![]() This ushered in a new industry for many years. The wood was prized and cutting resulted in many hundreds of thousands of stumps that are very resinous, do not rot, and eventually become fatwood. The trees grow very large (up to 150 feet), taking 100 to 150 years to mature and can live up to 500 years. In the United States the pine tree, Pinus palustris, known as the longleaf pine, once covered as much as 90,000,000 acres (360,000 km 2) but due to clear cutting was reduced by between 95% and 97%. Anywhere there is a pine tree or pine stump, there can be fatwood that can be found on top of the ground, but it is more concentrated and preserved in stumps. In the sub-tropics of the Southern Hemisphere, including Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Argentina and New Zealand, the trees are not indigenous but were introduced. The highest diversity in the genus occurs in Mexico and California. In North America, they range from 66°N in Canada (Jack Pine), to Central America to 12°N in Nicaragua (Caribbean Pine). From the Himalaya and Southeast Asia, with one species (Sumatran Pine) just crossing the Equator in Sumatra. From the Philippines, Norway, Finland and Sweden (Scots Pine), and eastern Siberia (Siberian Dwarf Pine), and south to northernmost Africa. Species usable for fatwood are distributed across a range including Eurasia, where they range from the Canary Islands, Iberian Peninsula and Scotland east to the Russian Far East. There are between 105 and 125 species classified as resinous pine trees around the world. The pitch-soaked wood produces an oily, sooty smoke, and it is recommended that one should not cook on a fire until all the fatwood has completely burned out. A small piece of fatwood can be used many times to create tinder by shaving small curls and using them to light other larger tinder. It lights quickly even when wet, is very wind resistant, and burns hot enough to light larger pieces of wood. At every stage of the aging process, fatwood will burn readily, unless excessively damp.īecause of the flammability of terpene, fatwood is prized for use as kindling in starting fires. New fatwood leaks the sticky sap, while in aged fatwood the sap has hardened and is no longer sticky. Over time the evaporation of the terpene changes the state of the sap it slowly gets thicker until it hardens into resin. ![]() Composition Ĭoniferous tree sap is a viscous liquid that contains terpene, a volatile hydrocarbon. In 1648, a company was formed in Sweden called Norrländska Tjärkompaniet (The Wood Tar Company of North Sweden), and was given exclusive export rights for pine tar by the King of Sweden. The commercial use of fatwood from stumps stemmed from the production of pitch and pine tar. Using fatwood lighters while working in Olaus Magnus' Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555) ![]()
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