Billy Ruffian

TWO A Stormy Launch 1786

As with so many events in British history, the weather played a significant part in the launch of the Bellerophon. She should have been completed and in the water several weeks before the autumnal gales of 1786. In June of that year the Kentish Gazette announced that the ship would be launched in August. In September the newspaper contained a letter from Rochester dated 13 September which noted that, 'The Bellerophon, a beautiful ship of 74 guns, now building at Frinsbury for the use of the government, will be launched the 23 of this month.' For some reason she was not launched on the 23rd and it was arranged that she should be launched two weeks later, early in the afternoon of Saturday 1 October. High water that day at Chatham was at 12.05.

Commissioner Proby was invited to launch the new warship. He was a former naval captain and had been the Resident Commissioner of Chatham dockyard for the past fifteen years. Also invited to the launching ceremony were the Bishop of Rochester, the mayors of the three Medway towns and representatives of the Admiralty and Navy Board. An elaborate dinner was ordered from the landlord of the Crown Inn which was situated across the river from the shipyard and had rooms overlooking Rochester Bridge.

The weather had been blustery during September but in the first week of October southern England was hit by violent storms. On 5 October the wind blew hard from the north-west, uprooting trees and taking slates off rooftops. The next day the wind veered round to the south-west and on 7 October gale-force winds swept up the English Channel. At Shoreham a Danish timber ship was driven onto the beach and dashed into pieces in the surf with the loss of all her crew. A small house alongside the fish market at Brighton was washed into the sea by breaking waves, and the piers at Newhaven were so badly damaged that ships had difficulty getting in and out of the harbour. Sweeping across Kent and the Medway valley, the wind brought down fruit trees and hop poles, and nearly blew away a field of recently cut radishes. Several houses in eastern Kent lost their roofs and the top of the church spire of Minster in the Isle of Thanet was blown to the ground.

The Bellerophon was in a vulnerable position on the low-lying land of the Frindsbury peninsula. From the north she was partly sheltered by the chalk escarpment on which the church stood, but her massive hull was fully exposed to winds from the south and west. She was safe enough during her building because she was firmly supported by timber shores around her hull and her elm keel rested solidly on the wooden blocks of the slip. But during the summer of 1786 a launching cradle had been constructed to hold her upright as she moved towards the water; the slipway itself had been heavily greased with tallow, and many of the supporting shores had been removed. A drawing of the ship which was made shortly before her launch shows her towering over the surrounding buildings and sheds of the shipyard. She is depicted with huge flags flying from temporary flag staffs above her newly completed hull: the red ensign flies at her stern, a small union flag at her bows; the Admiralty flag, the royal standard, and a large union flag fly from poles erected where her masts will be stepped after her launch. It was customary for these flags to be flown whenever a warship was launched in Britain to signify that the vessel was one of the King's ships and was under the immediate control of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. The flags had been made in the flag loft at Chatham and brought across from the dockyard.

As the wind howled down the Medway valley the flags strained at the poles, tugging like sails and causing the hull to shiver on her cradle. The wind continued to increase during the morning of Saturday 7 October and the Bellerophon began to rock dangerously as if anxious to be on her way. Some of the shores supporting her hull started to shift and then to collapse. After hurried consultations with his shipwrights Mr Nicholson decided that he had no alternative but to launch her prematurely. There was no time for speeches or ceremonial. He grabbed the bottle of port which Commissioner Proby was to have broken across the ship's bows, and hurled it at the ship. Whether he shouted above the wind 'Success to his Majesty's ship the Bellerophon we do not know. There were only the shipyard workers there to hear him and they were more concerned about seeing the result of their labours safely in the water than about recording the event.

