it’s told to be “a sheepshank with crossing ropes in the midsection”: http://korpegard.se/knot/?knot=18&hideComments=&showInt= I tried to tie a few variants of such a knot, but each time it appeared nothing else but the good old sheepshank.
at last, Mr. Gerald L. Findley is selling his book on-line with this mysterious knot explained inside: http://www.ropeworks.biz/text04/k.html Alas, its cover isn’t transparent
Neither of the pages presents an illustration or at least an unambiguous explanation of the knot. Did anybody see a trustworthy description of the Trumpet knot elsewhere? Instructions or illustrations are welcome. Thanks!
In my Swedish eyes it appears to be yet another case of terms and nomenclature being different in different languages. The Swedish name for “sheepshank” is “trumpetstek” - which means, more or less, “Trumpet Knot”. (I suppose you might argue that a more literal translation might be “Trumpet Hitch”, but anyway…)
So any reference stating Trumpet Knot = sheepshank is most likely quite correct!
The idea that the Trumpet knot and the Sheepshank are essentially the same sounds rather grounded now. If you start from the well-known three loops (e.g., as shown in http://www.boatsafe.com/marlinespike/sheepshank.htm), you will get the knot’s version with the mid sections crossed and the standing parts of the rope exiting on the same sides, i.e., the Trumpet knot, but it can be easily transformed into the “canonical” Sheepshank merely by rotating one of the half-hitches around the respective loop. Curiously, the Wikipedia article I referred to implies, too, that it’s the Trumpet knot that one gets from the loops. At last, according to my experiments, both forms look identically when under load.
I won’t be surprised to find out that the method of three loops was first discovered by the Dutch (or Swedish ;)) sea-folk and then adopted by their British fellows (or rivals?) along with the other name for the knot.
