A
fin whale being hauled aboard a factory ship, here reaching the
top of the slipway. The pleats that mark out the rorquals can
be easily seen in the picture.
The invention of the slipway and onboard
flensing was another great step forwards in the technology of industrial
whaling. Prior to this, whales had been flensed by the side of the
whaling ships, with perhaps just occasional smaller catches being
hauled aboard using cranes or winches. The advantages are numerous
allowing whales to be flensed in sea conditions that would have
made outboard flensing impossible. It also meant that the whales
could be worked on by many men at the same time and allowed for
the disarticulation of parts of the whales being taken to other
parts of the deck for further processing using bone-saws for
instance.
None of the whale was in danger of being lost
this way and the risks taken by the flensers were reduced
considerably as was the improvement of their working conditions,
though both still remained hard and fraught with risk from blades,
saws, winches, cables and pieces of whale weighing tonnes each.
As ever in any of man's endeavours, forward
advances in technology were more often put to work to improve
profit, rather than improve the lot of the workers involved.
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