B A C K T H E N
Bosun Earl Warren Making a Fender
Photo courtesy of the Newport Maritime Museum, Newport News, Va. Text courtesy of Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn.
Like a mad sausage maker, Bosun Warren pauses to survey his newest creation. Of course it isn’t sausage but rope, and it’s not some giant pudding but instead a bow fender for a harbor tug, maybe even one destined to nudge the great liners of the 1930s into the piers on New York’s Hudson River. Tugboats had sharp steel noses, and from their invention at the start of the steam era they needed cushioning so this prow could ease up to a massive hull and then apply tremendous pressure to direct the seagoing ships to their docks in crowded harbors.
The line looks like sausage because the bosun has had to unravel it to make his fender. Rope consists of many fine strands, which gain strength and become workable only when they are tightly bound together. In some lines the individual strands are actually wrapped into a larger entity; the most familiar of these are the giant cables that span suspension bridges. Most line, however, is made by twisting a bundle of fibers and locking the threads together by the force of this rotation. This twisting ensures that there is much friction between the sides of the fibers as they press against each other, and this contact is what really makes up the accumulated strength of the line itself. The intimate connection thus produced also allows the tiny fibers to be short, and in a random fashion the short pieces are able to sustain their share of the overall load through contact with adjacent bits of yarn. Common rope has three such bundles, and it is finished with a second twisting that creates the spiral form we associate with ordinary line.
Today these enders are still made in shipyards and in the slack hours, on the broad and sunny afterdecks of tugs. But while the one pictured here has a chain and rope core, modern ones can have the tough cushioning of rubber hidden in their center. This particular example is quite special, though, because the beard of a tugboat is traditionally made out of junk line, short bits that are no longer useful as hawser; here, however, we see brand new line being sacrificed to the fender. Some of this line has been unraveled, as the rippling strands hanging down the center show, but much of it is in the form of fresh bundles of strands that have never before been twisted into finished line. These hang limp and straight, whether from the sides of the fender or the Bosun’s able hands. This must be a very special construction, to be made of such expensive stuff, probably destined for a new and splendid tug that must make her owners proud as she slips down the ways to a hard working life.
William T. Radcliffe, American 1913–1997