Page 17 - The Complete Rigger’s Apprentice

Introduction

igging is the art of using knots and lines, either effect. It is up to the individual sailor to decide how
Rto move things or to keep them from moving. much of the old to mix with the new; there is always
It can be put to such mundane tasks as guying some mixing, for even an ultramodern vessel carries
telephone poles or raising the flag at city hall. But elements of the past in its design and gear.
it is expressed in such monuments to engineering Because contemporary rigging is machine-
as an ocean racer’s minimalist rod spiderweb or made and technology-intensive, it tends by its very
the awesome hoisting gear of a 300-ton shipyard nature to exclude sailors from participation. If we
crane. Somewhere between, there is a branch of find it difficult to be involved, it’s a short step to
the art, best expressed in classic and contemporary assuming that we can’t be involved. I once took
cruising vessels, that seeks to combine technologi- some yacht club members on a tour of the Eliza-
cal achieve ment, human scale, and a minimum of beth II, a working replica of a 16th-century British
tools and expense. Knowledge of it enables one to trading ship. The huge, heavy masts and yards of
sail more efficiently, with the help of fewer experts such vessels are held up by little bits of string—
and fewer costly manufactured contrivances, and the carefully made marline seizings that secure the
with the confidence and peace of mind that result lower ends of the shrouds. The yacht club mem-
from personal resourcefulness. It is called tradi- bers had all seen old ships before, but they’d never
tional rigging, and it is the subject of this book. looked closely at the details of the rig. When they
At the beginning I would like to emphasize the understood what these seizings were doing, they
distinction between the terms “traditional” and were literally open-mouthed in astonishment. It
“archaic.” No amount of reverence for our maritime had never really occurred to them that a human
heritage will lead us to put tarred-hemp standing being, with nothing more than a stick, a piece of
rigging on modern craft; time, engineering, and marline, and a little skill, could make something
newer materials have rendered that practice obso- just as structurally significant as a modern swaged
lete for all but historical reproductions. On the other terminal.
hand, many procedures and materials from the 19th What a contrast this makes with the days of
century and earlier are still in use today, unchanged the original Elizabeth. Because rig materials were
or only modified to meet new demands. Basic knots so fragile and degraded so quickly, the crew’s daily
such as the Bowline, Anchor Hitch, and Figure-Eight activities were intimately involved with the life of
are good examples, as are blocks, winches, seizings, the vessel, so much so as to blur the distinction
lashings—well, the list is continued in the following between the two. Modern rig materials require
pages. These items have survived because long, hard far less of our time for maintenance, but precisely
experience has shown that they can be counted on because they are so evolved, so inaccessible to sim-
to do their jobs with minimum fuss and maximum ple manual skills, they can require far more of our

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