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. Beneath the furnaces was a space as large as the whole
area of the try-works, about a foot deep, which, when the fires
were lighted, was filled with water to prevent the deck from
burning.

It may be imagined that the blubber from our twenty porpoises
made but a poor show in one of the pots; nevertheless, we got a
barrel of very excellent oil from them. The fires were fed with
"scrap," or pieces of blubber from which the oil had been boiled,
some of which had been reserved from the previous voyage. They
burnt with a fierce and steady blaze, leaving but a trace of ash.
I was then informed by one of the harpooners that no other fuel
was ever used for boiling blubber at any time, there being always