ALL IN A DAY'S WORK 169 



— if a whale may be said to have either neck or nape — a hole to 

 receive the blubber hook. The cutters made a deep, semicircu- 

 lar scarf above and around the hole. A boat-steerer placed the 

 hook. The men on deck carried the purchase of the tackle to 

 the windlass and hove it taut. The cutters carried the scarf 

 down on each side of the hole, to free a strip of blubber about six 

 feet wide. The cutters worked away and the tackle tightened 

 to the heaving of the men at the windlass, the ship leaned 

 more and more to starboard and the great hook pulled into the 

 blubber. Then the blubber, following the line of the scarf, 

 would presently burst away from the flesh and rise in a long 

 strip peeled from the whale, which turned in the chains like a 

 stick on which a string is wound. The lower block rose, fol- 

 lowed by the ''blanket piece," as the strip of blubber is called, till 

 it reached the masthead. With a long keen two-edged boarding- 

 knife a boat-steerer pierced the blubber down by the bulwarks 

 and cut a second hole, in which he made fast a strap and toggle, 

 or a second blubber hook, which was secured to the lower block 

 of the second tackle. The men hove taut the second tackle; the 

 boat-steerer sliced through the blanket piece with the boarding 

 knife, watchful of its course when with all its ponderous weight 

 it should swing free and clear; and the first blanket-piece was 

 lowered through the main hatch. As the spades rose and fell, 

 cutting their way deep into blubber every time they descended, 

 as the men hove at the windlass, the blubber continued to rise 

 to the pull first of one tackle, then of another, in blanket-piece 

 after blanket-piece, and ''the whale was kept rolling until it 

 was rolled out of its jacket, just as a person would haul a piece 

 of tape from a spool, if it were wound spirally from end to end," 

 until the cutters came to the "small." Here, since the forward 

 part of the body quite overbalanced the rest, further unrolling 

 would have been too difficult. So they cut the small from the 

 body forward and from the flukes aft, and hoisted it on deck. 



As they made the first incisions forward of the fin, they drove 

 the spades deep toward the backbone; and as the whale turned 

 in the chains, they cut clean through to the vertebrae round the 

 base of the head. Reeving a cable or head-chain through 



