User:Jerry in San Diego/Draft of tar and feathers revision

The Material Used: Most Likely Pine Tar, not Asphalt, Bitumen or Pitch
The assumption that tarring and feathering was a necessarily brutal procedure, a form of torture, seems to be belied by the often humorous manner in which it is presented in literature, where the punishment inflicts public humiliation and discomfort, not serious injury. This would be hard to understand if the tar used were the material now most commonly referred to by that name, which has a high melting point. However, the tar of the days of wooden ships was pine tar, a completely different substance, with a much lower melting point. Some varieties were liquid at room temperature.

Modern tar, also called bitumen or asphalt, is produced from either petroleum or coal. (Americans, at least colloquially, call all these materials tar, while the British seem to reserve ‘tar’ for coal or pine tar, while the petroleum derivative is called bitumen.) Typically used for tarring roads and roofs, the material must be semi-solid in normal weather under the hot sun, so it is formulated to have a high melting point. (Actually tar, which is a mixture of a large number of different complex hydrocarbons, doesn’t have a single melting point, but instead what is called a “softening point,” the temperature at which the material becomes too soft to do its job. It becomes more and more liquid as temperature rises above that.) For example, one modern brand of roofing asphalt has a softening point of 220⁰F (104⁰C), but is applied at 380⁰F (193⁰C). At the latter temperature it is a liquid that can be sloshed around. Obviously this kind of petroleum-based hot tar would burn any skin it came into contact with. Paving materials, both coal and petroleum-based, are mixed at somewhat lower temperatures (221⁰F (105⁰C) for coal tar, 302-357⁰F (150-180⁰C) for bitumen), but when liquid would still be hot enough to cause severe injuries.

However, historically, the most common tar was another material altogether, which had different properties and completely different uses. This was pine tar. It was used for waterproofing wooden ships and for weatherproofing rope. Its smell is one you know if you’ve ever been on an old wooden ship. According to Wikipedia’s article on pine tar, “Traditionally, hemp and other natural fibers were the norm for rope production. Such rope would quickly rot when exposed to rain, and was typically tarred to preserve it. The tar would stain the hands of ship's crews, and British Navy seamen became known as 'tars.' ” Melville, in Moby Dick, mentions “putting your hand in the tar-pot” as one of the undignified things sailors were expected to do. It was not a punishment, just a duty, like sweeping down the deck.

Clearly this would not have been possible with asphalt. But rope, unlike roads, must remain flexible. Pine tar was semi-liquid at working temperatures. According to ScienceLab.com, a purveyor of chemicals and lab equipment, the melting point of its pine tar is 77⁰F (25⁰C). That is a comfortable room temperature. It is lower than the melting point of butter. Pine tar’s boiling point is listed at 235⁰F (113⁰C). This leaves a wide range of temperatures (77-235⁰F) at which pine tar might have been used on a targeted person, from roughly the temperature of dipping butter, or even room temperature, to something truly scalding.

A further note: since each of these materials – bitumen, coal tar, pine tar, pitch – is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons, its viscosity/temperature characteristics can vary greatly, depending on how it was made and treated, though pitch is by definition darker and thicker than tar. Somewhat like molasses, which comes in different grades, some pine tars were like golden syrup at room temperature, others much blacker and thicker. The latter had to be heated to a higher temperature to use, and so was called “hot tar.” Therefore it is difficult to know, in a particular instance, just what the material might have been that someone was tarred and feathered with. Unless the tar was boiling, it was not necessarily a brutal procedure. Often it seems to have been more a matter of humiliation than torture.