Down came the head upon the deck and a great cheer went up. The "old head" was safe. Immediately afterwards, the mate came forward with a bottle of Jamaica rum and gave each man a swig. "Bringing in his old head," as it is called, is a memorable event in cutting in a whale, and is always celebrated by dealing out a drink all around. Great hunks of meat were cut out from the carcass. These were hung over the bow. The meat was served in the form of steaks and sausages in both forecastle and cabin. And let me give my testimony right here that whale steak is mighty good eating. It tastes something like tender beef, though it is coarser grained and of ranker flavor. We preferred to eat it as steaks, though made into meat balls with gravy it was extremely toothsome. I do not know how whale would taste if served on the home table, but at sea, after months of salt horse and "sow belly," it was delicious. The hunks became coated with ice over the bow and kept well. They lasted us for several weeks. When the carcass was cut adrift it went floating astern. Flocks of gulls and sea birds that had been constantly hovering about the ship in hundreds waiting for the feast swooped down upon it. The body washed slowly out of sight, still swarmed over by the gulls. The head rested in the waist near the poop. It was, I should say, twelve feet high at the crest of the bow, and suggested some strange sort of tent. I stepped inside it without bending my head and walked about in it. Its sides were shaggy with the long hair hanging from the teeth or baleen, and the interior resembled, in a way, a hunter's forest lodge made of pine boughs. If the head had been in a forest instead of on the deck of a ship it would have formed an ideal shelter for a winter's night with a wood fire burning at the opening. Only the lower tip of the head or what we might call the nose rested on the deck. It was supported otherwise upon the teeth. I now had my first opportunity to see baleen in its natural setting. The teeth viewed from the outside looked something like the interior of a piano. The whale's gums, following the bony skeleton of the jaw, formed an arched and undulant line from nose tip to the back of the jaw. The front teeth were six inches long; the back ones were ten feet. Each tooth, big and little alike, was formed of a thin slab of bluish whalebone, almost flat. The largest of these slabs were six inches broad at their base in the gum. The smallest were an inch. All tapered to a point. They were set in the gum with the flat surfaces together and almost touching. They were extremely pliant and at the outer ends could be pulled wide apart. The inner edges were hung with black coarse hair, which seemed exactly like that of a horse's tail. The hair on the small front teeth was an inch long perhaps; on the back teeth, it was from six to ten inches long.