l rolled it was impossible to maintain a footing, and
every fall was upon blubber running with oil. A machine of wonderful
construction had been erected on deck in a kind of shallow trough about
six feet long by four feet wide and a foot deep. At some remote period
of time it had no doubt been looked upon as a triumph of ingenuity,
a patent mincing machine. Its action was somewhat like that of a
chaff-cutter, except that the knife was not attached to the wheel, and
only rose and fell, since it was not required to cut right through the
"horse-pieces" with which it was fed. It will be readily understood
that in order to get the oil quickly out of the blubber, it needs to be
sliced as thin as possible, but for convenience in handling the refuse
(which is the only fuel used) it is not chopped up in small pieces, but
every "horse-piece" is very deeply scored as it were, leaving a thin
strip to hold the slices together. This then was the order of work. Two
harpooners attended the try-pots, replenishing them with minced blubber
from the hopper at the port side, and baling out the sufficiently
boiled oil into the great cooling tank on the starboard. One officer
superintended the mincing, another exercised a general supervision over
all. There was no man at the wheel and no look-out, for the vessel was
"hove-to" under two close-reefed topsails and fore-topmast-staysail,
with the wheel lashed hard down. A look-out man was unnecessary, since
we could not run anybody down, and if anybody ran us down, it would only
be because all hands were asleep, for the glare of our try-works fire,
to say nothing of the blazing cresset before mentioned, could have been
seen for many miles. So we toiled watch and watch, six hours on and six
off, the work never ceasing for an instant night or day. Though the
work was hard and dirty, and the discomfort of being so continually wet
through with oil great, there was only one thing dangerous about the
whole business. That was the job of filling and shifting the huge casks
of oil. Some of these were of enormous size, containing 350 gallons when
full, and the work of moving them about the greasy deck of a rolling
ship was attended with a terrible amount of risk. For only four men at
most could get fair hold of a cask, and when she took it into her silly
old hull to start rolling, just as we had got one half-way across
the deck, with nothing to grip your feet, and the knowledge that one
stumbling man would m