Pinnace (ship's boat)

As a ship's boat, the pinnace is a light boat, propelled by oars or sails, carried aboard merchant and war vessels in the Age of Sail to serve as a tender. The pinnace was usually rowed but could be rigged with a sail for use in favorable winds. A pinnace would ferry passengers and mail, communicate between vessels, scout to sound anchorages, convey water and provisions, or carry armed sailors for boarding expeditions. The Spanish favored them as lightweight smuggling vessels while the Dutch used them as raiders. In modern parlance, "pinnace" has come to mean an auxiliary vessel that doesn't fit under the "launch" or "lifeboat" definitions.

Identification of some pinnaces in contemporary historical documents is often difficult because there was no standardization of pinnace design, be the type 'small' or 'large'. The term seems to have been applied to variants of what may be called the full-rigged pinnace, rather than the alternative use of the term for a larger vessel's boat. Furthermore, several ship type and rig terms were used in the 17th century, but with very different definitions than applied today. Re-assessment of the design of some 17th-century ships not designated "pinnace" sometimes uncovers the unexpected. For example, in the 17th century, brigantine referred to a two-masted sailing ship that was square-rigged on the foremast, and fore-and-aft rigged on the main mast. The designation 'brig' did not exist until the early 18th century, by which time vessels described as pinnaces had been well known for at least a century and a half.

By the late 17th century, a brigantine in the Royal Navy was a small, square-rigged, two-masted ship, that could be rowed as well as sailed. 'Brig' referred to any ship that was square-rigged on both masts. When 'brig' and 'brigantine' were too widely applied, other possibilities for ship types were obscured. There is also the problem in sorting out what is meant by a 'barque' in the early 17th century. Note that the 'barque' or 'bark' rig as we understand it was not known in the first half of the 17th century, and so exactly what is meant by a 'barque' is not clear. "When Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote of 'barques', he referred to ships that were both 'small' and 'large' and weighed 12 to 40 tons", thereby suggesting the two types of pinnace and their usual range in tonnage.

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