We were getting near enough for me to see things clearly. The vessel’s starboard side was toward us, and there hung the cutting-stage by the gangway. Strangely {47} enough, perhaps, I had never before seen a cutting-stage. When a ship is in port they are not in evidence, and we had had no occasion yet to rig ours. It is a simple affair of three planks, the two shorter ones butted against the side of the ship and resting on the wales. The two short planks keep the outer plank, which is longer, at the proper distance from the side. The planks are bolted together at the outer corners, and are held up by ropes running from the outer corners to the main rigging at one end, and at the other to a post rising above the rail of the ship. Most of the work is done from the long outer plank, which has bolted on its inner edge posts of iron supporting a light railing. It is somewhat of a mystery why the men do not fall off of those few inches of slippery, rocking plank, with nothing at their backs but the wide ocean. They are supposed to have monkey-ropes about their waists—usually forgotten—or a line at their backs along the cutting-stage, and they have long, heavy spades in their hands, which seem to anchor them. Sometimes they do fall off among the sharks, but they rarely come to any harm. But at the time it looked to me like a very insecure footing, and I was sure any house-painter would have rejected it with scorn. The ship turned out to be the Palm, of New Bedford, and the captain was an old friend of Captain Nelson’s. The two stood apart, aft, for some time, watching the busy men about the try-pots. The men were stripped to the waist, most of them, and laughing and talking among themselves like children. Some were passing pieces of blubber from the hatch to the mincers; some were mincing the blubber on those pieces with heavy knives much like a butcher’s cleaver with a handle at each end; some were carrying the minced pieces to the try-pots; and some were stirring the mess in the pots or feeding the fire, with long, two-pronged iron forks in their hands. The black smoke billowed up over their heads, and {48} copper gleamed red in the rays of the low western sun, and the half-naked bodies wet with sweat gleamed red, and there was a reddish tinge to the black smoke. It looked like an orgy of devils about the pots, and when the men came out from behind the try-works I almost expected to see their forked tails hanging down, and cloven feet.