In the early 19th century, the American whaling industry entered a golden age, and countless whaling ships sailed away to risk their fortunes.
Whaling scene
So, how did the sailors of the whaling ships at that time hunt whales and refine whale oil? In this article, we will restore the scene at that time.
After the 18th century, as the resources of whales in the coastal waters gradually dried up, whalers began to build larger ships and marched into the deep sea. The biggest difference between whaling ships and merchant ships is that merchant ships have fixed routes, and sailors know how long it will take them to reach their destination. But whaling boats are different, and sailors need to search the vast seas for whales, then venture to catch them, and finally fill the entire ship with whale oil to go home — a process that can take as little as a year or two, or as much as three or four years.
This means that as long as you board a whaling vessel, you must pray sincerely and work hard to get home earlier.
In the vast expanse of the sea, sailors would take turns to be on duty at the lookout on the mast. On the high observation deck, it is necessary to carefully observe the situation in the nearby sea and look for schools of whales. In fact, it's not an easy job, because finding the water jets from whales requires a good eye, and it's entirely possible to find nothing for months.
Once a sailor sees a column of water spewed out by a whale on the lookout, he must shout with all his strength: "The whale has sprayed water!" "Some captains also explicitly demanded that they must shout out a sense of rhythm and sound better.
Remember, for whaling sailors, the cry of discovering whales is indeed more important than anything else, and no matter what they are doing at that time, they will immediately stop and run to the deck. The captain will also rush up at the first time to check the specific location and number of whales, if it is a large group of sperm whales, then everyone will shout with excitement.
Immediately after that, several dinghies on the whaling boats would be put into the sea, and the sailors would board the dinghies and paddle hard in the way they had been trained before. There were six people in a whaling dinghy, and the helmsman would shout slogans to cheer for the paddlers. Whaling boats often have more than two miles away from the whales, so paddlers have to do their best to catch up with the whales.
As the whaling dinghy approaches the whale herd, the helmsman will stand at the bow of the boat, holding a whaling fork in his hand, looking for a target — the larger the whale, the higher its value, but also the more dangerous it is. After throwing the first whaling fork at the right time, skilled sailors often quickly throw the second whaling fork. Because the whales after injury will continue to struggle, whaling forks often fall off.
The injured whale will first choose to swim to the deep sea, with a long rope tied to the whaling fork and the tail end tied to the whaling dinghy. Normally, injured whales don't have the strength to dive too deep into the sea and will soon float up. However, there are also strong whales that continue to dive deeply, and sailors have to cut the rope in time to prevent the dinghy from being pulled into the sea.
If you're lucky, the whale will soon surface, and a sharp spear will end its life with a sharp spear. Of course, this is also the most dangerous, because the whaling boat must be close enough that it is possible to be broken by the whale's huge tail fin.
Eventually, when the whales stopped struggling, the people in the whaling dinghy gave a flurry of cheers, and the most dangerous work of the whaling boat was complete.
<h1>Below, it's a very hard cut. </h1>
A whaling vessel in the distance is cutting blubber
Sailors on whaling boats would tie the whale's tail with ropes and slowly tow it back to the whaling ship, when some whalers described the work as "super-large-scale surgical or specimen dissection."
The whales are towed to the starboard side of the whaling vessel and then secured with strong chains. Next, the sailor would descend from the boat a scaffolding of narrow planks, right in place for the whale carcass, on which the sailor would stand and cut the whale carcass. The platform is not large, but simple handrails have been added to facilitate work. The tool for cutting whales is a huge shovel with a steel head that is unusually sharp and has a handle that can reach 4.8 meters long.
The first step in the cutting work is to cut off the whale's head, which is often the responsibility of the captain and first mate. Once the whale's head is cut off, it is chained to the stern of the boat and waited to be processed. The second pair will then take the shovel and start cutting the blubber.
There was a thick layer of blubber under the whale's skin, and the second pair stood on the workbench, using a shovel to first open a circular knife edge near the pectoral fin, and then let the sailor insert a large iron hook weighing more than 45 kilograms into it—the iron hook was attached to the iron chain all the way to the deck, and there was a pulley set on which to hoist the cut blubber.
The work of hanging this large iron hook is very dangerous, because the whale carcass is not completely fixed at this time, and it will shake with the waves. The sailor first fastens a safety rope around his waist, then slowly climbs from the dinghy to the whale carcass, carefully walks over and picks up the large iron hook hanging from the boat, and then hooks the whale corpse with great effort—a process that, if the soles of his feet slip, may fall between the carcass and the hull and be squeezed alive, or become the belly of a shark attracted by the smell of blood.
