[Illustration: CUTTING IN.] CHAPTER VI. “Cutting in.” As we are now ready to “cut in” the whale, we will briefly explain the _modus operandi_. In the first place the decks are cleared, in order to have room to work. The ponderous cutting tackles are swayed up to the lower-mast head (the main), the strongest point any where above a ship’s deck. Large hawsers are then rove through these blocks, then through similar ones on deck, to the windlass, in the forward part of the ship. To the lower blocks are attached ponderous iron hooks, weighing over one hundred pounds each. These hooks are for the purpose of “hooking on” to the blubber, and can be put on and taken off the blocks at pleasure. And now, suspended in stages over the side, the first and second mates, armed with their long spades, begin cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above one of the fins. This done, a broad semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew, striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving at the windlass. The entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mastheads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave of the billows, till at last a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upward and backward from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight, dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber. Now, as the blubber envelops the whale, as we described in the last chapter, precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. The strain, constantly kept up by the windlass, continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water; and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the “scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of the mates—the chief mate separating the head from the body while the whale is being rolled over the first time—and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious, blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky; and every one present must take good care to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him overboard.