Our fishing was over for that time. Meanwhile one of the
harpooners had brought out a number of knives, with which all
hands were soon busy skinning the blubber from the bodies.
Porpoises have no skin, that is hide, the blubber or coating of
lard which encases them being covered by a black substance as
thin as tissue paper. The porpoise hide of the boot maker is
really leather, made from the skin of the BELUGA, or "white
whale," which is found only in the far north. The cover was
removed from the "tryworks" amidships, revealing two gigantic
pots set in a frame of brickwork side by side, capable of holding
200 gallons each. Such a cooking apparatus as might have graced
a Brobdingnagian kitchen. Beneath the pots was the very simplest
of furnaces, hardly as elaborate as the familiar copper-hole
sacred to washing day. Square funnels of sheet-iron were loosely
fitted to the flues, more as a protection against the oil boiling
over into the fire than to carry away the smoke, of which from
the peculiar nature of the fuel there was very little. At one
side of the try-works was a large wooden vessel, or "hopper," to
contain the raw blubber; at the other, a copper cistern or cooler
of about 300 gallons capacity, into which the prepared oil was
baled to cool off, preliminary to its being poured into the
casks.
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