MAYFLOWER IN PLYMOUTH HARBOR
CHAPTER II
Rope-Making in the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Coming down to more recent times we find that rope-making had been going on for centuries with probably very little change, up to the time of the introduction of machinery and the establishment of the factory system. It had been carried on as a domestic industry, or a trade handed down from father to son, and naturally was of most importance in the principal seaport towns where vessels were built or fitted out.
This was the state of the business at the time of the settlement of America, and it was not long before the rope-maker began to be needed as a citizen of the new Colonies. This need was felt in Boston with the first efforts at shipbuilding there, and was also suggested by the great demand for fishing lines, the cod-fisheries being of great importance upon the Massachusetts coast.
OFFICE OF PLYMOUTH CORDAGE COMPANY
It is recorded that rope was made in Boston as early as 1641 or 1642. John Harrison, a rope-maker of Salisbury, England, came to this country at the request of a number of citizens of Boston, and set up his business in that village. He seems to have had a monopoly of the local trade for a good many years, under the paternal protection of the town authorities, for John Heyman, to whom permission to make rope in Boston was given in 1662, was the next year ordered to give up the work and depart from the town, it being found that this competition interfered with Harrison’s business to such an extent as to make it difficult for him to properly support his family of eleven persons.