From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Career (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 |
| Displacement: |
3,600 tons |
| Length: |
314 feet (95.7 m) |
| Beam: |
43.5 feet (13.3 m) |
| Draught: |
17.5 feet (5.3 m) |
| Speed: |
19.75 knots |
| Complement: |
273 to 300 (Officers and Men) |
| Armament: |
2×6 inch Naval gun, 2×4.7 inch Naval gun, 8×6 pounders, 2 to 4×14 inch Torpedo Tubes. Converted in 1914 to a lightly armed minelayer. |
HMS Brilliant was an Apollo class cruiser 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. 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.
