Naval Stores, Pine Forests and History
The term “Naval Stores” is a little-known name for products such as Pine Tar, Pitch, Rosin, Turpentine and Oakum, all of which are found in the Natural world and all of which were absolutely essential to the construction, maintenance and operation of traditional sailing vessels.
These products—substances—were to sailing vessels what motor oil is to internal combustion engines; not “the thing” itself—engine or sailing vessel—but products that were crucial to the operation and function of “the thing.”
With the exception of Oakum, all naval stores came from pine trees. Oakum is a mix of pine tar and Manila rope strands that is used for caulking the seams between the planks of a wooden hull—a carvel planked wooden hull. Manila rope is made with fibers from the Abaca plant and is also called Cebu hemp or Manila hemp. Abaca grows in the Philippine islands, but it is not a true hemp.
I was marginally aware of naval stores as a category, but like most people I never gave it much thought until my wife, Susan, and I moved to a small town on the Florida Panhandle where sailing vessels, history and pine trees have always been important.
Context—historical, economic, social and environmental—has always been important. The forests that English settlers found in North America were quickly understood, by the Crown if not the settlers themselves, to be economically important. Live oak timbers needed to make the frames for ships’ hulls, pine trees for spars as well as for turpentine, pitch, pine tar and rosin as sealants, waterproofing and caulking were all vitally important for the expansion and global operations of the Royal Navy.
The next time you hear someone lamenting the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, which is clearly lamentable, remember this simple fact—at the beginning of the English colonization that was to create the United States, the forest of longleaf pine trees( also known as heart pine), covered 90 Million Acres. It went from southern Virginia down to central Florida, then West across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana and on to what today is known as East Texas.
160 tears later only about 2% of that 90 million acres of pine forest remained. Today the remaining longleaf pine forest is 4%–6% of its original size. Maybe less.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
THE PRODUCTS, THEIR ORIGIN AND USES.
CRUDE TURPENTINE—also known as RESIN (not Rosin), is the sticky sap of the pine tree, especially the longleaf pine tree in the South Eastern United States. It was harvested and collected by hand, with workers first cutting away a patch of bark on the tree trunk, then cutting diagonal gouges into the underlying wood. Called a “cat face,” these gouges allowed the pine sap to flow out of the tree into small containers placed on each tree immediately under the cat face.
The sap from each tree was periodically collected by hand, put into kegs and transported by small wagons pulled mostly by small mules, to Turpentine “camps” for distillation.
The extraction of the sap from the tree, when correctly done, did not damage the tree because the Resin was not part of the trees’ nutrient system.
At the turpentine camp the raw resin was heated in large copper kettles, vaporized and the vapor then condensed in a cooling tower. This is no more than basic distillation. The refined product created by distillation was called Spirits of Turpentine. (See video below.)
[ There are many videos about longleaf pine; this one is my favorite because of one of the narrators, Janisse Ray, and because of old footage of turpentine camps, a modern demonstration of making- extracting pine tar in a dirt kiln and the reverence it shows for a magnificent and poorly understood ecosystem. I hope you will enjoy it.]
Florida history tells us that many contemporary small, rural towns in Florida started out as turpentine camps.
In her classic story of Florida rural life in the 1920s Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings mentions people working in turpentine camps as late as the 1920s.
SPIRITS OF TURPENTINE is the distilled resin of Crude Turpentine; what is today known as just Turpentine. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was used in paints, medicines, solvents, for the processing of rubber and as a fuel for oil lamps.
ROSIN—is a residue, a by-product of turpentine distillation used for water proofing leather and was also mixed with soap made from animal fat and wood ashes (lye) to make the soap less harsh.
PINE TAR—is possibly the most important of the naval stores. It was and still is produced by putting “light wood”, also called “fat wood,” along with pine tree roots into simple dirt kilns, called “tarkels,” where carefully controlled combustion released and drew out the pine resin in the wood and roots. The tar exits the tarkel by flowing out through a pipe to drain into containers. (See video above.)
