The copper held only half a ton. It was furnished with a furnace, and the requisite appendages. A man, designated “tub-filler,” with a ladle of copper, was employed in filling a hogshead with chopped blubber, dragging it to the copper, and emptying it in, until the copper was full. A fire of wood was, in the first instance, applied, but after a copper or two had been boiled, the finks or fritters were always sufficient to boil the remainder without any other fuel. When the blubber was sufficiently boiled, two men, called “copper men,” with two long-handled copper ladles, took the oil and finks out of the copper, and put it into a “fritter barrow,” which, being furnished with a grating of wood in place of a bottom, drained the oil from the fritters, from whence it ran into a wooden tank or cooler, of about five tons’ capacity. Three coolers were usually provided, and placed some feet asunder, a little below each other; a quantity of water was put into each before the oil, and the oil, whenever it came to a certain height in the first cooler, escaped through a hole, by a spout, into the second, the same way into the third, and from thence, by a plug-hole, into the casks or butts in readiness for its reception. When the oil in these butts was thoroughly cold, whatever it had contracted was filled up, and the casks then rolled into the water, and, in rafts of twenty together, were conveyed into the ship. The whalebone was separated from the gum, or substance in which it is imbedded, rubbed clean, packed in bundles, of sixty laminæ or blades each, and taken to the ship in the longboat. Thus prepared, the cargo was conveyed home, either when a sufficiency was procured, or the close of the season put an end to the fishing occupations. While some of the people belonging to the whale-ships were engaged in boiling the blubber, the rest of the crew, it is probable, were occasionally employed in the capture of other whales. Besides the buildings made use of in boiling the blubber, the whale-fishers had other buildings on shore for lodging the blubber-men in, and for the use of the coopers employed in preparing the casks.