Tar was important to sailors because ships depended on wood, rope, canvas, and seams that needed protection from water, salt, rot, and constant wear.
Before steel ships and synthetic ropes, the sea was held together by timber, fibre, pitch, tar, and skill. Sailors lived with materials that swelled, dried, frayed, cracked, soaked, and rotted. Tar helped protect those materials. It was not decorative first. It was practical survival technology.
Tar could be brushed on rigging, worked into rope, applied to wooden surfaces, and used as part of sealing and preservation systems. It helped shed water and slowed decay. The smell of tar became part of harbour life because shipyards, ropewalks, chandlers, and working vessels used it constantly.
This is why naval tar and naval stores were strategically important. A fleet needed timber, masts, hemp, flax, pitch, tar, rosin, turpentine, iron, canvas, and enormous labour. Tar was one small word inside a whole maritime supply chain.
For sailors, tar belonged to maintenance. It was the kind of material that made the difference between sound gear and dangerous failure. That is why it appears so often in maritime language, old shipyard accounts, and the romantic image of the tarry-handed seaman.