Ship's Ladders-Rope Handrails?

[bear]

Ahoy Mates

 

Have a question concerning ships ladders. Was there any use of a rope next to the ladder used as a handrail ? And if there was,what time period's were they used in?

 

Thank

Keith

[JerseyCity Frankie]

People will write in and ask for a clarification on the date and the type of ship you are talking about. Quite rightly. But in general I cant imagine a ship without a handrail of some kind on any of the stairs aboard, unless they are ladders. I DO see a great deal of stairs on models, those connecting the poop deck and forecastle head with the rest of the deck for instance, with very steep treacherous stairs and no handrail provision of any sort and this never strikes me as plausible. Ships pitch and roll too much for a lack of a handhold in a place like that. There would be too many broken bones otherwise.

[druxey]

In the period of sail, the British naval term for these were 'entering ropes' that hung either side of the entry steps. The had diamond knots worked at 9" intervals for additional security. There were also other safety ropes such as guest ropes and passing ropes.

[Force9]

Tyrone Martin states that US Frigate Constitution had no rope rails for gangways/ladders with the possible exception of the rearmost near the officer accommodations.

 

Evan

[JerseyCity Frankie]

I also have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that for most of the decades of square rigged sailing there were no documented Jackstays on the yards. Which I view as an impossibility but there it is, no documentation for jackstays until very late in the game.

Its unscientific and unsupportable to go ahead with gut feelings when researching ship models. We should certainly stick to only the things that the physical record bears out.  But I still can not imagine a gangway of any sort on any ship of size without a nod to safety in the form of a rope or wooden handrail to assist climbing up and down in heavy seas.

There is a huge grey area you can step into though in which you could imagine scenarios where hand rails or hand ropes were put up and taken down over the life of the vessel, so unremarkable and mundane that their disposition or lack there of was never mentioned in a surviving record. But I KNOW you can't really use that method of thinking as a basis for argument.

[mtaylor]

It's quite possible that hand ropes on internal ladders were only rigged in heavy weather...   there's lots of these odds and ends floating about that we don't have documentation for. 

[shiloh]

The ships I sailed aboard were of the Steel Navy Variety, all deck openings had some sort of guard or handrail around them, in the case of a watertight hatch-scuttle combo it was the open hatch itself with the holding stanchions. All weather deck ladders, " what some call stairs, we called ladders", had hand rails on the ladders along catwalks and other walkways. Below decks there were  handrails on some ladders, 'stairs', if they were long ones and not so steep. With low overheads and plenty of things to grab, hand rails were often not needed. Guess the answer is as it usually is, "It Depends", except for weather deck ladders, they typically had hand rails, grabbing at air for support does little good.

jud

[popeye2sea]

Remember, our concept of safety was vastly different from back in the day.