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

oil and yesterday the expedition ‘take’ reached 20,000 barrels. We were now at about
84° E
My overall work was going moderately well - my special interests a bit better - but
it was too early to feel pessimistic because there was at least another 8 weeks of the
season to run! We heard that ‘Powell’ the next tanker - had been delayed and
wouldn't be arriving with mail until the end of February. This dampened some
spirits.
Four days later, the weather had still not permitted ‘Biscoe’ to come alongside us.
On ‘Balaena’ we had been very busy but nothing very special had happened; we had
all got well into the routine of the work. I was really more interested in the mature
females and usually left the males alone, because I couldn't examine every whale in
detail. The foreman, whose English was none too good, called them ‘boys’ and ‘girls’
so when I went along to the poop deck, where his office is, I asked "Any girls about
today?" There were many more boys than girls, so I was often heard to say
regretfully in the lab "damn! - sixteen boys astern and not a single girl". As the
whales were brought in to the factory ship, they were tied on by steel hawsers fixed
to their tail flukes, and towed behind the ship. When they were required a huge pair
of metal tongs lowered by winch was maneuvered to fit over the tail flukes; they
were then winched up one by one onto the after plan. There the flensers stood
waiting to strip off the blubber and skin - just like peeling a huge banana - and take
out the baleen plates from the upper jaw.
Both blubber and baleen are pulled away by winches as the flensers cut with their
long, very sharp flensing knives. The blubber is cut into pieces small enough to be
fed into the mouths of pressure cookers, like large steel sweet jars. They are located at
the side of the plan, standing on the factory deck under the main deck, with their
open mouths flush with the level of the main deck planking. When they are full the
tops are closed and steam is fed in to digest or cook the oil from the blubber. These
boilers are called ‘digesters’ or ‘cookers’. The mass of baleen plates, in one chunk,
about fifteen feet long is cut away and then swings in an arc over the deck,
suspended from overhead derricks, to hang over the side. The rope strop is cut with
a flensing knife and the mass tumbles into the sea. Men are occasionally crushed
against the bulwarks by the 2-ton mass as it swings across the deck. This happened
once on our voyage and I was extra careful when in that vicinity. While all this was
going on my job was to record the species and sex of each whale, measure its length,
make external observations of diatom film, parasites, scars, and if the whale was a
female check whether it was lactating, by examining the mammary glands on the
underside.
Each whale was then attached to the main winch and pulled through an arch in
the ship's superstructure (called Hell's Gate) to the fore plan, where it was
dismembered. First the head was taken off; it is about twenty feet long and weighs
several tons. Then the meat was cut off leaving only the backbone - perhaps 50 - 60
feet long and 5 feet high. The rear end of the backbone was shackled to a large ring
bolt in the deck and the neural arches joined to the vertebrae comprising the
backbone were cut from the vertebrae. This operation involved a heavy hawser
attached to a winch with an 80-ton pull; on the end was a large hook, sharpened on
the inside, which was fitted into the first neural arch. Tension was then put on the
winch and the hook ripped along the backbone cutting, or tearing, through the
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