Billy Ruffian

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.'

In 1761 the Bellona, one of Slade's earlier designs for a 74, engaged in a single-ship action with the French 74-gun ship Courageux. There was a fierce gun battle but within thirty minutes the French ship was forced to surrender, although she was larger by 100 tons and had 150 more men than the Bellona. Slade's designs were to prove equally successful in the great fleet actions of the wars against France, notably in the three battles in which the Bellerophon took part. There were ten of Slade's ships at the battle of the Glorious First of June in 1794. No fewer than eight of the twelve British 74-gun ships which annihilated the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile were Slade designs. And at the Battle of Trafalgar, which took place more than thirty years after his death, seven of the ships were Slade designs, including the Victory of 100 guns, generally regarded as his masterpiece and arguably the most famous warship of all time. Of course it was often the morale and fighting qualities of the British officers and seamen which were responsible for the spectacular victories of the age of Nelson, rather than the design of the ships, but the fact was that Slade's ships were severely tested in a variety of conditions. They were the subject of comprehensive sailing reports sent in by captains, and again and again they proved their superiority. This explains why so many ships were built to Slade's designs and why it became recognised that a British ship could invariably beat a French ship in single-ship actions even though the French ship might be up to 50 per cent more powerful in terms of her guns.

It would make for a better story if we could say that on a certain day Sir Thomas Slade sat down at his drawing board and started work on his designs for the Bellerophon. He had his office in Crutched Friars, near the Tower of London, and we could picture him there, surrounded by ship models, with plans and sketch designs pinned up on the walls around him. But Slade had been dead for ten years when the Navy Board ordered the building of the Bellerophon. He had died in 1771 at the age of sixty-eight, leaving an impressive legacy of ship designs and a reputation for honesty and hard work. To quote from his gravestone again, 'He had constantly in view the improvement of the King's Yards, and the English Navy; which great end he steadily pursued with an unwearied application and spotless integrity.'

The Bellerophon was one of fourteen ships built to the design of the Arrogant which had been designed by Slade in 1758. Other ships in the same class included several which would play distinguished parts in forthcoming conflicts, notably the Goliath which led the British fleet into action at the Battle of the Nile, and the Elephant, Nelson's flagship at Copenhagen. Although the plans for the Bellerophon and the Arrogant have not survived there are a number of other plans of 74-gun ships bearing Slade's signature in the National Maritime Museum in London. Like all plans for naval ships of the period these are drawn to a 1:48 scale and show the four key aspects of the ship which the shipbuilders needed in order to fashion the oak and elm timbers into the shapes required. The first aspect was the side elevation or profile; the second was the plan view of one half of the ship, which was usually drawn underneath the profile view; the third and fourth aspects were drawn together as a composite plan, one half showing the cross-section of the ship viewed from the bow and the other showing the ship viewed from the stern.

It would have been the job of a draughtsman in the Surveyor's office to make an exact copy of the plans of the Arrogant by pricking through the master plan onto a sheet of paper below and then re-drawing it as accurately as possible. Sir John Henslow, the Surveyor who succeeded Slade and who so much admired him, would have checked the new plan, signed it, and then arranged for it to be placed in a specially designed box and delivered to Chatham dockyard. The senior officers at Chatham were responsible for supervising the building of any navy ships built at private yards on the River Medway. From Chatham the plans would have been passed on to Mr Edward Greaves at Frindsbury.

While Thomas Slade can be regarded as the father of the Bellerophon, the role of the mother, or at least the midwife, must belong to Edward Greaves because it was he who was responsible for bringing the ship into the world. Unfortunately we know very little about him apart from his correspondence with the Navy Board and the occasional mention of ships built by him which appear in various Admiralty documents. We do know that he was a shipbuilder of considerable experience because he already had a flourishing ship-yard on the Thames at Limehouse where he had built several ships for the navy. These were mostly small ships and he was evidently keen to build a ship of the line. It must have been with this in mind that he took on the lease of the shipyard at Frindsbury.

