It did not take long to open the casks. That is perhaps the simplest form of cooperage. They opened enough to give them the heads and hoops that were needed. Then came the bundles of staves, which were undone carefully, one bundle at a time, so as not to get the staves mixed. These staves, being old and oil-soaked, were quickly set up, and the casks rolled over to join the others already lashed by the bulwarks, to be filled with hot oil. They were filled through a big copper funnel—Peter called it a tunnel—with a fine wire strainer fastened in it, and a nozzle that fitted in the bunghole of a barrel. The mouth of this funnel was large and square, and there was a double bend in its long nose, setting off the mouth from the bunghole by a couple of feet. They do these things differently now. There are large iron cooling-tanks below decks, and the hot oil is poured into them through a pipe which opens in the deck near the try-pots. I have no experience with them, for they were unknown to me in 1872, so that I cannot say whether the oil cools as quickly in the tanks as it did in the casks. The tanks save a great deal of work, although we had men enough to do the work except when we were very much crowded, with two or three whales at once fast alongside, waiting to be cut-in and tried out. The casks that had been filled were beginning to show a slight ooze of oil at their seams. I was watching them when Peter Bottom stopped beside me. He gave me a friendly smile. “This ’ll never do,” he said, “will it? ’Most all the casks leak at first. You ’ll hear a deal of setting up hoops before we stow it—and after, too, or the barrels might be empty, some of ’em, when we {101} got home. A lot of oil can leak out in four years, if it ’s only a few drops a day.” I made no answer, and Peter glanced at me. “What ’s the matter? Little mite seasick?” “Oh, Peter!” I said. “The smell!” He smiled again. “Lor’ love you,” he said, “this is nothin’. It ’s pretty bad sometimes, when we ’ve had the try-works going for three or four days and nights. Then we ’re so tired we can hardly stand, and there ’s so much oil and water over everything you can’t walk the deck. Why, many a time, I ’ve sat down and slid across the deck on the seat of my trousers. And the foul smoke chokes and strangles you, and it feels as if it had got all through you, and you ’d like to scrape your lungs with a knife, to get off the soot. Everything ’s covered with oil, your clothes soaked with it, your skin full of it, your feet, hands, and hair. Break a biscuit and it shines with oil, and cut a piece o’ meat out o’ the kid and the knife leaves its trail of oil. There ’s no gettin’ away from it, and you fair hate yourself. But cheer up, Tim, it ’ll soon be over, and then you ’ll see such a cleanin’ up as you never knew. Sperm oil washes off easy, praise the pigs!”