Page 178 - The Pocket Guide to Outdoor Knots

ESKIMO BOWLINE

Purpose

Quickly and easily tied, this unorthodox bowline is more secure and may be used
in situations where the regular knot would shake loose and spill. It could pass for

the tricorn loop (pages 32–33), already described in Section 1—Overhand

Knots, but in fact it has one less crossing point.

Tying

Begin as if for an overhand knot, but then interweave the working end over-
under-over as shown (figure 1). Pull upon the two knot parts indicated to

transform the knot (figures 2–3) when a sort of bowline-on-its-side results.
Tighten it and a compact tricorn button knot appears (figure 4).

Knot lore

Early in 1985 I was invited to visit London’s Museum of Mankind to examine an
Inuit sled, a jig-saw of bone and ivory bits and pieces, lashed together with

rawhide thongs. Each lashing sported what appeared to be little triangular
buttons knots, which it took me a while to work out were actually these bowlines

used as hitches to begin each lashing.
The earliest previous use of this knot (on Baffin Island) was recorded by the

ethnologist Franz Boas, in 1907, and for that reason it has been referred to as the
Boas bowline. But the sled I saw had been presented to polar explorer Sir John

Ross (1777–1856) at an earlier date, by a tribe of Inuits, and it was old when
they gave it to him. Moreover, they had not seen a white man before. So, not

only can the inference be made that this knot has a genuine Inuit pedigree (rather
than being a common bowline copied, wrongly, from European seaman) but it is

perhaps 100 years older than the sighting by Boas.