The brigantine: two masts, two kinds of sail

What is a brigantine?

Around 1715 a brigantine was a sailing ship with two masts that carried two different kinds of sail.

• On the front mast, the foremast, it carried square sails. These are rectangles hung from wooden poles called yards that run across the ship. They work best with the wind behind.
• On the back mast, the mainmast, it carried one large fore-and-aft sail. This sail ran along the length of the ship, held by a pole called a gaff at the top and a boom at the bottom, much like the sail of a sloop. Sails like this let a ship sail closer to the wind and turn more easily.

In the early 1700s many brigantines also carried a small square topsail high on the mainmast, above the fore-and-aft sail.

Brigantines usually measured between about 30 and 150 tons (a measure of how much cargo a ship could carry), so most were bigger than sloops and schooners but smaller than the big three-masted ships.

Where does the name brigantine come from?

The word comes from the Italian brigantino, linked to brigante, a brigand or raider. In the 1500s it meant a small, fast vessel in the Mediterranean that could be both sailed and rowed with oars.

When sailors in northern Europe and the Atlantic took up the name in the 1600s, they gave it to quite a different vessel: a sailing ship with no oars at all. By the early 1700s “brigantine” described the way a ship’s sails were arranged, its rig, rather than one particular design of hull.

Is a brigantine the same as a brig?

Around 1715, usually yes. “Brig” started out simply as a short form of “brigantine”. As late as 1769, William Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine, a well-known sailors’ dictionary of its day, gave the two words a single entry and called it a two-masted merchant ship. He described the English kind as having its mainsail running along the ship on a gaff and boom.

Later in the 1700s and into the 1800s the two words drifted apart. “Brig” came to mean a ship with square sails on both masts, and “brigantine” was kept for the mixed rig with a fore-and-aft mainsail. Records rarely say exactly how a ship was rigged: a Rhode Island slave ship of 1764, the Sally, is simply called a brig. So when you read “brig” or “brigantine” in an old document, it is safest not to assume exactly how the ship was rigged.

A close cousin was the snow, another two-master that was often the largest of the two-masted ships.

What were brigantines used for?

Above all, cargo. Before 1775 the brigantine was the second most common type of vessel built in the American colonies, after the sloop. They worked the American coast and were big enough to cross the Atlantic.

They were also easy to turn into privateers: privately owned ships given a government licence in wartime to capture enemy merchant ships. A few light guns and swivel guns on the rails were enough, because the aim was to frighten a merchant ship into surrendering, not to sink it. In July 1703, during Queen Anne’s War, the governor of Massachusetts licensed the Boston brigantine Charles to cruise against French and Spanish shipping. Instead, her crew took over the ship under John Quelch and went south to raid Portuguese vessels off Brazil. Quelch and five of his men were tried and hanged in Boston on 30 June 1704.

Were brigantines used as slave ships?

Yes. Brigantines carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, although the larger three-masted ships carried more of this trade. In one study of British slave ships arriving in Virginia between 1725 and 1769, brigs and brigantines made up roughly one in ten of all the ships counted, although the records do not give the rig of many of them. Historians disagree about how big slave ships usually were: one study found most British ones of 1698 to 1775 were about 50 to 150 tons, while a newer study of the whole 1700s puts nearly half at 100 to 200 tons.

In 1718 pirates under Charles Vane captured a slave ship off Charles Town. A 1724 book calls it “a large brigantine” with about 90 Africans aboard; the South Carolina council simply called it a ship from Guinea. The records treat the Africans only as cargo and give none of their names, and the sources do not say what happened to them afterwards.

A better-recorded voyage came later. In 1764–65 the Providence brig Sally bought 196 Africans on the West African coast. Some of the captives rose up against the crew, and 109 of the 196 died.

Which pirates sailed brigantines?

• Charles Vane sailed sloops early in 1718, but by the late summer his own vessel was a brigantine. Woodes Rogers, the new governor of the Bahamas, reported that Vane had two ships and a brigantine with him. Late in 1718 Vane’s brigantine ran from a French warship, and his crew voted him out and made John Rackham, later known as Calico Jack, captain of the brigantine.
• Edward Low got his first command in 1722: a captured Boston brigantine, the Rebecca, with 44 men. According to the 1724 book she carried just two cannon and four swivel guns. Low later moved into a schooner.
• Thomas Anstis, one of Bartholomew Roberts’ captains, slipped away from Roberts in 1721 in the brigantine Good Fortune. The 1724 book tells how she escaped navy warships more than once, even when a larger pirate ship sailing with her was wrecked.

How did a brigantine sail compared with a sloop?

A brigantine mixed both kinds of sail. The square sails forward drove her well on long ocean passages with the wind behind, while the fore-and-aft mainsail helped her sail closer to the wind and turn more easily than a fully square-rigged ship. Brigs and brigantines could also be worked by a fairly small crew for their size.

Compared with a sloop, a brigantine was bigger and carried more cargo. Compared with a three-masted ship, she needed fewer hands but carried less.