Our work under the fo'c'sle head got all hands started, and during many a dismal wet dog watch we practiced the forming of every knot from the bowline down; Peter, the boy, and myself trying to outdo each other in the variety of our achievements. Frenchy taught us a new way to form that "king of knots," the bowline, in which the loop is passed through the gooseneck twice, forming a double loop, a most useful knot employed in the French Navy. When a man is to be lowered over side, he sits in one of the loops and the other is passed under his arm pits, the gooseneck coming against his chest. His weight tautens the part under the arms, and it is impossible for a man to drop out of this bowline, even though he becomes unconscious.
In this manner much of the unrecorded lore of the sea was passed on to us in the Fuller as the same things have been handed down through the ages since the Phoenicians, the Norsemen, and the more ancient sailors of Cathay first rigged their barks, fashioning their bends and hitches in the same manner as the sailors of today. Where the marvelous knots originated, no one can tell. Who invented them, no one knows; but we do know that the rope craft of the sea is standard and defies improvement. It takes time to learn the knots, bends, hitches, and splices; how much longer it must have taken to discover them can only be imagined.
In time, much of this will be entirely superseded by wire and steel, as indeed all lower standing rigging is already of wire. But turnbuckles and riveted plates are part of the metal ships, unyielding and stiff, that buckle the hollow steel masts, or sheer the channel plates clean from the hull, when wrenched by the resistless power of the sea.
In the days of wood, of tough live oak, and tarred hemp lanyards, with their "give" and "spring," the old style rigging knots and splices endured for thousands of years. Can steel and steam resist the hands of time as well?
On the Fuller we were taught that everything had to be done just so to be "shipshape and Bristol fashion," as the old sea phrase has it. It was always:
Worm and parcel with the lay,
Then turn and serve the other way.
And the humblest tools have had their form decreed since the art of seamanship began. The serving board and the serving mallet used by Noah; the fid, the marling spike, the sewing palm, and the caulking iron, are the ultimate tools of the most ancient handicraft; the art of building and rigging ships. We used all of these implements with industry as the blustery weather sent us up from the Horn to Honolulu. We saw how able sailors fit a cringle to the tough four-stranded hempen bolt ropes on the storm canvas; we learned the proper way to strop a block, with the splice where it belongs, as every sailor knows, and the throat seizing frapped and hitched in sailor fashion.
The hours spent under the fo'c'sle head during those days of the voyage were not so tedious. The Horn was behind us and the prospect of fine weather ahead. Yarning was always going on, and often we spent the dog watches in making fancy plaitings and knottings for sea chest covers and the like. I realized that such men as Marshall, Old Smith, Hitchen, Axel, Brenden, and Frenchy were of a dwindling breed, soon to be as rare as the makers of stone axes, or the seamen of the Roman galleys.
One other sailor of the ship's company asked odds of no one in the range of his knowledge of the sea. Whatever else we may have thought of him, we were forced to acknowledge Mr. Zerk a seaman of the most accomplished sort. Versed in the art of wire splicing and up to every dodge in sailmaking and rigging, he combined the ability of the marling spike man with the gift of the larger seamanship involved in the handling of a vessel under all conditions. If his eye ever lights on this, and I hope it will, I herewith accord to him the full measure of my admiration, for the combination of these two types of sailor is rare; as rare as the few remaining ships of the school that brought him forth.
The Fuller was a wooden vessel, Bath built, and coppered, not with the beautiful "red copper" we read about in Clark Russell, but with a composition resembling brass, tough, yellow, and antifouling; a less expensive sheathing than the pure copper, and, to my mind, every bit as good a color, the bright yellow, between the deep blue sea and the black hull, striking a pleasing line that glints like gold when the sun just hits it at the proper angle.