The mates stood on the little platform in front of the try-pots, watching their kettles of fat, stirring them now and then with their long-handled, long-shanked devil-forks. Now and then they picked up a piece of blubber on their forks, holding it for an instant clear of the mess, to see if the oil was all tried out of it, and if it was thoroughly done. At last one of the pots was ready, and the piece of blubber, after dripping for a moment into the pot, was thrown on deck instead of being dropped back. It was crisp, and the edges curled like a piece of bacon; it sizzled as it lay there, and it would crackle when it had cooled a little. Standing at some distance from the try-pots, as I was, it made my mouth water; but I am afraid it would not have been as good as it looked. At any rate, I was not to try it, for the fire-door was opened, and the piece of bacon thrown in with an iron fork.
The boatsteerers now came crowding around, with shallow strainers, or skimmers, about a foot across, with a perforated bottom and a long handle, and took out the pieces of blubber, letting each drain out its oil, and threw them on deck. They were the scraps, and would be used almost immediately for feeding the fires. There was an extra try-pot there, three feet across, with legs a few inches long cast on it, standing on the deck near; in fact, there were two of them. It was intended that the hot scraps should be thrown into one of these, but it was easier to throw them on deck, so that was where most of them went, although some of them got into the pot.
A piece of cold minced blubber—bible-leaves—was put into the second pot to hold it back while the first was emptied. A great square copper tank stood beside the try-works, the cooling-tank already mentioned. Although I never measured our tank, I should think it was about three feet wide by four feet long, and stood nearly five feet high. With the long-handled copper dippers the hot oil was ladled from the try-pot into this tank, which held a good deal of oil. Here the oil cooled a little, and some of the stuff, which the skimmers had not taken out, settled toward the bottom. From the side of the tank, near the top, projected an overflow spout, with a fine strainer back of it, and under the spout was kept one of those huge iron pots on short legs. The try-pot which had been emptied was now recharged with fresh minced blubber, and the operation was being repeated.
The contents of the second pot were soon ready, and were ladled into the tank, and that try-pot recharged with fresh minced blubber. So it went on: horse-pieces, mincers, try-pots and tank. I know well that all the men concerned in the process were tired enough of it before they got through, if they thought about it at all. Perhaps they did not think, and merely did it as part of the day’s work; or, at best, took pride in their individual skill in the part of the process assigned to each.
I got very simply tired of the monotony of it, and nauseated with the smell of the burning scraps. It was impossible to get away from that smell without jumping overboard, and I was not yet ready for that. The thick, oily black smoke rose in a column from the two copper stacks, and drifted off in the darkness to leeward; and the men under the shadow of the roof were occasionally bathed in a ruddy light, as they wielded their forks or their skimmers or their copper dippers. I watched the smooth stream of oil run smoking from the overflow spout with each dipperful that was ladled into the tank, while the level of the oil in the huge iron pot got higher and higher. I had had enough of watching it. We had caught one whale, had tried out less than a third of the oil, and there was blubber everywhere, and I was tired of it already. How many whales would it take to fill us up? Perhaps forty. Perhaps fifty or more if we were able to send home any of our oil. The thought of it staggered me, and I turned away.
They had already broken out some of our cargo. The cargo consisted largely of casks, which were variously labelled with chalk or white paint, and some of the new casks, light colored, with that black paint which is used in putting the addresses on wooden boxes or cases. Of the new casks some were labelled “Bread,” some “Flour,” and so on through our list of food that would keep. The “bread” was not the soft kind that I was familiar with in the form of light, delicately brown loaves—my mother’s. It was hardbread, or hardtack, and it looked much like dogbread, like a rock when freshly baked. Good dogbread tastes better than old hardtack, but hardtack in good condition is pretty good. It is good for the teeth. Of course there were no casks of green vegetables, or of eggs or of butter or of milk, or of many other things which we think necessary to our well-being ashore. There were some of salt beef, such as it was. The casks which contained the bread and the flour and what-not, when they had been emptied in the regular course of events, would be filled with oil.
We had been out too short a time to empty many of these casks, and others were being hoisted from the hold, with the legend “Heads and hoops.” There were shooks of staves, too, the staves for each cask hooped together tightly, and bearing some resemblance to fasces. If I had known at that time what fasces were, I should have expected to see the sharp head of a cutting-spade projecting from each bundle. Such a bundle might be borne before a whaling captain as the symbol of his authority. But I had never heard of fasces, and I was interested only in the process of opening the casks and getting out the heads and hoops. The bundles of staves would come later.
The cooper was in charge of this work, but a number of men were helping him. There is always more or less cooper work being done on a whaler, and there were half a dozen men in the crew who were pretty skilful at it. There was an abundance of cooper’s tools on board, especially of hammers and the little tools that are set against the hoops, and struck or tapped with the hammer held in the right hand, to drive the hoops up or down. I think these were called “tappers,” but I am not sure at this moment. Names which were once familiar to me have a curious habit of slipping from my mind and eluding all my efforts to recover them. I suppose it is a symptom of age. The old-fashioned name of a perforated skimmer about five or six inches across, very slightly concave upwards, and with a flat iron handle—somewhat resembling the try-pot skimmers on a small scale—has eluded me in that way for some years. I almost have it, and it is gone. My mother or my grandmother could have told me in an instant, but I suppose it is of no use to ask anybody now.
It did not take long to open the casks. That is perhaps the simplest form of cooperage. They opened enough to give them the heads and hoops that were needed. Then came the bundles of staves, which were undone carefully, one bundle at a time, so as not to get the staves mixed. These staves, being old and oil-soaked, were quickly set up, and the casks rolled over to join the others already lashed by the bulwarks, to be filled with hot oil. They were filled through a big copper funnel—Peter called it a tunnel—with a fine wire strainer fastened in it, and a nozzle that fitted in the bunghole of a barrel. The mouth of this funnel was large and square, and there was a double bend in its long nose, setting off the mouth from the bunghole by a couple of feet.
They do these things differently now. There are large iron cooling-tanks below decks, and the hot oil is poured into them through a pipe which opens in the deck near the try-pots. I have no experience with them, for they were unknown to me in 1872, so that I cannot say whether the oil cools as quickly in the tanks as it did in the casks. The tanks save a great deal of work, although we had men enough to do the work except when we were very much crowded, with two or three whales at once fast alongside, waiting to be cut-in and tried out.