THE PRESENT SURVIVAL OF OPEN BOAT WHALING 349 



Pico seems never to have exported any of its sperm leather, and very little of it is made today, 

 perhaps because the whalemen are not so poor as they were. But sperm leather was formerly widely 

 used for making the soles of shoes, and for the rough sandals worn by Pico men. (The surfaces of Pico 

 are so severe that it is the custom to go shod, whilst peasants and whalemen in other islands go 

 barefooted.) Senhor Machado says that a sperm leather sole lasts for six months, which is very good 

 wear on Pico lava and cinders. Complete shoes can be made by using uppers tanned from the skin 

 of large foetal whales. In former years the skin of the adult penis made uppers for durable leather 

 sea-boots. 



The extraordinary strength and flexibility of tendons and connective tissue fibres from the Sperm 

 whale make their use widespread in the Azores. At those modern stations which have a meat meal 

 plant, the tendons have anyway to be pulled from the giant fillets of meat, otherwise they would clog 

 the machinery. They are not discarded, but are saved and used for lashing the yokes of the ox-carts 

 which are still the customary transport of the archipelago. The thick, round tendons from the tail are 

 made into whips. Below the blubber there are layers of parallel connective tissue fibres which are best 

 developed in the head, where they enclose the spermaceti organ as beautiful, glistening sheets, closely 

 composed of flat ribbon-like fibres, each several yards long and less than \ in. wide. These fibres also 

 are used for lashing yokes, but more especially for lacing and joining machine belting. 



The whalemen 



The life of the Azores shore whalemen has changed little since the days when their forbears shipped 

 with Yankee masters for the deep-sea voyage. Their dress has not changed at all. This is J. Ross 

 Browne's description of his Azores shipmates on a whaling voyage (1846, p. 33); 



The Portuguese wore sennet hats with sugar-loaf crowns, striped bed-ticking pantaloons patched with duck, 

 blue shirts, and knives and belt. They were all barefooted .... 



Today most whaleboatmen still wear the wide-brimmed straw sombrero and the trousers of striped 

 bed-ticking, the latter with neat and extensive patching which is itself a reminder of the old whaling 

 life when old clothes had to be kept together during a prolonged voyage, and men became experts at 

 ' a patch over a patch, and a patch over all'. In the boats and on the flensing platform the whalemen 

 still go barefoot. 



At some at least of the whaling settlements, as at Californian settlements in the last century, the 

 whaleboatmen receive no wages but are paid on the ' lay ' system, which is a direct survival from the 

 whaleship days when each officer and man, according to his station, received an agreed share or lay of 

 the net profits of the voyage. At an Azores whalery the owners may take half the profits, and the other 

 half be divided amongst the whaleboatmen at an annual pay-off, so that the boatheaders,. harponeers 

 and tow-boat enginemen get two shares each for every share of the ordinary boatman. The shore-side 

 staff at modern stations, that is, the platform and factory workmen, seem to receive fixed salaries and 

 a bonus on the oil : I believe there are some whaleries where the whaleboatmen also are paid like this, 

 instead of receiving a lay. Even the ' slop-chest ' system of issuing clothing and other goods, by debits 

 to the pay-off, is preserved in the Azores, for at Porto Pirn (and probably elsewhere) the whalemen 

 go to one shop, the casa dos baleieros, where they have a year's credit for food, clothing, wine 

 and oil. 



Most of the whalemen and their families till a patch of land for maize or vines, keep a cow or goat 

 and some chickens, and do a little fishing when they can, to help out their earnings from the whale 

 fishery. 



The whalemen are devout Catholics, and every Azores whaleboat sails with one or two sacred 

 pictures in frames secured under the cuddy-board or under the box. In Fayal, on the first Sunday in 



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