Barka

Sail-cloth could vary in colour when it was new, depending on the raw-material, but I suspect that the sails would have been bleached in the tropical sun during the voyage to East India.

In Scandinavia and possibly elsewhere it has been customary to impregnate the sails against damp and mildew. To impregnate the sails like this is called "barka" in Swedish.

In the old days, the inner bark from birch trees would have been used after it had been dried in darkness.

A more modern (early 1900s) recipe specifies:

5 kg of tallow
3 kg of catechu (an extract from the Acacia Cathecu or the nuts of Areca Catechu)
4 kg of red pigment (red ochre auburn)
1 liter of linseed oil
1 liter of paraffin (kerosene)

Melt the tallow, add the linseed oil and the paraffin. Mix with the catechu and the red pigment. Heat the mixture to boiling temperature and apply to the sails.

Another recipe specifies 10 l of water and 2 kg of catechu. Mix the pulverized catechu in the water. Afterwards filtrate all particles from the fluid. The colour is determined by the proportions of the ingredients. Add more water to get it lighter, more katechu to get it darker. For the best result, a test strip of sail-cloth should be coloured dark red. Take up the sail after having been immersed in the solution for 2-3 hours and stretch it well by hand in all directions.

This impregnation makes the sails waterproof and resistant to mould. However, observe that these treatments are not suitable in sunny areas as the sunlight tends to make the dark sail-cloth brittle.

Updated 1995-12-06 by Lars Bruzelius

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