Cutlass

The cutlass is a short, broad-bladed sword with a slight curve and, typically, a solid hand guard, developed and used from roughly the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries by naval sailors, privateers and pirates who needed an effective close-combat weapon suited to the cramped, unpredictable footing of a ship's deck rather than the open ground a longer land sword assumed. Its short length made it easy to swing effectively in tight quarters and among rigging, and unlike a rapier or a longer military sword, its cutlass required comparatively little formal fencing training for an ordinary sailor to use with lethal effect, which suited the mixed and often only partly trained crews of merchant and naval vessels of the period. Navies issued cutlasses as standard boarding and shipboard defense weapons well into the age of sail, and the type's strong popular association with piracy comes from the same practical qualities that made it a favored weapon of any armed sailor operating in the close-quarters violence of shipboard combat and boarding actions.