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."

A whale will weigh about as many tons as it is feet long--in other
words, this seventy-three foot whale weighed probably seventy ton and
from the blubber we tried out thirty tons of oil--nearly half its weight
in the tanks beside the baleen!

We had been sailing in the wake of the big school of whales we had
spied when we killed the baleener. We came up with them again at
mid-afternoon, and found that they were sperms. That was why the
_Mysticete_ we had killed