SPITZBERGEN 35 



fried scraps of blubber, then as now called "fritters," into the 

 "fritter-barrow," which stood above a cooler. 



The fritter-barrow was in form like the conventional barrow, 

 but the barrel boards were set half an inch apart, so that it was 

 really a big sieve which drained the oil from the fritters into the 

 cooler. The cooler, which would hold some five tuns, was made 

 of deals and was filled with water to within an inch of the hole 

 from which a spout, ten or twelve feet long, ran to a second 

 cooler. There were three such coolers, and from the third the 

 oil, by this time fairly cool, ran into a cask. Plugging the 

 last spout, the men would roll the filled casks away, put others 

 in their places, and open the spouts again. Thus the boiling 

 and straining went merrily on and, as to-day, when it was well 

 started it provided, in the form of the fritters, which burned 

 with fierce heat, the fuel for the fires. 



The casks, when the oil in them was cold, were closed and 

 marked and rafted to the ships, where they were stowed down 

 for the autumn journey south. 



On board the Dutch whaler the captain divided his authority 

 with a "specksnyder," or chief blubber-cutter, who had charge of 

 the actual whaling, as the captain had charge of navigating and 

 working the ship; the men — and this was true of our own whale- 

 men at the very beginning of the American industry — boiled out 

 the blubber on shore, as a general rule, instead of on board ship; 

 and the owners paid wages instead of lays. (This also we did in 

 the days of colonial whaling, and sometimes, though rarely, 

 in the later days.) But though the lay appeared in the per- 

 centage of oil given to some of the Dutch captains and officers, 

 and though there is a suggestion of the lay system in the re- 

 wards given certain of the officers and men of Dutch whalers for 

 each whale captured, it does not appear that anything of the 

 sort was offered among the English whalemen, and it is given 

 as one of several explanations of their poor success, that the 

 captains were paid wages and allotted no share in the profits. 

 Evidently, in those days as well as later on, some incentive 

 besides pure adventure was needed to offset the perils and 

 hardships of whaling. 



