Preface. Thousands of types of knots have been invented since rope was, I imagine that unless some books on this survive, that future generations will be busy reinventing what was once known in the past. Rope was far more important than I’d realized to human civilization.
These are the incomplete, disjointed notes from my Kindle, so you will probably want to buy the book to have a complete, flowing narrative. Alice Friedemann
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Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization by Tim Queeney
We’ll never know, but the sequence probably goes something like this: fire, stone tools, and then the twisted strands of the first ropes. In many cultural traditions the fire giver of myth is openly branded as a thief. The gods don’t bestow fire on lowly humanity freely as a gift; special beings must “steal” the fire for mankind’s use. In Native American Cherokee myth, after possum and buzzard fail in their attempts to bring fire to humanity, grandmother spider gives it a try. Small and overlooked, she brings a clay pot with her and snatches up fire from the sun, hides it in the pot, and follows her web back from the other side of the world to where the people live. In the Greek version, the fire stealer is the Titan Prometheus. Zeus, the king of the gods, learns of Prometheus’s theft and in punishment has him chained to a rock where every day his liver is eaten by a hungry eagle, and every night it grows back.
It’s all very good to make a sharp, light spearpoint and to have a shaft of wood prepared to accept the deadly warhead, but how do we attach it in a way that can withstand the rigors of repeated use? One way that spearpoints were set on their shafts was with a sticky bed of pine tar or some variety of tree pitch. A good start, but that wasn’t nearly strong enough.
The SEM images show that the Abri du Maras specimen has the elements of cordage. The specimen was determined to be fifty thousand years old, making it the oldest example of rope yet known.
They postulated in a paper published in Nature magazine that the ability to make rope represented impressive abstract thinking by Neanderthal people. “The production of cordage is complex and requires detailed knowledge of plants, seasonality, planning, retting, etc. Indeed, the production of cordage requires an understanding of mathematical concepts and general numeracy in the creation of sets of elements and pairs of numbers to create a structure. Indeed, numerosity has been suggested as ‘one possible feral cognitive basis for abstraction and modern symbolic thinking’.… As the structure becomes more complex (multiple cords twisted to form a rope, ropes interlaced to form knots), it demonstrates an ‘infinite use of finite means’ and requires a cognitive complexity similar to that required by human language.”
The easiest way to make simple rope is to find a thin vine. The vine itself can be used as a length of cordage. This approach to rope is limited, however, both by the length of the vine and by the fact that even the thinnest vines aren’t very easy to work with for making knots or for compacting into an easy-to-carry coil. Another primitive way to make simple cordage is to strip off a length of tree bark and then twist that length between thumb and fingers of either hand. This twisting action will eventually make the strip kink in the middle between our hands. So we will have the middle kink and then two lengths coming off either side.
Eventually we produce a length of two-strand twisted cordage. This hand-twisting process is easy to learn and produces simple cordage useful for many simple tasks. For early humans, this was surely the first way they realized the tremendous usefulness of rope as a tool.
What makes the 50,000-year-old cordage discovered by Bruce Hardy at Abri du Maras extra intriguing and important is that it isn’t simple two-strand cordage; it’s more sophisticated three-strand rope, in which there are three individual strands twisted around each other.
An S twist is when the rope elements are twisted to the left,
A Z twist is the opposite. It represents fibers that have been twisted to the right.
A three-strand rope begins with thin wisps of material called fibers—of halfa grass or some other natural fibrous source. The fibers are twisted together, in the same way wool is twisted using a spinning wheel into yarn. In fact, this first element of a rope is called a “yarn.” The yarn is twisted together using either an S or Z twist. Then a group of three yarns is twisted together into something called a strand. If the yarns have an S twist, then we want to twist them into a strand using a Z twist. Twisting them the opposite way puts the elements in tension with each other; the opposing twists work to keep the rope together. The final step for a three-strand rope is to twist the three strands together, again using the opposite twist that was used to make each strand. So what are the physical factors that make these twisted strands work as rope? The first is friction. The many strands of natural fiber don’t easily slide past each other because of friction (and some mechanical interlocking due to surface irregularities).
Due to the twist, the strand wraps itself around the other two strands in the form of a helix. The result of the helix is that when a pulling force is applied to the strand, the helix tightens, thus locking the rope more tightly together.
There are no downstream strands to hold the strands together at the ends of a rope, which means they can unravel. To secure the ends we can either tie a knot into each end so the strands don’t unravel, or we can hold the strands in place by wrapping a lighter line around the rope’s circumference. This process is called “whipping,” which we’ll discuss later on. Making rope by hand twisting is laborious. We have to do all the twisting with hand manipulations while making sure we’re imparting the right direction of twist.
If we fed lengths of grass into the four holes and then spun the whole tusk around, the four strands of grass would twist around each other and make a four-strand rope.
A mammoth tusk is possibly the earliest ropemaking tool ever found. It’s the first indication we have that early humans may have started the process of systematizing rope production.
The three-strand rope found proves that the ancient Egyptians were surprisingly adept ropemakers. A rope of its sturdy dimensions was surely used as docking line to hold a boat fast to the quays along the Nile and for the halyards and sheets and stays of the boat’s rigging.
Egyptian ropemaking was highly advanced. The Egyptians had mastered producing rope from halfa, papyrus fibers, and the fibrous parts of date palms, flax, other grasses, animal hide, and even animal hair.
The earliest written mention of this process is from a Fifth Dynasty (2520 to 2400 BCE) tomb in Thebes. In another tomb in Thebes from 1500 BCE, a scene is depicted of three men making two-strand rope. “The man on the right is separately twisting the two strands, which are attached to whirling tools, in the clockwise sense and slowly walking forwards. Meanwhile, the man on the left is closing the strands by twisting the tool, to which both strands are attached, in the anti-clockwise sense and walking backwards as the rope is formed. The man in the middle, who is seated, holds a marlinspike between the strands.… His role is to control the forming of the rope by ensuring the strands are laid tightly together.… The painting also shows papyrus plants, a bundle of cut reeds, and four coils of rope. There is also a group of the tools used in rope-making, including a knife for cutting the papyrus stems, a mallet for beating them, two whirling tools and two marlinspikes.”
In ancient Egypt, rope was not solely the province of boats and boatbuilding. Surveyors were “rope stretchers” who used knotted cord to measure land. Even the great pharaohs ceremonially stretched ropes to mark the foundations of new buildings.
