David Cordingly was Keeper of Pictures and Head of Exhibitions at the National Maritime Museum for twelve years, where he organized such exhibitions as ‘Captain James Cook, Navigator’, ‘The Mutiny on the Bounty’ and ‘ Pirates: Fact and Fiction’. His other books include Life among the Pirates, Under the Black Flag and Heroines and Harlots.

Published by Bloomsbury in September 2003 and longlisted for the 2003 Wolfson History Prize, Billy Ruffian: His Majesty's Ship Bellerophon and the Downfall of Napoleon is the story of the Bellerophon — a ship of the line known to her crew as the Billy Ruffian — from her birth in a small shipyard on the river Medway in 1789, the year of the French Revolution, to her death, after service as a prison hulk, in a breaker’s yard forty-seven years later.

He lives by the sea in Brighton, England.