Sloop-of-war
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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 which 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.
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.
See also
- Rating system of the Royal Navy
- HMS Scarborough typical British World War Two era sloop
The most famous sloop would probably be HMS Speedy (brig-sloop of 14 guns), commanded by Lord Cochrane. She and her exploits in the Mediterranean in 1805 served as the inspiration for the fictional Jack Aubrey's first command, the Sophie.
External links
- Royal Navy Sloops from battleships-cruisers.co.uk - history and pictures from 1873 to 1943.