THE PRESENT SURVIVAL OF OPEN BOAT WHALING 339 



Trying out. A necessary preliminary to trying out the blubber is the reduction of the blanket pieces, 

 or the smaller square pieces cut from a stranded whale, into strips of a suitable size for mincing before 

 they go into the try-pots. These strips are the horse-pieces, and measure about 18 or 24 in. long and 

 6 or 8 in. wide. They are prepared with a cutting spade and ' leaned up ' (from any adhering bits of 

 meat) with blubber knives similar to butchers' knives. At certain stations, like Lagens do Pico and 

 Negrito, Terceira, the horse-pieces are temporarily stored in large shallow stone tanks dug into the 

 ground close to the try- works. These tanks are equivalent to the blubber room, a space in the upper 

 hold of a whaleship where it was customary, except when caring for small whales, to send down the 

 blanket-pieces and prepare and keep the horse-pieces before passing them up to the try-works. The 

 horse-pieces, which are heavy enough in spite of their small size, are usually shifted about with a steel 

 spike or prong mounted on a wooden handle, called a blubber pike. With this instrument they are 

 pitched into blubber tubs and so carried to the mincing-horse. This is a stout wooden plank where the 

 horse-pieces are laid and sliced with transverse cuts into ' books ' or ' bibles '. The slicing or mincing 

 (which facilitates the subsequent extraction of the oil) is done with a two-handled draw-knife called 

 a mincing knife. The slices are about \ in. thick, and the ' book ' earned its peculiar name because each 

 cut stops short of completely severing the piece, which now resembles a book with forty or so pages. 

 Towards the end of the last century a good many of the American whaleships adopted a simple hand- 

 cranked machine for mincing the books. These mincers may exist in the Azores, but I have not seen 

 any during my survey of the try-works stations. It is in fact unlikely that the mincing machine is used, 

 since it may need a crew of three or four men to make the most of its obvious advantage of speed in 

 mincing, whereas the mincing knife needs only one man ; and time is not very important at a small 

 try-works station which does not expect to be ' blubber-logged ' by a large catch. The minced books 

 fall straight into the mincing-tub, a large blubber tub across which the horse is laid. From the 

 mincing-tub the books are forked into the try-pots with a two-pronged blubber fork about 7 or 8 ft. 

 long. The try-pots, where the oil is boiled out, are huge cast-iron cauldrons whose size may be judged 

 by the spare pot with implements shown in Plate XVIII, Fig. 1. 



The pots are built into an oven of volcanic stone faced with cement, forming an extraction plant 

 called the try-works (Az. trawl). Resembling a large domestic copper (as indeed it was called in the 

 early Spitzbergen fishery) this traditional structure arrests the eye, even when no whales are being 

 cared for, and distinguishes some small coastal settlement as a try-works station. The try-works vary 

 a little from one whalery to another, and it is convenient to describe a Pico try-works (Plate XVIII, 

 Fig. 2) in explaining the rest of the process of trying out. 



Pico has the most primitive and also the most numerous of the existing try-works. Here they stand 

 exposed without shelter of any kind. There are two pots in rectangular casings in each try-works, 

 except for one single-pot installation among the several at Lagens do Pico. Each pot in the try-works 

 has its own fire-place, usually with a step before the hearth. Iron plates sliding on a horizontal rod 

 serve to close the fire-places, which in whaling language are properly termed ' the arches '. The flues 

 behind each fire-place lead to a common chimney of characteristic shape, squat and conical with 

 flattened sides. When trying out is in progress, the oil melting from the books is kept constantly 

 stirred with a blubber fork or a pike or a spade. The boiling oil is judged to be done when the remains 

 of the books have become crisped and browned 'scraps' or 'cracklings'. The pot-spade is handy for 

 stirring because it can most efficiently scrape any scraps from the side of the pot where they would 

 otherwise burn and darken the oil. Scraps are removed and the oil skimmed with a sieve-pan or scrap 

 dipper, which is a colander made from a pierced circular plate of iron or copper, mounted on a long 

 handle. The scraps, pitched into the arches with a pike or fork, are used as fuel to keep the try-works 

 going, and this practice dates at least from the early Spitzbergen whale fishery when the scraps were 



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