This idea of using rope as a measuring device for civic construction was also found in ancient Babylon. The 1754 BCE stone inscribed with the law-giving Code of Hammurabi has an image of the sun god giving mankind a measuring rope to stake out the building of temples.
the stones were quarried in Wales and then transported to the Salisbury Plain by people who were sufficiently organized and motivated to carry out this enormous task. Wooden sledges, rope, and the muscle power of hundreds of people would have been required. And the route must have been carefully planned beforehand to minimize river crossings and avoid sinking a stone-laden sledge in a wet bog. Moving the altar stone from Scotland means even more rivers to cross and bogs to avoid.
The tall sarsen stone trilithons (two upright stones with a stone lintel joining them) are sandstone blocks that were quarried 16 miles north of the Stonehenge site. They were certainly dragged there on sledges by teams of people hauling on ropes. One expert, Sheffield University professor Mike Parker Pearson, suggests that up to four thousand people came together to haul the large sarsen stones into place and erect them.
THE VOYAGING CANOE HŌKŪLE‘A, LAUNCHED in 1975 by the Polynesian Voyaging Society of Hawaii, is a modern reconstruction of a traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe. These catamaran canoes, built for centuries by Polynesian peoples, were highly dependent on rope. Instead of nails or wooden pegs to join sections of the boat, the Polynesians relied on coconut-fiber rope to lash the twin hulls, the crossbeams, the crew platform, and other structural elements into a capable ocean-sailing vessel. Rope was also essential for raising, lowering, and controlling the sails.
One of the main fiber sources used by these premier voyagers was the hairy outer husk of the coconut, called coir. Other materials also included fibers harvested from plants like pandanus and lawyer cane. To caulk seams in the hull and make them watertight, they used a white compound made from dehydrated breadfruit sap mixed with strips of coconut husks.
To make the coconut fiber rope, the coconut husks are soaked in water for a time. This softens the fibers so they can be removed and collected. Next the fibers are dried and then twisted into rope. Coconut-husk fiber rope is still made throughout the Pacific with Sri Lanka and India being major producers. Coir rope is an excellent choice for use on the sailing outriggers of the Austronesians as the fibers have a higher lignin content than many other . This makes the rope nearly waterproof in salt water. Using this durable rope, the various sections of their outrigger canoes were tightly lashed together.
If a craft is sailed far downwind, there is always the problem of the return, either by tacking against the wind or waiting for a wind shift. This would not have been an enviable prospect for an exploring party low on food and water, and perhaps with a battered canoe. In contrast, if a craft is sailed to windward, it is relatively easy to return home by sailing swiftly downwind.
Rather than using mechanical devices, the Polynesian voyagers solved the problem using well-honed abilities of observation. They paid close attention to the stars above them, to the winds and wave trains on the surface, and to how islands affected the shapes and directions of the waves. They noted the presence of birds and even marine life in the sea. And they reportedly made use of light flashes moving through the water called te lapa that gave them direction to surrounding islands. This body of knowledge was passed down via oral tradition from generation to generation, an impressive example of powers of observation and strong societal connections. Like all ancient cultures, the Polynesians noted the rising, transit, and setting of stars in the night sky. They realized that depending on latitude and the seasons, different stars would pass directly overhead (known as our zenith in astronavigation) during the night.
wind direction itself was a method for navigating. And as the winds blow across the ocean’s surface for days or weeks on end, they push long, roughly parallel waves before them, providing another clue. Islands in the stream of waves cause the waves to bend and refract as they move past outposts of land. Then these refractions come together in ways that allow an experienced Polynesian navigator to see the direction to the island. The various permutations of these wave interactions were memorized by navigators so they could be used to read the surface of the ocean and point the way to go. As the voyagers neared islands—but while the island was still out of sight—they would note the presence of certain species of birds that routinely fly out to sea and then return to the island at night. The navigators also passed down observations of when and where on a voyage they might see dolphins or whales or other marine life—yet another data point for wayfinding. During the daytime Polynesian voyagers watched for the presence of clouds that formed over islands and coral reefs. They also noted differences in the color of the sky resulting from light bouncing off island sand or the light color of atoll lagoons. Most intriguing of the Polynesian navigational tools is te lapa, or “the flashing.” These are underwater light flashes—think sudden bursts like lightning but just under the surface of the water—that Polynesian navigators say are visible in the ocean. These light flashes emanate from islands and move in straight lines outward. According to Polynesian knowledge, these flashings are of different colors and the colors can be used to differentiate islands.
To show the value of rope as a major tool and instrument of technology, there is an account of a high-ranking Egyptian priest named Wenamon who went to Byblos to trade for cedar, and the payment included gold, silver, garments of royal linen, and five hundred coils of rope.
When conditions were right and the trireme was not expected to go into battle, masts were stepped, usually a mainmast and a foremast, and the ship was sailed from point to point. When it was time to engage enemy ships, the masts and the associated rope rigging were removed and put ashore, as there was no room on board with all those grunting rowers on a narrow vessel. Plus, carrying the weight of the mast, sail, and rigging would serve to slow down a trireme under oars.
hogging is the term used to describe what can happen to a wooden vessel as it carries people and cargo and is subjected to the stresses of moving through the waves. The strongest part of the vessel, where it is widest and the most wood has been used in its structure, is the middle of the ship, called amidships by mariners. The ends of the ship, the bow and the stern, have a tendency to sag downward as they become increasingly narrow and farther away from amidships. This process of bow and stern sag is called hogging
To prevent their ships from hogging, the Egyptians attached a thick rope hawser under the bow, ran it to a wooden truss amidships, and then continued the hawser aft to the stern, where it was similarly attached under the planks.
There was no papyrus plant or halfa grass to press into service. The Norse turned to fibers from nettles, milkweed, pine bark, heather, animal hide, and hair. The animals they used for hide were land animals like deer, elk, cattle, and oxen. As superb seafarers, they also were familiar with seals and walruses, and they used the skins of these animals cut into strips and twisted together. Norse walrus- and seal-hide rope was highly prized for its strength and abrasion resistance. It was used on Norse ships for halyards, shrouds, and stays. Animal hair was also twisted into rope; ropes were made of cow tail hair, pig bristle, sheep’s wool, and horsehair. The hair of horses was favored for use aboard ship because it didn’t freeze easily.
