18 TEE CRUISE OF THE "CACHALOT." 



busy skinning the blubber from the bodies. Porpoises 

 have no skin, that is hide, the blubber or coating of lard 

 which encases them being covered by a black substance 

 as thin as tissue paper. The porpoise hide of the boot 

 maker is really leather, made from the skin of the 

 Beluga, or " white whale," which is found only in the 

 far north. The cover was removed from the " try- 

 works" amidships, revealing two gigantic pots set in a 

 frame of brickwork side by side, capable of holding 200 

 gallons each. Such a cooking apparatus as might have 

 graced a Brobdingnagian kitchen. Beneath the pots 

 was the very simplest of furnaces, hardly as elaborate as 

 the familiar copper-hole sacred to washing day. Square 

 funnels of sheet-iron were loosely fitted to the flues, 

 more as a protection against the oil boiling over into 

 the fire than to carry away the smoke, of which from 

 the peculiar nature of the fuel there was very little. At 

 one side of the try-works was a large wooden vessel, or 

 " hopper," to contain the raw blubber ; at the other, a 

 copper cistern or cooler of about 300 gallons capacity, into 

 which the prepared oil was baled to cool off, preliminary 

 to its being poured into the casks. Beneath the furnaces 

 was a space as large as the whole area of the try-works, 

 about a foot deep, which, when the fires were lighted, 

 was tilled with water to prevent the deck from burning. 

 It may be imagined that the blubber from our twenty 

 porpoises made but a poor show in one of the pots ; 

 nevertheless, we got a barrel of very excellent oil from 

 them. The fires were fed with " scrap," or pieces of 

 blubber from which the oil had been boiled, some of 

 which had been reserved from the previous voyage. 

 They burnt with a fierce and steady blaze, leaving but 

 a trace of ash. I was then informed by one of the 



