Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [16]
"It is as if from the open field a brick-kiln were transported to her planks," wrote Herman Melville of a ship's tryworks.
The timbers beneath are of a peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height.... On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the great try-pots, two in number, and each of several barrels' capacity.... Sometimes they are polished with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punch-bowls.
In earlier times, the trying out had been done on shore, but as whaling trips grew longer due to increased demand for oil and whalebone—and the increased scarcity of whales—the blubber, especially in warm weather, would begin to spoil over time. Residents of whaling ports, who had suffered the stench and smoke of the tryworks, may have welcomed the move to shipboard rendering, for there was nothing refined about the business. The first fire of a voyage would be lit with wood, but "the unmelted skin of the whale made a wonderful fuel, and the whale was therefore cooked in a fire of his own kindling." The green hands had to get used to the smell—"like the left wing of the day of judgment"—for in flush times the try-pots could boil for a week, and the hands minced unceasingly for their i/15oth of a share. At any moment, the sails and rigging might catch fire while they were trying out, and the ship would burn to the waterline. If the seas were rough, the boiling oil could splash and scald them; they could be crushed by slabs of blubber as they stripped it from the whale, which hung from chains off the side of the ship. They might slash themselves with the sharp blades of their tools or slip on decks slick with oil and blood as they cut the blubber into slabs called blanket pieces. These were cut into horse pieces—so named because they were cut on sawhorses—which were then cut partway through into thin slices, or "leaves," so that the slab remained intact on one side, looking very much like the pages of a book. "'Bible leaves! Bible leaves!' This is the invariable cry from the mates to the mincer," wrote Melville. "It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin slices as possible, inasmuch as by doing so the business of boiling out the oil is much accelerated and its quantity considerably increased, besides perhaps improving it in quality."
After the men finished rendering the blubber, they dumped what remained of the carcass back into the sea amid a frenzy of sharks, then scoured the ship with lye leached from the cinders and ashes of the fires. No matter the scrubbing, they never got rid of the smoky stench, which seeped into the wooden deck, the canvas sails, their clothes, and their own pores. It was said that sailing vessels downwind of a whaling ship could smell it from miles away. The only "clean ship" was one that returned to port without any oil in its hold.
Upon their return to port, the hands might have nothing to show for their time at sea, as they'd borrowed against their share of the profits, so they had no choice but to ship back out again, into the drift ice and doldrums and winter storms, the fevers and scurvy, the salt pork and hardtack. Is it any wonder that Melville imagined that the men squandered what oil they could? "There they lay," he wrote of the Pequod's crew, "in their triangular oaken