A contemporary picture of the shipyard gives the impression that it was no more than a few wooden sheds crouching uncertainly at the water's edge. However the yard was put up for auction in 1790, four years after the launch of the Bellerophon, and the advertisement which appeared in the Kentish Gazette suggests that it was unusually well set up for a private yard. We learn that the property was 'delightfully situated in the parish of Frindsbury', and 'In the shipbuilders yard there has lately been built ships of war of 74 guns, and other vessels and is as commodious as any private yard in the kingdom either for builders or timber merchants, with a good rope walk and every suitable convenience.' During the 1770s the yard had been owned by Henniker and Nicholson, and at least three naval warships had been built there. Sir John Henniker was a local grandee (he is commemorated by a lavish monument in Rochester Cathedral) and, although it was presumably Mr Nicholson who managed the yard, Sir John may well have ensured that it was provided with everything necessary for the construction of ships of all sizes.

In December 1781 Edward Greaves approached the Navy Board with a proposal to build a 64-gun ship at his yard on the Thames, and a 74-gun ship and a frigate at Frindsbury. He was turned down on all counts. The minutes of the Navy Board for 14 December are curt and to the point: 'Acquaint him we do not approve of building a ship of 64 guns at his Dock in the River nor of building a 74 gun ship and Frigate at Sir Jn. Hinnikers Yard opposite Rochester.'

The Navy Board had arranged for his building slipway at Limehouse to be surveyed and decided that nothing larger than a 44-gun ship could be built there; and they were concerned that the shipyard at Frindsbury was too close to the royal dockyard at Chatham. Merchant yards usually offered higher wages than those in the royal dockyards and they did not want Greaves poaching skilled workmen from Chatham. Greaves overcame the Navy Board's objections to Frindsbury by entering into an agreement 'not to employ any Artificers from the Kings Yard'. On 8 January 1782 the Navy Board agreed that 'Sir Jn Hinnikins Yard at Frinsbury is a proper place for building a 74 gun and 32 gun ship' and informed Greaves of their decision. For some reason Greaves did not reply immediately because on 16 January the Navy Board were pressing him to let them know whether he was prepared to go ahead with the building of the 74-gun ship at Rochester. He wrote back at once. His letter is hidden among dozens of dusty letters with names beginning with the letter G which are crammed into a cardboard box in the Public Record Office. It is a key document in the life story of the Bellerophon.

Hon.d Sirs

I return you thanks for the offer you are pleas'd to make of a 74 Gun Ship to Build near Rochester & am willing to undertake to Build Her on the same Terms as the River Thames for Ships of a similar contract as that you mean to favour me with. Also a 32 Gun Frigate to Launch in two Years if it meets your approbation. I remains Sirs

Your much obliged & Obedient honble Servant

Edwd Greaves

Jan. 18. 1782

PS. Please to favour me with the Payments on the 36 Gun Frigate I have taken the same manner as 44 Gun Ships.

A month later, on 19 February 1782, Greaves put his signature to the formal contract for the building of the ship. The original contract still exists and is an impressive document. It consists of twenty-four pages of closely printed text with measurements and particular details added in pen and ink. It covers every single aspect of the construction of the ship's hull and internal fittings from the stem to the sternpost. In addition to specifying the exact size of the keel, main frames, decks, gunports and so on, it also instructs the shipbuilder to provide removable cabins for the officers with bed places and lockers; cabins and stores for the boatswain and carpenter; fish and bread rooms, and a store for spirituous liquor. Ladders, gratings, pump cisterns, a fire hearth and hammock racks are specified, as are the decorative details at the stern of the ship. Outside the captain's great cabin at the stern, for instance, there is to be 'a handsome walk or balcony, with ballisters as shall be directed by the Officer or Overseer inspecting the said works; and the whole stern finished agreeable to ships of her class built in His Majesty's Yards.'

