To a greater degree, people are now happily flensing each other under their real names, complete with a profile photo of themselves.
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" As an adolescent, Winton witnessed sperm whales "dragged flukes first up the flensing deck, their heads hacked off with a steam-powered saw.
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Every year our grade school class field-tripped to the town museum, where we heard stories about courageous Dutch and English settlers who harpooned and lanced whales before towing them ashore and using their flensing knives to cut blubber into long strips.
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Mr. Gray, who wrote the beloved "Streetscapes" column for The Times for nearly 30 years, offered to pay for the "flensing" if the school would leave his skeleton on display for 10 years, "or until it gets stolen by the Sixth Form," the senior class.
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Flensing IslandsThe Flensing Islands () are a group of small islands lying west of Foca Point on the west side of Signy Island, in the South Orkney Islands. The islands were named "Flenserne" on a chart of 1912–13 by Norwegian whaling captain Petter Sorlle. The name Flensing Islands, suggested by the earlier Norwegian name, was used by Discovery Investigations personnel on the Discovery II who surveyed the group in 1933. Flensing is the process of stripping skin and blubber from whales.
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According to legends he was skinned alive and beheaded so is often depicted holding his flayed skin or the curved flensing knife with which he was skinned.
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Flensing at Whalers Bay, Deception Island Flensing is the removing of the blubber or outer integument of whales, separating it from the animal's meat. Processing the blubber (the subcutaneous fat) into whale oil was the key step that transformed a whale carcass into a stable, transportable commodity. It was an important part of the history of whaling. The whaling that still continues in the 21st century is both industrial and aboriginal.
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During the open-boat whaling era in Japan (1570s-1900s), whales were winched ashore by large capstans. There, men with flensing knives would not only cut up the blubber into long strips with the assistance of these capstans, but also cut up the viscera and bones to make various products. Flensing at the Tyee Company whaling station at Murder Cove, Alaska Shore whaling flensing methods elsewhere differed little from the European whaling mentioned above. 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.
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A humpback whale about to be flensed at the Cheynes Beach Whaling Station in the early 1950s Flensing at stations in the early modern era (late nineteenth century) differed little from earlier methods. In Finnmark the whales were merely flensed at low-tide. Later mechanical winches and slipways were introduced. The whale was winched up the slipway onto a flensing plan, where men with long-handled knives shaped like hockey sticks would cut off long strips of blubber with the help of winches.
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Men using flensing knives to cut up a whale. The building that now houses the museum was built in 1845 by prosperous merchant whaler Benjamin Huntting II at the height of the town's maritime prosperity. Designed by Minard Lafever, the house is an elaborate Greek revival structure with a temple-front portico and fluted Corinthian columns. In an unusual homage to the source of Huntting's fortune, Lafever edged the roof line with a row of decorative crenallation in the form of alternating flensing knives and blubber spades.
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Katz was the subject of the 2009 punk rock song "Human(e) Meat (The Flensing of Sandor Katz)", a satirical vegan response to Katz's 2006 chapter on "Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat" in The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved.
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This technique proved too cumbersome, resulting in the stern slipway being adopted by later factory ships. Tønnessen & Johnsen (1982), p. 351. in the Lancing in 1925 flensing could be performed entirely on the open sea.Tønnessen & Johnsen (1982), pp. 353-55.
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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. A further breakthrough occurred in the 1923–24 season when the Norwegian factory ship Sir James Clark Ross spent an entire season in the Ross Sea flensing whales alongside the ship while anchored in Discovery Inlet off the Ross Ice Shelf.For an account of this voyage see Does (2003). With the introduction of the stern slipwayIn 1926 the C.A. Larsen, named after the Norwegian pioneer in Antarctic whaling Carl Anton Larsen, had a slipway built in its bows.
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The jobs held by the women allow the men to continue to hunt full-time. But one consequence of this division of labor is that Thule women are losing their knowledge of traditional skills faster than the men. These skills include flensing, treating and sewing skins.
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Overfishing caused the collapse of the humpback population by 1962 and a shift in focus to sperm whales.Frost, p.35-6. Remains of Tangalooma's concrete flensing deck in 2010. Overfishing also saw the closure of some whaling stations before the government ban on the industry was introduced.
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Schmitt et al. (1980), p.113. The next season, 1866, he used the Sileno and the iron steamers Staperaider and Vigilant- identical ship, bark-rigged, 116-feet long, each carrying two whaleboats and equipped with steam tryworks and powerful winches to bring aboard large strips of blubber when flensing whales.Schmitt et al.
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Men flensing a whale in California, circa 1901 The skills learned from processing drift whales, such as flensing (stripping the blubber), may have led to seeking out live ones. For example, the Makah of Washington State have been hunting grey whales for at least 1500 years, but were harvesting stranded whales for many centuries before that. On the other side of North America, drift whale scavenging on the Outer Banks of North Carolina led to organised hunts, documented at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum. When the early settlers arrived in New England, they saw from the deck of the Mayflower a huge number of whales, far more than they were accustomed to see in European waters, according to American historian W. Jeffrey Bolster.
