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 In time, much of this will be entirely superseded by wire and steel, as indeed all lower standing rigging is already of wire.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.