HMS Brilliant (1891)

For other ships with the same name, see HMS Brilliant.

History
United Kingdom
Name	HMS Brilliant
Builder	Sheerness Dockyard
Laid down	1890
Launched	24 June 1891
Commissioned	1893
Fate	Scuttled as blockship, 23 April 1918
General characteristics
Class and type	Template:Sclass-
Displacement	3,600 tons
Length	314 ft (95.7 m)
Beam	43.5 ft (13.3 m)
Draught	17.5 ft (5.3 m)
Speed	19.75 knots (36.58 km/h)
Complement	273 to 300 (Officers and Men)
Armament	2 × QF 6-inch (152.4 mm) guns 6 × QF 4.7-inch (120 mm) guns 8 × 6 pounders 2 to 4 × 14 inch Torpedo Tubes Converted in 1914 to a lightly armed minelayer.

HMS Brilliant was an Template:Sclass- of the British Royal Navy which served from 1893 to 1918 in various colonial posts and off the British Isles as a hastily converted minelayer during the First World War.

Operational History

Brilliant was commissioned at Portsmouth on 1 October 1901 by Captain Hugh Pigot Williams, for service with the Cruiser Squadron. In May 1902 she was taken into Portsmouth for a refit, and later that year she served in the 1902 Coronation review.

Wreck

In April 1918, Brilliant was deliberately scuttled in the mouth of Ostend harbour in Belgium during the failed First Ostend Raid. This operation was intended to block the harbour mouth and prevent the transit of German U-boats and other raiding craft from Bruges to the North Sea. German countermeasures were however too effective, and Brilliant and fellow blockship HMS Sirius were eventually destroyed by their crews outside the harbour mouth after running aground on a sandbank. The wrecks were broken up postwar.