Reynolds’s colorful and gruesome account of Mocha Dick’s end was likely embellished for maximum effect on his readers. Melville was known to have read Reynold’s account and it clearly influenced him in writing his whaling novel.
As embellished as it might be, however, the account does illustrate some key elements of the use of rope aboard whaling ships. 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 two thousand 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 ten thousand feet.
When extrapolated to the size of the American whaling fleet of seven hundred and thirty-five ships in 1846 and a worldwide fleet of 900, 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.
With so much demand for working rope, the process of making cordage was transformed during the eighteenth century. When I talked to British rope historian, researcher, and knot expert Des Pawson, he stressed changes in this period.
“One of the landmarks must be when man started to use some kind of equipment instead of making rope entirely by hand,” Pawson said. “And 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. There was a huge number of different patents developed…and rope manufacturing advanced by leaps and bounds.” Ropemaking transformed into an industrial enterprise.
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 eight to fourteen feet tall, producing strong, long-length fibers. These fibers were separated from the plant by the process of retting. (Recall that lime-bast fibers were soaked in water to rett, or separate, them from the outer bark and the inner material—retting for hemp was a similar process.)