After a whale had been “cut in,” or stripped of his blubber, an operation somewhat resembling the unwinding of a lot of tape from a long bobbin, the whale answering for the bobbin as he is turned round and round in the water, and the blubber for the tape as it is windlassed off, the whity-yellowish, skin-stripped carcass was then cast adrift, and it floated and swelled and smelled. Day after day it swelled bigger and smelled bigger. It rose out of the water like an enormous bladder. It would pass us in the morning with the ebb tide and come back with the flood. A coal-oil refinery was a cologne factory compared to it. Sometimes two or three of these gigantic masses would be floating to and fro about us at once. Sometimes one would be carried against our bows and lodge there, the rotten mass lying high out of the water, oozing and pressing over our low bulwarks on deck. We had a fight with one of these carcasses for half an afternoon trying to pry it off with poles, oars, and handspikes. It was an unfavorable mass to pry against. Of course it smelt. For a dead mass it was extremely lively in this respect. There are no words in which to describe a powerful smell so closely as to bring it to the appreciation of the senses. It is fortunate there are none, for some talented idiot to make his work smell and sell would be certain to use them. The gulls used to navigate these carcasses on their regular trips up and down the lagoons. They served these birds as a sort of edible ferry-boat. You might see forty or fifty feeding and sailing on a single carcass. But they seemed downcast--the dead whale was too much for them. Not that they ever got full of the carrion, but they exhausted themselves in the effort. The supply was unlimited; ditto the void within the gull, but there were limits to his strength. CHAPTER IX. OUR BUTTER FIENDS.