One mast, a few sails
A sloop has a single mast, with a fore-and-aft mainsail and, traditionally, a single headsail. It is the simplest of the fore-and-aft rigs and, in the modern form with a triangular mainsail and a jib, the most common rig on sailing yachts today. The line between sloop and cutter has varied over time, so that boats called by one name in one era were sometimes called the other in another.
There is a second meaning to watch for. In the Royal Navy, “sloop” or “sloop of war” was a classification of small warships, whatever their rig. Many navy sloops were in fact ship-rigged or brig-rigged. This article is about the sailing rig, and the commercial and private vessels that used it.
Bermuda sloops
Bermuda, settled by the English in the early seventeenth century, had few natural resources apart from its cedar trees and its sea. Local builders developed a distinctive type of sloop, which came to be known as the Bermuda sloop. Built from Bermuda cedar, a durable and light timber, these vessels were low, fast and handy, with a large mainsail on a raked mast, a long boom and a bowsprit with a jib.
Bermudians used them for trade, carrying salt from Turks Island, sailing to the American colonies and the Caribbean, and for fishing and wrecking. They were prized for speed, and the Royal Navy and various colonial governments bought or copied them as dispatch vessels. Their reputation was good enough that Bermuda sloops are mentioned in many contemporary accounts. The details of their design differed from builder to builder and from decade to decade, so one should not imagine a single fixed pattern.
Jamaica and the Caribbean
Other islands had their own sloops. The Jamaica sloop, built from local hardwoods, is often described in sources of the period as a fast, sturdy trading vessel. Caribbean traders used sloops for short voyages among the islands, carrying sugar, rum, provisions and passengers, as well as carrying goods to and from the North American coast. Their advantages were obvious: a single mast needed only a small crew, the rig could handle the variable trade winds, and the shallow draught allowed them to enter small bays and creeks.
The Caribbean sea lanes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were busy and dangerous, and the sloop was a common sight on them.
Privateers and pirates
The same qualities made sloops useful for privateering, in which private vessels were licensed by a government to attack enemy shipping. Such licences were known as letters of marque. A fast sloop with a sizeable crew and a few guns could overtake a slower merchant ship and, if necessary, escape a larger warship by sailing closer to the wind.
Sloops were also used by pirates in the early eighteenth century, in what is sometimes called the Golden Age of Piracy, roughly the 1710s and 1720s. Several well-known pirates sailed sloops at various stages of their careers, including Stede Bonnet, whose vessel Revenge was a sloop. The attraction was the same: they were fast, handy, cheap and easy to crew. It is worth saying that popular images of pirate ships often show large square-rigged vessels, whereas many real pirate vessels were small and fast.
Sloops in the American colonies and the Navy
On the North American coast, colonial builders also turned out sloops in large numbers for trade and fishing. Rhode Island, New York and other colonies had thriving builders of sloops, and the rig became familiar on the Hudson River and in Long Island Sound. Sloops of this kind carried goods between small ports and up the rivers, as river craft and sea craft at once. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the schooner took over more of the coastal trade in some regions, though sloops continued in use.
Towards the yacht
When yachting grew in the nineteenth century, the sloop became a popular choice. American yacht designers favoured shallow, beamy centreboard sloops for racing in the waters off the East Coast. In Britain, the cutter had a strong following, and the distinction between cutter and sloop was often one of degree. Both fed into yacht history in the century.
In the twentieth century, the Bermuda rig, with its tall, triangular mainsail and no gaff, became standard. Its name refers to the type of sail first used on Bermuda boats, though the modern rig was refined elsewhere. As designers learned how to make masts that were tall and light, the Bermuda sloop proved efficient to windward and easy for a small crew. The large racing yachts of the America’s Cup in the 1930s were sloops, and the same rig was adopted by dinghies, keelboats and cruising yachts in great numbers.
Why the sloop lasted
Three reasons stand out. A single mast and few sails keep the cost low and make the boat easy to build and to sail. The rig performs well to windward, which is why it is so common on racing boats. And it is flexible: the same basic arrangement works at almost any size, from a small dinghy to a large yacht. That combination explains why a rig developed for trading and fighting in the Atlantic and Caribbean has become, with some changes, the standard sail plan of modern sailing.