To make this very capable rope, we need to strip hefty lengths of bark off a tree in springtime or early summer when the tree is growing. We’ll get a length of material that’s made of several layers and different types of plant cells. The outer opaque bark will be included, but we’ll also get strands of a fibrous material just under the bark. These strands are made up of what botanists call sclerenchyma, or bast fibers (the name bast possibly comes from Proto-Indo-European bask, meaning bundle). The bast fibers are the source material for making dependable twisted-strand rope. Before we can use these fibers to make rope, we have to process them a bit. The bast fibers are attached to the outer bark. And mixed in with them can be cells called phloem, from an area closer to the inner structure of the tree. So, after we strip away the bark from the lime tree, we need to separate the bast fibers from the outer bark and any phloem cells. The way to do this is via a process called retting. We soak the strips of bark in water for a month or two. Bacteria in the water set to work on the bark strips, and a type of rotting takes place and the bark delaminates. When the inner layers of bast are ready, they can be peeled away from the outer bark. These strips and ribbons of bast are then dried. Once dry and split into roughly equal widths, they are ready for the labor-intensive process of twisting into rope. The fibers of lime bast aren’t as strong as hemp fibers, but for northern peoples like the Norse, they were readily available. Bast rope made its way onto Norse ships, both the longships, which were raiding and military vessels, and the cargo-carrying knarr, which were wider of beam and designed to maximize carrying capacity. The rope was used to raise and control the sail and was also used in lashing the strakes (planks) below the waterline to the frames, similar to the Egyptian method.
Norse longships were made of wood, which tends to float. But since the longship was loaded down with the weight of its crew, supplies, weapons, and the rocks in the bilge used as ballast, the buoyancy of wood alone was not sufficient to keep a Norse longship afloat if the vessel filled with water. Without a deck to shed water, a large wave breaking into a longship could fill it with tons of seawater, and the Norse crew could be in big trouble. It’s likely many swamped longships quickly slipped under the waves and sank. Since the Norse used rope in a similar fashion to other peoples by lashing together some of the hull planks with rope, their longships did have a degree of flexibility to handle rough seas. Rope lashing of hull elements allows the hull to absorb wave impacts. And the hardy, wear-resistant walrus- and seal-hide rope used on board longships must also have aided their ocean-going abilities. Even with this rope-assisted advantage, making such a voyage in an open ship like a longship was clearly a gamble.
Waldemar Lehn, a professor at the University of Manitoba and an expert in atmospheric effects, claimed that Erik the Red may have sighted Greenland while still far away due to something called a superior mirage, which occurs when layers of the atmosphere at the right density and temperature cause an upside-down mirror image to appear above the horizon.21 This effect is common in the Arctic and is called hillingar in Icelandic. Erik the Red may also have been keyed to the existence of Greenland by something called ice blink, where the glare of an ice field, such as Greenland’s ice cap, reflects off a low gray cloud layer. The dangerous nature of voyaging in Norse ships is pointed up by a Norse saga claiming that of the twenty-five ships that Erik was able to muster for the first wave of colonizing Greenland in 985, only fourteen arrived. The other eleven either turned back to Iceland or were lost at sea.
When it comes to rope and the connection to marriage and spirituality, there’s the ritual of handfasting, which was employed historically and still today. The ritual involves the betrothed couple joining hands and then their union is symbolized by binding the hands together with rope or cord. While this symbolic act of union was widely used by many cultures, its employment by the Celts led to its continued use by Irish and Scottish people.
In England a great many of these clandestine marriages took place in London at the notorious Fleet Prison. Imprisoned Anglican ministers and some men who dubiously claimed they were Church of England ministers conducted marriages in the prison. This form of quick marriage became so well known that a similar group of self-proclaimed ministers set up shop just outside the prison in storefront wedding “chapels” that would have been right at home in modern-day Las Vegas.
The parson was seen walking before his shop; a squalid profligate figure, clad in a tattered plaid night gown, with a fiery face, and ready to couple you for a dram of gin, or roll of tobacco.”
In Europe, folk belief held that the winds could be controlled with knotted cords. These “wind knots” appear in Homer’s Odyssey in the form of a knotted silver cord that holds shut the bag of winds that Aeolus, the god of the winds, gives to Ulysses.
A Norse story speaks of the blacksmith Volundr storing wind knots. “A long rope of bast hung there, with knots in it at regular intervals. In each and every knot a storm wind was bound. Each week he untied a knot and freed the wind that was bound in it, and sent it south with his mad song, charged with clouds and hail.”
Rope and ropemakers were so important to the building of Christian cathedrals they even had their own patron saints: St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Andrew the Apostle.
The intent of Gothic architecture was to break free from the stolid round arches, barrel vaults, thick walls, and small windows of the previously dominant Romanesque style that produced buildings that favored the squat and dark.
It evolved toward towering churches, airy and filled with light—built to evoke a sense of a heavenly space on earth.
“In three centuries—from 1050 to 1350—several million tons of stone were quarried in France for the building of 80 cathedrals, 500 large churches and some tens of thousands of parish churches. More stones were excavated in France during these three centuries than at any time in Ancient Egypt.… The foundations of the cathedrals are laid as deep as 10 meters [33 feet] (the average depth of a Paris underground station) and in some cases there is as much stone below ground as can be seen above.”
In lieu of ink on parchment, many of the masons constructed models of the cathedrals they planned to build. These practical models allowed them to solve problems with the building process beforehand and get a solid sense of how to proceed.
Unfortunately, almost none of the construction models from this era have survived. Many models were undoubtedly destroyed by their builders because the master masons were keen to keep their skills secret as a hedge toward future employment.
We might imagine a Gothic cathedral under construction as being completely encased in a cocoon of scaffolding that all but obscures the work from view. For a variety of reasons, though, this was not the case. The scaffolding was only set up to build a section at a time. As a result, it was always being taken apart, moved, and reconfigured. And while it would have been possible to use nails to fasten the scaffold poles together, nails were not used, both because they were expensive and because nailing the poles then extracting the nails before reassembling the poles and renailing them would have damaged the wood as the process was repeated.
As the workers moved up to build the second story (the triforium) and the third level (the clerestory), it would be expensive in numbers and lengths of poles to continue running the scaffolding to the floor. To save the expense of all that alder wood, once the first story was built, the scaffolds were hung on the stone structure as it rose.
