Bermuda Sloop - Merchant and Privateering Use

Merchant and Privateering Use

The fore-and-aft rig was particularly useful in manoeuvring upwind, and was very useful to Bermudians who used boats as the primary means of moving about their gusty archipelago into the 20th century. The rig was as useful in maintaining trade and emigration links to the North American colonies, directly upwind to the West (prevailing wind direction is to the East), which were and remain Bermuda's primary trading partners. After Bermudians turned wholesale from agriculture to a maritime economy, following the dissolution of the Somers Isles Company in 1684, the windward capabilities of Bermudian vessels became the primary enabler of the salt industry which was to be the central leg of Bermuda's economy for the next century. Bermudian vessels sailed south-west (more-or-less upwind) to the Turk Islands, where salt was harvested. This salt was carried to North American ports and sold at high profits. Bermudian vessels also developed a trade in moving goods such as grain, cocoa, brandy, wine and more from the Atlantic seaboard colonies to the West Indies.

The Bermuda sloop became the predominant type of sailing vessel both in the Bermudian colony and amongst sloop rigs worldwide as Bermudian traders visited foreign nations. Soon, shipbuilding became one of the primary trades on the island and ships were exported throughout the English colonies on the American seaboard, and in the West Indies, and eventually to Europe. Bermudians built roughly a thousand ships during the 18th Century. Although many of these were sold abroad, the colony maintained its own large merchant fleet, which, thanks partly to the domination of trade in many American seaboard ports by branches of wealthy Bermudian families, and partly to the suitability and availability of Bermudian vessels, carried much of the produce exported from the American south to Bermuda and to the West Indies. Bermuda sloop design strongly influenced the development of vessels built by the Chesapeake builders, and Bermudian features like the raked mast began to appear in American schooners.

The Bermuda sloop differed from other sloops partly in the form of its hull, which was very stiff. This stiffness was a result partially of the shipbuilding skills on the islanders, but also thanks to the availability of large quantities of Bermuda cedar, which has superior qualities of rot-resistance, low density (making the ships lighter and faster) and high strength (making the ships more durable). Designed to sail primarily on the open ocean, their relatively deep hulls gave them superior seaworthiness by comparison to similar vessels, such as the Baltimore clipper, which were intended to operate in coastal waters. Despite this, single-masted Bermudian sloops were optimised for speed, and were very demanding craft to sail. In rough weather, they were easily swamped. The vessels carried little fixed ballast, which allowed the carriage of large cargoes.

During wartime, much of Bermuda's merchant fleet turned to privateering, a lucrative activity for which the fast sloops were well-suited. They often carried sufficient crew out to return with several prizes, and these extra crew were useful both as movable ballast, and in handling the labour-intensive sloops. The threat of piracy and privateering was a large problem for mariners of all nations during the 17th and 18th centuries, but it was also as widely popular an enterprise. Bermudian mariners excelled at the activity, thanks largely to the speed, especially to windward, and manoeuvrability of the Bermuda sloops, which suited them well to the role. The same abilities allowed Bermuda sloops to escape from better-armed privateers - and, even more so, to escape from larger men-of-war, which, with their square rigs, could not sail as closely to windward. The ability of the sloop rig in general to sail upwind meant a Bermuda sloop could outrun most other sailing ships by simply turning upwind and leaving its pursuers floundering in its wake. This evasiveness meant they were highly prized amongst merchantmen. Of course, these qualities also made Bermuda sloops the ship of choice for the pirates themselves, earlier in the 18th Century, as well as for smugglers.

Despite Bermudian privateers preying heavily on American shipping during the American War of Independence, some historians credit the large number of Bermuda sloops (reckoned at well over a thousand) built in Bermuda as privateers and sold illegally to the Americans as enabling the rebellious colonies to win their independence.

The American War of 1812 was to be the encore of Bermudian privateering, which had died out after the 1790s, due partly to the build up of the naval base in Bermuda, which reduced the Admiralty's reliance on privateers in the western Atlantic, and partly to successful American legal suits, and claims for damages pressed against British privateers, a large portion of which were aimed squarely at the Bermudians. During the course of the American War of 1812, Bermudian privateers were to capture 298 ships (the total captures by all British naval and privateering vessels between the Great Lakes and the West Indies was 1,593 vessels).