Sloop-of-war
In the
18th and the earlier part of the
19th centuries, a
sloop-of-war was a small sailing
warship with a single gun deck that carried between ten and eighteen
cannons. A
brig sloop had two
masts and a
ship sloop had three (since a
brig is a two masted square-rigged vessel and a ship a three- or more-masted square-rigger, though invariably of 3 only in that period). A ship sloop was generally the equivalent of a
corvette (the French term for the same type, a name subsequently also applied to British vessels). A sloop-of-war was smaller than a sailing
frigate and outside the
rating system. In general, a sloop-of-war would be under the command of a
master and commander rather than a fully commissioned or
post captain.
A sloop-of-war was quite different from a civilian or mercantile
sloop, which was a general term for a single masted vessel rigged like what we would today call a gaff cutter (but usually without the square topsails then carried by cutter-rigged vessels); some sloops of this other type nevertheless served in the 18th Century British Royal Navy, particularly on the Great Lakes of North America.
Successive generations of guns became larger in the second half of the 19th century and with the advent of steam-powered sloops, both paddle and screw, so by the
1880s even the most powerful warships had less than a dozen large calibre guns. The term had by then become much less precise, meaning a small warship with a single gun-deck bigger than a
gunboat.
Especially numerous in the
20th century were British mass-produced sloops of the "Flower" class of the
First World War, a name-class subsequently echoed by the famous corvettes of the "
Flower" class of the
Second World War. By this time the terms "sloop" and
corvette had both come to mean a small warship armed with one or two 4-inch guns and
depth charges, primarily employed on convoy escort duty. After the Second World War, the
sloops were replaced by
frigates, which term had been re-introduced in 1940 for somewhat larger escort vessels more similar in size (though not in performance or cost) to the larger
destroyers.
Perhaps the most famous sloop was the
HMS Resolution, in which Captain
James Cook made his second and third
Pacific voyages. Cook called the Resolution "the ship of my choice", and "the fittest for service of any I have seen."
In 1805
Lord Cochrane commanded the
HMS Speedy, a brig-sloop of 14 guns, through a series of famous exploits in the
Mediterranean. The
Speedy served as the inspiration for the fictional
Jack Aubrey's first command, the
Sophie.
*
Rating system of the Royal Navy*
HMS Scarborough typical British
World War Two era sloop
*
Royal Navy Sloops from battleships-cruisers.co.uk - history and pictures from 1873 to 1943.
