Tons of Rope

by Mike Crowe

Lobstermen may be the few among us regularly handling great lengths of rope. In the days of sail the square rigged ship was by far the greatest consumer of rope. It had always been essential aboard ship, but the fully rigged ship with as many as 25 sails used literally miles of rope. Standing rigging, running rigging, bolt rope sewn into the edges of all the sails, foot ropes, braces, halyards and anchor cables were a few of the longer uses. The complete gang of standing and running rigging alone for one 400-ton brig launched at Portland, Maine, in 1865 was 3.8 miles long. By 1850 the 1,000-ton ship was common and one launched in 1862 had a gang of standing rigging alone that was over 2 miles long, with sizes ranging up to 9-1/2 inches and over a ton of “smaller stuff,” which was various smaller lines. It might be said that the sailing ship mothered the invention of techniques for making rope better and more efficiently.
Aboard ship, rope sizes ranged from twine to 7 inch diameter and larger. It was everywhere, used for everything. Knowing the names of every rope and how to tie essential knots for specific purposes was part of the basic knowledge sailors were expected to have. Rope controlled the ship, holding together and operating the complex system of sails which were the ship’s engine. As the size of ships grew in the 19th century the amount of rope used on them also increased.

By the late 1800’s the means of rope production had changed more than the rope made. From the earliest days when the transition was made from using vines for rope to fabricating plant fibers into a line, the process was to twist several strands around each other. This formed a product stronger than the sum of the parts. Making line for fishing was one of the earliest reasons for twisting fibers. There is evidence of early Egyptian rope-making using papyrus and leather around 3500 B.C. Some of these ropes were used in building the pyramids and no doubt on ships. Cannabis hemp, the primary rope fiber for centuries, was used in China 12,000 years ago, where the plant is believed to have evolved. There its fibers were used very early to make rope, clothing and paper. Its early value there is seen in a 2300 B.C. reference to paying tribute (taxes) to rulers with hemp.

Later in Europe, from at least the middle ages, hemp was the plant of choice for ropemaking. The English developed ropemaking techniques alongside string-making for the longbow, the weapon of choice in the English infantry before firearms. The 1/8” string had to be 4 to 5 times the strength of the bow, which was around 70-90 lbs. Henry VIII (1491-1547) required farmers to plant 1/4 acre in hemp for every 36 acres under cultivation.

In America, a group of Bostonians solicited English ropemaker John Harrison to establish a ropewalk in 1641 near where the South Station is today. The first crops of hemp were grown in Salem, Massachusetts in 1640 and taxes at the time could be paid with hemp. Over the next century the states of Kentucky and North Carolina and what was then the west, Missouri, soon became major producers. It was Russian hemp that was the preferred fiber and America imported thousands of tons. Other fibers like cotton, jute and sisal have been and still are used to make a range of ropes and twine.

Although the Egyptians had some simple mechanical devices for making rope machinery arrived late in American rope production. However, simple mechanical parts were devised in response to rising demands for quantity, high quality and low prices. Ships and the shipping business were growing in the 1800’s. When the British left New York in 1784, the American’s sought to replace the British markets lost. They went to China with the ginseng that grew wild in the New England woods. This trade led to the development of the China clipper, ripe with sail and long on line that saw a hard, short life. The size of the clipper ship topped out with Donald Mackay’s “Great Republic”. In it’s large sail plan the boltropes sewn into the topsails were 8 1/2” and her main yard was 120 feet long.

Rope was made in a long narrow building called a ropewalk. Some ropemaking operations started outdoors and eventually were covered and enclosed. The only complete American ropewalk in existence is at the Charlestown Navy Yard near Boston. The 1/4 mile long stone building produced most of the rope for the U.S. Navy until it closed in 1971. The Charlestown Navy Yard has preserved a length of 25 inch cable. The majority were not this long or made of stone, which in part explains the scarcity of this once familiar coastal building. Corporate consolidation was another factor. Hemp fibers had to be soaked in pine tar to resist deterioration in the tough environment at sea. Hot North Carolina tar, flammable fibers and wooden buildings were a volatile mix.

Made in many diameters and lengths, rope was sold by weight. Before 1850 it was designated by circumference; today diameter is also used. At sea larger ropes are designated by circumference and the smaller stuff by the number of threads it contains. A 1-1/4” rope is called 15-thread because it is laid from three strands, each strand formed from five threads or yarns. On land diameter is generally used to designate size. The many varieties of rope include three or four strand, hard or soft lay, with or without a heart rope and many sizes of each. A soft lay is stronger, a hard lay or tightly twisted rope is stiffer and easier to handle. The intended use determines which lay is better. A cowboy’s lariat would be a hard lay and rope sewn into the edge of a sail a soft lay.

