THE PRESENT SURVIVAL OF OPEN BOAT WHALING 34' 



of Pico carry the coast road several hundred feet above the shore. At present there is a zigzag 

 roadway winding precipitously to Ribeiras from the coast road, but I was told in 1949 that two years 

 previously the settlement could only be approached on foot or by pack-mule. Both settlements are 

 much exposed and were severely damaged by a hurricane in 1946. Each has a stone jetty or quay 

 along a reef jutting into the cove and sheltering a small beach where whaleboats are launched and 

 whales are stranded. Whales are also cut in alongside the quay. At Ribeiras this quay has a crab and 

 a single try-works with two pots. The quay at Calheta do Nesquim has two crabs and once boasted 

 three try-works, but two of these were destroyed by the hurricane. 



The functioning try-works I have seen in other islands are roofed over or completely enclosed in 

 a shed or try-house. In the old whaleships the try-works were sometimes roofed over, but never 

 completely enclosed. 



There is a try-works station at the town of Velas in San Jorge. Velas is the largest settlement in this 

 island, and it may be for health reasons (since try-works belch thick and evil-smelling smoke from the 

 burning scrap) that the try-house at Velas is situated at the end of a short road hugging the sea-wall 

 beyond the main part of the town. Wattle-sided ox-carts carry the blubber here from the quay where 

 the whales are cut in alongside. This wagon transport recalls Obed Macy's description of early shore 

 whaling at Nantucket (p. 337). The two boat-houses at Velas, like that at San Mateus, Pico, are across 

 the road from the narrow boat slip, and the whaleboats have to be hauled over. San Jorge has a second 

 station at Topo, but I have not visited this and do not know whether the whales are cut in stranded 

 or alongside. 



The factory at Negrito, Terceira, is a little more elaborate than at Velas. Negrito is the only try- 

 works station whose boats sail from a separate place : this is the boat station at San Mateus, a little 

 farther along the coast. Negrito has two stranding slips with a raised stone platform between, where 

 a single crab can work ropes through fairleads to either slip. The try-house stands nearby on somewhat 

 higher ground, before a cemented space where two stone blubber tanks are excavated. Within the 

 try-house there is a battery of four pots which are used for blubber only. The spermaceti from the 

 case and junk is boiled out separately in an adjoining open-air try-works whose two pots are made not 

 from cast iron but from riveted sheets of wrought iron. Spermaceti needs a lower temperature for 

 trying out than blubber, and I have been told, rather obscurely, that this explains the use of sheet iron 

 pots. At several Azores stations the case and junk are tried out indiscriminately with the blubber, so 

 that the cooked spermaceti or ' head oil ' is not kept separate. But where this separation is carried out, 

 I understand that it is still customary, as in the whaleship days, to ' squeeze sperm ' before putting the 

 head matter into the pots. Squeezing sperm means plunging the hands into a tub of the semi-liquid 

 spermaceti and there squeezing them together, so as to remove ' slobgollion ', the fine strings and 

 tatters of membrane which are suspended in the spermaceti and which would tend to char in the pots 

 and somewhat affect the quality of the head oil. Turning again to factory details, it may be mentioned 

 that proper storage tanks, excavated from the rock and lined with cement, have been built under- 

 ground at Negrito : three are for body oil and one is for head oil. Most Azores try-works stations fill 

 the cooled oil directly into the familiar steel drums for shipment. (The wooden oil casks of whaleship 

 days are no longer used in the Azores, and nowadays the coopers who make the line tubs and blubber 

 tubs for whaleboats and factory get the major part of their living from coopering wine casks.) The 

 other try-works station in Terceira is at Biscoites on the north coast, but I have not seen it. 



On the island of Graciosa there are two small try-works stations, at Barra and at Santa Cruz, neither 

 of which I have visited. 



Santa Maria has a single station in the more sheltered south-east corner of the island at Porto do 

 Castelo, but its equipment for rendering oil is more elaborate than I have seen at any other try-works 



