People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 March 1894 — Cutting up a Whale. [ARTICLE]

Cutting up a Whale.

When a fish, as the whalers will forever call it, is taken, the

ship gets alongside, and the creature is fixed head and tail in a curious and ancient fashion, so that by slacking or tightening the ropes, each part of the vast body can be brought uppermost. A whole boat may be seen inside the giant mouth, the men hacking with axes, to slice away the ten-foot screen of bone, while others, with sharp spades upon the back, are cutting off the deep great-coat of fat in which kindly Nature has wrapped up this most over-grown df her children. In a few hours all is stowed away in the tanks, and a red islet, with white projecting bones, lies alongside, and sinks like a stone when the ropes are loosed. Some years ago, a man, still lingering upon the back, had the misfortune to have his foot caught between the creature’s ribs, at the instant when the tackles were undone. Some oeons hence those two skeletons, the one hanging by the foot from the other, may grace the museum of a subtropical Greenland, or astonish the students of the Spitzbergen Institute of Anatomy.—A. Conan Doyle on “The Glamour of the Arctic,” in McClure’s Magazine for March.