It was a busy and interesting scene. The strange, unfamiliar cries of the Orientals mingled with the shouts of the cutters and the jarring rattle of the winch as the huge strips of fat were torn from the whale’s body, fed into the slicing machine, carried upward, and dumped into enormous vats to be boiled or “tried out” for the oil. When the blubber was entirely gone, the carcass was split open by chopping through the ribs of the upper side and cutting into the abdomen, letting a ton or more of blood pour out and spread in a crimson flood over the slip. A hook was attached to the tongue bones (hyoids) and the heart, lungs, liver, and intestines were drawn out in a single mass. The body was then hauled to the “carcass platform” at right angles to, and somewhat above, the “flensing slip,” the flesh was torn from the bones in two or three great masses by the aid of the winch, and the skeleton disarticulated. [Illustration: Flensing a whale at one of the Vancouver Island stations. A great strip of blubber is being torn from the animal’s side. ] After the bones had been split and the flesh cut into chunks two or three feet square, they were boiled separately in great open vats which bordered the carcass platform on both sides. When the oil had been extracted, the bones were crushed by machinery making bone meal to be used as fertilizer, and the flesh, artificially dried and sifted, was converted into a very fine guano. Even the blood, of which there were several tons, was carefully drained from the slip into a large tank, and boiled and dried for fertilizer. Finally, the water in which the blubber had been tried out was converted into glue. The baleen, or whalebone, which alone remained to be disposed of, was thrown aside to be cleaned and dried as opportunity offered. The baleen of all the fin whales is short, stiff, and coarse and in Europe and America has but little value. In Japan, however, it is made into many useful and beautiful things. I learned that the cutting operations at Sechart and the other west coast stations were conducted in the Norwegian way which is followed in almost all parts of the world except Japan. In the Island Empire a new method has been adopted, which, while it has the advantage of being very rapid, is correspondingly dangerous and will not, I think, ever be widely used. CHAPTER II HOW A HUMPBACK DIVES AND SPOUTS Although it had been possible to secure but few good pictures during my first trip at sea on the _Orion_, nevertheless I had learned much about the ways of humpbacks. One impression, which I subsequently found to be correct, was that this would prove to be the most interesting of all large whales to study—at least from the standpoint of its habits.