In the 18th and 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, because a brig in those days was a one or two masted vessel – to be a ship it had to have three or more masts. A ship sloop was generally an equivalent of a corvette. A sloop-of-war was smaller than a sailing frigate.

A sloop-of-war was quite different from a civilian sloop, which was a general term for a single masted vessel.

Successive generations of guns became larger in the second half of the 19th century, 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 and which was bigger than a gunboat. Especially famous were British mass-produced sloops of the "Flower" class of the First World War. By the Second World War it had come to mean a small warship armed with one or two 4-inch guns and depth charges. After the Second World War, the sloops were replaced by frigates.

See also

• Rating system of the Royal Navy

The most famous sloop would be HMS Speedy (14 guns), commanded by Lord Cochrane. She 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.