The two blubber-room men with short handled spades cut the great blankets of blubber in what in whaling parlance are called "horse pieces." These horse pieces are two or three feet long and about six inches wide. They are pitched into tubs on deck and the tubs dragged forward to the mincing vat. This is an immense oblong tub across the top of which is fastened a plank. Two sailors with mincing knives are stationed at each end of the plank. The mincing knife is like a carpenter's drawing knife, except that the edge is on the outside. The sailor lays a horse piece along the plank. Then grasping the mincing knife by its two handles, he passes the blade back and forth from side to side across the blubber until it has been cut into leaves something like those of a book, each leaf perhaps a quarter of an inch thick and all of them held together at the back by the black skin. Thus minced the horse pieces are pitch-forked into the caldrons that are kept bubbling with boiling oil. When the oil has been boiled out of them, the horse-pieces, now shrunken and twisted into hard, brittle lumps, called "scrap," are skimmed off and thrown into a vat at the port side of the try-works to be used later as fuel in trying out the remainder of the blubber. The oil is ladled off into a cooling vat at the starboard side where, after it has cooled, it is siphoned into hogsheads or tanks and these are later stowed in the hold. The trying out of the whale gave several delicacies to the forecastle menu. Hardtack biscuit soaked in buckets of sea water and then boiled in the bubbling caldrons of oil made relishing morsels. The crisp, tried-out blubber, which looked like honey-comb, was palatable to some. Black whale skin freed of blubber and cut into small cubes and pickled in salt and vinegar had a rather agreeable taste, though it was much like eating pickled rubber. These things with whale steaks and whale sausages made trying-out days a season of continual feasting. At night "scrap" was put into an iron basket swung between the two chimneys of the try-works and set on fire, making a flaring yellow blaze which lighted the ship from stem to stern and threw weird shadows everywhere. The beacon not only gave us plenty of light to work by, but advertised the brig's good luck to any ship which happened in sight of us. In the blubber-room, holes were cut in a blanket piece and rope yarns, having been rubbed upon the blubber, were coiled in the hole and lighted. As they burned they lighted the oil from the blubber. These unique lamps had all the oil in a ten-ton blanket piece to draw on. It was only the wick that ever gave out. New strands of rope yarn had to be provided from time to time. Three or four of these lamps blazing and spluttering made the blubber-room bright.