Hammocks

I love hammocks and have a collection of them. Below is a woven cloth hammock from Brazil. The photo is from Kona. It is too hot here to use it until around December, but it is still part of my collection. From this angle you cannot see the beautiful embroidery work on the hammock itself. Our friend Bill brought it from Brazil for us in the 90's and it's seen a lot of use, but it is still strong.


A man named Saturnino in Akumal made the first hammock I acquired. I picked out the light and dark blues and stopped off to see its progress on the loom every day for weeks as I walked to my studio garage apartment from the dive shop. Below, Pablo shows it's still usable upstairs outside on the patio. I've been toting it around the globe for over 25 years. It has seen its better days, but it keeps hanging.



When I furnished this house I counted hammock hooks to buy hammocks accordingly. I found enough hooks to hang 25 hammocks, but I settled for ten.


I think the hammock is the most practical and versatile piece of furniture. We watch TV from our hammocks. I wrote this piece in the hammock. Pablo prefers to sleep in the hammock. We roll up our hammocks and can easily pitch camp between two coconut palms OR two monterrey pines!


My research on the history of the hammock produced weird results. First the NYT article puzzled me. Wikipedia said Philipinos invented hammocks, but there was no information to support that theory. Most reports state they originated 1000-3000 years ago in the Mayan world. They were found along their extensive trade routes in all of Mexico, Central and South America. One source reported Amazonian Aborigines (?) wove hammocks from the bark of the hamack, hamak, or amac tree. Thus, its name, the hammock or in Spanish hamaca.


I read that Columbus was credited with discovering the hammock, but all he did was take some back to Europe after seeing how comfortable the Bahamians, or per another source Dominican Republicans, were lying around in them in the tropical heat. The sea faring men found them practical and they became the preferred bunks on many European ships. The ships used canvas hammocks, narrow, uncomfortable, and spaced only inches apart from one another.

Yucatecan hammocks are intricately woven, usually out of cotton, nylon, or a polyester combo. They're all the same length. It is the width and the weave that make the difference in quality. The more threads in the weave the better. A 'familial' (literally big enough for a family) size hammock or a 'matrimonial' (double) is more comfortable than a 'doble' (single) or 'individual'(just barely there). The trick in sleeping in one is to lie diagonally. The hammock supports the spine nicely if you manage to get yourself situated in there correctly. It takes some kicking and pushing and pulling for me to get it right, but I can get there. Pablo is a pro.


The other most comfortable sleeping position is crosswise, like this:

Russell concentrates on a creative moment sitting in the hammock. If I am going to sit in mine, I usually grab a couple of pillows to support my back, get my feet up, and put my work on my lap.

A hammock cools you off in the heat. Air can circulate through the weave. Add a few fans and you are in a pleasant comfort zone. A hammock keeps you up off the floor where humidity, mold and PESTS abound. The mosquitoes however use the hammock to their advantage. I believe they use the grid pattern to zero in on my most vulnerable parts!

In the cold you can wrap in a blanket and the hammock around you like a cocoon. If it's really cold you can have someone put hot coals underneath you which generate heat up through the cocoon. Try doing that with a bed.

Remember, 90% of all Yucatecans are conceived in, born in, spend most of their lives in, sleep in, and die in their hammocks. It's a fun statistic and often a conversation maker.

I like the hammock concept so much that I have other hammock furniture. Below is a hammock chair for the house. We used them outside for a year but had to have them restrung and the wood revarnished, so just a wise tip, keep them inside and they will last forever. This is a small chair, just my size.

Some of the kitties like hammocks, some don't. Moka and Mokito love them. The other cats don't feel secure in them at all. Kitten Mokito played a part in the destruction of the chair pictured above during the height of his kittenhood. He is sitting in one of the bigger models. The larger chairs are great for sunbathing or laying back. But they shouldn't LIVE out in the sun either. They are in for repair now. This repair wouldn't have been necessary if foresight was 20/20.

Don't think that I quit there! Below are two hammock stools. Mike picked up the one on the left in Tixcocob and I found the one with the folding backrest when I took the chairs to be repaired. These are great for indoor and outdoor use, but they live indoors.


There are hammocks for your personal items. These hammocks are not strangers to anyone in the boating community. Here they are easy to find and inexpensive. I like to use them in a variety of places.

Last but not least are the hanging hammock chairs. There are two outback on the patio behind the pool. You can stretch out and put your feet up, and I had a great photo showing exactly that, but it was accidentally deleted. If you had any idea how long it took me to work on this hammock article, you'd understand. I do own some regular furniture. There are a couple of beds, several tables and chairs, and accoutrements, but a visit to my house is definitely a trip to Hammockville.

.