The suspension of the scaffolds on the rising walls was also necessary because it opened up the floor of the building cathedral for other uses. This was important as many of the cathedrals replaced existing churches, and the priests and congregation needed a space to continue regular services.
At old St. Paul’s Cathedral in London this included even horse fairs held inside the building.
Beauvais (1230 CE) achieves a vaulted height of 157 feet.21 With no OSHA standards in place, a single misstep and a worker would have plummeted to a messy death. These heights and the lack of scaffolding that reached from the ground to the top of the structure meant that the builders needed a way to get stone and mortar up to where the work was being performed. They also needed a way to raise the centering forms, which were constructed on the ground, up to the highest level of the cathedral. To do this, they relied on rope and basic lifting devices used by the Greeks and the Romans. Rope, ingenuity, and muscle power had solved the problem of lifting loads long before the Middle Ages. One of the earliest lifting cranes is the shaduf, which is depicted in Egyptian wall paintings from 1300 BCE. Primarily used for lifting water, a shaduf is a lever arm device consisting of a pole mounted on a vertical stake. One end of the pole is weighted, while the other end has a bucket hanging from a rope.
A windlass only took advantage of human arm power, but the ancients realized that leg power was much stronger. So, they made a big wooden wheel and put a man inside. The device was called a treadwheel. All the worker had to do was walk and the large wheel would turn the take-up spindle, which pulled on the lifting rope and thus lifted the object.
From the time of the Greeks and Romans all the way into the Middle Ages, windlasses and treadwheel cranes didn’t evolve much. Quintus Haterius would have recognized the cranes employed to build the Gothic cathedrals in France. Like their Roman antecedents, the treadwheel cranes used in the Gothic era had no braking mechanism to prevent the wheel from running backward. But the use of natural-fiber rope like bast and hemp helped provide enough friction so that their walkers could generally keep the wheel under control.
their most important function took place after the walls and buttresses were in place. Once the walls reached their highest point, treadwheels on the floor of the cathedral, or even mounted on the walls, were employed to haul the large wooden roof beams to the top of the structure, most likely by running the lifting rope up to the highest point of the scaffolding and reeving it through a block
Many of the cathedrals from the Middle Ages still have treadwheels in the roof spaces. The builders often left the treadwheel behind since they expected some repair would be needed for the cathedral’s upper levels over time and the treadwheels were the perfect way to raise these materials.
rope in the period between the 1450s and 1880s, called the Age of Sail, when wind-driven ships ruled the seas.
The wind dropped to nothing for the Constitution, while the British ships still had a light breeze. Hull had to keep his ship moving, but the wind had betrayed the Americans. So he ordered the ship’s eight small boats launched. Rope would play another important role: as towing lines from the small boats to the Constitution. These boats were all equipped with oars, and the sailors who manned them could row and pull the ship along behind them. The sailors now worked the oars for all they were worth, slowly towing the ship forward. Soon the British lost the wind as well and the American sailors’ exertions kept the U.S. frigate just out of reach.
(156 feet).3 Morris suggested to Hull that this depth allowed them to use a technique called “warping,” a method of moving the ship forward with the use of a special anchor called a kedge. This was a smaller anchor than the ship’s main anchors and could be carried forward in one of the ship’s boats and dropped over the side. The anchor would fall to the bottom, and then sailors on board the ship could turn the large, manually driven anchor winch to reel in the anchor line and pull the ship forward toward the kedge anchor.
attained a speed of up to 3 miles per hour—slow indeed, but perhaps it would be enough to keep the British hounds at bay. The biggest question was: Given the water depth, did the Constitution have enough heavy rope on board to make the technique work? They needed to take the kedge anchor far out ahead of the vessel so the down angle of the anchor rope would be a narrow one. An anchor rope too short meant the angle would be too steep and the anchor would not grab the sea bottom; it would pull up as soon as the rope was tensioned.
With this nearly 6,000 feet (a nautical mile) of rope attached between the kedge anchor and the ship, the crew commenced warping the ship forward. Now, in addition to the sailors rowing the ship’s boats, sailors on the deck of the Constitution put their backs into the task of escape. When the ship had been brought close to the anchor, the kedge was raised, brought forward again, dropped, and the process repeated. The 420 men of the Constitution kept up this exhausting routine all day and through the night. Though the British frigate Shannon was able to draw
Without the lengthy ropes Morris found on board and tied together to make up that nearly mile-long anchor line, the Constitution would have been captured.
Hemp is the most misunderstood material [by modern people] due to its association with marijuana. It was long used for cordage and is very strong and low-stretch. It’s a great blending yarn and was mixed with every material. The Union Navy used hemp for sails and rigging during the Civil War.”
The galley, a type of ship that used oars for propulsion, was ascendent in the Mediterranean for thousands of years. But galleys tended to be lightly constructed and were not well suited for use outside the more placid waters of the Mediterranean. Historian Carlo M. Cipolla notes that while galleys were “serviceable enough in the Mediterranean,” they “could not stand up to the long rollers and the fierce sou’westers of the Atlantic.
Wind-driven ships were superior for going far and wide on the world’s often stormy oceans. And ships wholly reliant on their sails were also wholly reliant on rope. Ships propelled by oars needed only the hands of the rowers for control. But sails designed to deal with shifting wind directions needed the precise control and nearly infinite adjustability that rope provides. Without rope, the Age of Sail would have been impossible:
Heralding the dominance of sailing ships were relatively small vessels known as caravels. Caravels were sailed by Portuguese captains like Bartolomeu Dias, who first rounded the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, and Vasco da Gama, who first sailed from Europe to India.7 The next step in the rise of the sailing ship was the voyage of Christopher Columbus’s three ships, whose names read like a nursery rhyme: the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria.
a carrack—larger and heavier than a caravel. And, after Columbus’s successful voyage crossing the Atlantic in 1492, the most important thing about the carracks was that they were rigged with square sails.
The true square rigger, however, took the single square sail of these previous marine cultures and multiplied its power. Instead of a single mast and a single sail, the square rigger carried several masts and multiple square sails. These sails worked best when the wind was coming from a quadrant astern—from behind or at an angle less than 90 degrees from amidships.
China also was an early giant in the Age of Sail and Age of Exploration. In 1405,
Admiral Zheng He, departed China headed south. Not only was the fleet expansive in number of ships, with various sources putting the count at more than 315 (along with thousands of troops—the entire complement was put at thirty thousand men),10 the ships themselves were a far cry from the diminutive caravels of Dias and da Gama. Some reports claimed the largest of these vessels was 600 feet long and rigged with nine masts.