In those days ship launches, like fairs and public executions, always attracted large crowds. The families and friends of all the men and boys concerned in the building of the ship came along. So did the local gentry and their servants. Contemporary paintings of ship launches on the Thames show the riverbanks lined with spectators, and dozens of yachts, barges, rowing boats and skiffs out on the river where their passengers and crews could get a grandstand view of the proceedings. A band would be hired for the occasion to play patriotic and martial tunes, and as the ship hit the water everyone cheered and waved and threw their hats in the air. But when Commissioner Proby, the Bishop of Rochester, the mayors and the sightseers from Rochester and the surrounding villages arrived that afternoon they found the Bellerophon already afloat. She was pulling at her anchor cables as the outgoing tide swept past her hull, the surface of the water whipped into short, steep waves by the fierce winds. She was little more than a bare hull with no masts and no rigging and she floated too high in the water because she had yet to be weighed down with guns, barrels of water, casks of provisions and some 300 tons of iron and shingle ballast. But although the weather had disrupted the proceedings the launch was considered a success. Commissioner Proby despatched a letter to the Admiralty to inform their lordships that 'His Majesty's Ship Bellerophon was safely launched from Mr Graves's Yard at Friendsbury this day,' and the following day the Rochester correspondent sent a report to the Kentish Gazette:

Yesterday about four minutes after twelve o'clock, the Bellerophon, of 74 guns, was launched from Messrs Graves and Nicholson's Yard at Frinsbury, near this city. The launch was very fine, but very few people were present on account of its being sooner than expected. Messrs Graves and Nicholson on that day gave an elegant dinner to many of the principal gentlemen of the Three Towns, &c, at the Crown Inn, in this city. The band of musick, belonging to the Chatham Marines, were engaged on the occasion.

In London the gales had blown down a house in Castle Street, damaged the roofs and chimneys of waterfront houses in Westminster, and sunk several small craft on the Thames but otherwise life went on much as usual. King George III and Queen Adelaide went to see the celebrated actress Sarah Siddons performing in James Thomson's play The Tragedy of Tancred and Sigismunda at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. They were accompanied by the Princess Royal, Princess Augusta and by Fanny Burney the young writer whose first novel Evelina had been highly praised and who had recently been appointed a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Mrs Siddons performed to a brilliant and crowded house and, according to The Times, 'added laurels to her fame . . . every step she takes, every word she speaks, and every cast of countenance is chaste and interesting to the auditor.'

From The Times we also learn that Sir Joshua Reynolds was putting the finishing touches to a portrait of Lady Cadogan. John Singleton Copley was working on a vast painting of the siege of Gibraltar: to help him visualise the scene he had a model made of the fortress at Gibraltar and all the gunboats and ships' gear that were used in the action. Another fashionable artist, George Romney, had just completed a fine portrait of Mrs Warren which it was believed would greatly enhance his reputation. The previous year he had devoted much of his time to painting the ravishingly beautiful Emma Hart, soon to be better known as Lady Hamilton. Emma was now twenty-one and had recently arrived in Naples where she was staying in the elegant home of Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador. Her previous lover, Charles Greville, had wished to marry an heiress and had sold her to his uncle, Sir William, for the price of the payment of his debts. Emma thought she had come to Naples with her mother for a holiday and was outraged when she learned of the arrangement. However she felt she had no option but to go along with the situation. She learnt Italian, took music lessons and singing lessons, and soon became a celebrated figure in Naples society, famous for her beauty and her theatrical performances. A few years later she married Sir William.

Meanwhile the man who would become Emma Hamilton's most famous lover was in the West Indies. Nelson was a 28-year-old captain in October 1786. He was living alone in the senior officer's house at English Harbour in Antigua while his ship HMS. Boreas was being refitted in the dockyard. He complained of the mosquitoes which ate him alive during the day and kept him awake at night. A few months earlier he had met Frances Nisbet on the West Indian island of Nevis and fallen in love with her. Frances, or Fanny as she was always called, was the daughter of the senior judge on the island and her uncle was the President of the Council. In 1779 she had married Josiah Nisbet, a doctor, and moved to England where they had a son. In 1781 Nisbet died and Fanny had returned to Nevis with her son and become her uncle's hostess. When Nelson met her she was an attractive and accomplished 27-year-old woman. Nelson's naval duties kept them apart for months at a time so he resorted to writing her passionate letters filled with lively descriptions of his life and his feelings. 'Separated from my dearest what pleasure can I feel? None! Be assured my happiness is centred with thee and where thou art not, there I am not happy.' And of English Harbour he wrote, 'My good Fanny, Most sincerely do I regret that I am not safe moored by thee instead of being in this vile place.'

