THE PRESENT SURVIVAL OF OPEN BOAT WHALING 345 



are severed, and the lower jaw is dragged to one side (Plate XVII). At this stage the head blubber is 

 removed, either in square pieces if the whale is small, or in strips flensed with the head-winch. The 

 spermaceti organ is dissected by first opening the case and scooping and draining the spermaceti into 

 tubs. The case is then chopped out piecemeal, followed by the blocks of junk, very much as the 

 head of a stranded whale is cut in. The skull only remains, and this is trimmed of any adhering tissue 

 and dragged to the far corner of the platform to be sawn into pieces. 



All sawing is done with two-man forester's saws, for there are no steam bone-saws at the Azores 

 modern stations. The ribs as well as the skulls are sawn up, and there are heavy bone-axes to chop 

 neural spines and transverse processes from the larger vertebrae to get them small enough for the 

 cookers. A last job, which has to wait for some slack period after the platform has been mainly cleared, 

 is to remove the teeth from the lower jaw. An accumulation of lower jaws may in fact be left for days 

 or weeks so as to rot the integuments and tooth attachments and make stripping easier. ' Stripping 

 ivory' is done in the traditional manner, well shown in a sketch made about 1850 and reproduced in 

 Haley (1950, posthumous, p. 199). The tooth row on each side is dragged away complete, adhering to 

 a strip of gum as the teeth are helped in turn from their sockets with a heavy spade. Modern Nor- 

 wegian practice is similar. The teeth are preserved for scrimshaw (p. 347), together with some sections 

 of the mandibular rami, called 'pan-bone'. The anterior symphysial part of the lower jaw normally 

 goes with the rest of the bone to the cookers. 



Work on the platform and in the cooking factory may be continued if necessary by lamplight into 

 the early hours, but the men get very tired, for there are no night shifts or reliefs. 



The sequence of operations described is followed rigorously on the platform at Porto Pirn. Indeed, 

 the routine nature of the work is one of the few things this and the Norwegian practice have in com- 

 mon. In Norwegian whaling the animal, still with its head unsevered, is flensed by removal of the 

 entire blubber blanket in three strips : the first two strips are simultaneously dragged off with flensing 

 winches left and right, and the whale is then ' canted ' by hauling on crossed wires, one secured to the 

 lower jaw and one to the upper flipper, so as to get at the third strip which has been underneath the 

 whale. Overturning the carcass in the Azores is done late in the work and upon what is only the 

 median half of a truncated animal. The Norwegian practice of butchering or 'lemming' a flensed 

 whale is first to remove the head, and then open the body cavity in a single operation by severing the 

 attachments of the ribs and dragging away a whole side of breast by tension at the shoulder: this is 

 in marked contrast to the Azores piecemeal method. In dissecting the head the Norwegian practice 

 again avoids piecemeal methods by detaching the whole ' trusk ' or spermaceti organ (case and junk 

 together) as one mass of tissue. The Azores platform men are no less skilful than their counterparts 

 overseas, but the methods employed, and the modest power and variety of the available machinery, 

 make whaling operations at an Azores modern station slower than at a skilled station elsewhere. 

 On a good day in the Azores I have known a platform occupy nine hours in dismembering three whales 

 measuring 52, 42 and 41 ft., and still leave two heads half dissected. A good crew using Norwegian 

 methods can clear a 50-ft. Sperm whale from a factory ship deck within three-quarters of an hour and 

 from a shore station within one hour. 



The factory at Porto Pirn employs a battery of vertical pressure cookers much like those at any other 

 steam whaling station . The steam is supplied from a boiler fired with brushwood . The wall of the cooking 

 plant limits the rear of the flensing platform, and there is a door near the top of the wall, admitting 

 to an elevated gallery where the cookers can be filled. The pieces of blubber and sawn blocks of bone, 

 suspended on hooks or strops, are hoisted to the door with a steam-operated whip: there are no 

 elaborate bucket-hoists or ramps for this purpose. Cookers for blubber and bone are similar to each 

 other, except that a series of iron grids or spacers are fitted when charging with blubber, so as to 



