In A Holding Position — Michael Crockwell

If you were looking to anchor your boat in the Bronze Age, from 3300 to 2100 B.C., you’d tie a rope around a heavy rock and throw it overboard. These primitive anchors got a little more sophisticated with the addition of grooves and sticks and the killick was born. Gaelic for anchor, killicks were still being used in Newfoundland and Labrador in the last century. The word anchor itself is so old that it’s derived from not only a Latin word “ancora” but a Greek word before that. In ...