What are ground toes?

[allanyed]

I am not kidding, I am looking for an answer on this one.  It is part of the caulking description in a 1776 contract for a British sixth rate  The entire phrase (the spelling is as in the contract) is

The white ocham to be from flying & not from ground toes or decaid White ropes.   

A part of the original is below.  

TIA
Allan

[iMustBeCrazy]

Allan, I think the context is 'not reclaimed/recycled" so ground as in the past tense of grind. toes, tocs, I don't know.

[Jaager]

Toes?   In the context of worn out hemp, not a clue.

Is tow a noun for a line with that function?

 

 

Click the field of focus back a magnitude and:   would keratin fibers be a binder for tar?   Equine, bovine, or swine hooves are water proof?

Edited June 20, 2023 by Jaager

[Bob Cleek]

"Tow" is "short and coarse fibers of little value separated from the longer and more valuable fibers through hackling in the manufacture of rope. Tow is occasionally used in the manufacture of inferior qualities of rope." (International Maritime Dictionary, rene de Kerchove, 2nd Edition, Van Nostrand and Reinhold Co. 1961, Litton Educational Publishing]

 

"Tow" is also the short bits of fiber that break off of natural fiber rope, particularly hemp and sisal ("Manila") rope. On a large square-rigger, a lot of tow would find its way to the deck and collect in wet piles and muck things up. Hence the bosun's call, "Sweepers, man your brooms. Clean sweep down fore and aft." Another general meaning of "tow" is simply "worn out rope."

 

"Tow" was sometimes collected and saved for use in canvas pockets for padding of various sorts in rigging and so on, and for caulking material when mixed with tar to make oakum. Worn out or rotten line was often recycled into oakum as well. Quality oakum, however, was made not from lengths of worn-out line or "tow," but from new, long hemp strands. The highest quality new hemp line or oakum is made from the strong fibers from center of the stalks of the cannabis plant, which are whitish in color. (Oakum used by plumbers to caulk iron pipe joints is usually made from tarred jute or burlap.)

 

"Fibers and flyings" are what fill the air in a textile mill or rope walk and if you've ever been in a running textile mill, you will know that there is a huge cloud of fibers, little bits and pieces of broken fiber and dust, and "flyings" which are longer thin threads thrown off in the milling or spinning process, which must be continually cleaned up as they pose a large fire hazard. "Flyings" from the mills and ropewalks were used to make high quality oakum. 

 

Oakum is made by taking long fibers soaked in thick pine tar and simply twisting and rolling them into "ropes." The caulker has to prepare the oakum by unraveling lengths of the loosely twisted fiber from the loose ball (or "bale") of oakum and rolling the pine tar-soaked strands back and forth between the palm of his hand and the top of his thigh. (If you see a guy in the boatyard with his pants covered with tar on the front of his upper leg, he's a caulker! )

 

So, "The white ocham to be from flying & not from ground toes or decaid White ropes." means, "The white oakum specified here is to be made from mill flyings of the top-quality virgin white fiber of the plant and not from ground up tow or recycled rotten white hemp rope."

 

Quality oakum will result in a longer-lasting caulking job. Using old, weak fiber from worn out, rotten, or "decaid" rope will rot and decay in short order. The Admiralty wanted to use "the good stuff" because they didn't want to have to recaulk in short order because the stuff used was rotten to begin with.

 

Caulking mallet, caulking irons, and untarred "bale" of white hemp for making up oakum. See: Oakum - Wikipedia

 

Edited June 20, 2023 by Bob Cleek

[allanyed]

8 hours ago, iMustBeCrazy said:

toes, tocs, I don't know.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

 

Craig,  I know of TOCS but only in the sense of modern terms, the theory of constraints which is a management paradigm😁   Looking further at the "c's" and "e's" in the contract, it could very well be toc versus toe.  Either way I am at a loss.   It sounds like flying is new stuff and ground is used material which makes sense, but what exactly is toe, toc, tow?   It really is not an issue for our model scales, but I did find it to be an interesting item none the less.

 

Dean,

To me the word looks nothing like tow, BUT, you may be right based on what I found when looking up TOW.    MIddle English - touw   from Old English tow  (“spinning”) in compounds, e.g. towcraeft, towhus, towlic, from Old Norse tó (“uncleansed wool”), Dutch touw (rope)   

 

Bob Just saw your post  after I wrote this, so my follow up post is a bit late, but maybe fits in with your dissertation which looks to be spot on.  Thank you very much!   

Allan

Edited June 20, 2023 by allanyed

[druxey]

I agree with Bob; an archaic non-standard spelling of 'tow'. And decaid is 'decayed' or worn out.

[Bob Cleek]

7 hours ago, druxey said:

I agree with Bob; an archaic non-standard spelling of 'tow'. And decaid is 'decayed' or worn out.

Exactly. In fact, not even a "non-standard spelling," since there was no such thing as "standard spelling" back then! They just spelled phonetically and the word was "sounded out" by the reader. There were some efforts to standardize spelling prior to the 15th century, but standardized spelling didn't really start to catch on until the printing press became common. Manuscript writers continued with the phonetic spelling method for quite some time after. 

