Page 580 - The Ashley Book of Knots

DECORATIVE MARLING SPIKE SEAi\lANSHIP (APPLIED KNOTS)

3617. Another Loop HITCHING. Bring a loop up first from one

face of the ring and then the other. Each time it is thrust through

the previous loop, which is then drawn snug.

3618. A hitching with a very pronounced ridge is made with a sail

needle. Start as in the first diagram, proceed as in the second diagram

and continue as in the third, and thereafter repeat two and three

alternately. Draw up snugly, but not enough to distort. 3&16

3619. A ringbolt hitched httrpoon mounting, on a two-fiued Arctic

iron, that was collected in Provincetown. The two-fiued iron has

been out of use in the whaling industry for almost exactly one

hundred years, which approximately places the date of this mount-

ing. The becket is wormed and all six strands are seized and tapered.

One strand takes a round turn about the socket toward the rim and

then is teased and laid down the socket to be covered by the remain-

ing five strands. The five are hitched as in '/I. 3606 and when the shank 3611

is reached they are opened, teased and served over for several inches.

A THREE-BIGHT, FIVE-LEAD, THREE-PLY TURK'S-HEAD is put on at

the base of the socket.

3620. A one-fiued iron with a grafted mounting. This iron was in

use about 1840.

3621. RINGBOLT HITCHING applied to an early toggle iron, circa

1845. The eye is spliced directly around the socket, and a becket

for bending the whale line is formed with the bight. The end of the

hitching is seized and snaked. These three harpoons are now in the

collection of the Mariners' Museum in Newport News.

The most familiar bit of sailor's knot work that remains to us is

his sea chest beckets. They have survived because the chest itself 'was

- .
•
too practical a piece of furniture to be cast aside. When brought o

•
-
back from sea it has generally been put to some domestic task; , . .

to serve perhaps as wood box or coal scuttle, as clothes chest or cel- , I

larette, as grain or vegetable bin, as attic catchall-I have even seen

one in a barn serving as a nesting place for a setting hen.

Often a sea chest has a sloping front designed to keep it from

Leing topheavy and also to save the sailor's shins in a seaway. Some-

times the back also slopes, and, very rarely, the ends as well. The best

type of becket clears the lid of the chest just enough to spare the

sailor's knuckles.

Richard H. Dana, Jr., in the Seaman's Manual (1841), defines the

"

word becket as follows: "A handle made of rope in the form of a

circle, as the handle of a chest, is called a becket." W. Clark Russell

(Sailors' Language, London, 1883) and Olsen (Fisherman's Seaman-

ship, Grimsby, 1885) give similar definitions. Several writers of fic-

tion and verse have called them shackles, a name suggested no doubt

by their shape, and the title, so sponsored, has even entered the Ox-

ford Dictionary, while the real name is still knocking at the door.

•
.,

•
'.
-
•
.'
'.
•

[ 57 1 ]