In April 1782 we learn from the minutes of the Surveyor's Office that the ship is to be called 'Bellerophone'. Who chose the name, and why were so many ships named after Greek and Roman gods and heroes? It is said that Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had a copy of Lemprière's classical dictionary on his desk and simply picked a name from this. The dictionary gives a lengthy account of the story of Bellerophon, who was the handsome son of the King of Ephyre. He was wrongly accused of making love to the wife of King Argos and was sent to kill the three-headed monster Chimaera in the expectation that he would die in the attempt. However, with the help of the goddess Minerva and the winged horse Pegasus, he killed the monster, conquered the Amazons, and returned to marry the daughter of the King of Lycia. The problem with naming a ship after this particular hero was that, while naval officers educated in the Classics might have no difficulty in pronouncing Bellerophon correctly, the ordinary sailors were totally baffled by it and came up with various alternative names. 'Billy Ruffian' or 'Billy Ruff'n' seem to have been the most commonly used names, but a Rowlandson cartoon of 1810 refers to the ship as 'Belly Rough One', and Captain Marryat, who was serving in the navy while the Bellerophon was in commission, has a passage in his novel Poor Jack in which an old seaman calls the ship 'the Bellyruffron'.

On 26 April Mr Greaves wrote to the Navy Board to tell them that he had got in a large quantity of timber at Frindsbury for building the Bellerophon and the 32-gun frigate and he wanted it inspected so that he could obtain his first payments for building the two ships. The Navy Board ordered the officers at Chatham to inspect the timber and two months later Greaves was given a certificate for his first bill.

Apart from the keel, the hull of the Bellerophon was almost entirely built of oak, as were all British ships of the line at this period. Indeed oak was the preferred building material for the warships of all the maritime countries of the western world. This was because oak was hard and tough and far more resistant to rot than other woods. The presence of tannic acid contributed to its durability, although in the long term this did not prevent the ravages of the teredo worm, particularly in ships which spent time in tropical waters. Of the many varieties of oak, the tree most favoured by British shipbuilders was the English oak, or quercus robur, a species which had been established in Britain for thousands of years. It was the dominant tree in the woodlands and hedgerows of southern England and acquired a special significance through its long association with the ships of the Royal Navy. The patriotic song 'Heart of oak are our ships, Jolly tars are our men' was only one of many which linked the tree with the fortunes of the country.

Warships required vast numbers of oak trees for their contruction. It was usual to measure the quantities of wood used for shipbuilding in terms of loads'. A load consisted of 50 cubic feet of wood, roughly the equivalent of a single large tree, which was as much as could be loaded onto a cart. A 74-gun ship used between 3,000 and 3,700 loads for the building of her hull, which means that more than 3,000 oak trees were felled for the creation of the Bellerophon. Apart from the sheer quantity involved there were further considerations. Oaks for shipbuilding must be between 80 and 120 years old. Trees younger than this would not be large enough for the great pieces of timber required for the construction of a ship of the line. Older trees were subject to decay. It was also essential that the trees be within easy reach of a waterway because it was difficult, if not impossible, to transport a heavy and unwieldy tree trunk for any distance on an eighteenth-century road in the days before tarmac was introduced. In England it was reckoned that any tree more than 40 miles from water transport was of no use for the navy. In France this was such an important consideration that no one was allowed to fell an oak tree within 15 leagues of the sea or 6 leagues of any navigable river without first giving six months notice to the Council of State or the Grand Master of Forests and Waterways.

So how did Mr Greaves get the trees he needed to build the Bellerophon? Long before he secured the contract from the Navy Board, the trees would have been selected by government officials. We can imagine these men riding on horseback across the fields and along the lanes of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire, scouring the countryside for suitable oaks. They would have had the weatherbeaten faces of farmers and gardeners, and they were expert at assessing the age and condition of the trees which they inspected. They visited the great estates of noble landlords, they rode across farmland, and they searched the woods and the few remaining forests of southern England. Forest and woodland oaks tended to grow tall and straight as they reached upwards to the light and these provided the straight timbers required for sternposts and planking. But what the government men were particularly looking for were the isolated trees growing in fields and hedgerows. These were a very different shape from forest trees. They had room to spread their branches sideways and, buffeted by wind and weather, they developed the curves which yielded the valuable 'compass timber' needed for the frames or ribs of a ship, and for the knees which supported and reinforced deck beams.

