The lance in use was an iron spear with a wooden handle, altogether ten or twelve feet in length. The capture of the fish, in which, owing to the particular excellence of the situation, they seldom failed, being accomplished, it was towed by the boats, rowing one before another “like a team of horses,” to the ship’s stern, where it lay untouched from one to two or three days. The fat being then removed was carried to the shore, where ample conveniences being erected, it was afterwards subjected to heat in a boiler, and the greater part of the oil extracted. As the usual process of the early fishers for extracting the oil may be interesting to some readers, I shall attempt to describe it, following the accounts by captains Anderson and Gray, whose papers are preserved among the manuscripts in the British Museum. The blubber being made fast to the shore, a “waterside man,” standing in a pair of boots, mid-leg in the sea, flayed off the fleshy parts, and cut the blubber into pieces, of about two hundred weight each. Two men, with a barrow, then carried it, piece by piece, to a stage or platform, erected by the side of the works, where a man, denominated a “stage-cutter,” armed with a long knife, sliced it into pieces, one and a half inches thick, and about a foot long, and then pushed it into an adjoining receptacle, called a “slicing cooler.” Immediately beyond this cooler, five or six choppers were arranged in a line, with blocks of whales’ tails before them; and adjoining these blocks was another vessel, called a “chopping cooler,” of two or three tons’ capacity. These men, being situated between the two coolers, took the sliced blubber from the slicing cooler, and, after reducing it into little bits, scarcely one-fourth of an inch thick, and an inch or two long, pushed it into the chopping cooler. These operations were carried on as near as convenient to the place where the copper was erected.