THE WHALING INDUSTRY 691 



Whales to be used for meat should be cut in the belly to cool the carcass, thus 

 leaving only the chest and tongue for inflation. Exhaust fumes from a gasoline 

 or Diesel motor may taint the flesh. The hole made by the inflating tube is well 

 plugged to prevent loss of air and sinking, and a bamboo pole with a big red 

 marker is planted on the carcass to aid in later detection. As wind and current 

 drift a carcass remarkably fast and the modern hunt covers a wide area, many 

 carcasses are lost after being inflated, flagged, and left. Foggy weather causes 

 large losses. Probably the greatest loss of whales to the industry results from this 

 practice; it may amount to 10 per cent. However, it is rarely figured in the annual 

 catch. To prevent loss of marked drift whales a "whale transmitter," emitting at 

 regular intervals radio signals of a certain wave length, is attached to the marker, 

 and its signals are picked up by a direction finder. 



Processing. The "small" or peduncle near the flukes is attached by a strap or 

 chain to the bow of the whaleboat, and the dead whale is thus towed to the 

 factory ship or shore station. Often the wings of the flukes are cut off to prevent 

 dragging. A boat can tow up to 10 medium-sized whales, but rarely more than 

 half a dozen large ones. 



At the shore station the carcass is tied to a pile. It is then warped to the ramp 

 and hauled to the flensing deck above the high-water mark by a powerful winch 

 and cable attached to a strap around the base of the flukes, or "small." On a 

 factory ship the strap of the tow is attached to a bight in a line running along 

 the side of the ship. The line is hauled around the stern and up the ramp to 

 bring the posterior part of the whale under the huge handlike Gjeldstad claw, 

 which is dropped upon the lower back. The claw slides toward the flukes, closes 

 like ice tongs, and locks at the "small." 



On the wooden flensing deck the carcass is stripped of its blubber in the same 

 manner that a banana is peeled. The carcass is then rolled underside up and 

 dismembered, the meat, glands, and bone being properly disposed of. The baleen 

 is discarded. All work is done with cables and winches, and experienced winch 

 men, cable tenders, flensers, and lemmers (meat cutters). 



The blubber is handled in three ways: open-cooking, pressure-cooking in a 

 grid digester, and pressure-cooking in a rotary digester. 



Open-cooking is the oldest method. As it is one of the best, it is still in use at 

 some shore stations. However, it cannot be done with any degree of modern effi- 

 ciency aboard ship (though this was the old way of rendering blubber on sailing 

 ships). The blubber is minced or hogged and dropped by gravity or raised by 

 conveyor into a large tank where it is cooked with open steam over several feet 

 of water for about 4 to 6 hours at about 356° F (180° C). The oil is then cooled 

 somewhat and the sediment allowed to settle before pumping the oil through 

 a lowering pipe to separating tanks. A second cooking can be given the residue, 

 with or without the addition of some caustic soda or sodium sulfate to aid in the 

 digestion of the solid material. Such a method involves inexpensive equipment, 

 is not time consuming, and produces an excellent, light-colored oil of very low, 

 free fatty acid content. The temperatures and pressures are obviously desirably 

 low. 



Pressure-cooking of blubber by a grid digester is done in a large, vertical, 

 cylindrical cooker with filling-door on top, emptying-door low down on one side, 

 and a fixed pipe to tap off the oil as the blubber is steamed under pressure. A 



