Anchoring - History

Its very difficult to accurately ascertain where the idea, or for that matter, the date when the concept of anchors came into existence. One thing is certain though, anchors have been around for a very long time.

Originally, stone was the medium of choice as it had weight, could be drilled for a mooring line, and if chaffed off nothing was really lost as there were many stones around. Metal was far too precious to use for mooring purposes because of such risky odds governing losses.

The ropes used in those days were of the hemp variety, and sea water as well as sun and just simply the weather would rot the line, especially considering it was immersed most of the time. It did not take man long to discover that treating the hemp rope with bitumen (a by product of oil - fractal distillation is a wonderful thing !) extended the life of the anchor "cable".

The Near East was full of oil seeps and the bitumen was used for everything man could think of, for men before Christ knew as much about the classes of petroleum such as asphalts, mineral oils, paraffin based oils and the naphthas, as we do today. In short, petroleum was used to preserve many items in those days, and hemp was one of them.

As far as the mooring device itself, metal still was too precious to use for this marine purpose, but the anchor stones took on the form of stone disks, wheel like, with a hole in the middle that a line could be passed through and in some cases, detached or slipped through the weight to be left on the bottom, recovering the precious line.

At some point, a windlass was invented to provide mechanical advantage to retrieving the ship anchor, which in turn allowed for more efficient anchor design or size, and allowed vessels to anchor where they would have been too exposed or possibly fighting too much current before the changes.

Pulling up anchors by hand was no easy task and the vessels were, for the most part, under 100 feet long and carried small crews.

This windlass seems to have come about sometime before Christ, however wide spread use was after the death of Jesus when the idea caught on in the Roman Empire.

On the Asian front, the Chinese went through much of the same engineering process, and the sea worthiness of Chinese junks is world renown.

Merchant ships would load several of the large stone disks and use them as ballast as well as mooring devices. There are areas of the Mediterranean that were ports at one time, (some still are), and the bottom of the harbors reflect this from all the old stone anchors that exist there.

Spare mooring devices and extra line was a must for the old vessels, and this practice still applies to a large degree today. People lose their boat anchors quite often, mostly through neglect of the cable (or line), shackles or winch.

With the passage of time, from plant fiber to chain, from hemp to cable and synthetic fibers, and for the anchor, from stone to wood and metal to just plain metal, was the cycle as we know of it. Different ideas and styles of anchors merged through the years, many for select purposes.