CUTTING IN AND TRYING OUT
Two boats were sent to secure the whale. I lowered with one. As we came up
to the whale, I marveled at its immense bulk. It looked even larger than
when it had breached and I had seen it shoot up, a giant column of flesh
and blood, against the heavens. It had turned belly up as dead whales do,
its ridged white abdomen projecting above the waves. It seemed much like
a mighty white and black rock, against which the waves lapped lazily.
Seventy-five feet long the officers estimated it--an unusually large bull
whale. I had never imagined any animal so large. I had seen Jumbo, said
to be the largest elephant ever in captivity. Jumbo made ordinary circus
elephants seem like pigmies. This whale was as big as a dozen Jumbos. The
great hairy mammoth, of which I had seen stuffed specimens in museums,
would have seemed a mere baby beside this monster of the deep.
As proof that the whale was ours, the harpoon sticking in its back bore
the brig's name, and fast to the haft and floating far out on the sea in
a tangled mass was the 800 fathoms of line from the brig's two tubs. Our
first work was to recover the line. As this had to be straightened out
and coiled in the boats, it was a long and tedious job. Then with a short
sharp spade, a hole was cut through the whale's flukes and a cable passed
through and made fast. With both boats strung out along the cable, the men
bent to the sweeps, hauling the carcass slowly toward the brig. Meanwhile
the vessel had been sailing toward us. So we had but a hundred yards or so
to pull.
The loose end of the hawser was passed through the hawse-hole in the
starboard bow and made fast to the fore-bitt. In this way the flukes
were held close to the bow. As the brig made headway under short sail,
the great body washed back against the vessel's side and lay upon the
surface, the head abreast the wheel on the quarter-deck--which will give
an idea of the whale's length.
The gang-plank was taken from the bulwarks and a cutting stage lowered
over the whale. This stage was made of three broad planks. Two projected
from the ship's side, the third joined their outer ends. Along the inside
of the third plank was a low railing. Two officers took their station
on the outer plank with long-handled spades to cut in the blubber. The
spade was enough like a garden spade in shape to suggest its name and was
fastened to a long pole. Its cutting edge was as sharp as a razor.
A block and tackle was rigged above the whale, the upper block fastened
to the cross-trees of the main mast and the tackle carried forward to
the windlass. A great hook was fastened into the whale's blubber, and
everything was ready for the cutting in.
As the officers with their spades cut under the blubber, the sailors
heaved on the windlass. The blanket piece of blubber began to rise. As
it rose, the officers kept spading under it, rolling the whale over
gradually. Thus the whale was peeled much as one would peel a roll of
bologna sausage. When the great carcass had been rolled completely over,
the blanket piece of blubber came off. The upper end of it fast to the
tackle hook was up almost against the cross-trees as the lower end swung
free. The largest blanket pieces weighed perhaps ten tons. Six were
taken off in the process of skinning. The weight of the whale, I should
estimate, was roughly something like one hundred tons, perhaps a little
more.
When the blanket piece was cut free from the whale it swung inboard,
and as it came over the main hatch, it was lowered into the hold. There
men fell upon it with short spades, cutting it into small pieces and
distributing them equally about the ship to prevent the vessel from
listing. It took most of the day to strip the whale of its blubber. When
this had been finished the great flensed carcass stretched out along the
ship's side a mass of blood-red flesh. The final work was cutting in the
"old head."
Long John with an axe climbed down upon the whale's back. As it was his
boat that had struck the whale the cutting in of the head was his job.
Nobody envied him the task. The stripped body of a whale offers a surface
as slippery as ice. As the waves rocked the whale, Long John had much
ado to keep his footing. Once he fell and almost tumbled into the water.
Finally he cut himself two foot-holds and began to wield his axe, raining
blows upon the neck. He chopped through from the upper neck surface into
the corners of the mouth, thus loosening the head and upper jaw from the
body. The lower jaw is devoid of teeth. The tackle hook having been fixed
in the tip-top of the head's bowlike curve, the windlass men heaved away.
Up rose the head above the bulwarks and swung inwards.
"Lower, lower away!" cried the mate.
Down came the head upon the deck and a great cheer went up. The "old head"
was safe. Immediately afterwards, the mate came forward with a bottle of
Jamaica rum and gave each man a swig. "Bringing in his old head," as it
is called, is a memorable event in cutting in a whale, and is always
celebrated by dealing out a drink all around.
Great hunks of meat were cut out from the carcass. These were hung over
the bow. The meat was served in the form of steaks and sausages in both
forecastle and cabin. And let me give my testimony right here that whale
steak is mighty good eating. It tastes something like tender beef, though
it is coarser grained and of ranker flavor. We preferred to eat it as
steaks, though made into meat balls with gravy it was extremely toothsome.
I do not know how whale would taste if served on the home table, but at
sea, after months of salt horse and "sow belly," it was delicious. The
hunks became coated with ice over the bow and kept well. They lasted us
for several weeks.
When the carcass was cut adrift it went floating astern. Flocks of gulls
and sea birds that had been constantly hovering about the ship in hundreds
waiting for the feast swooped down upon it. The body washed slowly out of
sight, still swarmed over by the gulls.
The head rested in the waist near the poop. It was, I should say, twelve
feet high at the crest of the bow, and suggested some strange sort of
tent. I stepped inside it without bending my head and walked about in it.
