peace, but unsure what to do with the man who had so recently brought it to war again. Considering the fate of some defeated rulers in history, Napoleon got off easily in some ways, but he obviously didn't think so. As they say, he made 'hay' in reclaiming his reputation by writing his memoirs. Memoirs are useful, but they are rarely totally objective. His certainly are not, but his 'star' has continued to shine for over 200 years.

Unfortunately, 'Billy Ruffian's' (the name used by many of Bellerophon's seaman) life was not illustrious after 1815. The ship became a prison hulk for adults and eventually for boys. After a period of years, the need for economy and the fact that most convicts were sent to Australia, allowed the navy to have her broken up. A sad end to a fighting ship.

IWhile there are a lot of books about the age of fighting sail, there are surprisingly few books about individual ships - yes, HMS Victory and the American frigate Constitution have numerous individual volumes about them, but apart from what might be called "celebrity ships" with very long histories (both ships mentioned have survived to the present), the workaday warships have been pretty much mentioned in longer works and otherwise ignored. So David Cordingly's biography of HMS Bellerophon was certainly a refreshing addition to the literature when it appeared in 2003.

HMS Bellerophon was not a fast frigate like Constitution or a stately first rate like Victory. She was a third rate ship of war, a 74 gun two decker, colloquially referred to as a "seventy four," the class of ship that dominated the battle line during the wars with France, a type blessed with great versatility; nearly as fast as a frigate, drawing less water than a first rate, weatherly, of a size convenient to serve as a private ship or a flagship at need, and equipped with a powerful, balanced armament - usually 32 pound smoothbore guns on the lower deck, 18 pounders on the gun deck, and 9 pounders (later partly replaced by carronades) on the quarter- and foredecks. The Royal Navy built hundreds of them.

One such was HMS Bellerophon, ordered by the Royal Navy from a small private shipbuilding yard in 1782. The Admiralty ordered her to be built to a draft by a man who was already dead - Sir Thomas Slade, whose designs dominated the Royal Navy until after the battle of Trafalgar in 1805 - at the same time ordering a number of sister ships from other yards. Bellerophon was launched in 1786.

Cordingly's choice of ship for his "biography" was inspired. Many seventy fours had careers full of incident, but Bellerophon - known affectionately to her crew as the "Billy Ruffian" - was engaged in three major battles: the Glorious First of June (a battle that ought to be better known than it is), the Nile, and the Battle of Trafalgar. Her long fighting service was capped off in 1815 when Napoleon Bonaparte, defeated at Waterloo, surrendered himself to Captain Frederick Maitland on the quarterdeck of the Bellerophon.

Cordingly handles all the action well, and his research into the many fascinating characters who populate his story is thorough. The book is well illustrated with greyscale images in line with the text, a section of greyscale plates, and two sections of color plates.

A couple mild gripes. Like most of the fighting ships of her day, Bellerophon had a dreary end, becoming a prison hulk in 1816, which dismal career she followed until she was finally sold to the breakers in 1836. Cordingly's book features a couple of very strange false starts leading into this, for what reason I don't know, but an editor should have caught it. The second place he falls down, more seriously, is in skipping over the ship's periods spent in dock being repaired. Wooden ships required a lot of work. In fact, he missed a chance for a good explanation because in 1812 the ship was taken in hand and subjected to what the Royal Navy called "doubling." Too old to justify a complete rebuild but needed for further sea service, she was docked at Portsmouth and her hull completely encased with three inch oak planks, with iron knees and braces and possibly diagonal iron riders added internally. All of this makes a lot of sense when in 1815 it was decided that Bellerophon was in no condition to take Napoleon on his long trip to St Helena exile, and a newer seventy four, HMS Northumberland, did the honors. The reason that the "Billy Ruffian" was hulked becomes obvious once you know all of this but for reasons I can't understand, Cordingly glossed completely over that part of the ship's career.

Those are pretty mild flaws; this is an excellent book, and would there more along its lines. Highly recommended.

A bit dull at times

Excellent 'biography' of an British warship in the 'Age of Fighting Sail', one with a particularly distinguished lineage. The HMS Bellerophon was a '3rd-rate' (74 guns) ship-of-the-line built around the time of the French Revolution and destined to play a key part in the ensuing Napoleonic Wars. He takes the story from it's conception and birth in 1786 to it's final humiliating days serving as a prison hulk in the 1820s. I could have stood more on the actual construction of the ship, though it does go into some detail, with amazing statistics on how much wood (oak and elm) was required to build one of these and the incredible labor with no power tools! He also provides an interesting sociological survey of the ship's crew. This is necessarily a partial history of the naval wars with France with a singular focus where possible. Major actions in which the Bellerophon was an active combatant included the 'Glorious First of June' in 1794, the Battle of the Nile in 1798 and Trafalgar in 1805. But the vast majority of the ship's time was spent in much less glorious pursuits, mainly blockade duty. She became notable as the Royal Navy ship that carried Napoleon and his entourage from Rochefort back to England after Waterloo, which was perhaps the most interesting portion of the book as I had little knowledge of the details. The final chapter on her role (among others) as a prison hulk makes for some grim depictions.

This is an interesting and well researched text on the life of one of the many "Wooden Walls" of Britain that fended off Napoleon. The story of HMS Bellerophon is representative of the Royal Navy as a whole during this period. It is representative of many of the ships that protected Britain in the long struggle against Napoleon. The depictions of the naval battles (The Glorious First of June, The Nile, Trafalgar) are excellent, particularly in the description of the part Bellerophon played in them. The character sketches of the men who commanded and called her home, at least those who left some record, are fascinating. Bellerophon reached the height of her glory in 1815 as she and her captain was the representative of the British government to whom Napoleon surrendered. However, the laurels of glory are fleeting, as the mighty ship was humbled by its conversion into a prison hulk shortly after, an ignominious fate that would mark her later years. All in all, the story of this fighting ship follows the contours of human life from birth to the height of ability and glory and finally to the end, in Bellerophon's case in the breaker's yard in 1836.

This book is marred by a number of errors. First, it states the Adm Howe recaptured Gibraltar in 1782. Any historian of the War of Independence or the history of the 18th century Mediterranean should know that Gibraltar hasn't fallen to anyone since the British captured it in 1704. It also states, on several occasions, that Louis XVII took the French throne after Napoleon's abdication when it was Louis XVIII. Beyond this, I could recommend this book to any student of the Napoleonic period.

What a cool idea to do a biography of a ship. It makes sense, of course, because the ship was everywhere, even if the captains changed. It was made just before the war broke out, built along the famous lines of the Bellona, present at the Glorious first, at the Nile, at Trafalgar, and most famously it was the ship in which Napoleon surrendered to Captain Maitland and was brought to England.
For some reason it took me a while to finish, but then one can never spend too much time with Cordingly. I'm thinking of starting up a little fanclub.

The story of a ship at the heart of the naval wars against Napoleon, and the men who served on her.

David Cordingly gives us the complete history of the 74 gun British warship Bellerophon (her crew found her name difficult to pronounce) right from her design, the cutting down of the trees for her timbers, her birth on the Medway till her death in the breaker's yard over fifty years later. From 1782 to 1836 the Bellerophon took part in many of the most significant sea battles of the Napoleonic Wars including the battle of the Nile and Trafalgar. Her most famous achievment was though the trapping of Napoleon as he fled France after the Battle of Waterloo, the negotiations by her Captain for his surrender and his carriage to England.
This is a fascinating tale of a ship's Captains and her crews during one of the greatest periods of British seapower.