On another island a young artillery officer had recently returned home on leave. Napoleon Bonaparte had spent a year attending the military academy in Paris. He had completed the course in a year (most of his fellow cadets took two or three years) and received his commission as a second lieutenant at the age of sixteen. In January 1786 he joined his regiment which was stationed in the south of France at Valence on the River Rhône. There his days were spent on army exercises, gun drill and lectures on ballistics, trajectories and fire power. His evenings were spent reading. He devoured a variety of books, ranging from Plato's Republic and Buffon's Natural History to historical novels and a book entitled The Art of Judging Character from Men's Faces. He recorded his observations on his reading at this time in a notebook. From this we learn that the book which interested him most was a French translation of A New and Impartial History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Signing of Preliminaries of Peace, 1762, by John Barrow. The British nation, which was later to prove his most steadfast enemy, already held a peculiar fascination for him.

In September 1786 Napoleon left his regiment and went home to the island of Corsica where he had been born and brought up. The family home was situated in a narrow street in Ajaccio, the capital of the island. It was a big house, as befitted his parents who were both from ancient and noble families. His father, Carlo Bonaparte, had been a lawyer and administrator but had died in 1785, leaving his wife Letizia with eight young children to look after. Napoleon, now aged seventeen, was the only one of them with a profession and a salary. A profile drawing made of him around this time shows a thoughtful youth with long, straight hair, a strong aquiline nose and firm mouth and chin. Although short in stature he was generally considered handsome and had a confidence and an unflinching gaze which made a lasting impression on those who met him. A lady who met him in Paris a few years later described him as 'Very poor and as proud as a Scot. . . You would never have guessed him to be a soldier; there was nothing dashing about him, no swagger, no bluster, nothing rough.' When Fanny Burney saw him in 1802 she was impressed by the plainness of his dress and thought he had Tar more the air of a student than a warrior'.

It would be ten years before Nelson and Napoleon played any part in the life of the Bellerophon. Meanwhile there were two government departments back in London which were instrumental in determining the movements of the ship from the moment the order was placed for her building until the day that she was decommissioned. These departments were the Board of Admiralty and the Navy Board which were responsible for the organisation and management of the navy. Every year Parliament voted sums of money for the maintenance of the ships and dockyards, for the building of new ships, and for the wages of seamen. The government of the day, and in particular the prime minister and the Cabinet, decided naval strategy and policy but it was up to the Admiralty to carry out the decisions and to allocate the money voted by Parliament.

The Admiralty office was an inconspicuous building in Whitehall beside the Horse Guards. It was set around a small, gloomy court-yard and shielded from the clamour of Whitehall by an elegant screen wall designed by Robert Adam. In the high-ceilinged board room with its Grinling Gibbons carvings, its rolled-up maps on the walls, and its wind indicator linked to a weather vane on the roof, their lordships decided on the movements of fleets, and the appointment and promotion of naval officers. Although the Admiralty Board managed an operation involving hundreds of ships, thousands of men, and naval bases around the world, it was a surprisingly small department. Sitting on the board were six or seven Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, three or four of whom were usually senior naval officers. They were assisted by the Secretary, a civil servant who occupied a key position in the department. He read all the incoming correspondence, decided which letters should be referred to their lordships, and answered the correspondence on their behalf. From 1763 to 1795 the Secretary was Philip Stephens and it was to him, or to his successor Sir Evan Nepean, that the captains of the Bellerophon addressed their letters when reporting the arrival of their ship in port, putting in a request for leave, or recommending an officer for promotion. Behind the scenes in the Admiralty office were some thirty staff which included administrators, clerks, messengers, porters and "1 necessary woman".

