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 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 subsequntly also applied to British vessels). A sloop-of-war was smaller than a sailing frigate and outside the rating system.

Related Topics:
18th - 19th - Warship - Cannon - Mast - Brig - Corvette - Frigate

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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 of this other type of sloop nevertheless also 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.

Related Topics:
1880s - 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 which time both 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.

Related Topics:
20th - First World War - Second World War - Corvette - Depth charge - Sloop - Frigate - Destroyers

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~