Page 150 - J. C. Turner - History and Science of Knots

140 History and Science of Knots

specialisations in which sailor or fisherman was a trade with rope and knots
as its tools.

Sailors' Knots

The period and setting we are considering here is characterised by dramatic
changes in shipbuilding. Vessels are seen to evolve from Viking longships and
knarrs via sluggish carricks to complex sailing machines like Baltic schooners,
Yankee clippers and German P-liners, which are generally considered to rep-
resent the summit and the end of the era of commercial sail. The role of rope
evolved along with the ships that depended on it. As we have already seen,
in its days, Viking cordage technology was an export product. By the time
P-liners managed to run regular trade routes between Hamburg in Germany
and Valparaiso in Chili around stormy Cape Horn, steel wires and chains had
taken over the natural fibred sheets and rigging. On bigger ships the introduc-
tion and continued use of wire rope eventually killed the natural fibre-knotting
tradition. These were large changes, but the most significant change struck the
people who handled the ropes and tied the knots before this turnover occurred.
The technical evolution aboard sailing ships should not be observed separately
from the increase in sophistication of societies which took place simultaneously.
Shipping was not only a pillar of many Western economies, but the sailors it
involved had become social entities within those societies. They differentiated
themselves by means of their social and cultural identitities. Since knots are
technical artifacts we shall focus on the latter.

Pig. 1. Wale Knot
A demand for terminology had caused sailors to concoct quite a number of
names, sometimes exotic ones (e.g. see Fig. 1), for their knots. Many of them
have been collected and supplemented with further names, by Clifford Ashley
or Raoul Graumont and John Hensel in their landmark knot monographs [1],