ean a sudden slide of the ton and a half weight,
and a little heap of mangled corpses somewhere in the lee scuppers--well
one always wanted to be very thankful when the lashings were safely
passed.

The whale being a small one, as before noted, the whole business was
over within three days, and the decks scrubbed and re-scrubbed until
they had quite regained their normal whiteness. The oil was poured by
means of a funnel and long canvas hose into the casks stowed in the
ground tier at the bottom of the ship, and the gear, all carefully
cleaned and neatly "stopped up," stowed snugly away below again.

This long and elaborate process is quite different from that followed
on board the Arctic whaleships, whose voyages are of short duration,
and who content themselves with merely cutting the blubber up small and
bringing it home to have the oil expressed. But the awful putrid mass
discharged from a Greenlander's hold is of very different quality and
value, apart from the nature of the substance, to the clear and sweet
oil, which after three years in cask is landed from a south-seaman as
inoffensive in smell and flavour as the day it was shipped. No attempt
is made to separate the oil and spermaceti beyond boiling the "head
matter," as it is called, by itself first, and putting it into casks
which are not filled up with the body oil. Spermaceti exists in all
the oil, especially that from the dorsal hump; but it is left for
the refiners ashore to extract and leave the oil quite free from any
admixture of the wax-like substance, which causes it to become solid at
temperatures considerably above the freezing-point.

Uninteresting as the preceding description may be, it is impossible to
understand anything of the economy of a south-sea whaler without giving
it, and I have felt it the more necessary because of the scanty notice
given to it in the only two works published on the subject, both of them
highly technical, and written for scientific purposes by medical men.
Therefore I hope to be forgiven if I have tried the patience of my
readers by any prolixity.

It will not, of course, have escaped the reader's notice that I have not
hitherto attempted to give any details concerning the structure of the
whale just dealt with. The omission is intentional. During this, our
first attempt at real whaling, my mind was far too disturbed by the
novelty and danger of the position in which I found myself for the first
time, for me to pay