The two captains went into the cabin, and there was nothing for the rest of us to do, for the crew of the Palm were too thoroughly occupied to give us much of a welcome. Everything was covered with oil and with huge pieces of what looked like butcher’s meat, besides the blubber. Whale-meat is red, much the color of beef, only darker, although it does not look like beef. We have recently been asked to eat it, as if that were a new idea. And the newspapers have had their short articles, or perhaps a column, carefully timed, telling us how good it is, and that it is getting to be quite the fashion at New York hotels, and that some firm in Oregon has been asked to put up a million or two cans of it. I even saw some displayed in the window of a fish market for two or three weeks; the same pieces, I judged, from their continually ripening color. It did not seem to be in any great demand. Whalemen have eaten whale-meat for a century or more. It is the meat of the right whale that is eaten. Sperm whale meat is full of oil and not edible. Once is usually enough for a man, a steak cut from the small. Even right whale meat does not seem to be a favorite article of diet, although porpoise steaks are good, and porpoises are whales. At the time I knew nothing of the palatability of whale-meat, and I was interested only in the trying-out process. I stepped carelessly nearer, and my foot slipped on the oily deck, and I should have gone down if it had not been for a strong arm that caught me about the body; and I found myself gazing into the smiling face of Peter Bottom, and at an enormous raw and bloody jaw that was {49} just behind him in the scuppers. It was more than fifteen feet long—the jaw, not Peter’s face—and it was armed with backward curved teeth, not close together, but spaced rather widely; several inches between the teeth. They did not look so very formidable; not nearly so wicked as a shark’s, and the whale’s upper jaw has no teeth. But whale’s teeth were no new thing to me, although I had never seen a jaw freshly cut off, with the ragged and bloody flesh on it. “What are they going to do with it, Peter?” I asked, too much interested in the jaw to thank him for catching me. “Will they try it out? Is there oil in it?” “Oil in what?” said Peter, looking about. “There ’s oil in near everything around here. There ’d have been oil in your clothes and in your hair if I had n’t been here to catch you. Oh, it ’s the jaw you mean. There ’s no oil to speak of in it, but there ’s teeth. When they get eased up on the oil, they ’ll pull the teeth with the help of spades and a tackle. There ’s fine dentists among the crew, I ’m thinking. And maybe they ’ll cut up the jawbone, for it ’s hard and fine, and good for scrimshawing; anything that ’s too big for a tooth to answer for. I ’ll show you, Timmie, when we get some whales of our own.” “What will you carve, Peter?”