Lifelines, a History

The saga of 'the backbone of civilization'

In search of light reading, for passing time on a flight, or by the lake? Consider Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization (St. Martin’s Press; 336 pages; $27.00).

Author Tim Queeney, onetime editor of the now-defunct Ocean Navigator, probes “a tool with which we made the world” — that originated “surely … long before the Copper Age” — in a lively, globe-spanning manner. His book won’t require intense focus, but that’s not an insult. Robust explorations of the Black Death, Galveston hurricane, and Holodomor are essential. But in the dead of summer, one cannot be blamed for nibbling on history.

Warning: The dogma lives loudly in Queeney. While his book isn’t suffused with wokery, there’s enough to induce regular irritation. Take his claim that “today, white supremacist groups attempt to terrorize people of color by displaying nooses or leaving them on the doorknobs of Black [sic] homes and businesses.” Seriously? A survey of recent headlines — clearly, a task Queeney avoided — suggests that noose-based “hate crimes” are frequently fake. And for the record, while America’s tradition of ethnic/racial mob murder is undeniably execrable, our largest mass lynchings were of Chinese (Los Angeles) and Italian (New Orleans) men. Merits a mention, if facts matter more than narrative-reinforcing.

Dodge the ignorant Identity Politics, and Rope yields a surfeit of fascinating vignettes. Starting with the “oldest example of rope yet known” — unearthed in a cave in France, just six years ago — Queeney regales readers with tales of the Egyptians, Polynesians, Greeks, Romans, and Vikings. Closer to the present, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages wouldn’t have soared to the heavens, if not for rope. Scaffolding “was … set up to build a section at a time,” and “it was always being taken apart, moved, and reconfigured.” Nails were in short supply, but rope, “likely made from lime bast,” held the poles in place. After firm knots were tied, the “lashings were further tightened by driving wooden wedges into them,” and the “result was a scaffold structure as tight and rigid as if nailed or bolted together.”

On another continent, the Inca Empire wielded rope as “a non-written method for keeping records.” Khipu, “intricate assemblages of twisted cords,” conveyed information “using a variety of characteristics, including the color of the cord, and also the number, type, and position of knots tied onto it.” To this day, “the exact meaning of the various characteristics of a kiphu” are “not fully understood to scientists.”

Rope even has a connection to the Boston Massacre. The 1770 bloodbath on King Street was sparked a few days earlier, during “an altercation between ropemakers at John Gray’s 744-long ropewalk just south of Milk Street and a British soldier named Patrick Walker.” Punches were thrown after the redcoat

was insulted by the ropemakers, but he was soon driven away by several of the workers. Walker went to his barracks and came back with eight fellow soldiers. They mixed it up with the gang of ropemakers who once again drove them off, employing the wooden levers used in rope twisting as clubs. The ropewalk battle escalated when more than forty soldiers returned for a full-on melee with the ropemakers, a battle that swirled back and forth and threatened to upset the hot tar cauldron. Once again the ropemakers prevailed, and this time the soldiers did not return.

More violence followed over the next several days, building to the tragic shots fired outside the Boston Custom House. Staying on the East Coast, Queney’s tale of the USS Constitution’s rope-assisted escape from a British mini-fleet in July 1812 is thrilling.

For supporters of a public-whipping revival, Rope provides hope. The punishment accompanied “English colonists to the U.S.,” and was “imposed on both men and women.” It fell out of favor in the second half of the 19th century, but several “jurisdictions adamantly hung on to their whipping posts.” Baltimore maintained the penalty, for wife-beaters, until 1938. (Quite an oversight on the part of “the patriarchy.”) In 1964, an article in The New York Times “detailed that Delaware still had twenty-four offenses on the books that could be punished by up to sixty lashes.” A Superior Court judge argued that the sentence “is so extreme a humiliation for its victims that it may reform incorrigible criminals.”

Tim Queeney is no Shelby Foote. Or Robert Caro. Or Rick Perlstein. But books about the ordinary have their place. The “very ubiquity” of Rope’s subject “made it disappear into the background.” An “indispensable tool for most of human existence” deserves better.