The sloop: the ship pirates loved

What is a sloop?

In the early 1700s a sloop was a sailing vessel with one mast. Its main sail was “fore-and-aft”: it hung from the mast and a long pole called the boom, so it ran along the length of the boat instead of across it. In front, triangular sails called jibs stretched out to a very long bowsprit, and many sloops also carried a small square sail high on the mast for sailing with the wind behind them.

That arrangement gave a small hull a lot of sail. It also meant a sloop could sail closer to the wind than square-rigged ships, so it could work its way upwind, which mattered a great deal in the Caribbean, where the trade winds blow steadily from the east. Most colonial sloops measured about 25 to 70 tons, small enough to sail into creeks, inlets and reef passages where big ships could not go, and light enough to be rowed with long oars in a calm.

What made the Bermuda sloop special?

Bermuda is a small island with little farmland, so by the early 1700s many Bermudians made their living building ships and sailing them. They built with the island’s native cedar, which is really a kind of juniper. Being lighter than oak, it made faster boats, and it resists rot and the shipworm that ate through oak hulls in warm tropical water.

Bermuda sloops had tall masts tilted backwards and long booms and bowsprits, and they were famous for their speed, especially when sailing against the wind. Merchants considered them among the best sailing vessels of their day. One record from 1720 shows that nine of the 22 boats at Antigua that year were from Bermuda. Sloops built in Jamaica were similar and just as prized.

Much of the sailing was done by enslaved Black Bermudians. Many became expert sailors, pilots and shipwrights, and they often made up most of a Bermudian sloop’s crew.

What did sloops carry?

Sloops were the delivery vans of the colonial world. They shuttled flour, salt pork, lumber and barrel staves from North America down to the sugar islands, and carried sugar, molasses and rum back. Bermudians often carried other people’s cargo for a fee. From the 1670s they also sailed south every year to the uninhabited Turks Islands to rake salt, arriving around March and leaving around November, and shipped it north to the mainland colonies. Bermudians brought enslaved Africans to the Turks Islands to work the salt pans.

Why did pirates use sloops?

Pirates did not usually build or buy their ships; they stole them. Sloops were everywhere, so they were the easiest ships to capture, and they suited pirates perfectly. They were fast enough to catch merchant ships and to escape warships. They could hide in shallow bays and slip over sandbars where a navy frigate would run aground. And they were easy to careen, which meant hauling the boat onto a beach and tipping it on its side to scrape the weed and shipworm off its bottom.

A trading sloop might sail with only six to ten men. A pirate sloop of the same size was often packed with 70 men or more (Stede Bonnet’s had 70), all useful for frightening a merchant crew into surrendering and for boarding. Guns were few and small: a handful of cannon on carriages (Bonnet’s had 10), plus swivel guns mounted on the rails.

Which famous pirates sailed sloops?

Almost all of them, at least for part of their careers.

• Benjamin Hornigold of Nassau gave a captured sloop to a young pirate who served under him, Edward Thatch, later called Blackbeard.
• Stede Bonnet, the “gentleman pirate”, bought and armed a sloop called the Revenge in 1717, with 10 guns and 70 men.
• Blackbeard began in a sloop and ended in one. Between them he had the big Queen Anne’s Revenge, but after she ran aground in 1718 he sailed the small sloop Adventure, a Jamaican trading sloop captured in the Bay of Honduras, off what is now Belize. He was killed at Ocracoke in 1718, fighting on the deck of Lieutenant Maynard’s sloop.
• Charles Vane escaped from Nassau in 1718 in a sloop.
• Calico Jack Rackham, with Anne Bonny and Mary Read, stole a small sloop called the William from Nassau harbour in 1720.

The pirate hunters used sloops too. When Virginia went after Blackbeard in 1718, the navy’s warships were too big to cross the shallow inlets of North Carolina, so Governor Spotswood hired two small sloops, the Jane and the Ranger, and filled them with navy sailors.

Is a sloop the same as a sloop-of-war?

No, and the names cause a lot of confusion. A “sloop-of-war” was a Royal Navy term for a small warship commanded by a junior officer. It described the ship’s job, not its sails, and by the later 1700s most sloops-of-war had two or three masts. The sloops of 1715 that traders and pirates sailed were small, single-masted vessels. The modern sail-training ship Spirit of Bermuda, launched in 2006, is a copy of an 1830s three-masted navy sloop, so it does not show what a 1715 trading sloop looked like.