The board was headed by the First Lord of the Admiralty who was a member of the Cabinet and was sometimes a senior admiral and sometimes a civilian politician. The most astute and effective civilian First Lord in recent times had been Lord Sandwich, a large, shambling man of great charm who had supported Captain Cook's voyages of exploration, reorganised the dockyards and ensured that the navy recovered from the disasters of the war with America. He had retired in 1782 and had been succeeded briefly by Admiral Keppel and then by Admiral Howe. Howe was a formidable and much-respected admiral but he was more at home on the quarterdeck of a warship than in the corridors of power in Westminster. He had less influence with William Pitt, the Prime Minister, than Charles Middleton who was the Controller of the Navy and the man in charge of the Navy Board.

The Navy Board was answerable to the Board of Admiralty but was responsible for most of the day-to-day business of running the navy, including the maintenance of the ships and buildings, the administration of the dockyards, and the appointment of warrant officers (masters, surgeons, pursers, boatswains, carpenters and cooks). It also supervised the Victualling Board, and the Sick and Hurt Board, and it made agreements with civil contractors for the building of ships. It was the Navy Board which carried on all the correspondence with Edward Greaves, drew up the contract for the building of the Bellerophon, and decided on the amount and manner of the payments for the ship, and the date by which the construction must be completed.

When the Bellerophon was launched in 1786 the Navy Board was still situated in Seething Lane behind the Tower of London but in 1789 the whole department moved to Somerset House in the Strand. There, in the magnificent new building designed by Sir William Chambers, the Navy Board operated for the next fifty years. The offices overlooked the Thames and were conveniently close to the Admiralty office in Whitehall. Much of the credit for the strength of the British Navy at this time must go to Middleton, who was Controller of the Navy from 1778 to 1792. He had been appointed by Lord Sandwich and proved to be an outstanding administrator. He was priggish and narrow-minded with an arrogant belief in his own abilities and a contempt for the abilities of those around him, including the various First Lords he served under. He was, however, a master of detail and capable of getting through a mountain of work each day. As one of his clerks observed, 'The Comptroller is the most indefatigable and able of any in my time. The load of business he gets through, at the Treasury, at the Admiralty and at his own house is astonishing . . .'

Next in importance to Middleton on the Navy Board were the two Surveyors of the Navy, who were responsible for ship design and building. (Sir Thomas Slade would have attended the meetings of the board in the 1760s.) Other members included the commissioners of the royal dockyards, and the Clerk of the Acts who acted as secretary to the board. The minutes of the meetings of the board and the letters addressed to the commissioners can be seen today in the Public Record Office and they make awesome reading. Middleton himself described the correspondence as 'very voluminous, and the business, from its variety, inexpressibly intricate.' Day after day, with scarcely a pause for Christmas, the board made decisions on every naval matter imaginable: on a given date this might include the building of a 98-gun ship at Woolwich, the construction of a storehouse in the dockyard at Antigua, the despatch of 2,000 hammocks from Deptford to Plymouth, the appointment of a ship's cook to a frigate, and sending a rat-catcher to destroy the rats infesting the ships at Chatham.

In an age when every letter and every order had to be hand-written and then delivered by a messenger on foot, on horseback, or by a sailing vessel for an overseas destination, communications were inevitably slow and unreliable. Moreover the sheer volume of work which faced the members of the Admiralty Board and the Navy Board meant that hasty decisions were often made, and important matters were sometimes overlooked or passed on the nod. And not all Board members were as able or as conscientious as Middleton, who observed that, 'Some members were overloaded with business, while others came and went as best suited their conveniency; and it fell of course to my share to bring things to some conclusion out of this undigested heap, before the day ended, be it right or wrong.' And yet in spite of the difficulty of communications, the ignorance, incompetence and lax attitudes of some Board members, and the inevitable instances of bribery, corruption and nepotism, the system worked remarkably well. It would be tested to its limit during the next thirty years and would prove more than equal to the challenge.