Twilight in the South 343 



attacked. The next job, also performed by the head flensers, is to cut 

 the whole roof of the mouth out of the whale and with it the once so 

 valuable baleen. Today, this is useless, and is just heaved overboard. 

 The junior flensers cut the blubber into long strips about eighteen 

 inches wide and ten feet long. These are seized by the blubberboys, 

 who work with big metal hooks with a wooden cross handle and 

 who tow the strips to open manholes on the deck. These lead directly 

 down into the whirring choppers, which make a mighty pudding of 

 the blubber and then spew it on down into the pressure cookers. 

 These devices are the basic clue to modern whaling, for without their 

 invention and perfection, the whales could not be processed fast 

 enough to make the whole business pay. 



They were invented by a Finnish engineer named Nils Kvaener 

 and act just Hke vast editions of the housewife's pressure cooker, 

 except that superheated steam under six hundred pounds' pressure is 

 shot into them when they are filled with blubber, meat, or other 

 material, and they are then kept running for various lengths of time 

 according to whatever grade of whatever oil is needed and how the 

 machines decide to do the job, for machines, like people, have strik- 

 ing individualities, however perfectly they may be constructed. The 

 contents, when fully "cooked," are centrifuged in order to separate 

 the oil from the residue which, in the case of the blubber, is only a 

 little dirty water and useless muck called, like all other absolutely 

 worthless parts of the whale, "grax," but which in the case of the 

 meat and bone cookers consists of various "meals" that are then dried 

 and bagged. If anything still remains, it is gone over again to take the 

 last drop of oil out of it. Separate boilers handle rare materials like 

 the livers, from which refined vitamin extracts are produced. 



When the whale has been stripped of blubber and the "bada," or 

 baleen, the flenser's work is done and the corpse is pulled through 

 an archway to the forward deck where it is attacked by gangs known 

 as "lemmers." These men are sort of superbutchers with an uncanny 

 skill in dissecting the whale with the greatest dispatch but the utmost 

 conservation of labor. The livers go to specialist lemmers who slice 

 them in a certain way. The meat goes down one series of holes, the 

 bones, when cut up by vast power saws, down others; only the 

 stomach and a few parts of the guts are thrown overboard. Even 

 the blood and all bits and pieces that may accumulate on deck are 



