Thanks for the reply
I'm working on a pirate RPG. My players will be a pirate crew, but I wanted to keep the total number of crew as low as possible and still make for a ship that could sail and fight at full effectiveness. I'm downloading "A Seamans Grammar as I type. It should indeed be useful.
Game is set circa the early 1700s. I'm not really going for full realism, but I would like to have some level a verisimilitude. I figure the boat to be a Bermuda or Jamaican sloop, somewhere in the 70 foot range and carrying 8-10 six-pounders. Still toying with the idea of making it a brig-sloop. I never realized the dizzying array of types of vessels operating in the Caribbean at the time until I started doing a little research.
Tomorrow I am going to a local library to pick up a copy of Pirates: terror on the high seas in the Caribbean and South China Sea by David Cordingly that was referenced in this thread and hopefully it will also help. However, I figured that there would be someone here that could give me a more informed answer to my question than I could likely work out on my own.
