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Updated: May 6, 2025
I was in Ben Gibson's boat, of which old Tom was steersman. He would handle the iron too, for as I have said, Ben was just as green in the actual practice of whalemanship as I was myself. We raced with the other boats for the nearest prize, which proved to be a husky bull, longer than the baleener we had killed. I was bow oar, and I found that I could hold my own with the rest of the crew.
A whale will weigh about as many tons as it is feet long in other words, this seventy-three foot whale weighed probably seventy ton and from the blubber we tried out thirty tons of oil nearly half its weight in the tanks beside the baleen! We had been sailing in the wake of the big school of whales we had spied when we killed the baleener.
When it came up again it was still tail-end to the Scarboro and not half a mile away. There was no other whale in sight; but this was a big fellow a right whale, or baleener. After coming up it lay quietly on the water, or moving ahead very slowly. The men were eager to get after it in the boats; but Captain Rogers knew a better way than that to attack a lone whale.
The first kill had been successful. Oil was in sight. But as I soon found out the real work of the voyage had begun as well. The first operation of butchering a whale if it be a baleener is to secure the whalebone. This is a difficult job as I very soon saw. The thick, hard, horny substance must be separated from the jaw; and it sometimes turns the edge of the axe like iron would.
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