The Age of Rope, Part 2: Building Ropewalks
This is the second part of a two-part series. Follow the link to read Part 1.
As northern European countries expanded their navies in the early modern period, they needed to improve their infrastructure. Two surviving ropewalks at the naval shipyards at Chatham, England, and Rochefort, France, were built or developed at the end of the seventeenth century. In France, engineer and architect François Blondel (1628-86) designed Louis XIV’s coastal defenses including the port and arsenal at Rochefort (Figure 1). The newly built ports were as grand as the ships themselves. At Rochefort, in Brittany, the Corderie Royale is a grand version of a ropewalk. Blondel’s ropewalk was built in stone, better for fire protection but also a statement about permanence and military strength. Buttresses along the great length were extruded volutes, a classical marker that tied these most functional of buildings to the grandeur of other royal constructions (Figure 2).
Figure 1. La Corderie Royale, Rochefort, France. Photograph by Yoyolicia. Creative-Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-83), the French secretary of the navy, sent an envoy to Venice to draw the design and layout of the Corderie della Tana, the recently rebuilt ropewalks in the arsenale (Figures 3 and 4). The rebuilding of the rope house was one part of the expansion of the Venetian arsenale overall. The drawing returned to Louis XIV recorded the large central open space as well as the subsidiary spinning rooms and storage spaces above the side aisles. The extreme size of the ropewalk in Venice was described by a French visitor as “the longest and widest house That I ever saw, or anyone else, I do believe.”
Figure 2. La Corderie Royale, Rochefort, France. Creative-Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
In England, the majority of rope for the expanding navy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was made at one of four naval shipyards at Plymouth, Portsmouth, Woolwich, and Chatham. Naval shipyards brought together the manufacturing and construction necessary for the supply and support of England’s rapidly expanding imperial ambitions and territorial claims. All four were drastically modernized at the end of the eighteenth century. The only ropewalk which survives in recognizable form is the one at Chatham—where rope is still made by a devoted group of master ropemakers (Figure 5).
Figure 3. Plan, section and elevation of the ropewalk in Venice, 1669. Collection des cinq-cents de Colbert, Folio 66. Bibliothèque National de France.
“The ship was the moveable object that linked ports around the world.”
Figure 4. Corderie della Tana, Arsenal, Venice. Photo Federicofoto.
By 1780 the Chatham building was in terrible condition, needing extensive repairs. The redesign and rebuilding of the ropewalks was just one part of extensive expansions of the entire shipyard at Chatham (Figure 6). The systematic rebuilding of the ropeyards [ropewalks] at Chatham and the other British naval yards aimed at great efficiency, safety and production (Figure 7). The original wooden buildings, like the surviving structure at Karlskrona, were a fire hazard and insufficient to provide the rope needed by the Royal Navy.
Figure 5. Ropewalk, Chatham. Photo Gaius Cornelius. Creative-Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International.
The designs for the ropemaking area of the shipyard required the movement of materials from one building to another. The rebuilt layout of the buildings at Chatham allowed the rope to pass from building to building in a more efficient and continuous process. The buildings thus became like the ship itself, joined together by rope.
Figure 6. Chatham dockyards buildings. ADM 140/21. 1735. National Archives, Kew.
Throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, ropemaking benefited from new machinery that mitigated the need for vast quantities of manpower to pull and draw the ropes down the length of the ropewalk. The largest ropes of 18 inches or more in diameter required upwards of two hundred men (Figure 8). The redesign of Chatham, however, allows us to see not only buildings rebuilt into brick and stone as fireproof methods but also slight shifts in their reorganization to allow for a more seamless and fluid production method as ropes moved from one building into the other without the need to bundle and transport.
Figure 7. Chatham dockyards buildings; proposed alterations in machinery at yarn houses. ADM 140/110. 1735. National Archives, Kew.
Figure 8. Supply ratings handling coil of 16-inch towing hawser (rope) at the Naval Stores Department, Nore, Harwich, c. 1940. Photo by Lt. J. E. Russell. A 16341, Admiralty Official Collection. Imperial War Museum.
As remarkable as these buildings are, and appear where they survive, there was also a much larger number of ropewalks in any port of size—whether that port was connected with the navy or not (Figure 9). The ships of the navy were only a small portion of the galleys, caravels, and other types that harbored in ports both large and small. Each of these ships also required the same provisions (albeit not the cannons and armaments) required by navy warships. Streets alongside ports were lined with the shops, victualers, boarding and public houses needed to outfit ships and tend to their crews when they were in port.
Figure 9. Ropewalk, Castine Maine. Photograph by William G. Sargeant (1848-1923), c. 1900. Castine Historical Society Collections.
When the new ropewalk was being constructed at Chatham, the commissioners urged the overseers at Chatham to do everything possible to keep the ropewalk in production but if they could not, they should farm out the raw materials (hemp, tar, etc.) to local ropemakers.
Even for ports that served as naval bases, many private ropemakers did not have the luxury of an enclosed space for laying rope. These smaller operators used the streets of the port, and this is recorded in early maps.
The ship was the moveable object that linked ports around the world. In contrast to the centralized structure of navies that pressed the need for infrastructure and industries dedicated to naval operations, individual agents who were responsible for the ships, crews and supplies leaving from any port worked with smaller operators in ports--private craftsmen, merchants supplying commercial shipping.
“The buildings thus became like the ship itself, joined together by rope.”
In Boston around 1800 there were about seventeen ropemakers who used streets with or without simple roofs. Because of the smell of the tar and the danger of fire, these smaller operations were either in the west end of the city or on Beacon Hill, less populated and desirable sections of the city yet still close to the harbors and navy yard in Charlestown.
The expense of a 300-meter-long building was possible only for institutions and governments. Finding open, level land to those dimensions was notoriously difficult especially given the uneven edge along the water of most harbors. The traces of open-air ropewalks remain in many cities, sometimes conveniently called Ropewalk, but recognizable as the unusually long straight street most often situated just to the edge of the main commercial area of the harbor (Figure 10).
Figure 10. Ropewalk, Montrose Park, Washington DC. Laid out in 1804 by ropemaker Richard Parrot. Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service.
Ropemaking was at the center of activities of the pre-modern port, and in its “long and low” buildings, shaped the expanding naval shipyards of the early modern period. Even outside the military, ropemaking shaped port cities by laying down a long straight line on the city ground.
By the time that Longfellow published his meditation on rope and rope making, the great age of sail was coming to an end. The Corderie Royal ceased production in the 1870s, and in a generation ships no longer depended on sail power. The need for vast quantities of rope had disappeared.
Rope is so fundamental to ships and thus to our experience of the sea that perhaps we should not call it the Age of Sail but rather the Age of Ropes. The lines made by rigging also lead us to other lines: the lines of ropewalks, the edges of the sea, and the conceptual lines of navigation across oceans. But this is where it gets strange. For everything about the sea conspires against lines and dissolves certainty. Salt erodes hemp, and there is nothing linear in the water.