Hammocks and Malaria: NYT July 12, 1881

Please indulge me to blow you away with an article I dug up while researching hammock history. If you live in the Yucatán, most likely you have and appreciate your hammock(s). You may find this interesting even if you don't have a hammock or live in México. It is long, but what could I possibly cut out? The first paragraph makes it sound like a horrible disease! It just gets more and more bizarre!


The New York Times, Published July 12, 1881


HAMMOCKS

The hammock is steadily diffusing itself over the piazzas and the front yards of our country. A few years ago the hammock was rarely met except at the South, where it is endemic all year round. A few isolated cases of hammock occasionally manifested themselves in Philadelphia, New York, or Chicago, but they were too few to create any alarm. Now we find hammocks wherever we go, and they are ruining the health and morals of the American people at a rate which must make every intelligent man tremble for the future of the Republic.


The hammock is, perhaps, fair to the eye, but it is deceitful above all things and desperately crooked. No matter how easy and luxurious it may seem during the first five minutes that one occupies it an aching back and weary legs are the sure result of lingering in its lap. It is more treacherous than any beast of the field. Unless the greatest care is taken it never fails to throw its occupant out. Nature has mercifully constructed woman with back hair, as a protection against hammocks, so that when she falls out of a hammock and alights on her head she seldom sustains injuries that are fatal to herself; but even the strongest man who walks down a street bordered by Summer cottages and listens to the dull, monotonous sound of female heads striking on the piazza, and has his helpless eyes dazzled by red, pink, or parti-colored flashes that shoot into the air like the swift and evanescent auroral streamers, cannot but have his holiest feelings harrowed to a most painful extent. When a full-grown man drops from a hammock he is either stunned, in which case his wife rushes out and begs him to tell her if he has hurt himself, or he rises up and expresses by implication his strong disapprobation of the introduction of that unsatisfactory word "Hades" into the revised edition. Children who have read Capt. MARRYATT'S novels and have thus learned that one of the principal duties of a Midshipman in former days was to place a pile of cannon-balls on the deck immediately under the hammock of a fellow-Midshipman and then to cut the hammock lashings, frequently practice this feat of seamanship upon their brothers, sisters, and grandmothers, substituting piles of stones for cannon-balls. It is, perhaps, a beautiful but certainly a demoralizing sport, and the hammock is plainly responsible for thus affording lessons in cruelty and murder to the rising generation.


The worst feature of the hammock is, however, its agency in producing what are usually called malarious fevers. In former days physicians believed that in warm, damp countries, where a lack of drainage existed, an invisible poison, called malaria, developed itself and produced disease among men. This theory has not endured the test of time. Year by year malaria is spreading into districts where what were formerly considered the necessary conditions of malaria do not exist. It is found in the Rocky Mountains and among the granite hills of New-England. Dr. CHADBOURNE was recently asked to explain why malarious diseases have latterly appeared in Berkshire County, Mass, and he has just written a long letter in which he lucidly explains that neither he nor anybody else knows anything about it, and all that can be said on the subject is the old theory of the causes of malaria is untenable.


Now, in the growing use of hammocks we have a full and sufficient explanation of the cause of so-called malarious fevers. They exist only where hammocks are found. The home of these diseases was originally in the tropics, where the entire population spends its time in hammocks, if the pictures in the primary geography are to be believed. All over Central and South America the women never get out of their hammocks, and the men only rise from theirs at intervals of a week or two, in order to take part in a revolution. In our Southern States malarious fevers are only less common than they are in the tropics, and it is notorious that hammocks have been popular in the South for generations. In New-York and Philadelphia the spread of alleged malaria has kept pace with the spread of hammocks, and in New-Jersey, where the natives have long used the hammock as a place of refuge from the ferocious mosquitoes that lurk in the grass, chills and fever is the normal condition of these people. Summer boarders from the cities have carried hammocks and malarious diseases to New-England country towns, and miners who sleep in hammocks in order to avoid the company of rattlesnakes have introduced the same diseases into the Rocky Mountain regions. It is the hammock and not an imaginary malaria that is undermining the livers of our fellow-citizens.


Why is it that the hammock produces a class of diseases all of which are intimately connected with a disordered state of the liver will be evident if we remember the attitude in which the hammock compels its occupant to lie. It forces his body into a curve, thus compressing the liver between the diaphragm, the waist-band of the trousers, and other contiguous organs. The consequence is that the liver, squeezed and bruised, declines to perform its functions, and some one of the various fevers hitherto called "malarious" attacks the unhappy victim. Where hammocks are used "malaria" exists; where hammocks are not used "malaria" is unknown. Instead of dosing people with quinine and arsenic, let us adopt the prophylactic measure of casting our hammocks into the fire, and we shall preserve our health and our morals.

Published: July 12, 1881
Copyright © The New York Times