33 6 DISCOVERY REPORTS 



beach and jetty of each station. At Lagens do Pico, the biggest try-works station, most of the whales 

 are stranded on stone slipways. The two stations at Graciosa and the station at Topo, San Jorge, may 

 use both methods but I have not visited these. All the stations in two islands (Porto do Castelo in 

 Santa Maria, and Negrito and Biscoites in Terceira) merely strand their whales. At Velas, San Jorge, 

 on the other hand, it seemed to me that cutting in is all done alongside the jetty (Table 4). Neither 

 method makes any use of the meat, bones and viscera, and local sanitary regulations require that the 

 stripped carcass be towed out to sea on a suitable ebb tide. 



When a whale is cut in by stranding, it is heaved up the beach as far as it will go upon the flood 

 tide. A thick rope warp is secured to the whale's snout, and the end is taken up the beach to a capstan 

 which is securely bedded in rock and cement, and is walked round with capstan bars. The proper 

 designation of this capstan is a ' crab ', a whaling term dating from the late seventeenth century : it is 

 the only engine or installation, apart from the try-works, necessary for saving a stranded whale. With 

 the crab it is not possible to do more than strand the whale with its lower sides and tail awash, and 

 the men at the seaward end may be working up to their thighs in water even at low tide when most 

 work is done on the carcass. The whale is stranded with the head end leading, in order to get at the 

 spermaceti organ with the least difficulty. The blubber of the trunk and head is removed piecemeal by 

 two men with cutting spades who work mostly atop the whale. Each is assisted by a hook-man who 

 takes tension with a 3 -ft. iron blubber hook as the blubber, in pieces (Az. pipas) each about 2 ft. 

 square, is chopped out and eased from the underlying connective tissue. For transporting the blubber 

 up the beach there are cooper-made blubber tubs, carried between two men using a stout pole thrust 

 through rope handles. The blubber pieces are very heavy and a second method is to mortise a hole in 

 the piece and so carry it skewered on the pole across the shoulders of two men. 



Stripping the head blubber reveals the walls of the spermaceti organ which accounts for most of 

 the enormous bulk of the head. Lying outside the skull and above its rostral part, the spermaceti 

 organ is supported below by the maxillae and limited behind by the maxillary crests. There are two 

 parts within its substantial fibrous walls. The upper part is a reservoir or cistern called the case 

 (Az. queize), irregularly traversed by fine membranes and full of liquid spermaceti. A large case may 

 yield ten or more barrels of spermaceti, and there are records of yields exceeding fifteen barrels. The 

 floor of the case is traversed by the wide blowhole canal from the back of the mouth to a distal sac 

 leading upwards to the blowhole on the top left-hand side of the front of the head. Below the case 

 and separated from it by a thick layer of fibres (' whitehorse '), there lies the 'junk ' (hz.janco) which is 

 divided by transverse partitions into a regular series of compartments or cells : each cell is filled with 

 an areolar tissue loaded with spermaceti so that the cut surface of the junk looks like an opaque jelly. 

 The hollow lines (p. 329, Plate XVI) of a Sperm whale's head seem to correspond for some part of their 

 length with the level of the whitehorse, so that they roughly distinguish the case above from the junk 

 below in the external aspect of the head. 



Without tackles the dissection of the spermaceti organ from the stranded whale is a considerable 

 task. The stripped head is cut in and the case broached, when the spermaceti is bailed and scooped 

 into a tub. On exposure to the air the spermaceti soon becomes a soft white waxy solid. When the 

 case is emptied its walls are cleared away so that the junk can be chopped out in manageable sections 

 to follow the spermaceti to the try-works. 



Cutting in a stranded whale is illustrated in Pouchet & Chaves's paper (1890, pi. ix). It is a laborious 

 and slow operation, and is accompanied by a certain amount of wastage of spilt spermaceti, although 

 some of this is recovered from the water and beach by ' skimming slicks ' with a scoop net, as is done 

 when cutting in alongside. The primitive nature of the survival is obvious, and the following descrip- 

 tion from Macy (1835) shows how the existing Azores practice compares with New England opera- 



