344 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



washed into a boiler and rendered, so that virtually the whole whale 

 disappears into the cookers, and when the deck is sluiced down after- 

 wards with power hoses, very little but dirty water goes overboard. 

 But still, even this gruesomely efficient procedure has not as yet 

 reached the peak of possible practicality. 



I have a friend, a chemical engineer of considerable prominence, 

 who has always been fascinated by sausage machines. He contends 

 that flensers, blubberboys, and lemmers, except possibly the liver lads, 

 could all be dispensed with if the whole business were redesigned, 

 retooled, and tackled from quite another angle. His idea is to haul 

 the whale into a structure like a huge coffin and then either cut it up 

 with a power-driven super meat slicer, all blades going simultane- 

 ously, straight through the whale, after which the bottom of the box 

 automatically drops all the slices into boilers or alternatively to seal 

 the coffin and just boil the entire whale under pressure. In either case, 

 improved chemical methods would be relied upon to separate what- 

 ever grades of whatever kinds of oil are needed from the resultant 

 animal "crude oil." The whole thing is completely beyond my per- 

 sonal understanding, but if you can get perfume, gasoline, tar, and 

 flavoring for ice cream out of petroleum, I must believe when I am 

 told that chemists should be able to perform a similar miracle with 

 a boiled whale. Perhaps, therefore, we shall still see the dawn of 

 Modern Whaling — Phase III, in which the floating factory gives way 

 to the floating cracking plant. Should this ever take place, it is my 

 guess that it will have to be named American IV, and that it will 

 write finis to the whole history of the pursuit of the whale. 



