Making Rope

I'm back! Back home in North Carolina, and back to my blog. It has been cold here, but the forecast promises us a little more reasonable temps this weekend. The laptop is at GeekGuy's shop, with a certain confidence that it is going to healed. Losing easy communication the last three weeks in Merida proved how much I rely on the internet.

This photo is the fabulous recliner we saw at Hacienda Sotuta de Peon. It TRULY is comfortable...those things my feet are propped on swing around, and tuck underneath the arms of the chair when not in use. I think it is a French design, but don't quote me on that.

The tour of sisal production was much more fascinating to me than the tour of the Big House. Such a labor intensive product, that virtually enslaved Mayan people in a hot, wet, smelly job. It created a product that was highly valued, but the wealth from the product was not very well distributed. Sort of like cotton plantations in the pre-war
southern US. The process uses every part of the plant, even the waste is used as compost.

In a previous post, there are photos of the process at the mill, so these photos show a little more about how the hennequin is used after it is dried.

This photo shows how it was combed, before machines did the work. A handful of dried sisal is 'whomped' across these teeth, and pulled through. It was harder than it looks! And, I learned that the smelly part is not natural: it's diesel fuel. A little bit of diesel makes the raw material easier to handle. Yuck.

After it was combed by hand, then it was spun. A small amount was attched to a spinning wheel. This is a two-man process. This man is feeding small amounts into the spinning wheel, which is being turned by the second man (out of the picture). It is just like spinning wool. This created one small cord, which might have been plied with others of the same size to make larger and larger ropes. It took MUCH space, as the ropes were made to order lengths for sailing ships.


This is the baling machine, which was worked by two men. The combed-but-not-spun raw material was put into a huge box. Then, a big weight was slowly lowered, compressing the sisal into 300 pound bales. Here, the baling man and I were tying it off...a very specific way to tie it!

Sisal was mostly baled and shipped to the manufacturers, in Merida. The machinery was too pricey for each hacienda to own, so the sisal was sold by the pound, and moved by rail to the rope plants.

After the tour of the Big House, the green mill (where the strands were extracted from the leaves), and the baling house, we walked through a small orchard on our way to a collection of machinery the family has collected for display. In the orchard, our guide invited us to pick some tangerines for a snack. There were also lime trees and orange trees.

The next post, I'll show you a little of the antique machinery, which was fascinating!