The merchant frigate: a cargo ship with guns

What was a merchant frigate?

Around 1715 the largest ships that traded across the oceans were usually “ship-rigged”: they had three masts, and every mast carried square sails hung across the hull, with a few triangular sails stretched out in front. Big traders and warships were built and rigged in much the same way, so from a distance a large merchant ship could look rather like a small man-of-war.

On deck she had a raised quarterdeck at the stern, where the captain and officers stood to steer and command, and usually a raised forecastle at the bow. Along her sides were gunports for a row of cannon. Below was the hold for barrels, bales and chests of cargo.

People at the time did not usually call such a vessel a “merchant frigate”. They called her a ship, sometimes adding how she was built. We use the name here as a simple label for an armed, three-masted cargo ship.

What did “frigate-built” and “galley-built” mean?

The word frigate moved around a lot. It began in the Mediterranean as a name for a long vessel driven by both sails and oars. In navies it came to mean a fast, lightly built warship, but it only settled into a fixed class of warship around the Seven Years’ War of 1756 to 1763. Before then it was used loosely.

Merchants used it in their own way. William Falconer’s sea dictionary of 1769 explains that a “frigate-built” merchant ship had a raised quarterdeck and forecastle with a deep open space between them, called the waist, four or five steps lower. A “galley-built” ship was the opposite: her deck ran almost level from end to end. “Gally” was an old spelling of galley, so the name of Black Sam Bellamy’s famous prize, the Whydah Gally, probably described how she was built. Falconer was writing about 50 years after 1715, so his definitions show how sailors used the words a little later than the game’s years.

Why did merchant ships carry guns?

No law forced a trader to carry cannon, but on most ocean routes it was wise. English merchant crews usually included a gunner to look after the cannon. The dangers were different in each sea:

• Pirates were a serious danger in the Caribbean and off West Africa in the years after 1715.
• Privateers were private warships licensed by a government to capture enemy merchant ships in wartime. In war, a trader could carry her own licence, called a letter of marque, so that she could take an enemy prize along the way without being treated as a pirate.
• Guardacostas, Spanish coast-guard ships sailing under commissions from Spanish governors, seized British ships they suspected of smuggling in Spain’s colonies. In May 1726 London merchants complained to the King that they had lost over £300,000 to them since 1713.
• Corsairs from North Africa raided shipping in the Mediterranean. Britain protected its ships there mainly through treaties and special Admiralty passes, issued from 1662.

Could an armed merchant ship fight off a warship?

Rarely. A navy frigate, according to a 1769 sea dictionary, carried 20 to 38 guns and was built to fight. A merchant ship was built to carry cargo, so she had fewer cannon and a much smaller crew.

Pirates knew this. They packed their ships with men (Blackbeard’s two sloops carried about 150), and faced with a crowded pirate deck many merchant crews gave up quickly. The Whydah surrendered in February 1717 after a three-day chase with hardly a shot fired. Later that year the French slave ship La Concorde, with 16 guns but a crew weakened by sickness, surrendered after two volleys to Blackbeard’s two sloops. Pirates prized ships like these because they could carry more guns and men than a sloop.

Were slave ships armed merchant ships?

Yes, and many of the best-known armed merchantmen of this era were slave ships. They carried guns against pirates, and also against the people held captive below, who often tried to win back their freedom. Many slave ships had a high wooden barricade built across the deck, which the crew used as a fort during an uprising. The French slave ship Diligent of 1731, about 140 tons, carried eight cannon, two swivel guns and 55 muskets.

The Whydah Gally was launched in London in 1716 for the slave trade and named after Whydah, the West African port in today’s Benin. She was about 300 tons and 110 feet long, with 18 cannon and room for ten more. According to National Geographic, 367 people were bought at Whydah and 312 survived the crossing to be sold in Jamaica. La Concorde, a 200-ton ship from Nantes, took 516 people aboard at Whydah in 1717, and 61 of them died on the way across the Atlantic.

The captives resisted in many ways. Several hundred uprisings on slave ships are known. Most failed, but in 1729 the captives on the Clare took control of the ship.

What was the South Sea Company’s annual ship?

Spain did not allow foreigners to trade with its American colonies. In the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Britain won an exception. Its South Sea Company, founded in 1711, gained the asiento, the contract to sell enslaved Africans to the Spanish colonies, and also the right to send one ship a year, of 500 tons, to sell ordinary goods. The Spanish called it the navío de permiso, the “permission ship”, and the King of Spain was owed a share of its profits. The first annual voyage sailed in 1717 and did only moderately well.

The arrangement caused constant quarrels. Two extra ships Spain allowed the company, the Isabela and the Bedford, were far bigger than the agreed size, and the Spanish suspected smuggling. In 1725 the annual ship Prince Frederick was seized by the authorities at Veracruz and held there for years.