Its sides were shaggy with the long hair hanging from the teeth or baleen,
and the interior resembled, in a way, a hunter's forest lodge made of pine
boughs. If the head had been in a forest instead of on the deck of a ship
it would have formed an ideal shelter for a winter's night with a wood
fire burning at the opening.
Only the lower tip of the head or what we might call the nose rested
on the deck. It was supported otherwise upon the teeth. I now had my
first opportunity to see baleen in its natural setting. The teeth viewed
from the outside looked something like the interior of a piano. The
whale's gums, following the bony skeleton of the jaw, formed an arched
and undulant line from nose tip to the back of the jaw. The front teeth
were six inches long; the back ones were ten feet. Each tooth, big and
little alike, was formed of a thin slab of bluish whalebone, almost flat.
The largest of these slabs were six inches broad at their base in the
gum. The smallest were an inch. All tapered to a point. They were set in
the gum with the flat surfaces together and almost touching. They were
extremely pliant and at the outer ends could be pulled wide apart. The
inner edges were hung with black coarse hair, which seemed exactly like
that of a horse's tail. The hair on the small front teeth was an inch long
perhaps; on the back teeth, it was from six to ten inches long.
Such teeth are beautifully adapted to the animal's feeding habits. The
baleen whale feeds on a kind of jelly fish. We saw at times the sea
covered with these flat, round, whitish living discs. The whale swims
through an area of this food with its mouth open. When it has obtained
a mouthful, it closes its jaws. The water is forced out between the
slab-like teeth; the jelly fish remain tangled in the hair to be gulped
down.
Our first job after the cutting in of the whale was to cut the baleen from
the jaw. It was cut away in bunches of ten or a dozen slabs held together
by the gums and stowed away in the hold not to be touched again until
later in the voyage.
[Illustration: "Trying Out"]
While the baleen was being prepared for stowage, the lid was removed
from the try-works, uncovering the two big copper caldrons. A fire was
started in the furnace with kindling and a handful of coal, but kept going
thereafter with tried-out blubber called "scrap." Two men dressed in
oil-skins were sent down into the blubber-room as the portion of the hold
was called in which the blanket pieces of blubber had been stowed. Their
oil-skins were to protect them from the oil which oozed from the blubber.
Oilskins, however, are but slight protection as I learned later when I was
sent into the blubber room at the taking of another whale. The oil soaks
through the water-proof oil-skins and saturates one's clothes and goes
clear through to the skin leaving it as greasy as if it had been rubbed
with oil.
A whale's blubber lies immediately beneath its skin, which is black and
rubbery and about a quarter of an inch thick. The blubber is packed
between this thin covering and the flesh in a layer of pink and
opalescent fat from six inches to two feet thick. The blubber is so full
of oil that the oil exudes from it. One can squeeze the oil from a piece
of raw blubber as water from a sponge.
The two blubber-room men with short handled spades cut the great blankets
of blubber in what in whaling parlance are called "horse pieces." These
horse pieces are two or three feet long and about six inches wide. They
are pitched into tubs on deck and the tubs dragged forward to the mincing
vat. This is an immense oblong tub across the top of which is fastened a
plank. Two sailors with mincing knives are stationed at each end of the
plank. The mincing knife is like a carpenter's drawing knife, except that
the edge is on the outside. The sailor lays a horse piece along the plank.
Then grasping the mincing knife by its two handles, he passes the blade
back and forth from side to side across the blubber until it has been cut
into leaves something like those of a book, each leaf perhaps a quarter of
an inch thick and all of them held together at the back by the black skin.
Thus minced the horse pieces are pitch-forked into the caldrons that
are kept bubbling with boiling oil. When the oil has been boiled out of
them, the horse-pieces, now shrunken and twisted into hard, brittle lumps,
called "scrap," are skimmed off and thrown into a vat at the port side of
the try-works to be used later as fuel in trying out the remainder of the
blubber. The oil is ladled off into a cooling vat at the starboard side
where, after it has cooled, it is siphoned into hogsheads or tanks and
these are later stowed in the hold.
The trying out of the whale gave several delicacies to the forecastle
menu. Hardtack biscuit soaked in buckets of sea water and then boiled in
the bubbling caldrons of oil made relishing morsels. The crisp, tried-out
blubber, which looked like honey-comb, was palatable to some. Black whale
skin freed of blubber and cut into small cubes and pickled in salt and
vinegar had a rather agreeable taste, though it was much like eating
pickled rubber. These things with whale steaks and whale sausages made
trying-out days a season of continual feasting.
At night "scrap" was put into an iron basket swung between the two
chimneys of the try-works and set on fire, making a flaring yellow
blaze which lighted the ship from stem to stern and threw weird shadows
everywhere. The beacon not only gave us plenty of light to work by, but
advertised the brig's good luck to any ship which happened in sight of us.
In the blubber-room, holes were cut in a blanket piece and rope yarns,
having been rubbed upon the blubber, were coiled in the hole and lighted.
As they burned they lighted the oil from the blubber. These unique lamps
had all the oil in a ten-ton blanket piece to draw on. It was only the
wick that ever gave out. New strands of rope yarn had to be provided from
time to time. Three or four of these lamps blazing and spluttering made
the blubber-room bright.
Working night and day, it took three days to cut in and try out the whale.
While the work was going on, the decks were so greasy that we could run
and slide anywhere for long distances like boys on ice. After the whale
had been tried out and the oil casks had been stowed below, we fell upon
the decks and paint work with lye and water. Hard work soon had the ship
looking as bright as a new pin.