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

arches. The operation was repeated on the other side of the backbone. The skull and
the back bone were then sawn up into smaller pieces by steam-driven bone saws –
each about l2 feet long - and the men dragged the pieces and slid them into the meat
and bone pots. These were like the blubber digesters - just visible as circular holes in
the deck - and pressurized steam rendered the pieces into oil, meat and bone
products. Much of the meat was frozen (if Robbie passed it as fit) or made into meat
meal and meat extract; the heart and guts went into other pots to make a poorer
quality meal. The liver went to the liver plant for liver oil. The remaining offal was
dragged by winch over to a gap in the bulwarks on the port side near the front of the
fore plan and slipped into the sea. In half an hour nothing remains of a monster
eighty or more feet long; the largest I measured was a blue whale of 97ft..
The biologist's job is an adventurous and potentially dangerous one, the most
dangerous in the whole operation. On deck, disorientated and bathed in clouds of
steam, one had to keep one’s wits about one, to be looking around all the time for
wires and hooks. A harmless cable lying in innocent curves on the deck would
suddenly become a taught wire 6-8 feet above the deck as winch power was
suddenly applied by turning on the steam pressure. It often seemed that the whalers,
whose sense of humour was primitive, delighted to try to catch me out in this way. In
escaping such disasters it would have been easy to step into one of the open digesters
and fall fifteen feet to its bottom - if it was still empty. The Biologist Inspector was the
only person on the ship who, in the course of his job, ran the gauntlet of every one of
the specialized operations I have just described, from the time the whale appeared at
the top of the slipway, until the offal disappeared over the side. The most dangerous
elements were the removal of the baleen, (as I have mentioned), and the ripping of
the backbone (when the sharpened hook sometimes came adrift and it snaked
through the air on the end of the tensioned (70 ton) hawser). On one occasion it did
hit me as it flew through the air, fortunately a glancing blow, otherwise it would
have killed me. One of my jobs was to examine a number of vertebrae to check
whether their ‘epiphyses’ (disks joined at each end of a vertebra), were fused to the
centrum (the ‘cylinder’ of the vertebra) or not. This information was needed to work
out the progress, with age, of fusion and the stage at which physical maturity was
attained, that is when growth in length stopped.
I also had to collect internal organs for my research, such as the ovaries and testes,
adrenal, thyroid or other organs and to check on the stomach contents. The ovaries
were a particular difficulty, because the whalers' work went on at an inexorable pace
- they would not stop for me, because time was money. So often I found myself
chasing and clambering over a huge pile of slippery offal trying to ‘excavate’ the
second of a pair of ovaries from the heap, right up to the last moment when the guts
were about to slip over the side. If one had gone over with the remains one would
have lasted a few minutes at most in the cold Antarctic waters, for the ship was
moving and the lifeboat drill at St Vincent many weeks before had shown the futility
of lowering a boat to save a man overboard. But I had become used to it by then and
knew when and where to be careful. I nipped in when I could to examine the
backbone and later the insides, and collect bits and pieces which I took down to the
lab for examination later, when samples would be popped into jars of fixative, or
frozen. Sometimes, frustratingly I had to break off my search for the second ovary,
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