The frigate: the navy’s fast cruiser

What is a frigate?

In the age of sail a frigate was a fast, three-masted warship, well armed but much smaller than the big “ships of the line” that fought in great fleet battles. It was rigged mainly with square sails, which hang across the ship and push it along best when the wind blows from behind or from the side.

The word itself wandered a lot. In 16th-century Spain it could mean a kind of oared galley. In the 1600s the privateers of Dunkirk (privately owned ships licensed to attack an enemy’s trade) called their small, fast raiders frigates, and the Dutch navy used the word for any seagoing warship with fewer than 40 guns. English sailors of the time called many quick warships frigates too: a Navy Board record of 1689 calls the Adventure a frigate.

What did a frigate look like around 1715?

The Royal Navy did not officially have a class called “frigates” in 1715. It sorted its warships into six “rates” by the number of guns they carried. The small, fast cruisers were the fifth and sixth rates.

• Fifth rates carried about 30 to 40 guns on two decks, with heavier guns low down and lighter ones above. HMS Pearl, launched in 1708, had 42.
• Sixth rates carried 20 to 24 light guns, mostly on the upper deck. A 20-gun ship of the 1719 design was about 106 feet long, carried twenty 6-pounder guns and needed a crew of about 140 men.

The two-deck design had a weakness. The lower guns sat so close to the water that in rough weather their gunports had to stay shut, or the sea would pour in. Ships were also rebuilt and re-rated: HMS Lyme was built in 1695 as a 32-gun fifth rate and cut down to a 24-gun sixth rate in 1717.

What jobs did frigates do?

Frigates were the navy’s workhorses. They escorted convoys of merchant ships, and attacked enemy trade in wartime. In fleet campaigns they scouted ahead and repeated the admiral’s flag signals so the whole fleet could see them. Around 1800 Admiral Nelson called them “the eyes of the fleet”, though that phrase belongs to a later century.

In the peaceful years after 1714, small warships were sent to guard individual colonies as “station ships”. Pearl and Lyme were stationed in Virginia, and HMS Scarborough, a 32-gun fifth rate launched in 1711, patrolled the islands of the eastern Caribbean.

Did navy frigates hunt pirates?

Yes, though catching them was hard. In 1717 Scarborough destroyed a pirate galley and a sloop near St Croix, but the crews escaped.

In 1718 Virginia’s governor, Alexander Spotswood, wanted Blackbeard taken. The captains of Pearl and Lyme knew their ships were too big for the shallow inlets of North Carolina, so Spotswood paid for two small hired vessels, the Jane and the Ranger, and crewed them with sailors from the two warships. Pearl’s first lieutenant, Robert Maynard, led them, and Blackbeard was killed at Ocracoke on 22 November 1718.

The most famous pirate hunt of all was not won by a frigate. HMS Swallow, which caught Bartholomew Roberts off Cape Lopez in Gabon on 10 February 1722, was a 50-gun “fourth rate”, a small two-decked ship of the line. Roberts was killed, and his surviving crew were tried at Cape Coast Castle, where 52 men were hanged.

What was a prize court?

A ship captured from an enemy in wartime was called a prize. Before it could be sold, a court had to declare it a lawful capture, which was called “condemning” it. In Britain’s colonies these cases went to Vice-Admiralty courts, run under the authority of the Admiralty in London. A law of 1708 set out how prize cases should be tried and how the money should be shared among the captors. Once condemned, a ship and its cargo could be sold, sometimes at auction, and the money shared out.

The rewards could be large. After Roberts’s defeat, King George I let Swallow’s captain, Chaloner Ogle, keep the captured pirate ships and the remaining treasure once his officers and crew had been paid their shares. Ogle was knighted in 1723.

Navies also got rid of their own old ships. Some were sold, like the Adventure in 1689, though many worn-out warships were rebuilt or broken up for their timber instead.

Was the Queen Anne’s Revenge a frigate?

Not when she was built. Blackbeard’s flagship began life as La Concorde, a French merchant ship from Nantes of about 200 tons. She sailed as a privateer from 1710 and then on slave-trading voyages in 1713, 1715 and 1717. On the last voyage 516 Africans were forced aboard at Whydah, and 61 of them died crossing the Atlantic.

In November 1717, with 455 captives still aboard, she was captured by Blackbeard’s two sloops about 100 miles from Martinique. She had carried 16 guns. The pirates armed her more heavily and renamed her the Queen Anne’s Revenge. She ran aground at what is now Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, in June 1718. A few weeks later a Royal Navy captain, Ellis Brand, wrote that she had been a large pirate ship of 40 guns.

How did the frigate change after 1715?

The classic frigate was a French idea. In 1741 the shipbuilder Blaise Ollivier launched the Médée at Brest, with 26 guns on a single deck high above the water and no gunports on the deck below, so she could fight in any weather. France ordered about 30 more on her lines.

In 1747 the British captured a French privateer of this kind, the Tygre, and copied her. The 24-gun Lyme and Unicorn, launched in 1748, are usually counted as the Royal Navy’s first true frigates. By the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) British frigates carried 32 guns, and by the American Revolution 36 to 40. That later ship, sleek and single-decked, is the frigate most people picture today, scouting ahead of the big men-of-war.