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Last week I finished reading David Cordingly's Billy Ruffian. It's an excellent book of course and I know a lot of my flist have read it long since. Did anyone else cry at the end? I found the final chapter, covering the latter years that Bellerophon served as a prison hulk and describing how she was finally sold off and broken up in 1836, incredibly moving. To say nothing of the epilogue recounting the fate of the men whose lives were irrevocably intertwined with hers. It's easy to understand why the Navy were, and indeed still are, so unsentimental about their decommissioned vessels, but I still find it incredibly sad that these famous ships which had seen such long standing service were broken up with barely a second thought.
HMS Bellerophon by Thomas Luny
The Indefatigable was not such a long lived ship as the Bellerophon. Although she was launched as a 64 in August 1784 she was not commissioned until 1794 when she was razeed to a 44 gun frigate under the command of Sir Edward Pellew. Pellew of course is the Indefatigable's most famous captain but subsequent captains also had notable success with her and she seems to have been regarded as a lucky ship throughout her life. Like many fighting ships the Indefatigable was paid off at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and she was broken up at Sheerness in August of the following year. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nodbear will tell you, August 1816 also happens to be the last time that Admiral Lord Exmouth went to sea, to lead a combined British and Dutch fleet in the Bombardment of Algiers. I don't know why the Indefatigable wasn't hulked when she was decommissioned but I wonder if the process of razeeing had stressed her hull to such an extent that she was no longer serviceable. I would love to know if anything of her survived, some of her timbers perhaps or fragments of her fittings or ornaments. One thing I am very glad of is that she was never pressed into service as a prison hulk. That would have been too much to bear.
Indefatigable Hove To by Derek Gardner
Cordingly, D., (2003), Billy Ruffian: The Bellerophon and the Downfall of Napoleon. The biography of a ship of the line, 1782 - 1836., Bloomsbury, London.
HMS Bellerophon by Thomas Luny
The Indefatigable was not such a long lived ship as the Bellerophon. Although she was launched as a 64 in August 1784 she was not commissioned until 1794 when she was razeed to a 44 gun frigate under the command of Sir Edward Pellew. Pellew of course is the Indefatigable's most famous captain but subsequent captains also had notable success with her and she seems to have been regarded as a lucky ship throughout her life. Like many fighting ships the Indefatigable was paid off at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and she was broken up at Sheerness in August of the following year. As
nodbear will tell you, August 1816 also happens to be the last time that Admiral Lord Exmouth went to sea, to lead a combined British and Dutch fleet in the Bombardment of Algiers. I don't know why the Indefatigable wasn't hulked when she was decommissioned but I wonder if the process of razeeing had stressed her hull to such an extent that she was no longer serviceable. I would love to know if anything of her survived, some of her timbers perhaps or fragments of her fittings or ornaments. One thing I am very glad of is that she was never pressed into service as a prison hulk. That would have been too much to bear. Indefatigable Hove To by Derek Gardner
Cordingly, D., (2003), Billy Ruffian: The Bellerophon and the Downfall of Napoleon. The biography of a ship of the line, 1782 - 1836., Bloomsbury, London.
