Their cavortings were too much for Aziel Wright, George Hall, and Miller, three of the boatsteerers. They easily got permission, and Hall was first with a porpoise-iron, and was getting out on the jibboom. Miller got down into the forechains, Wright staying on deck. Hall and Miller got their porpoises, and then more, until there were half a dozen thumping the deck. The whole crew had gathered, and the men laid hold of the line when a porpoise was struck, and hauled him on deck by main strength. Then they killed them. It seemed to me a horrid job, but I watched it, as boys will watch horrid jobs; in the same spirit which used to prompt me to go occasionally to John Green’s slaughter-house, and see steers felled with a sledge, and have their throats ripped up with a sharp knife as you would rip up an old boot leg. They used to kill sheep there in what seemed to me a particularly brutal manner, and I have seen the men step up nonchalantly to a calf hung by its bound hind legs, seize it by the nose, and cut its head off, without a sound of remonstrance from the calf. These methods were quite usual at the time. Boys are queer little savages. {124} We had porpoise-steak for two or three days after that, and then hash. Porpoise-steak tastes pretty good to a man who has been nearly two months without fresh meat. A porpoise is really a small whale, and is roughly about the size of a swordfish. There must be comparatively few people who have not seen porpoises. The meat is much like whale-meat, but more tender and better flavored. A fine oil is extracted from the porpoise, the best coming from the jaw. The porpoise jaw-oil is used for chronometers and watches. Mr. Baker thought we might as well get everything the porpoises had to give, and he had the blubber tried out, and the jaw-oil. There was a small quantity of jaw-oil, to which we added later. {125} CHAPTER XIII In 1872 the sperm whale had almost disappeared from the Atlantic Ocean, and old whalemen thought that he was doomed to practical extinction. For twenty years or more sperm-whaling voyages had been lengthened to an average of nearly four years, and it had been necessary to hunt him over all the tropic and temperate seas of the world. I had reason to believe that Captain Nelson had not really expected to find any whales on the Hatteras grounds, and I know that he expected to find none on the Western grounds. Besides, it was late in the season by the time we reached the Western grounds, and it was likely that the whales would have disappeared, if they had been there at all. The mastheads were kept manned, however, as they were pretty generally.