'Why, sir,' he said, 'I heard several of them conversing together about him this morning; when one of them observed, "Well, they may abuse that man as much as they please; but if the people of England knew him as well as we do, they would not hurt a hair of his head" in which the others agreed. It was a sentiment Maitland understood perfectly. When he came to write his own account of Napoleon's surrender and the subsequent events he noted that the man possessed, to a wonderful degree, the facility for making a favourable impression upon those with whom he entered into conversation. Admiral Keith had been equally impressed and thought he would have charmed the Prince Regent.
'Damn the fellow,' he said, 'if he had obtained an interview with his Royal Highness, in half an hour they would have been the best of friends in England.
That evening the Bellerophon and the Tonnant got under way and headed back to Plymouth. An hour later the Northumberland weighed anchor and three days later she set sail down the Channel at the head of a convoy which included the frigate Havannah, two troopships filled with soldiers and seven armed brigs loaded with stores.
Three weeks after Napoleon vanished into exile over the horizon, the Bellerophon received orders which were to consign her to an exile as humiliating for a great ship as St Helena was for the former emperor. Her exile was to take place, not in a remote island, but on the river where she had been built and launched, and had spent the early years of her life. On Friday 1 September she anchored at the mouth of the River Medway and the next day she moored alongside the dockyard at Sheerness. Over the next two weeks the crew stripped her of everything that had made her a warship. The guns were removed; and the stores of the bosun, the cook, the carpenter, the gunner, and the sailmaker were taken out. The rigging was dismantled, and the masts and bowsprit lifted out by the sheer hulk. Out too came the the barrels of food and water, the coal for the galley, and several tons of shingle ballast. The last job of the crew was to scrub the hammocks and wash down the decks.
Wednesday 13 September was a bright and sunny autumn day with scarcely a breath of wind. At 11 o'clock the Pay Captain from the dockyard came aboard and paid the sailors of the ship's company. The marines had already been discharged to the barracks in Chatham. Midshipman Home provides a vivid picture of the departure of the ship's company in an atmosphere reminiscent of the last day of school. It was, he says, a glorious scene of confusion as the men collected their pay and left the ship, some blessing and some cursing their officers as they went. People were shaking hands and saying goodbye to their messmates, and wishing them a safe passage home. Midshipman Home wanted to tell Captain Maitland how kind he had been to him but when he got to the quarterdeck his words of thanks stuck in his throat and all he was able to say was, 'Fare you well, Captain Maitland!'
'Fare you well,' the Captain responded cheerfully. 'I cannot offer you a ship just now, but should I get a command again, which I am afraid will not be soon, you have only to show your face, and you shall have what vacancy I can give you. I wish you well.'
Home wasted no more time on board the ship. He took up the chest which held all his belongings and climbed down to a vessel which was waiting alongside ready to take people upstream to Limehouse and Wapping. There were some sixty men from the lower deck in the vessel but he was not worried about receiving any insults because he knew he had never treated any of them severely. He observed that the Bellerophon, stripped of her masts, rigging, guns and ballast, had become 'a mere hull, with an empty bottle hung at her figurehead, to show that the grog was out'.
The only sign that the ship was still a naval vessel was the long commissioning pennant which normally flew at the mainmast but which now hung limply from the flagpole at the stern. That evening Captain Maitland made a final entry in the ship's log-book. He concluded with the words: 'Sunset, haul down the pendant.' And underneath he signed his name 'Fred. L. Maitland, Captain.' The Bellerophon had ended her life as a ship of the line.
EIGHTEEN
A Hulk on the Medway
1815-36
During the first two weeks of January 1817 the southern counties of England were deluged by rain. In Kent the marshes surrounding the cathedral city of Canterbury were constantly flooded, and so high was the water level on the tributaries of the River Stour that the water-mills were prevented from working. The River Medway overflowed its banks at Maidstone and Yalding and the lower reaches of the river took on the appearance of the sea. Sheerness, perched at one end of the Isle of Sheppey, seemed more isolated than ever. The forts, the dockyard, and the houses huddled behind them, were almost marooned. On three sides were the swirling grey waters of the Thames and the Medway, and much of the marshland to the east of the town was under water.
A line of warships was anchored in this desolate, watery landscape, and beyond them, swinging from massive chains anchored to the riverbed, were two misshapen hulks. From a distance they seemed like vast and crudely built houseboats. Their massive hulls floated too high in the water. Their upper decks were hidden beneath overhanging wooden sheds with low pitched roofs and smoking chimneys. A naval man would have seen, from their size and the number of their gunports, that they had once been 74-gun ships, but they had little else in common with the ships which Nelson had led into battle. Instead of towering masts and taut lines of rigging, the hulks had two stumpy poles from which were hung clotheslines filled with flapping shirts. The curving sides of the hulks were disfigured by heavy wooden battens, nailed on to give protection against barges and other vessels bumping alongside. The gunports no longer revealed gleaming black gun barrels waiting to be run out, but were barred by iron grilles. Behind the bars in each ship were more than 400 convicts, condemned to several years' hard labour before being transported to Australia. One of these hulks was the Bellerophon.
Within a month of Napoleon and his suite leaving the ship, the Bellerophon had sailed back to the River Medway. But, instead of returning to the friendly noise and bustle of Chatham, Rochester and Frindsbury she was stationed off Sheerness dockyard at the mouth of the Medway. Her crew was paid off and the Navy Board agreed to her being converted into a prison hulk. The shipwrights and carpenters in the dockyard tore her apart and fitted long lines of cages below deck. During the summer of 1817 she was anchored near the hulk Retribution and received her first batch of convicts.
The forbidding appearance of the prison hulks, and the melancholy atmosphere of the surrounding marshes, are vividly depicted in the early chapters of Great Expectations, first published in 1860-61. For these descriptions, Charles Dickens drew on his childhood memories of the Cooling Marshes which border the estuaries of the Thames and Medway, and his later explorations of the area when he was living at his house in Gad's Hill. On the second page of the novel Dickens introduces us to Magwitch, a convict who has escaped from a prison hulk, 'a fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg.' He grabs hold of young Pip who has been looking at the graves of his father, his mother and his brothers in a deserted and overgrown churchyard. The convict is smothered in mud and ravenously hungry. When he learns that Pip lives nearby with his sister who is married to a blacksmith, he demands that Pip bring him some food as well as a file from the blacksmith's workshop. Pip hurries off in the gathering dusk. 'The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed.' On the edge of the river Pip can just make out the only two vertical features in the landscape: a beacon used as a mark by the sailors; and a gibbet with chains hanging from it which had once held a pirate. 'The man was limping towards the latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself up again.'