United States or Dominican Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Everything worked well after eight months of frozen inactivity, except that the bilge-pump and the discharge proved to be frozen up; they were cleared with some little difficulty. The engineer reported that to get steam he had used one ton of coal, with wood-ashes and blubber. The fires required to keep the boiler warm consumed one and a quarter to one and a half hundred-weight of coal per day.
The whale drifted on shore and the inhabitants were soon cutting off the meat and blubber. One man, working on the ribs, quickly had a hole made and light began streaming through. The raven said to himself, "Here I have grown quite corpulent during the lazy life I have been leading; I must not let the men see me."
I felt much interest in these details; and my companion went into the whole history of a whaling expedition, describing the first discovery of the huge fish from the ship; the pursuit in the boats, and the harpooning of the whale; its struggles after having been wounded; its being towed to the ship's side; the subsequent manufacture of oil from the blubber of the animal, and the preparation of whalebone.
Now he tore a strip from his shirt, folded it to proper size, filled his lamp with oil from the blubber, drove the point of his snow knife into the side of his igloo in such manner that the side rested in a flat position on the top of the bowl, and saturating the cloth with the oil he arranged it upon the knife, taking care that it did not touch either side of the bowl.
"You tempt me to murder," he was saying. "It is a deadly sin, my soul, and I have no mind to fry in Hell while my body swings on the Saint Denis road, a crow's dinner. Let Francois live, my soul! My soul, he would stick little Gilles like a pig." Raguyer began to blubber at the thought. "Holy Macaire!" said Francois; "here is a pretty plot a-brewing."
When sufficiently near the land, a strong seine was cautiously drawn around them and they were slowly but surely dragged to the beach; the blubber was stripped from their carcasses and converted into oil.
It poured with rain during those three days but he managed to light little fires in one of the caves with seal blubber and routing out the things in her cave he found everything she had so carefully salved, the cups and plates, the tin of coffee, half empty now everything, even to the tobacco the men had taken from the cache, he found Bompard's tinder-box and the Swedish match box belonging to La Touche.
He liked whale meat, especially the tail-steaks of narwhal, and cold boiled blubber was good in the winter, only it was impossible to cook it because of lack of fuel, unless one was aboard ship or had an alcohol stove in his outfit. The tidbit of the Eskimo was birds' eggs, gathered by the ton in summer-time, rotten before cold weather came, and frozen solid as chunks of ice in winter.
This is done in casks, in which the blubber is placed after it has been cut up into very small portions. The casks are stowed in the hold, and some are placed between decks; and when there has been unusual success, so that there are not casks enough, the blubber is stowed away in bulk among them.
Olaf wounded Ofeig Grettir fatally, but Thorgeir carried him off and sprang on to his ship with him. The Kaldbak men rowed into the fjord and the two parties separated. The following verse was composed on these doings: "Hard were the blows which were dealt at Rifsker; no weapons they had but steaks of the whale. They belaboured each other with rotten blubber.
Word Of The Day