I am imagining it was a length of rope they re-used in stretches? 100m of early century rope capable of comfortably supporting a human seems way too unwieldy to have carried that high.

I've thrown a bunch of links in elsewhere in the thread, but basically, there was a bosun's chair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosun%27s_chair) running inside the mast. As far as I can figure it out one man went up in the chair to secure the pilot, waited for the other two to reach him, and the three of them managed to get the pilot into the chair and back down to the ground.