Notas del episodio
The hammock began as survival gear in two places at once. Spanish colonists took the word hamaca from the Taino and Arawak peoples of the Caribbean, and Columbus noted netted sleeping hammocks used for sleep and barter, first woven from tree bark and later from sisal. Raised above the forest floor, sleepers avoided snakes, ants, and damp rot. The episode rejects myths crediting Saxons or the Athenian Alcibiades, and follows a historian of technology who traces a separate English canvas hanging bed through an 11th century Old English Hexateuch illustration and the 1330s Luttrell Psalter. Sailors later gave that canvas bed the Caribbean name. In 1597 the Royal Navy ordered 300 bolts of canvas for hanging beds, because a hammock swings with the ship instead of pitching sleepers onto the deck.
Stowed hammocks lined the gunwales as protection from shrapnel and musket fire. In the 20th century, explorers and soldiers adopted Venezuelan jungle hammocks with bug netting, rainflies, and drip strings. The U.S. M1966 jungle hammock for Vietnam had a waterproof bottom that filled with rain, while North Vietnamese troops sewed hammocks from captured parachute cloth. From Apollo 12 through Apollo 17, hammocks kept astronauts off the cold floor of the lunar module.
- A V notched wooden spreader added in the 1590s raised canvas walls around naval sleepers against drafts.
- Marines on New Britain slung hammocks inside slit trenches to escape both insects and artillery.
- Spanish arrivals in El Salvador saw hammocks used to isolate sleepers from constant earthquakes.
- In Brazil's rural northeast, hammocks carry the dead to towns with cemeteries, a practice Candido Portinari painted in 1944.
- Spreader bar hammocks flip easily, while a hang at about 30 degrees and a diagonal lie keep the spine flat.