Napoleon cake

For other ships with the same name, see HMS Bellerophon. Oil painting of a three-masted sailing ship seen from side against a background of cliffs, with many small boats filled with people in the foreground. HMS Bellerophon, known to sailors as napoleon cake “Billy Ruffian”, was a ship of the line of the Royal Navy. A third-rate of 74 guns, she was launched in 1786.

Bellerophon returned to European waters with the resumption of the wars with France, joining a fleet under Vice-Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood blockading Cadiz. The reinforced fleet, by then commanded by Horatio Nelson, engaged the combined Franco-Spanish fleet when it emerged from port. She was paid off and converted to a prison ship in 1815, and was renamed Captivity in 1824 to free the name for another ship. Bellerophon was ordered from the commercial shipbuilder Edward Greaves and Company, of Frindsbury in Kent, on 11 January 1782 to a modified design originally developed by Surveyor of the Navy Sir Thomas Slade. This armament consisted of twenty-eight 32-pounder guns on her lower gundeck, twenty-eight 18-pounder guns on the upper gundeck, fourteen 9-pounder guns on the quarterdeck and four 9-pounder guns on the forecastle. The ship was named Bellerophon, a decision that had been arrived at by at least April 1782, when it was entered into the minutes of the Surveyor’s Office. Drawing of a river with a rowing boat in the foreground and the hull of a sailing ship flying flags on the far bank.

Small houses and buildings visible in the background. By the time Bellerophon was launched, there was no pressing need for new warships. The signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 brought the American War of Independence to an end while Bellerophon was still under construction. Laid up at Chatham during the years of peace, Bellerophon was not commissioned until July 1790, when the crisis known as the Spanish Armament broke out. As war with Spain threatened, warships lying in ordinary began to be commissioned and fitted for sea. Captain Thomas Pasley, arrived on 19 July and began the process of preparing her for service.