Clipper ships—a type of fast sailing ship in the nineteenth century whose sole purpose was to get commodities like China tea to market in Europe as quickly as possible—were often depicted in nautical art with all regular sails and studsails set, churning up a frothy white bow wave, sailing at the ragged edge of control to get to market first. These ships could carry so much sail area that when fully canvased and being sailed hard they could be difficult to control, and even dangerous to their crews.
Numerous sails to propel the ship worked well. But these arrays of canvas were useless unless they could be controlled. And rope made that possible. These natural fiber ropes were prodigiously strong. As Herman Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, “The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is. By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one hundred and twenty pounds; so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly equal to three tons.” When the number of sails grows like garden weeds, so, too, does the need for rope. Rigging diagrams from this period look like the artist went wild, drawing a hopeless mess of lines. The challenge of operating such a complex set of ropes was daunting. A new crewmember on a sailing vessel had a steep learning curve. He had to learn all these running lines so well he could place his hand on the correct line in pitch dark or during a storm. For sailors on fighting ships, the challenge was even greater: they needed to find the right line while folks on other ships were shooting at them.
As we touched on above, in addition to the running rigging, these ships also required standing rigging to keep the masts from falling. As ships got higher, shipbuilders couldn’t find tree trunks long enough. So they used composite masts. The masts of USS Constitution are each assembled from three smaller masts, one stacked above the next. This approach allowed shipbuilders to make prodigiously tall composite masts for the towering rigs of sailing vessels.
Of the two systems, the standing rigging had the more difficult task. Standing rigging had to remain taut at all times. If it didn’t, any looseness could produce chafe—a slow but steady breaking of rope fibers when rope rubs against itself, against other rigging, or against a wooden part of the ship. Chafe is highly destructive and can sever a line in hours. If the standing rigging got really loose, the mast could come down. Keeping standing rigging tight simply by attaching a rope from a point on the ship to a point on the mast was impossible, however. The reason is simple enough: natural-fiber rope stretches. Stays and shrouds that were tight when first attached would be slack and sagging soon enough. The solution to this problem of rope stretch was something called a deadeye. Deadeyes were round or oval blocks of wood with three carved holes. They were used in pairs, one above the other at the deck end of the shroud. A rope called a lanyard was reeved through the three holes going back and forth between the two deadeyes like a shoelace between the holes in a shoe. The last pass of the lanyard through the lower deadeye was brought up and tied off on the shroud above the deadeye. When a shroud rope stretched and loosened, the lanyard end was untied and attached to a halyard—a line coming from high up on the mast equipped with several blocks (pulleys in landlubber terms) to provide mechanical advantage. A gang of sailors would sing a song as they hauled on the halyard in unison. These coordinated yanks would pull the lanyard tight through the deadeye and tighten the shroud to which the deadeye was attached.
Hemp rope not only stretches (although it’s less stretchy than other types), but it also is susceptible to rot if it gets wet. Getting wet is obviously a problem for a ship, since it lives in the high-humidity environment of the sea
“It rots from the inside out,” Wilson said. “Basically, when it gets wet, it composts.” Composting is not good for running rigging, but it’s particularly bad for standing rigging. If it rots, it loses strength and the masts collapse. To avoid this problem, mariners from ancient times tried their best to preserve standing rigging. The key was to saturate the fibers with the gooey substance from pine trees called tar. Applying pine tar to a ship’s rope was called tarring the rope. Tar was heated before application. The heating was key, according to Wilson: “Tarring is temperature related. The tar has to be hot enough to go all the way through the rope.” A properly tarred rope is largely waterproof and will far outlast a rope of untarred fiber. Combine running rigging, standing rigging, and all the other items of rope needed, like the hundreds of feet of heavy rope called cable, which is a “rope of ropes” that was used for anchor lines, and the result was a gigantic pile of cordage on a sailing vessel.
Without rope, these wooden ships would have all sunk. Not only because they couldn’t control their sails but because they couldn’t control their seams. Wooden vessels were built with planks of wood laid next to each other. These planks are what made up the outer skin of the hull. Wood is porous, however, and when it gets wet, it absorbs water and swells. This means that when the ship is constructed, some space is left between the planks for expansion. That’s great for the planking, but not so good for making the ship watertight. With those spaces open, a ship would sink in a matter of minutes. Here, again, rope was essential. Strands of hemp rope can be separated, picked apart by steadily pulling at the strands by hand. The result of this grueling work is a fibrous material of intertwined strands called oakum. And oakum makes an excellent base material for filling the seams between planks. Tightening up the seams this way is called caulking.
“The whole idea is that you can drive it into a seam under compression. It stays tight to prevent leaking, but it also keeps the hull tight, with miniscule amounts of movement.” Onboard ships, oakum was made from old lengths of rope called “rotten stuff,” according to Wilson. You might just call it “junk.” And indeed, the term junk was originally used in mid-fourteenth century English to describe old pieces of rope used for oakum. In the 1660s, junk was extended to mean “old refuse from boats and ships.” In the 1760s, junk also described salted meat used on long voyages. (There is a small island in Maine’s Casco Bay called “Junk of Pork.”) Later, junk’s meaning expanded to include other discarded items until it achieved its modern meaning of any type of refuse, trash, or cheap item of electronics received at Christmas that fails by New Year’s.
Oakum was also tied around the shrouds of a ship to protect the sails from chafing. This form of oakum was called chafing gear, or baggywrinkle. Since fore-and-aft vessels like schooners were more prone to having their sails chafe against the standing rigging shrouds,
Knots and rope have an intrinsic connection. Without rope, there are no knots. And without knots, rope is nearly useless, as there is no way to control the rope or adjust its length for the particular job at hand. This is especially true for sailing ships. It isn’t wrong to say that without knots the great voyages of exploration by the Chinese, the Polynesians, and Europeans would never have occurred.
The Kedge Anchor; or, Young Sailors’ Assistant, first published in 1847. This book is a staggering compendium of maritime knowledge. It begins with instructions on how to tie forty different knots—from the most basic overhand knot to the increasing complexity of the half hitch, the square knot, the bowline, the running bowline, the Spanish bowline, the carrick bend, the black-wall hitch, the sheepshank, and so on.
