Cutting
up the blubber blanket for processing and passing to the boilers
beneath the main deck.
Once removed, the blubber blanket is laid on the
deck and cut into smaller pieces by another group of whalers
called the "blubber boys" as in this photograph, these
pieces are then passed through hole in the deck - middle, left -
that pass through to the boilers and machinery to recover the oil
from the tissue. First of all the blubber passes through rapidly
rotating sharp blades that mince it up to smaller pieces still for
a more effective use of the oil in contains. As might be expected,
the blubber is very greasy and oily and so the blubber boys handle it
using a blubber-hook almost like a third hand to move around
pieces of it.
In earlier pre-industrial whaling days, these
processes would have all been carried out by hand. Manually
wielded knives cut the blubber into smaller pieces which would
then be cut up further fist by a hand-knife and then later on by a
device with two sets of knives at right angles to each other. In
any case, every part of the processing of the whale would have
been a manual operation including the feeding of the blubber into
the great pair of try-pots and then the ladling out again into
barrels. factory ships didn't have wooden barrels, but stored the
processed oil in great metal tanks. Like the oil industry today
even, they referred to the amount of whale oil they obtained as a
figure stated in
barrels.
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