There was a broad smile on every man’s face, from Captain Rogers down the line. The first kill had been successful. Oil was in sight. But—as I soon found out—the real work of the voyage had begun as well.
Chapter XV
In Which We “Strike On”
Belly uppermost the huge whale (its actual length was seventy-three feet) was fastened “stem and stern” along the starboard side of the Scarboro. The first operation of butchering a whale—if it be a baleener—is to secure the whalebone. This is a difficult job as I very soon saw. The thick, hard, horny substance must be separated from the jaw; and it sometimes turns the edge of the axe like iron would.
When we had got the baleen inboard, however, the more disagreeable work of “flensing” began. A number of the men, with old Tom Anderly at their head, got upon the whale in spiked shoes and with blubber spades attacked the main carcass of the beast. The blubber was cut up into squares, weighing a ton or more each, the hook of the falls caught in one end, and then the blubber was “eased off” with the spades while those aboard hauled on the tackle, thus ripping the blubber from the layer of flesh beneath.
In handling a small whale, Tom told me, they would thus rip the blubber off in long strips, rolling the carcass over and over in the bights of the holding chains. For this one whale Captain Rogers did not see fit to start the fire under the donkey-engine amid ships, by which the blubber could have been raised inboard much easier.
The try-out caldrons were heated, however, and the blubber as it came inboard—like “sides” from a great hog—was hacked into pieces of two or three pounds each and thrown into the pots. Soon the deck of the bark, from bow to stern, was slippery with spilled oil, or bits of blubber. A thick, greasy smoke rolled away from the ship. It’s flavor in the mouth was at first sickening. We got used to it.
“Hi, lad!” cried Tom Anderly, when I looked over the rail, “now you’ve got a taste of real whaler’s souse—everything you put in your potato-trap for the rest of the v’y’ge will be flavored with whale-oil.”