Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

strip of blubber. The whole process was rather like peeling a banana on a grand
scale!
On the northern side of the plan was the blubber cookery. Strips of blubber
were drawn over to it, cut into smaller pieces which were carried in conveyor
buckets up to the top of the blubber cookery, the blubber ‘loft’, where they were
fed into a dozen huge digesters or pressure cookers. The oil was separated from
the blubber by blowing steam in at the bottom until the oil separated. Each cooker
would hold up to 24 tons of blubber that was cooked for about 5 hrs at 60 lbs/in 2
of steam pressure. The oil separated from the water and was ‘blown off’ to the
separator house, behind the main winch, for a final separation by centrifuging.
The remaining contents of the cooker, grax, consisting of the solid fragments of the
blubber, soluble proteins and some oil, were also sent to the separator house. After
this purification the oil was pumped for storage in whale oil tanks to the north and
west of the station. With a good supply of whales to provide the raw material, the
station could produce 1000 barrels (six barrels to the ton) of oil a day.
On the other side of the plan was the meat cookery, to which the remnants of
the whales – the meat and offal - were drawn by winches. This raw material was
pulled up a steel slip to the top platform or ‘loft’, where guts, tongues and belly
blubber, were fed through circular iron hatches, like drain covers, into special
rotating Kvaerner cookers for cooking. A perforated inner drum rotated under
steam pressure in the cooker and the heat and attrition broke down the tissues,
releasing the oil. The flippers and ribs were cut up by ten-foot long steam saws
and treated the same way. The meat cookery and blubber cookery each had their
own boiler house to provide steam power.
At the back of the meat cookery the huge back fillets of meat – up to ten tons or
more each – were cut up and the chunks were loaded into a bucket conveyor and
taken to a cutter for chopping up. The minced meat was then slowly cooked, to
coagulate the proteins, as it was conveyed through treatment tubes and emerged
at the end onto a vibrating screen. Liquid passed through the screen to a battery of
horizontal centrifuges or desludgers, which removed the fine particles of solids
and sent the liquor to the separator house for recovery of oil. Two large screw
presses squeezed the remaining liquid out of the meat and sent it for oil recovery.
The press cake emerging then travelled to a cutter on the deck above to be broken
up and loaded into huge cylindrical dryers to have the moisture removed. One of
these was used for bone meal, the others for meat. An oil-fired flame was blown
down the drier to evaporate the moisture.
At the head of the plan, farthest from the sea was the bone cookery where the
heads and backbones of the whales were drawn up to the bone loft. Four huge
steam-powered bone saws cut them up into chunks small enough to be fed into
many bone pressure cookers and one Kvaerner cooker. Cooked bone was
unloaded into a skip, wheeled into the meat factory and tipped onto the floor,
where the larger chunks were cut up with axes and fed into the breaker. Bone took
longer to cook than blubber but yielded as much as a third of the oil in a whale.
The dried meat and bone meal was milled and bagged in 50 kg bags. The
factory could produce 150 tons of meal in a day and the huge shed behind the
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