I was an experimental cook, and once or twice, while cutting-in whale, tried them with whale meat. The flesh lying under the blubber somewhat resembles beef in color, and is so tender as easily to be torn apart by the hands. But whale meat is not docile under culinary treatment. Gastronomically, it has an individuality of its own, which will keep on asserting itself, no matter how much spice and pepper is put upon it. It is a wild, untamed steed. I propounded it to my guests in the guise of sausages, but when the meal was over the sausages were there still. It can’t be done. Shark can. Shark’s is a sweet meat, much resembling that of the swordfish, but no man will ever eat a whale, at least an old one. The calves might conduct themselves better in the frying-pan. We had many about us whose mothers we had killed, but we never thought of frying them. When a whaler is trying out oil, she is blackened with the greasy soot arising from the burning blubber scraps from stem to stern. It falls like a storm of black snow-flakes. They sift into the tiniest crevice. Of all this my cookery got its full share. It tinged my bread and even my pies with a funereal tinge of blackness. The deck at such times was covered with “horse pieces” up to the top of the bulwarks. “Horse pieces” are chunks of blubber a foot or so in length, that being one stage of their reduction to the size necessary for the try-pots. I have introduced them here for the purpose of remarking that on my passage to and fro, from galley to cabin, while engaged in laying the cloth and arranging our services of gold plate and Sèvres ware, I had to clamber, wade, climb, and sometimes, in my white necktie and swallow-tail coat, actually crawl over the greasy mass with the silver tureen full of “consommé” or “soup Julien,” while I held the gilt-edged and enamelled menu between my teeth. Those were trying-out times for a maritime head butler.