The making of pine tar on an industrial scale in 18th century North Carolina is believed to be the reason that people from North Carolina are still called “Tar Heels” today.
Pine tar, also known as Stockholm Tar, is also still used as a sealant and water proofing for Manila cordage on replica sailing vessels.
Mixed with Manila rope fragments to make oakum, pine tar is also used as a padding for the hooves of horses who have suffered bruising of the “frog,” the interior structure of their hooves. Like several practices of farriers this is distinctly in the category of Black Magic, but it works.
PITCH—is made by boiling pine tar that is mixed with a small amount of turpentine. This combination gives the pine tar a thicker, semi-solid form that can be applied, when hot, to the planking of ships, especially the planks below the water line. The hull is either taken out of the water or “careened,” laid over on one side on a beach at low tide. This coating of pitch was an early technique used to prevent or at least diminish worm damage to the planking.
OAKUM—is a loose mix of strands of Manila rope and pine tar, as described above.Before Polysulfide goop in tubes became popular oakum, or twisted strands of raw cotton, was used to fill the seams in ships’ planking. This was a centuries-old, time-honored traditional technology/craft, but it needed to be done periodically, requiring frequent use of pine tar, caulking material and skilled labor.
In the next post I will get into the specifics of using pine tar, marlin and Manila rope in the rigging of traditional sailing vessels.
I am a mostly self-taught, amateur rigger—very amateur, but I have just enough experience to appreciate the craft of rigging and I also have some excellent sources, references and illustrations.
I will end with these final facts and observations. After the American Civil War ended (1861-1865), the Southern states of the Confederacy went through what was called Reconstruction (1865-1877).
The economy of the South had always been based on agriculture and was heavily damaged during the war. But soon after the war ended a building boom began in both the Northern states of the Union and in Europe. The Northern forests of white pine in the Great Lakes region had been heavily cut (Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox).
But land in the post-war Southern states was cheap and the longleaf pine forest was vast. These factors, together with the demand for high quality lumber, combined to create a timber boom, driven by demand from the Northern states of the U.S. and those countries in Europe whose forests had been eradicated. At the same time the demand for naval stores also continued internationally.
In the late 1900s, 40,000 workers were employed in the production of naval stores and records showed $17,000,000 paid in wages to those workers. (See video Longleaf: heart of pine).
In 1899 a hurricane thought to be Force Two and one of many to come ashore in the Gulf of Mexico over the centuries, wiped out the small but very important lumber shipping port of Carrabelle, Florida. Carrabelle is located at the mouth of the Carrabelle river, which flows from the interior into the Gulf providing easy transport for rafts of cypress and pine logs. Carrabelle is about 20 miles East of where my wife and I now live on the Florida Panhandle. Lumber schooners and three masted, square rigged barques came to Carrabelle from many countries in Europe, as well as from the Northeast U.S.
In the hurricane of 1899, 15 of these lumber ships were destroyed or badly damaged. Twelve of the ships were loaded with lumber and naval stores. (See Photos #1 and #2 below.)
400,000 board feet of pine and cypress lumber was lost in the hurricane.
50,000 barrels of turpentine were also lost.
I cite these figures from an exhibit called The Shipwrecks of Dog Island now featured at the small Carrabelle History Museum.
The following year, 1900, brought the Great Galveston Hurricane, that almost totally destroyed Galveston, Texas. Period photos of the hurricane aftermath show complete devastation on a scale comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II.
By the 1930s the longleaf pine forest of almost 90 million acres had almost completely disappeared, due to human impact; the same being true of the bison, passenger pigeons, the plume birds of Southern Florida and later, large areas of the Amazon rain Forest.
“Those who refuse to learn the lessons of History are condemned to repeat them.”
PAU
As always, all opinions expressed above are mine alone.
Duncan Blair
References
The Southern Documentary Project’s video Longleaf: Heart of Pine
Carrabelle Florida History Museum Ship Wrecks of Dog Island
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