Billy Ruffian

This is the story of the Bellerophon - a ship of the line known to her crew as the Billy Ruffian - from her birth in a small shipyard on the river Medway in 1782, a few years before the French Revolution, to her death, after service as a prison hulk, in a breaker's yard a mile or so upstream fifty-four years later. In the intervening years, under five captains, she played a conspicuous part in three of the most famous of all sea battles: the Battle of the Glorious First of June (1974), the opening action against Revolutionary France; the Battle of the Nile (1798) that halted Napoleon's eastward expansion from Cairo; and the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), which gained Britain undisputed sea supremacy for 100 years. But her crowning glory came in 1815, six weeks after the Battle of Waterloo, when Napoleon, trapped in La Rochelle, surrendered to the captain of the ship that had dogged his steps for more than twenty years.