Drake-class sloop

The Drake class was a class of three sloops of wooden construction built for the Royal Navy during 1741. All were ordered in 1740, and were the first to be built by contract with commercial builders, although they were to a common design prepared by Jacob Acworth, the Surveyor of the Navy. They were the first new sloops to be built since the previous batch of eight in 1732 (which had all been built in the Royal Dockyards), but they closely followed the characteristics of their predecessors.

Although initially armed with eight 4-pounder guns, this class was built with seven pairs of gunports on the upper deck (each port flanked by two pairs of row-ports), and the two survivors in 1744 had their ordnance increased to ten guns.

Construction
At the start of the War of Jenkins' Ear in 1739, the Royal Navy had a shortage of small combatant vessels to undertake the patrol and escort role; basically their only suitable vessels were the twelve 200-ton sloops built in the period from 1728 to 1732 in the Royal Dockyards, each armed with eight 3-pounder or 4-pounder guns. A large expansion in the number of sloops was urgently needed to cope with the requirements of convoy duties. Initially, three more sloops of 200 tons were ordered in 1740 as replacements for earlier sloops of the same names. A design was produced by the Surveyor of the Navy, and contracts were offered to merchant builders in the River Thames area. The first two were contracted at a price of £7-15-0d per ton (or £1,550 for 200 tons) and the third at a price of £7-7-6d per ton (or £1,475 for 200 tons). After launching all three vessels were taken to Deptford Dockyard for completion and fitting out there, at an additional cost of £1,593-8-8d for Drake, £1,505-11-11d for Hawk, and £1,626-15-6d for Swift.