"CUTTING IN" THE BLUBBER AND "TRYING OUT" THE OIL
The scene that took place on board ship after we caught our first fish
was most wonderful. We commenced the operation of what is called
"cutting in", that is, cutting up the whale, and getting the fat or
blubber hoisted in. The next thing we did was to "try out" the oil, or
melt down the fat in large iron pots brought with us for this purpose;
and the change that took place in the appearance of the ship and the
men when this began was very remarkable.
When we left port our decks were clean, our sails white, our masts well
scraped; the brass-work about the quarter-deck was well polished, and
the men looked tidy and clean. A few hours after our first whale had
been secured alongside all this was changed. The cutting up of the
huge carcass covered the decks with oil and blood, making them so
slippery that they had to be covered with sand to enable the men to
walk about. Then the smoke of the great fires under the melting pots
begrimed the masts, sails, and cordage with soot. The faces and hands
of the men got so covered with oil and soot that it would have puzzled
anyone to say whether they were white or black. Their clothes, too,
became so dirty that it was impossible to clean them. But, indeed,
whalemen do not much mind this. In fact, they take a pleasure in all
the dirt that surrounds them, because it is a sign of success in the
main object of their voyage. The men in a _clean_ whale ship are never
happy. When everything is filthy, and dirty, and greasy, and smoky,
and black--decks, rigging, clothes, and person--it is then that the
hearty laugh and jest and song are heard as the crew work busily, night
and day, at their rough but profitable labour.
The operations of "cutting in" and "trying out" were matters of great
interest to me the first time I saw them.
After having towed our whale to the ship, cutting in was immediately
begun. First, the carcass was secured near the head and tail with
chains, and made fast to the ship; then the great blocks and ropes
fastened to the main and fore mast for hoisting in the blubber were
brought into play. When all was ready, the captain and the two mates
with Tom Lokins got upon the whale's body, with long-handled sharp
spades or digging-knives. With these they fell to work cutting off the
blubber.
I was stationed at one of the hoisting ropes, and while we were waiting
for the signal to "hoist away", I peeped over the side, and for the
first time had a good look at the great fish. When we killed it, so
much of its body was down in the water that I could not see it very
clearly, but now that it was lashed at full length alongside the ship,
and I could look right down upon it, I began to understand more clearly
what a large creature it was. One thing surprised me much; the top of
its head, which was rough and knotty like the bark of an old tree, was
swarming with little crabs and barnacles, and other small creatures.
The whale's head seemed to be their regular home! This fish was by no
means one of the largest kind, but being the first I had seen, I
fancied it must be the largest fish in the sea.
Its body was forty feet long, and twenty feet round at the thickest
part. Its head, which seemed to me a great, blunt, shapeless thing,
like a clumsy old boat, was eight feet long from the tip to the
blowholes or nostrils; and these holes were situated on the back of the
head, which at that part was nearly four feet broad. The entire head
measured about twenty-one feet round. Its ears were two small holes,
so small that it was difficult to discover them, and the eyes were also
very small for so large a body, being about the same size as those of
an ox. The mouth was very large, and the under jaw had great ugly
lips. When it was dying, I saw these lips close in once or twice on
its fat cheeks, which it bulged out like the leather sides of a pair of
gigantic bellows. It had two fins, one on each side, just behind the
head. With these, and with its tail, the whale swims and fights. Its
tail is its most deadly weapon. The flukes of this one measured
thirteen feet across, and with one stroke of this it could have smashed
our largest boat in pieces. Many a boat has been sent to the bottom in
this way.
I remember hearing our first mate tell of a wonderful escape a comrade
of his had in the Greenland Sea Fishery. A whale had been struck, and,
after its first run, they hauled up to it again, and rowed so hard that
they ran the boat right against it. The harpooner was standing on the
bow all ready, and sent his iron cleverly into the blubber. In its
agony the whale reared its tail high out of the water, and the flukes
whirled for a moment like a great fan just above the harpooner's head.
One glance up was enough to show him that certain death was descending.
In an instant he dived over the side and disappeared. Next moment the
flukes came down on the part of the boat he had just left, and cut it
clean off; the other part was driven into the waves, and the men were
left swimming in the water. They were all picked up, however, by
another boat that was in company, and the harpooner was recovered with
the rest. His quick dive had been the saving of his life.
I had not much time given me to study the appearance of this whale
before the order was given to "hoist away!" so we went to work with a
will. The first part that came up was the huge lip, fastened to a
large iron hook, called the blubber hook. It was lowered into the
blubber-room between decks, where a couple of men were stationed to
stow the blubber away. Then came the fins, and after them the upper
jaw, with the whalebone attached to it. The "right" whale has no teeth
like the sperm whale. In place of teeth it has the well-known
substance called whalebone, which grows from the roof of its mouth in a
number of broad thin plates, extending from the back of the head to the
snout. The lower edges of these plates of whalebone are split into
thousands of hairs like bristles, so that the inside roof of a whale's
mouth resembles an enormous blacking brush! The object of this curious
arrangement is to enable the whale to catch the little shrimps and
small sea-blubbers, called "medusa;", on which it feeds. I have spoken
before of these last as being the little creatures that gave out such a
beautiful pale-blue light at night. The whale feeds on them. When he
desires a meal he opens his great mouth and rushes into the midst of a
shoal of medusae; the little things get entangled in thousands among
the hairy ends of the whalebone, and when the monster has got a large
enough mouthful, he shuts his lower jaw and swallows what his net has
caught.
