He recorded where each man was born, where his wife or parents lived, and whether they were married or single. He also listed their occupations before going to sea and this provides a vivid picture of the skills present in a man-of-war at any one time: the crew of the Bellerophon included barbers, basketmakers, brushmakers, black-smiths, buttonmakers, cabinet makers, carters, farmers, glaziers, grooms, hatters, millers, plumbers, poulterers, shoemakers, snuff-makers, tallow chandlers, watchmakers, weavers and wheelwrights.
Although this is primarily the story of one particular ship of the line it is also, to a lesser extent, the story of Napoleon. For fifteen years (until Wellington eventually demonstrated in the Peninsular Campaign that the French armies could be defeated) the British Navy was the only effective defence against the territorial ambitions of France and in particular Napoleon's plans to invade and conquer Britain. The movements of the Bellerophon and Britain's other warships were very often the direct result of the Admiralty's response to the threat posed by Napoleon and his armies. Although there were many reasons for Napoleon's downfall, notably his disastrous attempt to invade and conquer Russia, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that the Bellerophon played a significant role in thwarting his ambitions. As one of the ships which spent years blockading the French ports and naval bases she played her part in crippling France's trade and preventing her fleets putting to sea and supporting an invasion of Britain. At the Battle of the Nile she attacked the flagship which had taken Napoleon to Egypt. The subsequent destruction of the French fleet left Napoleon's armies stranded and he was forced to abandon his ambitious plans to conquer the East. As he later told Captain Maitland, 'If it had not been for you English, I should have been Emperor of the East; but wherever there is water to float a ship, we are sure to find you in our way.' Although Napoleon had decided to postpone his plans to invade Britain several weeks before the Battle of Trafalgar, the wholesale destruction of the Combined Fleet of France and Spain in that famous action, in which the Bellerophon played such a distinguished role, effectively put an end to any future plans of invasion. And finally, by blocking his path to the open sea off Rochefort in 1815, the Bellerophon prevented him from escaping to America as he had planned and ensured that he never again disrupted the peace of Europe.
ONE
Born of Oak
1782-6
The Bellerophon was born on the north bank of the River Medway at Frindsbury, near Rochester. Today the village of Frindsbury has merged into the sprawling collection of housing estates and shopping centres, factories, office blocks and car parks which compose the Medway towns. Only the church remains untouched, standing in a green oasis of chestnut trees and venerable gravestones on the high ground above the river. Down on the waterfront is an untidy jumble of warehouses, shipyards and the remnants of a once thriving cement industry. Hidden among the corrugated iron sheds is a concrete slipway. It was here, or very close to this spot, that the Bellerophon was built at the shipyard of Mr Edward Greaves.
In the 1780s the Frindsbury peninsula was an almost empty expanse of fields and low-lying marshland. There were a few houses in the vicinity of the church, and there was a windmill in the field above the shipyard but little else except for a few grazing cattle. Across the river from the shipyard the ancient city of Rochester huddled beneath the Norman castle and cathedral, the grey stone towers and spires providing distinctive landmarks for ships heading upstream from the Thames Estuary. A mile downstream, around the bend in the river, the redbrick buildings of Chatham dockyard hugged the waterfront, surrounded by windswept pastures and isolated farms. And to the east, beyond the royal dockyard, the river meandered through desolate marshes frequented only by seagulls, wading birds and the occasional fisherman.
The design of the Bellerophon was based on plans drawn up by Sir Thomas Slade, a remarkable man who was generally considered the finest ship designer of his day. One of his successors as Surveyor of the Navy described him as 'truly a great man in the line he trod, such an one I believe never went before him, and if I am not too partial, I may venture to say will hardly follow him.' A portrait of Slade shows a burly-faced man with a stolid expression; the face of a man who could be relied on to do a workmanlike job. In fact he had a genius for ship design and it seems likely that Anson, the celebrated circumnavigator and later First Lord of the Admiralty, had spotted his talent and had supported his appointment as Surveyor.
Slade had worked his way to the top the hard way. He was born in 1703 or 1704 and came from a shipbuilding family. In the 1740s he was overseeing the building of several naval ships in the private shipyard of John Barnard at Harwich. This was a job usually carried out by a dockyard foreman and gave no hint of the influence he was later to have on ship design. In 1747, during one of his many visits to the east coast, he married Hannah Moore. She came from the village of Nacton, near Ipswich, and was the daughter of a local sea captain. Nothing is known of their family life beyond the words which appear on Slade's gravestone in the churchyard of St Clement's, Ipswich. These note that 'In the most endearing scenes of private life, he was an affectionate husband, an indulgent Father, a steady Friend, and an honest man.'
By 1750 Slade was assistant master shipwright at Woolwich dock-yard, the first step on the ladder which would take him to the top of his profession. In that year he moved to Plymouth dockyard as master shipwright and this was followed by a series of rapid promotions as he moved from one royal dockyard to the next. In 1752 he was back at Woolwich as master shipwright and a year later moved to Chatham. By 1755 he was master shipwright at Deptford, a key post from which Surveyors of the Navy had been drawn in the past. In August of that year the then Surveyor, Sir Joseph Allin, fell ill. Within a few days the Admiralty ordered that Allin should be pensioned off, on the grounds that he was 'disordered in his senses and incapable of performing the duty of his office'. In his place they appointed Thomas Slade and William Bately as Joint Surveyors. Bately had been Assistant Surveyor of the Navy for six years and was to design some fine ships, but it was Slade who was to put his stamp on an era of British shipbuilding.
During the 1730s and 1740s the design of warships in Britain had gone through a bad patch. Captains complained that the ships of the 1745 establishment did not 'steer easy, nor sail so well, as was expected. More seriously it was pointed out that the ships heeled over so much in blowing weather that they were not able to open their lee gunports. The Admiralty and serving naval officers were acutely aware that many Spanish and French ships were superior to their British counterparts. Sir Joseph Allin had attempted to rectify the faults of the earlier British designs but he had no fresh ideas and the period of his tenure as Surveyor was one of stagnation as far as British ship design was concerned.
All this changed with the appointment of Slade and Bately. Within three weeks of taking up his new post Thomas Slade had produced a design for a ship called the Dublin which was to become the first of an astonishingly successful series of 74-gun ships. Unlike Fredrik af Chapman, the great Swedish naval architect of this period who brought an intellectual rigour to the beautiful ship designs in his famous treatise Architectura Navalis Mercatoria, Thomas Slade relied on the practical experience he had gained in the shipyards. His approach was both pragmatic and instinctive. He took the best from the French designs of his day and made them better. And he constantly searched for improvement. He produced no fewer than nine versions of the 74-gun ship, each building on the experience of the previous designs so that during his sixteen years as Surveyor of the Navy the 74-gun ship was brought to perfection and came to be regarded as the ideal warship. As one experienced observer noted, 'She will not shrink from an encounter with a First Rate ship on account of superior weight, nor abandon the chase of a frigate on account of swiftness. The union of these qualities has therefore, with justice, made the 74-gun ship the principle [sic] object of maritime attention, and given her so distinguished a preeminence in our line of battle.'