By Tim Queeney
(304pp, St. Martin’s Press, $27.00)
In ancient times man responded to the urgent need for food, transportation, and trade by building all sorts of watercraft. After mastering the rivers and lakes his attention soon turned to journeys across oceans and the wealth these new lands represented. But all that unpleasant rowing—there had to be a better way. By attaching large sections of cloth to wooden spars he could harness the wind; and with a paddle at the stern he could steer. But to make all this work he needed one more thing: rope.
In his new book, Rope, Tim Queeney takes a carefully researched, deep dive into this topic: where it began, its manifold uses, and how it improved throughout history. With interviews of experts from such diverse backgrounds as a tall ship bosun, a lobsterman, a cable engineer, even a tightrope walker and a cowboy, he demarcates the contributions that rope has made to the world around us.
“When I saw pictures of the rope found in the boat pit discovered at the pyramid of Khufu in the early 1950s,” reflected Queeney in a recent email, “it made me realize that humans had figured out how to make high quality rope very early on. And that only underlined how important rope was to aiding the rise of civilization.”
Queeney covers everything, and I mean everything, about rope. Made from whatever was at hand—coconut fibers, bananas, papyrus, flax, sisal, or hemp—it wasn’t just for pulling, lifting, or binding things. The Incans sent encoded messages using knotted “khipu” cords, Persians perfected the use of lassos on horseback. On ships, rope fibers were hammered into the seams between planks to prevent leakage and made into baggywrinkles to prevent chafe. And the first intercontinental messages were sent via transatlantic cable. Queeney doesn’t shy away from rope’s dark side, either. One chapter covers in uncomfortable detail how rope is used to torture, hang, and lynch.
And as the ships grew ever larger, with more complex sailplans and miles of line, the making of rope became an industrialized enterprise. By 1788 Boston had 14 working ropewalks, special buildings where yarns of locally cultivated hemp were spun together on ropemaking machines. The constant quest for improvements to rope yielded advancements from natural fibers like Manila hemp to steel cable to synthetic, oil-based materials like nylon, polyester, Kevlar, and Dyneema.
To modern sailors, whether it’s rope, line, sheet, painter, or rode, it’s what enables us to master a boat. Next to the rudder, it’s the most important tool onboard.
June 2025
