han one at a time. Here, however, was a
wholesale catch. At last one of the harpooned ones plunged so furiously
while being hauled up that he literally tore himself off the iron,
falling, streaming with blood, back into the sea.

Away went all the school after him, tearing at him with their long
well-toothed jaws, some of them leaping high in the air in their
eagerness to get their due share of the cannibal feast. Our fishing was
over for that time. Meanwhile one of the harpooners had brought out
a number of knives, with which all hands were soon busy skinning the
blubber from the bodies. Porpoises have no skin, that is hide, the
blubber or coating of lard which encases them being covered by a black
substance as thin as tissue paper. The porpoise hide of the boot maker
is really leather, made from the skin of the BELUGA, or "white whale,"
which is found only in the far north. The cover was removed from the
"tryworks" amidships, revealing two gigantic pots set in a frame of
brickwork side by side, capable of holding 200 gallons each. Such a
cooking apparatus as might have graced a Brobdingnagian kitchen. Beneath
the pots was the very simplest of furnaces, hardly as elaborate as the
familiar copper-hole sacred to washing day. Square funnels of sheet-iron
were loosely fitted to the flues, more as a protection against the oil
boiling over into the fire than to carry away the smoke, of which from
the peculiar nature of the fuel there was very little. At one side of
the try-works was a large wooden vessel, or "hopper," to contain the raw
blubber; at the other, a copper cistern or cooler of about 300 gallons
capacity, into which the prepared oil was baled to cool off, preliminary
to its being poured into the casks. Beneath the furnaces was a space as
large as the whole area of the try-works, about a foot deep, which, when
the fires were lighted, was filled with water to prevent the deck from
burning.

It may be imagined that the blubber from our twenty porpoises made but
a poor show in one of the pots; nevertheless, we got a barrel of very
excellent oil from them. The fires were fed with "scrap," or pieces
of blubber from which the oil had been boiled, some of which had been
reserved from the previous voyage. They burnt with a fierce and steady
blaze, leaving but a trace of ash. I was then informed by one of the
harpooners that no other fuel was ever used for boiling blubber at any
time, there being always amply sufficient fo