34 o DISCOVERY REPORTS 



known as ' finks ' or ' fritters '. When trying out is completed, a heap of scraps is saved to start the next 

 boiling (Plate XVIII, Fig. 3). The heaps look like discoloured, yellowish-black stacks of old cork floats. 

 A bailer, consisting of a large copper or tinplate can mounted by a wrought iron shank upon an 8- or 

 9-ft. pole, is used to ladle the boiling oil from the pots into a cooler (Az. cula) placed alongside the 

 try-works. At Lagens do Pico the coolers (ancient adjuncts to all try-works since early Spitzbergen 

 days) are simply great cylindrical or slightly conical vessels made of sheet iron plates riveted together. 

 To hasten cooling at Lagens the oil may be ladled from the first cooler to a second or even a third : 

 elsewhere in the Azores I have not seen more than one cooler alongside a try-works. 



I have no information on the time taken to cut in and try out a whale in the Azores, but, judging 

 from the whaleship records, a large Sperm whale would probably keep a station with a two-pot try- 

 works busy for three or four days and perhaps longer. There is of course no comparison between these 

 methods and modern whaling on the Norwegian model. 



Try-works stations. All existing Azores try-works stations employ the implements and methods just 

 described. The correspondence with trying out aboard an old whaleship is remarkably complete. 

 In a whaleship the brick built try-works was placed just abaft the fore-hatch, and accommodated two 

 pots, although some ships had three-pot works in the middle of the last century. The only different 

 features of a whaleship try-works were a shallow water reservoir under the structure to protect the 

 deck from burning, and the absence of any chimneys until sheet metal ones were introduced in some 

 whalers during the second half of the century. But the Azores try-works stations can most strikingly 

 be compared with the early shore whaleries, with the basically similar operations at Spitzbergen 

 described by Gray, 1662-3 ( m Jenkins, 1921, p. 152), and more closely with later New England scenes 

 like that shown in a print reproduced by Scammon (1874, pi. xxm) of a New Bedford station in 1763, 

 with its try-houses and implements and blubber tubs. And such scenes as Carmel Bay in the 1850's 

 (p. 338) are not even different in detail from some present stations in Pico. There is given below a 

 survey of the aspect and equipment of the various Azores try-works stations as they exist today 

 (see also Fig. 3, p. 297; Table 4, p. 306). 



Lagens, on the southern coast of Pico, deserves further mention since it has always held a prominent 

 position and is now the biggest centre for processing whales in the old-fashioned way. Here there are 

 seven companies which own or share an installation of five open try-works. One of these has only a 

 single pot. The open-air factory is built at the expanded end of the breakwater, shaped like a frying- 

 pan, which runs out on a reef sheltering the lagoon of Lagens. Where the breakwater ends, the sea- 

 ward side is clear to give space for a derrick and room to turn the carts which transport materials. 

 On the lagoon or harbour side, the five try-works extend upon the level upper portion of a broad 

 stranding slip. Low walls, helping to break the wind and sea, join the try-works which are so disposed 

 as to make the nodes and terminals of branching arms formed by the walls. In this way three or four 

 working spaces, each with a crab and flanked by try-works, can handle separate whales hauled to the 

 common slip (Plate XVI, Fig. 2). Opposite the factory, across the harbour, there are six whitewashed 

 boat-houses and two launching slips, each of the latter providing for the whaleboats of a group of 

 three boat-houses. In the harbour the motor tow-boats lie at anchor. Elsewhere on Pico the 

 installations are more modest. West of Lagens the little village of San Mateus has a single try-works 

 with a large square tank as cooler, built on the rocky beach against the foot of the sea-wall. At San 

 Mateus the coast road so hugs the shore that whaleboats have to be manhandled from a boat-house 

 across the road : they are afterwards launched from a slipway which is a mere slit in the reef. Whales 

 may be stranded at this slipway or cut in alongside a rough quay built against part of the reef (Plate XVI). 

 To the eastward of Lagens there are two isolated villages, Ribeiras and Calheta do Nesquim, very 

 similar to each other as whaling settlements, and clinging to the foot of tall cliffs which in this region 



