THE PRESENT SURVIVAL OF OPEN BOAT WHALING 335 



course, got from the Americans who, I believe, perfected this British instrument when they developed 

 for their pelagic fishery the spiral method of cutting in shortly to be described, and required for this 

 purpose a long-handled chisel which could be wielded from a cutting stage at deck level and applied 

 to a whale ranged alongside in the water. As will be explained later, these are also the conditions of 

 cutting in alongside a jetty in the Azores, but they are not the circumstances of cutting in a stranded 

 whale on an Azores beach, or of ' working up ' on the flensing platform of an Azores ' modern ' station : 

 here the whale can be directly approached, and, as Figueiredo (1946, p. 114) has pointed out, the more 

 efficient flensing knife could be introduced as a time-saving replacement: none the less the long 

 cutting spade is certainly used with great skill and effect no matter how the whale is cut in. One form 

 of cutting spade, the boat spade, has already been described. The other forms differ only in detail. 

 The scarfing-spade, used for cutting blubber, is a little wider than the boat-spade : the leaning spade 

 is obviously wider, and is for detaching gobbets of meat from blubber : the bone spade has a long shank 

 and heavy blade for decapitating the head. These varieties can be distinguished at the Azores whaleries 

 (PL XVIII, Fig. 1), but they are used rather indiscriminately on the flensing platform at modern 

 stations. Here the lengths of the handles vary from 6 to 12 ft., although longer spades may be used for 

 cutting in at a jetty. A typical cutting spade measured at Porto Pirn had the following dimensions : 



ft. 

 Length of cast steel blade 

 Width of cast steel blade 

 Length of wrought iron shank 

 Length of wrought iron socket 

 Length of wooden pole 



Total length of mounted craft 



o 

 o 

 o 

 o 



7 

 9 



in. 



7 



4s 

 8 

 6 



4 



There may be mentioned another cutting instrument which is occasionally seen in Azores whaleries 

 although not much used nowadays. Made by a whalecraft firm in Pico, it is like a giant butcher's 

 knife, and an example measured in Fayal had a 27-in. blade riveted to a 19-in. handle. It is larger 

 than the leaning knives used by the Yankee whalemen for trimming blubber pieces, and seems to have 

 had no counterpart in the American fishery, at least after 1800. The 'Pico knife' is something similar 

 to a strand knife on a short handle and recalls knives depicted in a print (Jenkins, 1921, p. 129) of an 

 early Dutch whaler of the seventeenth century when it was customary to tow the Northern Right 

 whale to the ship in some Spitzbergen bay, and then hack off the blubber with axes and knives before 

 transporting it ashore for trying out. 





V *SILVEIRAPlCO»° 



r- 



Foof- 



Fig. 7. Pico knife. 



The Azores employ two methods of cutting in. The first and more primitive is simply to strand the 

 whale on the beach, or a gently inclined stone slipway, and there remove the blubber. The second is 

 the spiral technique of the whaleships brought ashore, that is, the whale is floated alongside a jetty or 

 quay, and cutting in proceeds as though the jetty were the deck and sides of a whaleship. The four 

 try-works stations at Pico use both methods, according to the number of whales to be saved, the state 

 of the tide and the weather, and the facilities agreed between companies, where several may share the 



