WHEN I was a boy (which was not so very long ago), it was my fortune,
one time, to make a trip from Bristol, Rhode Island, to New York, as
a sort of working passenger in the sloop _Resolution_, Captain Israel
Northup. One morning the captain called out to me from the wheel to
bring aft a bucket of water, at the same time pointing to a wooden pail
that stood on the deck near me. I therefore made fast (as I thought)
to the handle of the pail the end of the peak halliards and dropped it
over the side. It filled readily enough, and I was carelessly pulling
it up again, when suddenly, to my great chagrin, the knot that I had
made untied itself, and away went the pail drifting rapidly astern.
Captain Israel, although he had witnessed the whole of this
performance, said nothing at the time. But a little later, chancing
to walk past where I was sitting, he picked up the end of a rope, and,
running it through a ringbolt near by, showed me the knot which you see
in Fig. 1.
[Illustration: FIG. 1.—ANCHOR-BEND.]
“The next time you throw a bucket overboard,” said he, “you’d better
make it fast with an Anchor-bend.” Then in the kindness of his heart
he sat down on the rail beside me and gave me a practical lesson
(afterwards several times renewed) in the matter of rope-tying.
“There is some things about ropes that a boy _must_ know to be wuth
anything at all,” observed he. “An’ there mought be times when a man
would give all Cuby ter know how ter tie two ropes together so’t they’d
_stay_.”
[Illustration: FIG. 2.—THE WRONG WAY.]
Believing that these words of Captain Israel are worth heeding, and
wishing, so far as is possible in an article like this, to do for
other boys what the worthy old sailor did for me, I shall ask the
readers—both boys and girls, mind you—to take a rope and practise,
according to the following directions, some few of the most important
knots, hitches and splices.
The first thing to be sure of is the right way to fasten together two
pieces of string or rope. That is a thing that some of us have to do
twenty times a day; and it is quite probable that twenty times a day
we do it wrong. Suppose that you wish to lengthen your fish-line, or
add another ball to your kite-string: how will you do it? Shall you lay
the two ends side by side and then twist them together into a knot just
such as your sister would make in the end of her thread, as is seen in
Fig. 2?
If you do, you may fairly expect that your fish (if you hook him) will
get away with the main part of your line, or that presently your kite
will go skurrying off to northward far out of your sight, until you
find it again, half an hour later, after a hot chase, hanging tangled
and torn in one of the trees of farmer Applewood’s orchard. Such a knot
is at least as likely to slip as to hold, and, if tied in a rope, is
liable sooner or later to cut the rope, because the strain is at right
angles. What is really wanted is a Square-knot (Fig. 3, _a_).
[Illustration: FIG. 3.