The wisdom as well as the necessity of this arrangement is very plain.
Of course, while dashing through the sea in this fashion, with his
mouth agape, the whale must keep his throat closed, else the water
would rush down it and choke him. Shutting his throat then, as he
does, the water is obliged to flow out of his mouth as fast as it flows
in; it is also spouted up through his blowholes, and this with such
violence that many of the little creatures would be swept out along
with it but for the hairy-ended whalebone which lets the sea-water out,
but keeps the medusae in.
Well, let us return to our "cutting in". After the upper jaw came the
lower jaw and throat, with the tongue. This last was an enormous mass
of fat, about as large as an ox, and it weighed fifteen hundred or two
thousand pounds. After this was got in, the rest of the work was
simple. The blubber of the body was peeled off in great strips,
beginning at the neck and being cut spirally towards the tail. It was
hoisted on board by the blocks, the captain and mates cutting, and the
men at the windlass hoisting, and the carcass slowly turning round
until we got an unbroken piece of blubber, reaching from the water to
nearly as high as the mainyard-arm. This mass was nearly a foot thick,
and it looked like fat pork. It was cut off close to the deck, and
lowered into the blubber-room, where the two men stationed there
attacked it with knives, cut it into smaller pieces, and stowed it
away. Then another piece was hoisted on board in the same fashion, and
so on we went till every bit of blubber was cut off; and I heard the
captain remark to the mate when the work was done, that the fish was a
good fat one, and he wouldn't wonder if it turned out to be worth 300
pounds.
Now, when this process was going on, a new point of interest arose
which I had not thought of before, although my messmate, Tom Lokins,
had often spoken of it on the voyage out. This was the arrival of
great numbers of sea-birds.
Tom had often told me of the birds that always keep company with
whalers; but I had forgotten all about it until I saw an enormous
albatross come sailing majestically through the air towards us. This
was the largest bird I ever saw, and no wonder, for it is the largest
bird that flies. Soon after that, another arrived, and although we
were more than a thousand miles from any shore, we were speedily
scented out and surrounded by hosts of gonies, stinkards, haglets,
gulls, pigeons, petrels, and other sea-birds, which commenced to feed
on pieces of the whale's carcass with the most savage gluttony. These
birds were dreadfully greedy. They had stuffed themselves so full in
the course of a short time, that they flew heavily and with great
difficulty. No doubt they would have to take three or four days to
digest that meal!
Sharks, too, came to get their share of what was going. But these
savage monsters did not content themselves with what was thrown away;
they were so bold as to come before our faces and take bites out of the
whale's body. Some of these sharks were eight and nine feet long, and
when I saw them open their horrid jaws, armed with three rows of
glistening white sharp teeth, I could well understand how easily they
could bite off the leg of a man, as they often do when they get the
chance. Sometimes they would come right up on the whale's body with a
wave, bite out great pieces of the flesh, turn over on their bellies,
and roll off.
While I was looking over the side during the early part of that day, I
saw a very large shark come rolling up in this way close to Tom
Lokins's legs. Tom made a cut at him with his blubber-spade, but the
shark rolled off in time to escape the blow. And after all it would
not have done him much damage, for it is not easy to frighten or take
the life out of a shark.
"Hand me an iron and line, Bob," said Tom, looking up at me. "I've got
a spite agin that feller. He's been up twice already. Ah! hand it
down here, and two or three of ye stand by to hold on by the line.
There he comes, the big villain!"
The shark came close to the side of the whale at that moment, and Tom
sent the harpoon right down his throat.
"Hold on hard," shouted Tom.
"Aye, aye," replied several of the men as they held on to the line,
their arms jerking violently as the savage fish tried to free itself.
We quickly reeved a line through a block at the fore yard-arm, and
hauled it on deck with much difficulty. The scene that followed was
very horrible, for there was no killing the brute. It threshed the
deck with its tail, and snapped so fiercely with its tremendous jaws,
that we had to keep a sharp look-out lest it should catch hold of a
leg. At last its tail was cut off, the body cut open, and all the
entrails' taken out, yet even after this it continued to flap and
thresh about the deck for some time, and the heart continued to
contract for twenty minutes after it was taken out and pierced with a
knife.
I would not have believed this had I not seen it with my own eyes. In
case some of my readers may doubt its truth, I would remind them how
difficult it is to kill some of those creatures with which we are all
familiar. The common worm, for instance, may be cut into a number of
small pieces, and yet each piece remains alive for some time after.
The skin of the shark is valued by the whalemen, because, when cleaned
and dry, it is as good as sand-paper, and is much used in polishing the
various things they make out of whales' bones and teeth.
When the last piece of blubber had been cut off our whale, the great
chain that held it to the ship's side was cast off, and the now useless
carcass sank like a stone, much to the sorrow of some of the smaller
birds, which, having been driven away by their bigger comrades, had not
fed so heartily as they wished perhaps! But what was loss to the gulls
was gain to the sharks, which could follow the carcass down into the
deep and devour it at their leisure.
"Now, lads," cried the mate, when the remains had vanished, "rouse up
the fires, look alive, my hearties!"
"Aye, aye, sir," was the ready reply, cheerfully given, as every man
sprang to his appointed duty.
And so, having "cut in" our whale, we next proceeded to "try out" the
oil.