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Blubber Bay was where Captain Cook first contacted the Tla'amin Nation. Blubber Bay was a whaling station in the heyday of that industry on the British Columbia Coast, where blubber was sliced up (flensing) and rendered (try pot) from captured cetaceans. In 1970 there were 35 families living in a small company town owned by Domtar Chemical Company, quarrying limestone for concrete manufacture.
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The museum is filled with the equipment of the whaling ships: guns, try pots, flensing knives, blubber spades, figureheads, and a large collection of scrimshaw carvings etched on whale ivory. In the Harpoon Room, harpoons line the walls along with whale vertebrae and shipbuilding tools. Elsewhere are paintings of 19th-century whale hunts. The museum owns the entire building, allowing the Masonic Lodge to meet upstairs.
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The most famous example is the fictional Pequod in Moby-Dick, based on the whaling industry in Nantucket. Whaleships carried multiple whaleboats, open rowing boats used to chase and harpoon the whale. The whaleship would keep watch from the crowsnest, so it could sail to the signal and lash the dead whale alongside. Then the work of flensing (butchering) began, to separate the whale into its valuable components.
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On the flensing deck several workers use specialized tools to butcher the whale. Usable product is delivered to the lower decks of the ship for further processing and refrigerated storage. Non usable product is dumped back into the ocean. Additional regulations from the United Nations International Maritime Organization took effect on August 1, 2011, prohibiting ships using heavy oil from navigation in the Antarctic Treaty System area to prevent pollution.
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Whale-Fishing. Facsimile of a Woodcut in the "Cosmographie Universelle" of Thevet, in folio: Paris, 1574. A Whale Brought alongside a Ship, by the Scottish John Heaviside Clark, 1814. Flensing is in process. Photo of a working whaling station in Spitzbergen, Norway, 1907 This article discusses the history of whaling from prehistoric times up to the commencement of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986.
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Flensing deck of whaling station (1952-1962) and modern accommodation. Originally a whaling station, Tangalooma Island Resort (formerly known as Tangalooma Wild Dolphin Resort) is a resort on the west side of Moreton Island in Queensland, Australia. It lies on the eastern shore of Moreton Bay and is known for its resort accommodation, dolphin-feeding program, sand dunes and wreck diving. Swimming is popular along the white beaches.
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Arlov (1994):35 Cornelis de Man's 1639 painting of whaling at Smeerenburg A limited amount of open-sea whaling was performed by interlopers—independent entrepreneurs. The Noordsche Compagnie was disbanded by the government in 1642. The decade also saw an increase in whaling outside the main bays and fjords.Arlov (1994): 27 This gradually resulted in the abandoning of land stations as technological innovation allowed flensing along the ship, which allowed for pelagic whaling.
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Whales were towed to a shore station for flensing. They were first caught in Conception, Bonavista, and Trinity bays, but later catches (1966 to 1972) were mainly made in Trinity Bay itself. The season extended from May to September (rarely October), with peak catches being made in June and July. A small number – 51 between 1962 and 1967 – were also caught off Nova Scotia, with the season lasting from June to August.
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There is a gun emplacement on the hill behind the station, and another at Hansen Point with the original 4-inch gun still in position. Leith Harbour boasted a hospital, a library, a cinema, and a narrow gauge railway. The centre of Leith Harbour is a graveyard with a second, larger, cemetery to the rear of the station. Due to its nature, the station also contained a factory and a flensing plan or platform.
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Solveig Jacobsen standing (with her dog) in front of a whale on the Grytviken flensing plan, taken by Magistrate Edward Binnie in 1916. The settlement at Grytviken was established on 16 November 1904 by the Norwegian sea captain Carl Anton Larsen, as a whaling station for his Compañía Argentina de Pesca (Argentine Fishing Company).R.K. Headland, The Island of South Georgia, Cambridge University Press, 1984. It was successful, with 195 whales taken in the first season.
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The longest measured during JARPN II cruises in the North Pacific were a female and a male. The longest measured by Discovery Committee staff were an adult male of and an adult female of , both caught off South Georgia. Adults usually weigh between 15 and 20 metric tons—a pregnant female caught off Natal in 1966 weighed 37.75 tonnes (41.6 tons), not including 6% for loss of fluids during flensing. Females are considerably larger than males.
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The English brought the whale to the stern of the ship, where men in a boat cut strips of blubber from the whale's back. These were tied together and rowed ashore, where they were cut into smaller pieces to be boiled into oil in large copper kettles (trypots). The Dutch eschewed this system, bringing the whales into the shallows at high-tide and flensing them at low-tide. This latter method proved much less time-consuming and more effective.