It follows that most important knots owe both their origin and their names to the requirements of a ship at sea. So diverse are these requirements that the number of knots devised by the sailor is probably ten times greater than the sum of all other handicrafts combined.
Clifford Ashley’s book, first published in 1944, aims for truly encyclopedic coverage of the subject, and it contains a dizzying array of more than 3,800 knots, lashings, and decorative knots.
Another knot described in Ashley is the midshipman’s hitch, a knot designed to make a quick sling should one fall overboard and their fellow crewmen throw them a line. The sling would allow the person overboard to better hang on while their shipmates haul them back aboard. Tying this while hanging on with one hand and being dragged through the water by the ship probably takes a fair bit of skill and concentration.
“Distortion of the line by a knot will weaken it. A bowline will drop a rope’s strength by 50 percent. A better approach is to keep the line from being distorted. A round turn with two half hitches, for example, only loses 10 percent of the rope’s strength.”
The vast bulk of sailors in the Age of Sail were illiterate, of course, and while they often worked brutal hours, they did have free time.16 Since many couldn’t read, they passed the time doing ropework. They learned to tie ever more complex knots, which they sometimes secretly passed on from one man to the next, and experimented with decorative ropework.
Jackie has a ditty bag she made herself that is decorated with examples of her knot-tying skill. She does it as a way of keeping a connection to the sailors from the Age of Sail. “They would use a ditty bag like a résumé to show their craftsmanship,” Caulkins said. “When they would show up at a ship, they would use it as a way of proving the quality of their work, using the same stitching and types of knots they would use while working.”
What we today consider the sad business of hunting whales would have been impossible without many tubs of rope. Indeed, this was rope use on an industrial scale. Each of a whaleship’s whaleboats carried upward of 2,000 feet of rope in one or more tubs. And since each ship carried three to five whaleboats, the amount of rope needed just to conduct whaling operations on one whaleship was as much as 10,000 feet.3 When extrapolated to the size of the American whaling fleet of 735 ships in 1846 and a worldwide fleet of 900,4 the result is a prodigious tangle of rope. And that doesn’t account for the rope needed for the whaleship’s standing or running rigging. Or further, the many more miles of cordage needed by non-whaling merchant ships and naval vessels.
at the end of the eighteenth century, huge steps were made in the manufacturing of rope with the development of the register plate and forming tube.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the methods and materials of making rope became steadily more standardized. Whereas a variety of plant fibers like lime bast and flax were once used, in this period the process settled more fully on the use of hemp. Given the right conditions, hemp plants can grow 8 to 14 feet tall, producing strong, long-length fibers.
Bundles of fibers were then removed of seeds and other unwanted materials and organized into straight runs by hackling. The hackling process involved repeatedly drawing the fibers through a block of sharp metal spikes, looking like a giant’s hairbrush, called a hackle. To aid in this task, the fibers were often softened with small amounts of oil. Once hackled, the fibers were turned into thin yarns by drawing them out with the aid of a spinning wheel. In this process the ropemaker would walk backward maintaining a steady pull on the yarn as the small hooks of the spinning wheel twisted the fibers together.
the process was threefold: fiber bundles twisted into yarns, yarns twisted the opposite way into strands, and the strands twisted again the opposite way into rope.
Making a rope of any type required some space to spread out, space to lay out the lengths of material so they could be joined smoothly. In the early days of ropemaking the work was often done outside in an open area. As one history of ropemaking notes, “Originally a ropewalk was a level yard or field marked out with a series of pegged posts on which the yarn, strand or rope was hung as fast as it was spun, formed or laid.”
Eventually, ropemakers built roofs over these long ropemaking grounds to provide some cover from the rain. Over time walls and a floor were added and a long, narrow building called a ropewalk came into being. It was called a ropewalk because yarns were initially formed by walking the fibers backward.
the completed rope ends up shorter than the original length of the strands. If we wanted a 500-foot-long rope, for example, we needed a ropewalk of, say, 700 feet. Since the maritime world required long ropes for rigging ships and for deep anchor cables, that meant ropewalk buildings were usually many hundreds of feet long.
The British government established three ropewalks along the Thames: at Woolwich, Deptford, and Chatham. The ropewalk at Chatham Dockyard in Kent, England, which still makes rope for sale, has been making rope for more than 400 years and is 1,135 feet long.8 In the United States, the ropewalk built at Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston in 1838 was a staggering 1,325 feet long and made naval ropes until it was closed in 1971. By 1810 there were 173 ropewalks of various lengths in operation throughout the United States.
The fringe status of ropemaking was for three reasons: space, stench, and danger. Space, because ropemaking needed open land on which to build its long ropewalks. Stench, because the practice of dunking hemp rope in a vat of hot tar to make it water-resistant meant that the ropewalks gave off the odor of bubbling tar all day. And the danger came from the unholy combination of clouds of airborne combustible rope fibers, the open fires used to heat the tubs of pine tar, and the tar itself. When these dangers all came together the result was a flaming, hundreds-of-feet-long blowtorch that could quickly spread a conflagration to nearby buildings. By 1788, the city of Boston had fourteen working ropewalks, and the job of ropemaker “outnumbered any other class of mechanics.”
The danger of ropewalks located near inhabited areas was made all too clear by this fire. In an effort to forestall a further devastating event, the city moved to relocate the ropewalk district. This resulted in one of the earliest efforts to increase the size of the city of Boston using landfill:
The nineteenth century saw a steady advancement in the process of manufacturing in almost every industry. For example, a ropewalk powered by human or animal muscles or sometimes via waterpower was state of the art in the 1700s. By the 1840s, steampower had taken over providing the motive force. Manufacturing processes were undergoing steady development in the search for larger volumes and greater efficiency. Ropemaking was part of this change as new machines and consolidation of the trade into larger manufacturing facilities forced many smaller ropemaking operations out of business.
By 1848 human operators for feeding the fibers to the mechanical spinners were replaced by self-feeding devices.24 And by 1916 mechanical spinning machines called flyers were in place. These machines operated at 1,500 rpm feeding yarn onto bobbins and could hold up to half a mile of yarn weighing ten pounds.25 And while the original ropewalk on-site was still used for some special projects, the strand-making and rope-laying processes were performed by machines called horizontal strand-forming machines, bobbin frames, vertical laying machines, and compound laying machines. The latter machine had sizable armatures loaded with heavy coils of material that spun at high speed in opposite directions.26 Woe to the operator who got caught in its path. This machinery changed rope production “from a laborious task—dependent for its success on the skill of the individual expert—into quick, sure operations where every problem is met with the unfailing accuracy of a perfect machine.”
