The cutting in and trying out of the blubber is a prosy job, and nasty is no name for it. All hands strip down to a shirt, a pair of overalls rolled up to the knees, showing bare shins and sockless feet in large brogans, and in we go—grease from head to foot—day and night until the whale is all cut safely on board. If we tarried, bad weather would no doubt deprive us of our spoil.
It gives you a funny sensation at first to get into a deckful of blubber, with the slimy stuff around your exposed cuticle, and oil squashing out of your shoes at every step. But I am getting used to that now, and I feel like a veteran.... The try-works are run day and night, while there is blubber to feed them, and the refuse scrap is all the fuel they need, so it is very economical. They consist of two large caldrons mounted in brick work, near the center of the ship, and the whole structure is about six feet high. In the dark, with the flame roaring out of the short chimneys and torches stuck on poles about the deck to give light, we must form an interesting spectacle. The men, moving about the deck under the peculiar illumination, look like conspirators in a comic opera.
CHAPTER XXI
THE RIGHT WHALE AND BOWHEAD
Whaling began more than a thousand years ago in the Bay of Biscay, on the coast of Spain. The Basques, who were the first hunters, soon learned that a certain kind of whale, among the hundreds which came into the bay, yielded finer baleen and a greater amount of oil than any other and therefore it was said to be the “right whale to kill.”
In later years other species were gradually recognized, but the name “right whale” clung to the animal which was first hunted and thus it is known today. The scientific name, Eubalæna glacialis, bestowed upon it in 1789 by the Abbé Bonnaterre, is hardly appropriate, for the whale is not a lover of cold and does not go into the icy waters of the far north or south.
As years went by and right whales began to decrease in numbers, the hunters wandered afar and discovered in the waters about Davis Strait and Greenland another whale which was only a larger edition of the first and which eventually became known as the Greenland right whale, or bowhead; its smaller relative was then distinguished from it as the North Atlantic right whale.
A model of a right whale in the American Museum of Natural History. Prepared by Mr. James L. Clark under the direction of the author, from studies made at Amagansett, L. I.
The bowhead is appropriately named because the fore part of the head is arched in almost a half-circle to make room for the enormous baleen which hangs in the mouth. This sometimes reaches a length of fourteen feet, and is so exceedingly fine and elastic that until recent years it often sold for $4 or $5 per pound.
