Chap. III. THE WHALING-TOWN— TRY-WORKS. 45 
and had adopted a son of an old trader and friend of 
his named Jacky Love, who was on his death-bed, re- 
gretted by the natives as one of themselves. He had 
married a young chieftainess of great rank, and his son 
Dan was treated with that universal respect and kind- 
ness to which he was entitled by the character of his 
father and the rank of his mother. 
We found Williams's ware in the centre of the 
town ; and Arthur's perched up on a pretty terrace on 
the side of the northern hill which slopes from the 
valley. A nice clear stream runs through the middle 
of the settlement. Some few of the whalers were 
dressed out in their clean Sunday clothes : but a large 
gang were busy at the try-works, boiling out the oil 
from the blubber of a whale lately caught. It appears 
that this is a process in which any delay is injurious. 
The try 'Works are large iron boilers, with furnaces 
beneath. Into these the blubber is put, being cut into 
lumps of about two feet square, and the oil is boiled 
out. The residue is called the scrag, and serves to 
feed the fire. The oil is then run into coolers, and 
finally into casks ready for shipping. The men were 
unshaven and uncombed, and their clothes covered 
with dirt and oil. Most of them were strong, muscular 
men ; and they reminded me, as they stoked the furnaces, 
and stirred the boiling oil, of Retzsch's grim imagina- 
tion of the forge in the forest, in his outline illustra- 
tions of Schiller's ballad of Fridolin. On asking one 
whether they always worked on Sundays, he answered 
contemptuously, '*()h! Sunday never comes into this 
' ' bay ! " An Australian aboriginal native was one of this 
greasy gang, and was spoken of as a good hand. The 
whole ground and beach about here was saturated with 
oil, and the stench of the carcasses and scraps of whale- 
flesh lying about in the bay was intolerable. 
