of furnaces, hardly as elaborate as the familiar copper-hole sacred to washing day.  Square funnels of sheet-iron were loosely fitted to the flues, more as a protection against the oil boiling over into the fire than to carry away the smoke, of which from the peculiar nature of the fuel there was very little.  At one side of the try-works was a large wooden vessel, or “hopper,” to contain the raw blubber; at the other, a copper cistern or cooler of about 300 gallons capacity, into which the prepared oil was baled to cool off, preliminary to its being poured into the casks.  Beneath the furnaces was a space as large as the whole area of the try-works, about a foot deep, which, when the fires were lighted, was filled with water to prevent the deck from burning.

It may be imagined that the blubber from our twenty porpoises made but a poor show in one of the pots; nevertheless, we got a barrel of very excellent oil from them.  The fires were fed with “scrap,” or pieces of blubber from which the oil had been boiled, some of which had been reserved from the previous voyage.  They burnt with a fierce and steady blaze, leaving but a trace of ash.  I was then informed by one of the harpooners that no other fuel was ever used for boiling blubber at any time, there being always amply sufficient for the purpose.

The most interesting part of the whole business, though, to us poor half-starved wretches, was the plentiful supply of fresh meat.  Porpoise beef is, when decently cooked, fairly good eating to a landsman; judge, then, what it must have been to us.  Of course the tit-bits, such as the liver, kidneys, brains, etc., could not possibly fall to our lot; but we did not complain, we were too thankful to get something eatable, and enough of it.  Moreover, although few sailors in English ships know it, porpoise beef improves vastly by keeping, getting tenderer every day the longer it hangs, until at last it becomes as tasty a viand as one could wish to dine upon.  It was a good job for us that this was the case, for while the porpoises lasted the “harness casks,” or salt beef receptacles, were kept locked; so if any man had felt unable to eat porpoise—­well, there was no compulsion, he could go hungry.

We were now in the haunts of the Sperm Whale, or “Cachalot,” a brilliant look-out being continually kept for any signs of their appearing.  One officer and a foremast hand were continually on watch during the day in the main crow’s-nest, one harpooner and a seaman in the fore one.  A bounty of ten pounds of tobacco was offered to whoever should first report a whale, should it be secured, consequently there were no sleepy eyes up there.  Of course none of those who were inexperienced stood much chance against the eagle-eyed Portuguese; but all tried their best, in the hope of perhaps winning some little favour from their hard taskmasters.  Every evening at sunset it was “all hands shorten sail,” the constant drill rapidly teaching even these clumsy landsmen how to find their way aloft, and do something else besides hold on to anything like grim death when they got there.