Never Changes His Clothes

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23269, 11 February 1939, Page 9 (Supplement)

Never Changes His Clothes

HALE °il is a clear white \X/ oil in making soap and margarine," said F. 0; Ommanney, speaking from one of fche British Broadcasting studios last tear, "and the by-products from this inake glycerine, -which rs used, >mong other things, for high-explo-fcive. There are two main types of whales —the whalebone whales and Ihe toothed whales. It is the whaletone whales which give the whale t>il used in commerce. "Now you probably know that the jrhale is a mammal and not a fish, although he looks, extraordinarily like trne with his long tapering fish-like lhape and his flippers like fins. So that ft follows that he's warm-blooded like

you and me and not cold-blooded like a fish. "Because he live!) all his lifo in tho sea, often the very cold seas around the Antarctic Continent, he wears clothes just as you and I do. But the difference betM-een the clothes we wear and the clothes the whale wears is that we change ours sometimes —quite often, some of us—but the whale never changes his and carries his suit of blubber—that is, fibres impregnated with fat —on him all his life. "The big Blue whales which the whalers hunt in the south have, a coat of blubber which is anything from three to six inches thick all over the body. At the whaling station or on the factory ships at sea this beautiful white coat of blubber isi stripped off the whale's dead carcase.

The men pull it off with steel hawsers, cutting under it with long-

The Whale in the Southern

handled knives, so that it comes off in three long strips and looks, when this is done, rather like the pith and skin of a gigantic orange—if yon can imagine an orange with a blue or a black-and-white skin. When it has been peeled off like this it is cut into blocks and pushed under a circular knife like a bacon slicer, which revolves with terrific speed and deafening noise, of course. It cuts the blocks of blubber into thin slices and shoots them into the conveyor which takes them to the pressure boilers. "In the latest type of pressure boilers it is only five hours before a pale liquid can bo run off at the bottom into sepaiators. This is whalo oil mixed with water. This mixture passes through separators very much like those in a dairy which separate milE from cream. In tlio whaling factory the separator gets rid of all tho water out of the whalo oil Which, at the end of the process, should bo a fine, clear, thin, oily liquid. Stored in Tanks "It is then stored in huge tanks either at the whaling station or, in a floating factory, on board ship until it reaches Europe and is sold. The blubber gives the highest grade, that is to say, tho purest, whale oil, but the meat, as they call the rest of it, and the bone give an oil which is almost as good. "In the spring a decent-sized Blue whale yields on an average about ninety barrels of oil, but in the autumn he may have fattened up to an average of a hundred and twenty-five to a hundred and thirty barrels. When you next have a bath just think of your cake of soap spouting and blowing through the Southern Ocean."