ORDEB OF CETACEA. 
59 
their share of their feast. The hones, rolled about and heaped up 
in the creeks, are then carried away by the ships. 
Before being stored in the hold of the ship as cargo to be 
taken home, the parts stripped off the Whale have to undergo 
various preparations. 
Each piece of blubber is divided, by a machine, into slices of 
one centimetre in thickness ; then they proceed to the melting 
down, which has for its object to separate the oil from this 
enormous greasy rind. 
The operation of melting is effected on the deck of the ship 
by means of a furnace, of which the fire is kept up with 
scratchings, that is to say, the fragments of cellular tissue which 
float on the surface of the oil when the blubber is melted. An 
ordinary Whale yields a quantity of these, sufficient not only for 
melting down its own blubber, .but also sufficient for melting 
down a part of the blubber of another Whale. The base of the 
furnace does not rest directly on the deck ; it is separated from 
it by a free space, in which cold water is always circulating, 
which reduces the adjacent parts of the deck of the ship to a 
temperature below 100°. Without this .precaution, jthere would 
be a constant risk of fire. The quantity of oil supplied by a 
single Bight Whale may be as much as from twenty-five to thirty 
hectolitres. The operations, of which we have given a rapid 
sketch, make a whale- ship very unsavoury quarters. To give an 
idea of it, we will again borrow a few lines from the work of Dr. 
Thiercelin — 
“ I remember,” says the author, “ one evening in December, 
1838, I was on board the Ville-de- Bordeaux. We had killed four 
Whales that day. We had been able to Turn one of our four 
victims over ; the second lay along the ship to starboard ; and the 
two others were riding on the waves, fastened to the ship by cables. 
The deck, running with oil, was encumbered with empty barrels, 
with whalebone, and flippers partly stripped of their fat. The 
blubber-room was crammed full, and ttwo smoky lamps showed 
two or three novices, all covered with grease, employed in cutting 
up the small pieces. What a charnel-house is this room ! ”* 
The Borquals have the head smaller than in the Bight Whales, 
measuring about one-fourth of the entire length of the animal, a 
* Journal d’un Baleinier, tome i. 
