to what we had so long been accustomed to was amazing.  He did certainly give a lumbering splash or two with his immense flukes, but no one could possibly have been endangered by them.  The water was so shallow that when he sounded it was but for a very few minutes; there was no escape for him that way.  As soon as he returned to the surface he set off at his best gait, but that was so slow that we easily hauled up close alongside of him, holding the boats in that position without the slightest attempt to guard ourselves from reprisals on his part, while the officers searched his vitals with the lances as if they were probing a haystack.

Really, the whole affair was so tame that it was impossible to get up any fighting enthusiasm over it; the poor, unwieldy creature died meekly and quietly as an overgrown seal.  In less than an hour from the time of leaving the ship we were ready to bring our prize alongside.

Upon coming up to the whale, sail was shortened, and as soon as the fluke-chain was passed we anchored.  It was, I heard, our skipper’s boast that he could “skin a bowhead in forty minutes;” and although we were certainly longer than that, the celerity with which what seemed a gigantic task was accomplished was marvellous.  Of course, it was all plain-sailing, very unlike the complicated and herculean task inevitable at the commencement of cutting-in a sperm whale.

Except for the head work, removing the blubber was effected in precisely the same way as in the case of the cachalot.  There was a marked difference between the quantity of lard enveloping this whale and those we had hitherto dealt with.  It was nearly double the thickness, besides being much richer in oil, which fairly dripped from it as we hoisted in the blanket-pieces.  The upper jaw was removed for its long plates of whalebone or baleen—­that valuable substance which alone makes it worth while nowadays to go after the mysticetus, the price obtained for the oil being so low as to make it not worth while to fit out ships to go in search of it alone.  “Trying-out” the blubber, with its accompaniments, is carried on precisely as with the sperm whale.  The resultant oil, when recent, is of a clear white, unlike the golden-tinted fluid obtained from the cachalot.  As it grows stale it developes a nauseous smell, which sperm does not, although the odour of the oil is otto of roses compared with the horrible mass of putridity landed from the tanks of a Greenland whaler at the termination of a cruise.  For in those vessels, the fishing-time at their disposal being so brief, they do not wait to boil down the blubber, but, chopping it into small pieces, pass it below as it is into tanks, to be rendered down by the oil-mills ashore on the ship’s return.

This first bowhead yielded us eighteen tuns of oil and a ton of baleen, which made the catch about equal in value to that of a seven-tun cachalot.  But the amount of labour and care necessary in order to thoroughly dry and cleanse the baleen was enormous; in fact, for months after we began the bowhead fishery there was almost always something being done with the wretched stuff—­ drying, scraping, etc.—­which, as it was kept below, also necessitated hoisting it up on deck and getting it down again.