Neither Capper nor his chaplain give us any idea of the atmosphere and working conditions on the ship but Charles Dickens provides us with some insight into what it must have been like. The period when the Bellerophon was a convict ship for boys exactly coincided with the time that Dickens's father was sent to the Marshalsea Prison and Dickens's schooling was interrupted by his unhappy employment in a blacking warehouse. We therefore need look no further than the pages of Little Dorrit, David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby to get some idea of the conditions on board the Bellerophon. A visitor entering the chapel of the ship on a winter's morning would have been confronted with a scene similar to that which faced Nicholas Nickleby when he entered the schoolroom of Dotheboys Halclass="underline"
Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect... there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness.
And in the riverside warehouse of Murdstone and Grinby, where the ten-year-old David Copperfield was sent to work, sticking labels on bottles, we catch a glimpse of a building not unlike the decayed hulk of a convict ship rising and falling with the tide:
It was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, abutting on the water when the tide was in, and on the mud when the tide was out, and literally overrun with rats. Its panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years, I dare say; its decaying floors and staircase; the squeaking and scuffling of the old grey rats down in the cellars; and the dirt and rottenness of the place . . .
During the winter of 1825-6 the authorities came to the conclusion that the Bellerophon was no longer suitable for the confinement of boys, apparently because her internal layout did not allow sufficient space for workshops. In January 1826 Mr Capper noted that 'The Convict Boys, consisting of 350, under 16 years of age, have recently been transferred from the Bellerophon to the Euryalus at Chatham, the ship specially fitted for them.' The Euryalus was the former 36-gun frigate commanded by Captain Henry Blackwood which had kept watch on the enemy fleet at Cadiz in the weeks preceding the Battle of Trafalgar. At the end of the action Collingwood had shifted his flag from the dismasted Royal Sovereign to the Euryalus and in the great storm following the battle the frigate had taken the damaged flagship in tow. The Euryalus was now converted into a boys' prison with proper workshops but, being much smaller than the Bellerophon, the accommodation for the boys was extremely cramped. A year later Capper was having to admit that the boys confined on board 'have, upon two or three occasions been refractory, and committed outrages on the persons of the Officers. The Ship in which they are confined is found too small . . .'
The prison authorities decided that the Bellerophon would be more useful at Plymouth than moored at the mouth of the Medway On 26 April 1826 she was taken into one of the docks at Sheerness, the old copper plates were taken off her bottom and she was re-coppered and prepared for the trip to Plymouth, a coastal voyage of some 300 miles. She sailed from Sheerness on 4 June, called in at Portsmouth en route to pick up a batch of convicts, and arrived at Plymouth on 8 June. Her progress was reported in the Plymouth Herald:
CONVICTS. On Wednesday last, the Captivity Hulk (late the Bellerophon, 74, having been fitted up for the reception of convicts) arrived here from Portsmouth, having on board 80 convicts, who are to be employed in the Dock Yard, in a similar manner as individuals of the same description at Portsmouth. The Hulk the following day came up the harbour. It is reported that the convicts of the four Western Counties are to be in future regularly sent here.
This is confirmed by Capper's report of 26 July 1826 which noted that the Captivity, now stationed at Devonport (the dockyard area of Plymouth) had 80 convicts on board. By the following January the number of convicts on board had been increased to 149 and the ship had acquired a chaplain, by the name of William Prowse. He was much impressed by the behaviour of the convicts which was Tar beyond what I had expected from persons of their former habits. Both during Divine Service and at the School they behave in a serious and becoming manner.'
For the next eight years the ship remained moored in the river at Plymouth, a melancholy sight among the sails of the ships and small craft moving to and fro and the smoke and activity of the nearby dockyard. By 1833 she had 445 convicts on board, ten more than she had accommodated in the days when Edward Edwards, the chaplain, was preaching his sermons and encouraging the men to learn the Thirty-nine Articles. However, the ship's days were drawing to a close. Capper had received instructions from Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, to reduce the number of convict ships and he solved the problem by drastically increasing the number of men transported to the colonies. In 1834 he reported that 4,216 convicts had been sent to the settlements in Australia and 400 had been sent to Bermuda. He was therefore able to abolish the convict hulks at Plymouth and Sheerness. In July 1834 Capper informed the Home Secretary that the hulks on these stations had been handed over to the Naval Department. In the ledger which had followed the progress of the Bellerophon in and out of the royal dockyards and had noted the cost of every repair carried out to her hull, masts and rigging there is a final entry which simply states, 'Sold 21st Jany 1836 for £4030.'
The navy would have sold the hulk to a firm of shipbreakers and the evidence suggests that the Bellerophon was broken up by John Beatson's yard in London. Beatsons was a well-established family firm situated on the south bank of the Thames at Rotherhithe. The yard was experienced in breaking up East Indiamen as well as warships and in previous years had broken up several third-rate ships. The largest ship to be broken up by Beatsons was another Trafalgar veteran, the 98-gun Téméraire. Like the Bellerophon, she had spent several years as a prison ship at Plymouth before being moved to Sheerness to become a receiving hulk. Her last journey to the breaker's yard in September 1838 was commemorated by Turner in his famous painting The Fighting Téméraire, a haunting image of a great ship being towed upstream by a steam tug. As steam-powered paddle tugs were increasingly being used around the coasts of Britain, it seems likely that the Bellerophon made her last journey in a similar manner. The writer William Thackeray wrote a lengthy review of Turner's painting. He described the tugboat as 'a little, spiteful, diabolical steamer' belching out a volume of malignant smoke, but his words for the Téméraire might equally well have been applied to the Bellerophon. Behind the furiously paddling tugboat, 'slow, sad, and majestic, follows the brave old ship, with death, as it were, written on her...