Page 9 - Outward Bound Ropes, Knots, and Hitches

IntroduCtIon

Looking back now over thousands of miles of trail and river, over hundreds of
campsites, over the teaching I’ve done on Outward Bound courses from Maine
to Florida, the list of skills offered by instructors to students seems endless:
paddling a canoe, hoisting a sail, packing a pack, reading a map, treating a
blister, picking a tent site, firing up a stove, cooking dinner—to name just a
few. If, however, one skill stands out as universally useful, a skill you might use
in any situation, in any environment, on any trip, it is the tying of knots.
Knots hold the outdoor world together. Properly tied, they prevent the boat
from drifting away, the tent from lifting off in a high wind, and the bear from
reaching the food bag. The right knot turns a length of rope into a clothesline,
an anchor line, or a zip line. A good knot holds the sailing ship on course and
the canoe to the top of the vehicle. A matter of life and death, the climber is
secured to the rope and from falling off the end of the rope by knots.
To tie a knot is to add your name to a rich history. Long before mallet and
peg, hammer and nail, glue, duct tape, or Velcro, there was cordage—and the
knots that made it useful. Beside the unknown inventor of the wheel and the
forgotten discoverer of fire making, I rank equally as a genius the man or woman
who figured out how to entangle the ends of vines and plants’ fibers in ways that
would keep them from untangling. The tying of the first knot may have occurred
more than 100,000 years ago. How else were prehistoric stone ax heads attached
to prehistoric ax handles? No evidence, however, remains. But off the coast of
Denmark, a fishhook was found still tied to a line (a length of sinew or gut) with
what we know today as a clove hitch (see page 24). This hook-and-line was
estimated at more than 10,000 years old. Part of a knotted fishing net retrieved
from a bog in Finland has been dated circa 7200 BCE. During the zeniths of their
civilizations, the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans tied complex knots for diverse
jobs—and left wonders that remain thousands of years later.
From the icebound polar regions to the ever-warm equatorial regions, all
cultures in all times have knotted cords. Over the centuries knots have been
used by builders, surveyors, soldiers, and sorcerers. The butcher, the miller, the
cobbler, the farmer, the weaver, the housewife—they all needed a knot or two,
or three. Knots were used for communication, for record keeping, in religious
rites, and for corporal punishment.
It was at sea, though, under sail, that the science and art of knot tying
reached its greatest extent. As the scope and practice of ships at sea expanded,

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