Dread - Pirate Sloop

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me!

Dread is a fictional pirate sloop built in Bermuda during the 1680s, during the Golden Age of Piracy.

The sloop is a single-mast ship with a fore-aft rigged mainsail. Sloops were the most popular ships of their time in the Caribbean Sea, with pirates, merchants, and anyone in-between. Sloops had a much shallower draft than other boats and could be made very fast and sail in shallower waters. They also could have good cargo capacity and could even have many guns. Not to mention they were quite cheap! This made them the ideal ship for piracy in the region.

This particular boat is on the larger side for sloops of the time, however some were significantly bigger. It has an impractical gun count and layout, but the pirates don't care, it looks scary and goes boom! And yes, the guns would be super hard to reload, needing to be moved out of the ports and rotated to reload. This would be a very dangerous and long process compared to a regular reload, but ideally pirates never even have to fire a shot to secure their plunder.

The boat has a full interior, although cramped, to some, it's home. The boat uses a whip-staff to turn the rudder instead of a wheel, as steering wheels were not very common (or may have not even been invented yet!) at the time, especially for a boat of this size. Oh, and yes, the holes between the gun ports are for oars, actually. Many ships of this time period used them as auxiliary propulsion, especially pirate ships.

The name was chosen to be simple and short, but imposing. "Dread" was chosen as I felt it encompasses the feeling of seeing a pirate vessel rather well.

To fair seas and rich plunder! Drink up me 'earties, yo ho!