The Plymouth Cordage Company built new mill buildings in 1885, 1899, and 1908. By 1916 the company had two thousand employees and was the largest ropemaker in the world.27 By the early twentieth century the company had 370,000 square feet of floor space for storing the raw material fibers that arrived via ship and train, a number that speaks to the industrial scale of ropemaking in this era.28 The company’s ropewalk was closed in the 1950s, and a 250-foot-long section of it was dismantled and then rebuilt at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut as an exhibit of the hand-powered era of ropemaking.
There is evidence that Indigenous peoples of the Philippines were making rope from abaca more than thirty thousand years ago.
Abaca was also long used to make cloth: “The native islanders were making textiles from its fibers when Magellan reached the Philippines in 1521.”30 Growing 15 to 25 feet high, the seemingly solid abaca trunk is actually composed of separate leaf stems that grow in compact, overlapping layers.
The areas in which manila is superior to hemp include strength, flexibility, and resistance to damage from salt water. It’s naturally water-resistant in a way that hemp fiber is not. This feature removes the need to run manila rope through vats of tar to make it more water-resistant. While tarring hemp did make it last longer in a marine environment, it also made it less effective to use as line for running through pulleys or blocks, as the tar would wear off and could gum up a block. Manila line, on the other hand, would leave a block tar-free. This meant that manila was often preferred for running rigging that needed to move. Manila’s one drawback was that while water didn’t damage it, manila rope did absorb water, and when that happened the rope swelled and shortened in length. This was not a desirable characteristic for the standing rigging used to hold up masts. As a result, tarred hemp line continued to be used for a ship’s standing rigging until it began to be replaced by wire rope. Manila’s greater strength and easy handling made it more the line of choice for uses like harpoon line in whaling: “Weight for weight, manila whaleline is stronger than steel cable of equal length.”
Another intriguing use for manila line was for power distribution. In factory settings where a waterwheel or a steam engine was used to provide motive power, there was a need to distribute that power to individual machines in the facility. Sometimes flat belts were employed for this, but manila rope was also used. “Rope offered the most economical means of conveying power, and indeed was the standard means until the end of the [nineteenth] century, since any number of ropes could be taken off a single drive wheel.”
Another natural fiber that saw tremendous growth as ropemaking was industrialized is a material called sisal. This fiber is derived from plants of the agave family (a species of which is used to make tequila). In the nineteenth century most sisal fiber production came from the Yucatán region of Mexico.34 Sisal is not as strong or as flexible as manila and when manufactured into rope there are stray fibers, called “splinters,” that emerge from the rope. These make the rope less appealing both visually and to handle. There was one thing that sisal did very well, however, and this feature allowed companies like Plymouth Cordage to turn sisal twine into a huge business. Sisal was strong enough for use in tying bales of agricultural products. This binder twine was widely used on farms in the American Midwest for binding bales of hay, among other materials.
Blackburn and Welch left the schooner astern as the day broke, rowing to the southeast. Longline bottom fishing for halibut used lengths of rope secured to the seafloor with small anchors at either end of the line. To this central rope were attached individual baited lines called “snoods.” Each snood ended in a herring-baited hook. These ropes lay on or close to the seafloor, angling to catch bottom-dwelling halibut. At each end of the baited trawl line a rope was attached to a buoy that floated at the surface to mark the ends of the trawl.
2,006
They’d put out the anchors and almost a mile and a half of trawl with 480 hooks2 and then returned to the anchored schooner.
One of the simplest rigs for catching fish, and maybe one of the oldest, is a rope handline and a baited hook that’s dropped in the water. The person fishing has the line running over their hand, so should the fish hit the hook, they can feel the motion. Fishers of Taiwan even developed the technique of the “footline”—running baited lines through their toes. Apparently some were so practiced at this technique they could “work several lines with each foot.”
From earliest times, however, the big fish-catching use of cordage was to make grids of line into nets to bring food up from beneath the waves. The potent spiritual aspect of fishing and nets is reflected in many religious traditions. In a Greek myth, the goddess Dictynna, named “Lady of the Nets,” was saved from capture by King Minos of Crete by the nets of fishermen.
Net types are legion, since over the centuries human ingenuity has devised many ways to corral, scoop, or snag fish. There are cast nets, lift nets, trawl nets, seine and purse seine nets, haaf nets, lave nets, trammel nets, gill nets, drift nets, and many more.
A 2022 paper in Science Advances estimated the extent of the problem: “We estimate that nearly 2% of all fishing gear, comprising 2,963 km2 of gillnets, 75,049 km2 of purse seine nets, 218 km2 of trawl nets, 739,583 km of longline mainlines, and more than 25 million pots and traps are lost to the ocean annually.”
From the start of marine fishing, the impetus has been larger fishing vessels and bigger nets. In the North Sea, for example, Dutch, British, and German fishers worked from large sail-powered fishing boats called luggers. Then the move was made to steam power: “In 1882 the first steam drifter was introduced to the Scottish herring fishery and many luggers were equipped with steam capstans to facilitate the hauling of the long ‘fleet’ of drift nets. In Scotland the fleet of steam drifters grew from 41 in 1898 to 943 in 1908.”17 Fishing boats changed to diesel power in the twentieth century, and many fish-catching vessels reached such large size they were no longer fishing boats but fishing ships. These large vessels can deploy gigantic nets that scoop up everything in their path. The process was further industrialized with the advent of the factory-processing ship that could follow a fishing fleet and process thousands of tons of fish at sea.
Fishing boats have gotten so big that the largest have been dubbed supertrawlers. One of the largest is the Annelies Ilena, a Polish-flagged, Dutch-owned, 472-foot, 14,000-ton fish-catching machine equipped with its own processing equipment.20 These supertrawlers are not only large but they are well equipped with technology to pursue fish, such as radar, sonar, and access to realtime satellite imagery that shows sea surface temperatures.