Most rope is of three or four strands and making it into rope is done by twisting one around the other. There are three parts: fiber, thread and strand. The individual plant fibers are twisted into thread, the threads are twisted into strands and the strands twisted into rope. Fiber was taken from large bales and combed or hackled out straight like long hair (about 3 feet long) with a metal brush. In the ropewalk a spinner with hackled hemp wrapped around his waist twisted the fibers between thumb and fingers into a yarn that was spun into a thread. It was then fed to a spinning wheel run by another person, usually a child, as the spinner walked backward down the walk. After the hemp yarn was treated with pine tar it was put on bobbins at the end of the walk. It was then run through plates with holes in concentric circles. The plates fed the yarns out evenly and at the correct angle. After the plate, the threads were pulled through a tube, compressed and then twisted into a strand.

The third step was laying the three or four strands out parallel to their full length. At one end of the walk these strands were attached to a laying machine. This was basically a cart from which the strands, attached at one end, were twisted into rope as it moved down the walk.

The structure and strength of rope is based on the principle of opposing twists. Tiny barbs on the individual fibers help hold the thread together. The threads are formed into strands with a twist in one direction and the strands formed into rope by a twist in the opposite direction. The laying process tended to untwist the strands. Therefore each strand was connected at it’s other end to a device that kept each strand revolving to prevent the untwisting action of the laying process. These functions were all done by hand earlier, but by the middle of the 1800’s the simple devices described here were in use in larger ropewalks. Rope twisted to the right was designated a “right hand rope” and left likewise. The maximum length that could be made in one piece was determined by the length of the ropewalk.

In the 1830’s another fiber began to be added to rope in American ropewalks. Manila, named for the Philippine port it was shipped from, was more supple, softer, cleaner, resistant to the elements and therefore didn’t need to be tarred. All this and less likely to coil, it soon became the preferred fiber. Some, including the British Navy didn’t change to manila rope. The ropemaking business, in America, was structured in a way that required a lot of capitalization. Large inventories of stock were needed. Rope was sold on six months credit and competition was so stiff that one of the country’s leading producers, the Plymouth Cordage Company, two miles from Plymouth Rock, often sold below cost to maintain production. The result was consolidation of a business at one time as common on the coast as boat building and gear suppliers.

When the steamship replaced the square rigger in shipping and the navy, the demand for rope continued, but the type of rope used changed with these ships. The maritime fleet had changed more gradually than the navy to steam. The development of wire rope had begun in the mines of Germany in the 1840’s. By the time it was used on ships it was being built in much the same way as fiber rope. Wire rope replaced hemp and manila for standing rigging on the steel ships with steel masts that were in use in by the late 1800’s. Fiber rope continued to be used for running rigging and elsewhere on steel ships. Merchant and naval steamships continued to use large anchor cables, tow lines and various lines on deck.

Most rope today is made of synthetic fiber and a lot of it would not have been recognized as rope a hundred years ago. Synthetic fibers were experimented with in the 1930’s, but it was not until the 1950’s that synthetic ropes were being produced on a commercial scale. Some synthetic ropes were laid like natural fiber rope. Synthetics made possible the appearance of many kinds of new rope. They were made on machines, looked and performed in new ways, but fundamentally many were extensions of the limits of fiber rope. The first high modulus polymer fiber rope was sold about 30 years ago for use as a guy wire on a radio telescope. Its elasticity was similar to steel. Bungee cord and shock cord are a kind of extremely soft lay with a heart rope.

The USS Constitution in its recent major refit got synthetic standing rigging, black of course. Part of the maintenance routine on ships with hemp was tarring the rigging. Tar dripping out of the rigging on hot days was one of the less romantic aspects of life before the mast. On the other hand, the look of black synthetic standing rigging on a 210-year-old ship with the place the Constitution holds, tied up within view of the ropewalk that for so long made its rigging, is a little less.....

Eric Newby went to sea on a square rigged sailing ship as an apprentice at age 18 in 1938. That ship, the Moshulu, was shipping grain across the ocean from Australia, racing other grain ships in a world that would not survive World War II. With a simple camera and little knowledge of photography, he took some of the most extraordinary photographs of this sailing life. Another of his books The Last Grain Race, tells the story of his apprenticeship and life at sea.