<h1>Once this is done, the blubber can be cut. </h1>
Cut the blubber on the shore
If the whale carcass is not handled for a long time, it will rot and stink, so there is no time to delay. The sailors peel off the blubber one by one and hang it on the hook of the pulley set, and the sailors on the ship will turn the winch vigorously and slowly drag the huge blubber to the boat.
The balsam is pulled to the deck piece by piece, and finally the entire whale's fat is stripped away, and the remaining body is thrown into the sea.
The huge balks of blubber on the deck need to be further processed, and a special crew member uses a sharp shovel to cut the blubber into small pieces of 1 square inch each, and then continues to cut with a sharp meat cleaver - the small pieces of blubber will be cut into "pages", one end will not be cut off with the fish skin, and the blubber will be like a book page, which can increase the area where the blubber is exposed to hot oil and better refine the whale oil.
It's definitely a dirty and tiring job, because there's so much blubber that sailors need to cut non-stop. The deck was littered with blood and oil, and the balks of blubber slid with the swing of the hull, and sailors would be hit if they were not careful. Of course, handling this greasy blubber is disgusting in itself.
<h1>Here's the highlight, dealing with the sperm whale's head. </h1>
sperm whale
The huge head of the sperm whale is pulled to the deck, and then the whale's whiskers are cut off, which are directly put aside to dry, dried and bundled and stored. Next, the jaw of the sperm whale is cut off and the fat-rich tongue is sent into the refining room. The jaws are left to rot in a corner of the deck, and the whale's teeth are extracted a few days later— specially bought and carved into crafts.
The most important job is to obtain whale brain oil, and the sailor first makes a hole in the whale's head and then uses a wooden barrel to scoop out the whale brain oil little by little. Whale brain oil is very precious, so it will not waste a little, if it is not convenient to stick the barrel in, it will arrange for a skinny sailor to drill into it.
This means that sailors who go in soak it directly in whale brain oil, which is a job that sounds disgusting. However, Melville, the author of "Moby Dick", described that some sailors still felt that soaking in whale brain oil was very enjoyable: "This is really a fragrant and slippery errand... It's truly an amazing cooling agent! Amazing moisturizer! Amazing dissolving agent! Amazing sedative... I felt as if I saw angels in heaven standing in rows, each holding a can of whale brain oil in their hands! ”
Writers always use rich imagination and gorgeous rhetoric to describe, really soaked in the slippery whale brain oil to work, presumably there will not be too many good feelings.
<h1>In fact, the most painful job is to refine whale oil. </h1>
Whale brain oil and candles made of it
The whale oil refining room is in the middle of the whaling ship, and once the refining begins, it must work day and night. The crew would work shifts, and no one could stay in the smelly, hot workroom for long. Sailors kept putting balks of balsam into huge iron pots, and underneath were burning flames, and a mid-19th-century whaling sailor wrote: "The crew was woken up at midnight and put on dirty clothes soaked in oil... Fall, get up, fall again on a messy deck until you're covered in grease from head to toe... You dream of lying under a thick layer of blubber, and the fear and pain is enough to make you feel suffocated..."
The whole process of refining blubber is filled with a foul odor, and the refining plant on the shore can smell the smell for miles, not to mention the whaling ships that have nowhere to escape.
The sailors end up collecting small pieces of blubber scattered on the deck and putting them into a frying pan to refine the oil. This blubber has often been left for two or three days, and there is still some muscle tissue attached to it, so it has begun to deteriorate and stink. The sailors could only endure the stench as much as possible and dispose of the last scraps. When the refining is complete, the whale oil is poured into wooden barrels to cool down and finally moved into the warehouse for storage.
<h1>The last job, of course, is cleaning, and finally it can be cleaner. </h1>
Whaling boats have tips for cleaning up oil, carbide blubber burned under the refining cauldron, and whale skins that are burned to ashes all contain alkali. After dissolving these things in the water, scrubbing the deck will be very clean. One whaling sailor said that washing greasy clothes with these things was "as white as chalk."
Under normal circumstances, the process of hunting and refining blubber from a whale takes about 3 to 5 days, depending on the type of whale, a voyage can kill 20 to 70 whales, even if it is relatively successful. If such a simple calculation, some people may think that they can return with a full load in less than a year, but this is not the case.
Whalers spend most of their time searching for swarms of whales in the vast seas, and it is common not to see a single whale for months. For example, in 1848 W. Captain T. Walker led the Envoy to sea and returned to San Francisco three years later— the ship made a fortune by bringing back 5,300 barrels of whale oil and 43,500 pounds of baleen.
A whaling ship roams the sea for two or three years, and sailors have to endure loneliness. Most of their free time, they can only maintain the boat, practice paddling on the whaling dinghy, and stand on the watchtower, desperately looking for the water jets spewed by the whales.