386 MOBY DICK; OR 
akin to it, in the business of preparing the sperm whale for the try- 
works. 
First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the taper- 
ing part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It 
is tough with congealed tendons — a wad of muscles — but still contains 
some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first 
cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like 
blocks of Berkshire marble. 
Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts 
of the whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, 
and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It 
is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name 
imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked 
snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and 
purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, 
it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole 
behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive 
a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, sup- 
posing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, 
and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine 
vintage of the vineyards of Champagne. 
There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up 
in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling 
adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion ; an appellation original 
with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is 
an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs 
of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I 
hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case 
coalescing. 
Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to Bight whalemen, 
but sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It desig- 
nates the dark glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the 
Greenland or Bight whale, and much of which covers the decks of those 
inferior- souls who hunt that ignoble Leviathan. 
Hippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale’s vocabu- 
lary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman’s nip- 
