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SPERMACETI OINTMENT. This is made of a quarter of a pint of fine salad oil, a quarter of a pound of white wax, and half an ounce of spermaceti, melted over a gentle fire, and kept stirring till the ointment is cold. SPICES. As it regards health, spices are generally improper; but black pepper, ginger, and cayenne, may be esteemed the best.
About midnight that steak was cut and cooked; and lighted by two lanterns of sperm oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstan-head, as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on whale's flesh that night.
No attempt is made to separate the oil and spermaceti beyond boiling the "head matter," as it is called, by itself first, and putting it into casks which are not filled up with the body oil.
All that was needed was to pump the oil from the bark into the tramp's tanks. "And we've got a good bit of bone and spermaceti, too," said Captain Rogers. "I consider you one of the crew still, Webb. Or, if you are so determined, you may pull out here and I will give you your hundred dollars as I promised." "I feel that I should go home. Captain," I assured him.
They had kept the fire ablaze by pouring fresh spermaceti into the furnace of flesh which they had constructed, or rather excavated, in the back of the leviathan; and so far as that kind of fuel was concerned, they might have gone on roasting shark-steaks for a twelvemonth.
This sperm could be reached by simply removing the "junk" which forms the exterior portion of a cachalot's huge snout, and sinking a shaft into the skull. Here would, or should, be found a cavity filled with a delicate cellular tissue, containing ten or a dozen large barrels full of the purest spermaceti. They did not stand in need of anything like this quantity.
"The northern whales are black they are called the black whales; but the southern, or spermaceti whales, are not so dark in color." Captain Wilson then, at Percival's request, gave him an account of how the whales were caught, for he had been several voyages himself in the northern whale fishery.
For the first and only time in my experience, the fluke-chain was actually torn through the piece to which it was fast two feet of solid gristle ripped asunder. Away went the head with its L150 to L200 worth of pure spermaceti, disappearing from view almost immediately. It had no sooner gone than more sail was set, the yards were squared, and the vessel kept away up the Straits for shelter.
The last scientific contribution to the matter was the discovery by an analytical chemist, Dr. Pinkus, that the waxy mixture of which the bust is composed consists in definite proportion of spermaceti. "Nonsense!" reply Dr. Bode's supporters, "Shakespeare makes Hotspur speak of 'parmaceti, and it was well known to the doctors of Salerno in 1100 A.D., and probably used by the ancients."
It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally expresses. In those times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for light, but only as an ointment and medicament. It was only to be had from the druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb.