Flensing

These were tied together and rowed ashore, where they were cut into smaller pieces to be boiled into oil in large copper kettles (trypots).

Both parties only cut off the blubber and the head, leaving the rest of the carcass to polar bears and sea birds.

In California during the 19th century whales could be winched ashore either at a sandy beach or, in the case of the Carmel Bay station just south of Monterey, they were brought to the side of a stone-laid quay to be flensed.

Here whales were flensed alongside the ship, the blubber cut into small pieces and put into casks to either be boiled into oil at a station ashore, or, by late century, on the return to port.

At about the same time Basque whalers began trying-out oil aboard ship, but this appears to have met limited success: the method was not fully utilized until the late 18th century.

Flensing at stations in the early modern era (late nineteenth century) differed little from earlier methods.

At Grytviken, a whaling station at South Georgia, after the blubber had been stripped off the carcass by a group of flensers, a gang of three lemmers would pull it aside with the aid of steam winches and blocks to remove the meat and bone.

[5] At first, factory ships, simply more modern versions of earlier American whaleships, could only anchor in a bay to process whales.

[6] In the southern summer of 1912-13 the first successful attempt was made by a Norwegian factory ship at catching and flensing whales in the pack ice off South Orkney.

On each side of the whale there were large chocks built into the deck so the carcass wouldn't roll in a rough sea.

With the use of a winch on an arch at the center of the ship two strips of blubber were pulled off (like the peeling of a banana), which was attended by "a crackling like a bonfire of peasticks."

Next the lower jaw, which can be as long as twenty feet (6 m) for a blue whale, was lifted skyward, wrenched off and the baleen cut out.