I support Joop in his contributions on this. There is always a tendency for concentration to be confused with overall number so that as ships were (rather than are) a very obvious place where ropes (and by inference knots) abounded they must be the primary users/developers. Unfortunately the thousands of land based users do not exist in such a high profile concentration - we don't see climbers, cavers or arborists very often (unless we happen to be one) and so they fail to be as noticed.
Notice that this line of discussion is a bit beside the point re Budworth’s Quibble;
his point was simply that even at the time of issue/publication Ashley wasn’t
accurately representing then-modern usage so much as of a time recently passed.
One can read an account by Eric Newby entitled The Last Grain Race, Picador (1990) ISBN 978-0-330-31885-3
of his adventure as a young sailor aboard the 4-masted barque Moshulu (or see
some great photos by him in Learning the Ropes, John Murray, also Times Books (1999, of Random House);
this occurred near the end of the careers of such grand fully rigged ships, 1938.
One can imagine that Ashley was working on, writing his book for some time
prior to the publication date; also, that even with the large shippers putting
sailing boats to rest (as I see Moshulu rests --actually, restaurants– apparently
not far from a niece’s Philadelphia 'burbs abode, I should try to see it), there
must have been sailing boats continued in use here & there.
But the BQuibble quibblers boast of about a four-decades of experience in which
they claim full relevance of [u]ABOK, and subtracting five decades from 2010
(for easy arithmetic) puts their oldest time still 2 decades post Ashley, and forward.
As I say, they have left out any helpful details to believe their assertions.
As a Tall Ship sailor, along with thousands of others world-wide, I can assure doubters that very many of the knots in ABOK are still in use, and invaluable. I'll count them on my next trip and let you know how many different ones will be in use during my weeks' sail.And this is just the sort of detail that can enlighten us. (There is some tempering of all this by consideration of what [/i]tall-ships sailing[/i] represents: this is I think the preservation of a way of life for the sake of preservation, not practicality.)
A year or so ago, someone posted a URLink to a knots-tally for an old ship – to wit:
www.morethanknots.com/SM/Ashley_Table.html
The count there is approximately 30, maybe less. This is well shy of “nine tenths of
all recorded” knots, even by my more right-sized counting of [u]ABOK ; but, then,
the charge wasn’t to use them all (at any one time), but just to know them (why?).
(NB: there’s at least one double listing (Palm&Needle Whipping), and other listings
of things not usually counted as “knots”.)
note that there are trillions (for the US-knotters: 10^12) of knots out on the oceans, right now. Most of them manufactured .... on shore.Wow, that Joop Knoop can sure count fast! (We need him for our deficits.) But here is that issue about what "knot" means: the above link's tally counts knots as [i]types[/i] of tangles, not as the tangles themselves. I'm sensing a guesstimate from Joop based on commercial fisher's netting, each "knot" both the same and repeated. It's aa good thing we don't have to be responsible for "nine tenths" of that number of [i]types[/i] of knots! -- I can invent only so many per day, needing to eat, drink, & sleep, too. :D
As for knot origins, I’m continually impressed by how --even with today’s enhanced
communications (though maybe lower attention spans)-- little of knotting in one
application area penetrates to another – the lack of awareness can be surprising
(and very confusing, when it comes to knots naming & nomenclature).
So, I’m happy to believe that chronology isn’t a determiner of origin – i.e., that
for one set of users, a knot might have originated circa , but elsewhere,
coming without communication, it originated a century or so later. Both of such
cases should count as origins, and the latter shouldn’t be considered borrowing,
without clear indication that in fact that was the case. (E.g., I take it from Wright
& Magowan’s Alpine Journal article of 1928 that they originated the Butterfly knot
for themselves; yet Cyrus Day points to an early occurrence of the knot in the
States, in some school setting. (And someone is pursuing further documentation
regarding that.) I believe that I can point to three origins of SmitHunter’s Bend,
where seemingly the 2nd origin (Hunter’s) had the greatest influence.)