Bermuda sloop

[3] Later in the 19th century, the design of Bermudian vessels had largely dispensed with square topsails and gaff rig, replacing them with triangular main sails and jibs.

The rig was eventually adopted almost universally on small sailing craft in the 20th Century, although as seen on most modern vessels it is very much less extreme than on traditional Bermudian designs, with lower, vertical masts, shorter booms, omitted bowsprits, and much less area of canvas.

Soon, shipbuilding became one of the primary trades on the island and ships were exported throughout the English colonies on the American seaboard, in the West Indies, and eventually to Europe.

In service of the burgeoning shipbuilding industry, many Bermudian colonists began to cultivate Bermuda cedar instead of lucrative trade crops such as tobacco.

The archipelago’s ruling Somers Isles Company, which favored tobacco agriculture, attempted to limit Bermudian shipbuilding, inciting demonstrations, appeals, and unrest.

This unrest led to violence, the eventual dissolution of the Somers Isles Company and the archipelago’s transition to royal colony status in 1684.

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 evasive capabilities highly prized by merchantmen also made Bermuda sloops the ship of choice for the pirates themselves, earlier in the 18th century, as well as for smugglers.

The same abilities allowed Bermuda sloops to escape from better-armed privateers and even larger man-of-war British naval ships which, with their square rigs, could not sail as closely to windward.

This meant that slavery did not play the same role as in many other colonies, though privateers based in Bermuda often brought enslaved blacks and Native Americans who had been captured along with ships of enemy nations.

After 1684, Bermuda turned wholesale to a maritime economy, and slaves, black, Amerindian, and Irish (the various minorities merged into a single demographic group, known as coloured, which included anyone who was not defined as entirely of European extraction), played an increasing role in this.

Authorities in Boston offered these men their freedom, but nearly all of the 70 captives elected to be treated as prisoners of war, claiming slavery was all they knew and out of fear for their families who were still in Bermuda.

[11] Although such small sloops are rare today, the design was further scaled down to produce the Bermuda Fitted Dinghy, a class of racing vessel used in traditional competition between Bermudian yacht clubs.