Having selected a suitable tree, the men stamped a broad arrow on the tree trunk to indicate that it was now government property. The trees were felled at the end of autumn or in early winter when the leaves had dropped and the sap was no longer rising, and before the heavy frosts came along. Timber merchants who had secured contracts from the Navy Board sent out tree-fellers with teams of horses to cut down and haul away the selected trees. It was heavy and demanding work. The axes swung by the tree-fellers needed constant sharpening because the oak was so dense and hard, and the tree must be felled without breaking the valuable curved and forked branches. When the tree had crashed down, the smaller branches were lopped off and the great trunk was either slung between wheels or hauled onto a sturdy timber cart. Several pairs of cart-horses then dragged the load to the nearest water. The River Medway was navigable as far as Tonbridge, and timber felled in the surrounding area was floated downstream on the river or one of its tributaries for the first part of the journey. At Prentice's Wharf in Maidstone the trunks were loaded onto massive wooden barges with the aid of a primitive crane. The barges were flat-bottomed, with slab sides, and could carry four or five trees. They could be towed or rowed downstream with the current, or sailed with a single large square sail. From Maidstone the timber barges followed the swinging curves of the Medway through the Kentish fields to Rochester. There they passed under the arches of the medieval stone bridge and out into the wide expanse of river beyond where they anchored off Mr Greaves's shipyard until high tide when they were brought alongside the wharf and unloaded.

Meanwhile the yard's shipwrights had been busy working on Sir Thomas Slade's plans on the floor of the mould loft. Since the plans were drawn to the scale of 1:48 it was necessary to enlarge the frames shown on the drawing to full size. The mould loft was in a large barn-like building and had a smooth floor on which the shapes of the timbers to be used in the ship's construction were drawn in chalk. From these chalked patterns the men made up templates or moulds of thin wood battens which enabled them to transfer Slade's designs to the oak timbers which were now piling up in the yard outside.

The mould loft was the womb in which the form of the ship was created but the birthplace was the slipway down by the water's edge. There were two slipways, or slips as they were called, at Greaves's yard. The Bellerophon was built on one of these and on the other was built the Meleager, the 32-gun frigate which had been ordered at the same time as the Bellerophon. The slip was a ramp which sloped down to the river at a gentle angle of about 4 degrees. By long experience this was reckoned to be steep enough to allow the finished hull of the ship to slide slowly into the water when the time came for her launch. A line of wooden blocks was laid along the centre of the slip and on these rested the massive elm timbers which formed the keel of the ship. Elm was preferred over oak for keels because it was more readily available in long, straight lengths, and because elm, provided it was kept submerged, was even more resistant to rot than oak. A line of scaffold poles was erected on each side of the slip; as the ship grew upwards the poles provided supports for working platforms for the shipwrights. At each end of the slip were sheerlegs which acted as cranes to raise into place the timbers for the stem and sternposts, and the frames which formed the ribs of the ship.

With two ships on the go, the yard was a bustle of activity from dawn to dusk. Building a ship was highly skilled work but it was also labour intensive and physically strenuous. Apart from the teams of horses used to drag timber to and fro, every job in the yard was carried out by hand, just as it would be later when the ship put to sea. As on a sailing ship the only mechanical aids were the various forms of block and tackle, and the windlass or capstan. Shipwrights' tools were few and simple and had scarcely changed for centuries. The principal tools were the axe, the adze, the auger for drilling holes, and the saw. The larger timbers were sawn into shape by men working in sawpits, one man working the saw from above and the other heaving it down again from the bottom of the pit. Once the rough shapes had been sawn out, skilled shipwrights got to work with adzes, cutting and smoothing each piece of oak to its final shape. The sweet smell of sawn wood, sawdust and fresh oak chippings filled every corner of the yard, mingling with the coarser smells of horse manure and tar and the smoke from the blacksmiths' workshops. The families living in the neighbourhood, and the men working on the boats out on the river, became accustomed to the constant banging and thudding of iron tools, and the shouts and curses of the men and the boy apprentices as they slowly converted the raw oak branches and tree trunks into finely curved frames, futtocks, knees, stemposts, sternposts and neat piles of planks.

By the end of the first year the keel was in place and a line of curved frames marked the shape which the ship was to take. From a distance she rose into the air like the skeleton of a huge animal stranded on her back. And then, as the planks were laid, first on the inside of the frames and then along the outside, the skeleton became a ship. Every plank had to be fastened in place with trenails (literally 'tree-nails' but pronounced 'trunnels'). These were wooden pegs like dowel rods. They were made of oak and were hammered into the holes drilled with the auger. They were better than iron nails because they did not rust, swelled when wet to a watertight fit and would not damage the shipwright's tools when the final smoothing and shaping of the planks took place.

