It is a marvel this case or long forehead of spongelike spermaceti oil, only covered with thin soft blubber skin.
The mass of fibrous tissue is even fuller of liquid oil than a bath sponge could be full of water. Whilst it was still warm we pumped it out with flexible steel pipes, but it condensed and choked the pipe. But when it grew colder we could just handle it. I should think it produced about two tons of liquid oil.
Now we have the long under jaw of white leather-like quality, with its double row of ivory-white teeth, on board.
This is where our plan of campaign differs from the most recent whalers; they either tow their prey ashore or into harbour alongside great floating ship factories of several thousand tons, to be cut up and boiled down. We cut it up at sea and take the blubber on board, melt or cook it, and sail away.
Hauling Sperm Whale’s Flipper and Blubber on Board the “St. Ebba”
Our deck is now like a marble quarry, with great white chunks of fat in the moonlight, and dusky figures cutting these into blocks of about a foot square to go into our two pots.
To-day steam was let into them at one hundred and sixty pounds’ pressure, and the cooker has to watch two taps running from these, each now pouring out beautifully fine sperm oil.
Our whale cooker is little more than a boy, but he is a bit of a chef already, having studied whale-boiling in these very remote frost-bound islands, the South Shetlands previously referred to.
He stands by the two pots on either side of our small ship amidships, one to port, one to starboard; now and then he dips a bright tin ladle into the oil that keeps running out into an open tank, and sniffs at it, and pours it back lovingly, examining its colour, which is like pale sherry.