[Snug Harbor Johnny]

  One job in a work house (a residence of last resort for the destitute) was to pick apart old rope for the fibers.  'Guess there was always a market for inferior (thus cheaper) oakum.  Note that the specification for the better stuff implies that the cheaper stuff was in use as well.  Hmmm, just as there are cheaper brands of paint (one often gets one what pays for, as the cheaper ceiling paint I used once was so bad I had to paint over it with more expensive quality paint).  

 

  There was a story about a painter who 'stretched' white latex paint by adding some water while painting a Church steeple.  When done, there were dark clouds and lightning as a furious rainstorm washed off most of what had been applied to the steeple ... and a voice from above was heard to say, "Repaint, and thin no more !"

[popeye2sea]

18th century fire starting:

Tow makes great tinder for lighting a  fire. After striking your spark with the flint and steel onto a piece of char cloth, you make a small nest of tow around the spark and a few puffs of air will ignite the tow and then you place that into your stack of small kindling.

 

Regards,

Henry

[Louie da fly]

Yep. There are certain fungi that work as well as char cloth, too - the ones that grow on the trunks of trees. Apparently you grind it up when it's dry and then (and I forget what comes next).

 

I've done it with char cloth and tow. When the spark hits the char cloth it forms a small glowing point which you then wrap the tow around and blow like the blazes (sorry!). Dry grass works as a replacement for tow, too. I was once in a mediaeval gathering over the Easter weekend and we had to douse our fires when we'd finished with them (it was in a pine forest!). I decided to get some practice lighting with flint and steel every time we re-lit the fire- got fairly good with it, too. But hard on the knuckles - you lose skin either from the steel slamming against them while you hold the flint, or (worse still - it's sharp) from the flint itself. This video is very enlightening - I wish I'd seen it before 

 

 

Steven

[Mark P]

Good Evening all;

 

Further to Bob's informative reply above, I have just noticed an item in the Navy Treasurer's accounts for the year 1626 as follows:

 

Dressing 49 hundredweight, one quarter & 19lb of ground towes into fine Okam at 12s the hundredweight £29 10s 1d ha'penny. 

 

Also Converting of 8 thousand 4 hundred 2 quarters & 1lb of ground Towes into sounding lines, Deep sea lines, white lines, marline, and sail lines at 30s the hundredweight £126 15s 3d

 

It helps greatly that I understood what tow is before I read this. Thanks Bob!

 

All the best,

 

Mark P

[Snug Harbor Johnny]

On 9/28/2023 at 6:18 AM, Louie da fly said:

Yep. There are certain fungi that work as well as char cloth, too - the ones that grow on the trunks of trees. Apparently you grind it up when it's dry and then (and I forget what comes next).

 

I've done it with char cloth and tow. When the spark hits the char cloth it forms a small glowing point which you then wrap the tow around and blow like the blazes (sorry!). Dry grass works as a replacement for tow, too. I was once in a mediaeval gathering over the Easter weekend and we had to douse our fires when we'd finished with them (it was in a pine forest!). I decided to get some practice lighting with flint and steel every time we re-lit the fire- got fairly good with it, too. But hard on the knuckles - you lose skin either from the steel slamming against them while you hold the flint, or (worse still - it's sharp) from the flint itself. This video is very enlightening - I wish I'd seen it before 

 

 

Steven

  In Scouts, after learning how to use flint and steel, we had to master the bow and drill to make fire.  The bow and drill was definitely more difficult, and the carved wooden 'base' was key to accumulating embers to nurture the same way as char-cloth.  Once mastered, a Scout was awarded the "Smokey Eyeballs" certificate.

[Bob Cleek]

On 9/28/2023 at 3:18 AM, Louie da fly said:

But hard on the knuckles - you lose skin either from the steel slamming against them while you hold the flint, or (worse still - it's sharp) from the flint itself.

I just saw your post. For some reason, I overlooked it when it was posted.

 

When shaping flint or other fracturing stone (e.g., obsidian or chert) by striking it with a non-fracturing rock as when making arrowheads, a process called "knapping" or by striking a piece of flint with a piece of iron to create sparks, it is customary to hold the fracturing stone in or on a patch of leather in a manner which protects the hand holding the stone from being cut by the razor sharp edges of the stone you are striking. 

 

http://survivaltek.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/flintknapknife.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Louie da fly]

Makes a lot of sense. That stuff can be SHARP!

 

Steven

[Snug Harbor Johnny]

On 10/8/2023 at 12:45 AM, Louie da fly said:

Makes a lot of sense. That stuff can be SHARP!

 

Steven

  Electron microscopy shows freshly knapped  flint or obsidian goes down to just a couple of molecules wide at the edge ... effectively the sharpest edge for any material to have - as sharp or sharper than a surgeon's scalpel, or Sweeney Todd's razor.  This was important for early humans to butcher the mega-fauna they hunted - just getting through thick hides was an achievement.

Edited October 9, 2023 by Snug Harbor Johnny

[GGibson]

Very interesting read!  Another example of how language has evolved over time!  Fascinating!

 

But, have to admit, for those of us who are BOTH ship modelers and backyard BBQr's, seeing the "...Ground Toes" topic title caught my BBQ radar attention immediately!  We'll put almost anything on our smokers! 🤣