In the quiet midnight hour, when all nature is awake, when bright daylight illumines imposing views of mountains and sea, one loses all thought of sleep, and it is a struggle to leave the enchanted scene for your state-room, and, shutting out the light with thick curtains, seek needed rest and sleep.
The next morning we were called before six o’clock, and in small boats were rowed to an island to visit a whale-oil factory. We rowed in and out among seven whales, several of them fifty feet long, floating like great hulks in the water; two whales had been cut up and their blood had colored the water for quite a distance; so as we pulled for the landing we seemed to advance through a sea of blood.
On a great platform, surrounded by deep pools of blood, lay two immense leviathans of the deep; the skin and thick layers of flesh had been stripped from them and lay about in oozing piles; men, their clothing from head to feet reeking with gore, chopped and slashed away like demons inside the great carcasses, which seemed like bloody wrecks; the crash and noise of the machinery used in moving and denuding the monsters was deafening; it was a carnival of blood and slaughter, and we grew sick and faint at the sight. Picking our way amid the pools of blood and piles of flesh, we went into the oil factory, where the great rolls of blubber and flesh are cut by machinery into pieces, and then placed in boilers; much of the flesh looked clean and white like thick strips of very fat pork. By steam the contents of the boilers are tried, until all the oil contained in the blubber and flesh has run through pipes into large tanks. Some whales will produce sixty barrels of refined oil.
The best of the flesh is canned and placed on the market bearing French labels; some is cured and smoked, and other choice bits are made into sausages.
The residue in the boilers, after the oil has run off, is dried and ground into a feed for fattening cattle, who eat it readily; it has the color and appearance of ground coffee. The bones are made into fertilizers, and it will thus be seen that, when a whale has passed through this factory, nearly every part has been utilized. We took as a souvenir a whale’s inner ear, a bony structure somewhat resembling in shape a snail’s shell nearly closed, six inches long.
We saw the inside arrangement of a whale’s mouth. On each side of the upper jaw are long thin plates of whalebone set close together like the teeth of a comb, and fringed at the edges with a substance resembling thread. These plates, which furnish the whalebone of commerce, extend along the jaw from six to twelve feet, according to the size of the whale, their use being to retain the great assortment constituting the whale’s food. A whale opens his capacious jaws, taking in a mouthful of water, fish, and many forms of sea life; the water is forced out between the whalebone plates, which keep back the solids, and down goes the living collection à la Jonah, without chewing, into the whale’s big belly.
The harpoon, with which the whales are killed, is a stout iron rod or spear five feet long, with an iron ring at one end; it is shot from a cannon on the ship, which sometimes approaches within forty feet of the whale. When it enters, an immense cartridge explodes, killing the whale, and lifting four arms near the point of the harpoon which fasten into the whale, and it is towed ashore by ropes attached to the harpoon’s ring. From April till August, a great many whales are killed off the north coast of Norway, which are attracted by the schools of fish swarming there at that season.
It is perhaps needless to say that though the visit to this whale factory was intensely interesting, it was also extremely disagreeable. The smell of the boiling blubber, the great tanks of oil, and the heaps of fertilizers, is beyond description. It was only by holding our noses and stuffing handkerchiefs into our mouths that we were able to complete the tour of inspection. We returned to the steamer unable to eat any breakfast, though we had taken but a roll and cup of coffee on leaving, and several of the ladies ended by being sea-sick. The terrible odor clung to our clothes even after we had spread them on deck in the fresh air; the trophies of whalebone and whale’s ears which we brought back to the steamer converted the air of our state-rooms into miniature whale factories, and for the remainder of the voyage it was only necessary to say “whales,” to send a look of disgust over every countenance.