No documents have survived to indicate how many men were employed by Edward Greaves, but the surviving records of the royal dockyards suggest that there must have been two or three hundred men at work in the shipyard during the building of the Bellerophon and the Meleager. When the 58-gun ship Sunderland was in the early stages of construction at Portsmouth dockyard in the 1740s no fewer than 186 shipwrights and twenty joiners were working on the ship during the course of one week. At a later stage the shipwrights would have been joined by caulkers whose job it was to make the outer planks and the decks watertight. This was done by caulking the seams or spaces between the planks with unravelled strands of old rope called oakum. The oakum was hammered into the seams and then sealed with hot pitch to prevent it from rotting. Alongside the men working in wood were the blacksmiths who had to convert crude pieces of iron into dozens of specialised fittings ranging from stern lanterns, stanchions and rails to the hinges for gunports and cabin doors.

According to Edward Greaves' agreement with the Navy Board, the hull of the Bellerophon should have been completed in twenty-four months from the signing of the contract, which meant that she should have been ready to launch in April 1784. She was not ready that summer, nor the following summer, and was still on the slip in October 1786, four and a half years after her keel had been laid down. Since it was certainly possible to build a 74-gun ship in two years (indeed some were built in eighteen months) there must have been a good reason for the delay. We can find the explanation hidden in the contract for the ship. Towards the end of the document, before the penalty clauses and the details of the stage payments, there is a hand-written note concerning the time of launching which says that 'in case the said Commissioners think proper that the said ship should stand to season it is agreed that whatever time she shall so stand to season should be allowed the Contractor . . .'

For years the navy had experienced problems with ships built of unseasoned timber. Such ships were likely to succumb to rot much more rapidly than ships built of timber which had been allowed to weather and dry out in the yard for two or three years. In the royal dockyards large quantities of oak were therefore stored out in the open or under cover in special seasoning sheds and regulations were introduced which laid down that ships under construction must be allowed to season in frame: that is to say, the partially completed hull would stand on the slip for two or three years before being launched. A private shipyard could not always afford to buy in large quantities of expensive timber and then allow it to remain unused for two or three years while it was seasoning. It is clear that the officers from Chatham dockyard who were responsible for checking on the progress of the Bellerophon ordered Greaves to delay the launch for two years to give the ship's timbers time to dry out. The Admiralty would have had no problem with this because there was no longer such an urgent need for warships. In February 1783 the Peace of Paris had been signed, bringing to an end the war with Britain's former colonies in America.

The war had begun with the revolt of some of the colonists in Massachusetts in 1775 and had developed into the bitter and hard-fought struggle which the British call the American War of Independence and which is usually referred to as the American Revolution on the other side of the Atlantic. France and Spain saw the war as a golden opportunity to revenge themselves for the setbacks of the Seven Years War of 1756-1763 during which France had lost all Canada, as well as several West Indian islands, to Britain. In 1778 France joined on the side of the Americans and declared war on Britain. Spain followed in 177.9 and laid siege to Gibraltar. The result was that Britain's navy was stretched to the limit: ships were needed on the east coast of America to provide support for the British troops fighting General Washington's forces; ships were needed in the West Indies to combat French attacks on St Lucia, Grenada and St Kitts; a fleet was sent to relieve Gibraltar; and a fleet was needed in the English Channel to guard against a threatened invasion.

A series of military disasters in America culminated in the surrender at Yorktown of a British army commanded by General Cornwallis. Britain abandoned her rule over the American colonies and in November 1782 she signed a peace treaty with a new nation, the United States of America. Three months later the Peace of Paris was signed at Versailles which brought an end to the war with France and Spain. For the next ten years the countries of western Europe remained in a state of uneasy truce. The Gentleman s Magazine summed up the situation in October 1786: 'Peace and war are suspended in equal balance, and it is not possible at present to determine on which side the scale will turn. The continental powers are busied in arranging their armies to be in readiness for war; and the maritime powers in increasing their marine.'

It was during this temporary suspension of hostilities between Britain and France that the Bellerophon was finally launched.