The idea of using metal wire as the yarns and strands of rope rather than plant fibers had its first practical application in the mining pits in Germany’s Harz Mountains during the early nineteenth century. Both hemp rope and iron chain were used to raise buckets of mined material, and both had their problems. The ropes rotted in the damp environment and had to be replaced frequently, and the chain was susceptible to sudden failure. In the 1830s an engineer named William Albert did studies of iron chain loading and noted that repeated loadings led to failure—the first known research on metal fatigue. A single link breaking in an iron chain rendered the chain useless. Albert wondered if there was a way to use the superior strength of metal, but not as chain. “He realized the advantage of the hemp rope, in which the load bearing elements are in parallel arrangement,” one account of the history of wire rope notes, “but he also saw the advantages of the higher tensile strength of the iron chain. His attempt to combine the advantages of these two hoisting means marks the very birth hour of the wire rope.”
Wire rope began to be used for suspension bridges as well. Iron chain had previously been employed for building suspension bridges, notably the bridge at the Menai Strait in Wales, built in 1826. Early use of wire rope in bridge construction was well underway even by the late 1820s, with a foot bridge over the Rhône River at Tournon designed by French engineer Marc Seguin.
As San Francisco expanded from its waterfront beginnings, the city built its way up a series of steep hills. Many of the resulting streets were too steep for the horse-drawn trolley cars found in many cities in the 1870s. Steam engines were generally not powerful enough for the task either. The solution lay in wire rope and in the efforts of a transplanted British entrepreneur named A. S. Hallidie, who devised a version of wire rope he called California Cable. Hallidie had come to San Francisco in 1852 with his father,
All the elements of such a cable traction system—a stationary powerhouse that moved an endless wire rope cable under the street to which cars could grip and ungrip—had already been developed. It took the topography of San Francisco to make it work on a larger scale. The cars in Hallidie’s system had a variable mechanical gripping device, “a grip on the cars capable of providing a continuum from full release to a full hold at which the car moved at the speed of the cable.” By the 1880s San Francisco had five cable car companies operating 11.2 miles of routes.29 It was San Francisco’s topography, with some streets having inclines of up to 20 percent, that spurred this growth. The Chicago City Railway decided to go with a cable car system despite the possible drawbacks of winter weather. In practice, winter snow and ice did not seriously hamper its operation. By 1895 Chicago had 41 miles of double-track cable car routes.31 And Chicago’s success prompted more cable car operations to open in New York City, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Philadelphia, St.
Within only a few years of cable cars’ widest acceptance, however, the urban cable car went into decline, rendered obsolete by the electric motor, and “the electric trolley replaced it as a more efficient, comfortable and profitable form of transportation.”32 The decline was precipitous. “By 1890, electric trolley mileage was double that of cable car mileage, and the cable car was doomed.”
The 2-inch-diameter rope used on all the gliders on D-Day was made of a new synthetic material: nylon. Three-stranded, it looked much like a traditional hemp or manila rope, except for its shiny white color. The introduction of nylon ropes made the use of gliders a more reliable option. Hemp and manila weren’t as strong or as hardy.
Nylon was a superior choice over wire rope because it was stretchy, absorbing shock loads and then going back to its original shape. With the way a glider could be bounced around by the motions of the tow plane and the wind, this was an attractive property in an airborne tow rope. The Allies also devised a system for snatching gliders off the ground and into the air using a low-flying tow plane. Here, nylon’s ability to stretch as much as 25 percent and then rebound absorbed much of the shock loading of being accelerated to flying speed in seconds.
Molecular weight is important because researchers were looking to replicate the high molecular weight of silk, which is a protein made up of very large molecules, many times larger than those in many common materials. For example, a sugar molecule has forty-five atoms, gasoline twenty-three or twenty-six atoms, and grain alcohol has nine; but a molecule of silk can contain ten thousand to one hundred thousand atoms.
“Another problem was nylon stretches a great deal more than manila and hemp, and when it does break, it breaks with a larger recoil, a lot of vengeance and injuries and kills people.”
By the 1960s and 1970s, however, the advantages of synthetic-fiber ropes and reduced cost—as nylon and polyester and other new materials like polypropylene became widely manufactured—caused synthetics to all but drive out hemp and manila except for specialized applications.
Other high modulus fibers followed: Twaron, Technora, Spectra, Dyneema, Vectran, and Xylon (they sound like planets in a sci-fi novel). Another type of synthetic is high modulus polyethylene (HMPE), a fiber that is three to four times tougher than conventional nylon and polyester. All these flavors of synthetic rope are many times stronger than any natural-fiber rope ever constructed.
It might make sense to think that for heavy-duty purposes like mooring oil rigs, wind turbines, and other marine industrial gear, wire rope, with its great strength, is the only type of rope used. In fact, though, for deep water uses, wire has a huge disadvantage—it’s heavy. If we are doing deep sea mining, for example, and want to lift material from extreme depth, wire might not be the right choice. “Wire is not a problem when you are lifting from a depth of 20 feet or even 100 feet,” rope engineer Roland Verreet said. “But if you go 10,000 feet or 20,000 feet down, then it becomes very challenging because the rope might just destroy itself under its own weight.” Synthetic-fiber ropes, Verreet pointed out, are much lighter and don’t have to support this great weight: “Some of them are buoyant. They have the same specific weight as water. So, if you lift one meter above ground or 20,000 feet deep in the water, it doesn’t matter. The rope weight is compensated by the buoyancy.”
Having been employed for oil exploration, drilling, and single point-moorings for oil tankers for years, synthetic-fiber rope is now being used in a new energy application: for mooring floating wind turbines. From the mid-1930s to the 1980s, many new synthetic-fiber rope materials were developed, yet the rapid pace of new products has all but stopped in recent decades. New high-strength fibers have not been found. In a 2015 paper, John Flory wrote: “In the fifty years beginning in 1940, seven new materials were introduced into rope making: nylon, polyethylene, polypropylene, polyester, aramid, HMPE and LCAP. That is one new rope making material about every seven years. In the … years since 1990, no new, practical rope making material has been introduced.”
In North America, the first users of the lariat were Native American horsemen who gathered new mounts from herds of wild horses by using fiber ropes twisted from the plentiful grasses of the Great Plains. As Steiner notes, “In 1805 Lewis and Clark noted in amazement that the Shoshones were ‘expert at casting the cord about the neck of a running horse.’ The Nez Perce and Flathead were as proficient in lassoing ‘exceedingly swift’ wild horses. And the Lakota, at about that time, used the lariat as a symbol for wild horses in their history story-paintings, while the Cheyenne, Pawnee, Apache, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, and many other tribes, became famous for their deftness and skill in roping wild horses.”