There is no smell actually about our cooking process, till the water that is formed in the pots by the condensing steam has to be blown out of the bottoms of the pots. Then the blue sea gets a yellow scum and the atmosphere is pervaded far and near with the smell of beef-tea—the smell alone would make an invalid get up and walk for miles to windward.
At night it comes into my port under the blanket and permeates my being; we wish all whales at the bottom of the sea, but toute passe and in a minute or two the air is fresh again, and there is nothing left but a greasy feeling.
Each pot holds about fifteen barrels. I think this whale’s blubber will fill them several times and produce, say, seventy barrels, at five barrels to the ton, and the ton at £30. This whale ought to be worth moneys, so we see a fortune increasing by leaps and bounds, and we put aside all thoughts of more delays and difficulties and losses.
It is sweltering hot on our lee side, the side on which we are flensing the whale. Our men take to drink!—a pale pink tipple brewed in a large margarine tin and ladled round; I think it must be one part red-currant wine to five of water; I have tried it once or twice and always just miss the taste.
Blue sharks have pretty colours, especially when they are freshly caught, steel-grey and violet on their back, changing to green and white underneath. The long emerald-green eye in the grey skin is most effective—wicked-looking to a degree! Who has described the exquisite colour of the shark’s pilot fish, with its upright stripes blue and white, like the wings of a jay, and who can tell why they swim in front of his nose—is it to give the shark a squint? And why do they sometimes change (there are generally two of them) and take up positions on either side of his dorsal fin, and move as the shark moves exactly, never getting an inch from the position, and then, without rhyme or reason, they will both swim away somewhere, and come back again?
I think the grimmest aspect of sharks is in a quiet moonlight night, when above the calm water you see their dark fins quietly circling round you, and sometimes there is a whitish gleam as one quietly puts its head up above the moonlit water and quietly takes hold of a lump of whale fat, and breaks the stillness by shaking it like a tiger!
Still another half-night at our whale—the deck full of moonlight and dark shadows, great cubes of sperm white as marble, gleaming knife blades, the light glinting on oily hands, arms and faces, greasy thumps as chunks of blubber are heaved across the deck towards the cooking pots. Two dusky figures stand on top of these, silhouetted against the blue sky and stars. We work by moonlight, for dark nights we shall have an acetylene flare. The spermaceti of the head we handle in buckets and bailers. It seems a question whether to bail the clean, slippery oil with buckets or grasp it with both hands. All hands work very hard, for every handful, every chunk represents profit to them, and they joke all the time, with never a swear word, as far as I can hear. The captain smokes and looks on and smiles at some of their remarks. He keeps his eye on everything without interfering unnecessarily. The mate, his young brother, and his men want to show what they can do, though this line of business is new to most of them.
The cooking pots worked all night, and in my watch below, half awake, I dreamed of a hundred kitchens cooking beef-tea, then turned over with a sense of great satisfaction at having seen our show well started—the motor is going all right and we have proved we can approach whales as well as with a steam-whaler—a great satisfaction—and have proved we can flense a sperm at sea with such tackle as we have: and both the approach and the flensing before we left home were said to be impossible.
It is true that our flensing took a long time. But in the case of Right whales, Australis, if we are lucky enough to fall in with them, it will pay at least to take their whalebone at sea if nothing else.