174 THE AMERICAN WHALEMAN 



works has to be fed for a time with wood. After that no wood is 

 used, except as a means of quick ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, 

 after being tried out, the crisp, shriveled blubber, now called scraps 

 or fritters, feed the flames. Like a plethoric burning martyr, or a 

 self-consuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale supplies his own 

 fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his own 

 smoke! for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, 

 and not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an 

 unspeakable, wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the 

 vicinity of funereal pyres . . . 



By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear 

 from the carcass; sail had been made; the wind was freshening; the 

 wild ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up 

 by the fierce flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty 

 flues, and illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the 

 famed Greek fire. The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly 

 commissioned to some vengeful deed . . . 



The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a 

 wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean 

 shapes of the pagan harpooneers, always the whale ship's stokers. 

 With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into 

 the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames 

 darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The 

 smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there 

 was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into 

 their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the farther side 

 of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a 

 sea-sofa. Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, 

 looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in 

 their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke 

 and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy 

 of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious em- 

 blazonings of the works. 



The weirdness and flaming barbarity of such midnight scenes 

 could not fail to leave an indelible suggestion of the infernal. 

 "It requires but little stretch of the imagination to suppose 

 the smoke, the hissing boilers, the savage-looking crew, and 

 the waves of flame that burst now and then from the flues of 

 the furnace, part of the paraphernalia of a scene in the lower 

 regions ... I know of nothing to which this part of the 

 whaling business can be more appropriately compared than to 

 Dante's pictures of the infernal regions ... A trying-out 

 scene has something peculiarly wild and savage in itj a kind 



