The ancient art still thriving in UK dockyards

For much of British history, the Royal Navy excelled in defending its island homeland. During the Age of Sail when ships of the line were built of stout English oak, the navy was often referred to as the “wooden walls” that protected Britain from invasion.

But while wood was certainly essential, there was another element without which sailing ships, both warships and merchantmen, would have been helpless – rope.

Simon Stephens, curator of the ship model and boat collections at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, explains: “Without rope there’s no sails because it was the rope that supported the masts and spars and worked the rigging that allowed the ship to capture the force of the wind. You can have sails, but without rope they’re just meaningless.”

Ships in the Age of Sail were almost absurdly festooned with thousands of feet of rope.

So important was rope to operating a sailing vessel that hemp (the fibers of which are used as raw material, unlike Cannabis Sativa buds for smoking), was an important strategic commodity. British foreign policy was shaped by the need to procure what were termed naval stores: tree trunks for masts, pitch and pine tar for caulking hulls, and hemp fibers for spinning into miles and miles of rope.

In the early 19th century when Britain faced off against Napoleon’s continental empire, hemp was at the core of the conflict. Lord Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in 1805 against the combined French and Spanish fleets meant Napoleon’s attempt to destroy the Royal Navy in battle was dashed, and so were his hopes of getting his army ashore in Britain.

The French emperor turned to economic warfare and attempted to cut off British access to Russian hemp with a trade embargo. When that also failed, he invaded Russia in 1812 to stop the hemp trade.

When the French army retreated in defeat from Russia months later, British access to Russian hemp was assured.

As the size of the Royal Navy fleet waxed and waned and waxed again during the Age of Sail, the British government put considerable resources into maintaining the world’s strongest fleet in being. With such a large force, the need for rope in huge quantities was critical. Take a 74-gun ship of the line, for example. It was the primary fighting platform of the sailing Royal Navy. A ship of its size required roughly 154,500 feet for its running and standing rigging. Amazingly, that snarl of rope was not even the total amount of cordage carried aboard.

Additional rope was needed for the bolt ropes stitched to the outer edges of the sails, plus each of the 74 guns required rope for the tackles used to position the guns and yet more cordage was used by the various ship’s boats.

In 1800, the Royal Navy had 136 of these 74-gun ships. Added to the fleet were larger ships of the line and smaller vessels such as frigates, brigs, sloops and schooners. The ropemakers were certainly busy spinning and twisting rope!

Some of the rope used by the navy was made by private ropemaking firms, but the vast bulk of cordage was produced by the navy’s own ropemaking facilities at a handful of royal dockyards. The ropemaking requirements were substantial and, as dockyard historian J.G. Coad writes in The Royal Dockyards 1690 – 1850: “No other industrial activity has had such an impact on the main dockyards as that of ropemaking.”

Until the early 17th century, ropemaking was largely an outdoor activity. As the navy grew, however, ropemaking moved indoors into long purpose-built buildings called ropewalks.

The name arose from the fact that in the first stage of the process – making the thin yarns from hemp fibers – the ropemaker is equipped with a bundle of fibers wrapped around his waist and he walks backwards.

As he retreats, he feeds new fibers to the spinning yarn, steadily lengthening it. Multiple yarns are then twisted into strands and three strands are twisted again – this time in the opposite direction of the twist used to make them – to construct three-strand rope.

The main manufacturers of rope were the dockyards at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth. And even in the 17th century, manufacture is the right word.

As historian N.A.M. Rodger writes in his first volume of the naval history of Britain, The Safeguard of the Sea: “The dockyards were the largest and most complex parts of the naval administration, and by far the largest industrial establishment in the country.”

Chatham, for example, had its first rope house by 1626, which by 1698 had been expanded to a length of 1,120 feet.

The rope house was rebuilt again in the late 18th century so that by the 1790s Chatham had the 1,135-foot multistory building that still stands today.

When rope is made, the twist imparted as the strands are combined makes the finished rope shorter than the length of the strands at the start.

A long building, such as the one at Chatham, allows ropemakers to produce long ropes such as the 720-foot (219 meter) anchor cables large Royal Navy ships were required to carry. Of course, without sailing ships of the line demanding miles of cordage, the Royal Navy is no longer the rope house’s prime customer.

A private firm, The Master Ropemakers, still makes rope there. Alex Rowling, the company’s managing director, explains: “We supply ropes worldwide to lots of historic ships such as HMS Victory.” Visitors to Chatham can see demonstrations of rope being made.

And in the Age of Sail, British rope was considered better quality than that produced elsewhere. In his book Command of the Ocean, Rodger writes, “…there was steady progress in the quality of English cordage, which was lighter for a given strength than French, with reduced weight and windage aloft and less friction running through the blocks.” Also, as a naval force that spent much of its time at sea, British sailors were adept at rope and rigging repairs while underway.

HMS Victory, for example, was badly mauled at Trafalgar, but her crew was able to fashion a jury rig to get her sailing again.

The navy was not the only barometer of British maritime power or the impressive rope making industry serving it. For much of the Pax Britannica the nation also possessed the largest merchant navy – carrying on trade worldwide. According to Board of Trade figures, in 1830, before the widespread use of steam propulsion, there were a staggering 18,876 sailing merchant ships registered under the British flag.

A major innovation in ropemaking came from a late 18th century British merchant ship captain, Joseph Huddart, who invented two devices that made rope more reliable for use on ships. During his voyages Huddart had observed that shipboard rope often failed by the breaking of the outer fibers, while the inner fibers in a rope had few, if any, breaks.

He realized that if rope could be made in a way that better distributed the stresses amongst the fibers, it would be less likely to fail.

To solve this problem he devised the register plate, a metal pan with a series of holes that guided the fibers as they were brought together. He added to that a device called the forming tube, which compressed the fibers as they were brought together.

The result of these two simple additions to ropemaking was stronger, more reliable rope. Huddart became wealthy from these devices and bought several estates in Wales. In a Scrooge-like turn worthy of Dickens, however, he kept too busy to visit these great houses and died without ever seeing them.

As shipbuilding transitioned from wood to iron and steel and as steam power replaced sails, the need for fiber rope waned. One grand finale of hemp rope was its use by the HMS Challenger oceanographic expedition that circled the world from 1872 to 1876.

Challenger’s task was to collect specimens from the world’s oceans and to sound depths in seas never before plumbed. It was equipped for this task with 181 miles of hemp rope.

This rope was in use on March 23, 1875, when Challenger sounded the depth of the Marianas Trench in the southwest Pacific, finding a 26,850-foot deep spot since dubbed the Challenger Deep.

In a way, this groundbreaking scientific expedition can be seen as a final nod to the primary role of natural fiber rope in maritime affairs. While Challenger was equipped with a 1,200-horsepower steam engine, it was only used while taking soundings and collecting specimens.

The majority of the expedition’s 68,890 nautical miles was covered under sail, with the crew working together as sailors had for centuries, hauling on ropes to set the ship’s spread of canvas to the wind.

• Tim Queeney is the author of Rope – How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization (Icon Books, £20) which is published on August 14, and the former editor of Ocean Navigator magazine.