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Some Irish cashels remained in occupation up to the 18th century AD. In the 19th century a cross-slab and rotary quern were found in Cahermurphy. Some of the archeological sites were damaged in the 20th century by agricultural "improvements." Excavations in 2011–12 under "Clochaun 3" turned up a sharpening stone, hammerstone and pieces of flint and quartz. Bone finds included sheep, goats (with flensing marks) and fish, as well as a wrasse tooth of a kind used in amulets.
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Flensing Icefall is a large icefall at the east side of the Bowers Mountains in Victoria Land, Antarctica, situated south of Platypus Ridge at the junction of Graveson Glacier and Rastorguev Glacier with Lillie Glacier. The icefall was so named by the northern party of the New Zealand Geological Survey Antarctic Expedition, 1963–64, because the icefall's longitudinal system of parallel crevassing resembles the carcass of a whale when being flensed. This glaciological feature lies situated on the Pennell Coast, a portion of Antarctica lying between Cape Williams and Cape Adare.
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Two Norwegian whaling stations were constructed in Voe at the beginning of the 20th century - the Zetland Whale Fishing Company, set up by Christian Nielsen; and the Norrona Whale Fishing Company, set up by Peder Bogen - opened in April and June 1903 respectively, being the first whaling stations based in UK territory. Whales caught by harpoon were dragged in by steamers. They were hauled up a wooden slip with a steam winch to take them ashore. They would then be cut up using blades on long handles called flensing knives.
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As more and more of the carcass was utilized flensing became more specialized. Soon the entire whale was being used. 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. Other men armed with steel hooks cut the meat into smaller pieces and fed them into meat cookers, while the bones were put into separate boilers.
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North Atlantic Right Whale #2030 North Atlantic Right Whale #2030 was killed after becoming severely entangled in fishing gear in May 1999. Rescuers attempted to free her, but she fought them off, swimming hundreds of miles before ultimately succumbing to her injuries. Director Warren D. Allmon expressed interest in acquiring the skeleton after being notified on October 21, 1999 by the National Marine Fisheries Service that the right whale had been spotted dead off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey. PRI was informed that they could take the skeleton if they assisted with flensing the 30-ton carcass.
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Graveson Glacier () is a broad north-flowing tributary to the Lillie Glacier, draining that portion of the Bowers Mountains between the Posey Range and the southern part of Explorers Range, Victoria Land, Antarctica. The geographical feature is fed by several lesser tributaries and enters Lillie Glacier via Flensing Icefall. The glacier was so named by the northern party of the New Zealand Geological Survey Antarctic Expedition, 1963–64, for F. Graveson, a mining engineer who wintered at Scott Base in 1963 and was field assistant on this expedition. The glacier lies situated on the Pennell Coast, a portion of Antarctica lying between Cape Williams and Cape Adare.
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In the mid-1930s, the 900-ton steam-schooner California, of the California Whaling Company, would anchor in Paradise Cove about a mile offshore, near Point Dume, and process whales caught by her two "killer boats", the Hawk and Port Saunders. She spent about four months there each winter (December–April), mostly flensing gray whales on their annual migration from Alaska to Baja California and back. Emerson Gaze, a reporter who spent a day with the fleet, said they had caught over fifty whales up to late January 1936, nearly all gray (with the exception of a few humpback and sperm whales).Gaze, Emerson. 1936.
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Southampton Historical Museum. A try pot is a large pot used to remove and render the oil from blubber obtained from cetaceans and pinnipeds, and also to extract oil from penguins."A Whaling Trypot", National Maritime Museum, London Once a suitable animal such as a whale had been caught and killed, the blubber was stripped from the carcass in a process known as flensing, cut into pieces, and melted in the try pots to extract the oil. Early on in the history of whaling, vessels had no means to process blubber at sea and had to bring it into port for processing.. Cf. pp.
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The industrial facility was built to process whales caught in the area and is composed of a number of large steel and concrete sheds and workshops, smaller timber-framed offices and amenities buildings along with tanks and boilers. Much of the station was constructed from old mining equipment along with an alcohol distillation plant from Collie. The flensing deck was built over a natural rock slipway with steam winches installed further up the shore to haul the carcasses onto the deck. The initial quota for the first year was 50 humpback whales. The station produced a total of of whale oil during the 1953 season.
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Dalgård (1962), p. 164 The alleys between the buildings were cobbled with drainage gullies, allowing the men to walk dry-shod. There were seven double (and one single) ovens situated in front of the buildings. Amsterdam had three of the buildings and two of the double ovens, while to the west were the stations of the Middelburg, Veere, Vlissingen, Enkhuizen, Delft, and Hoorn chambers. During this time there were as many as 200 menEllis (1991), p. 64 working ashore, boiling blubber into oil, flensing whales, and coopering casks to pour the oil into. Following the destruction of a Dutch station in Jan Mayen by Danish-employed Basque ships in 1632, the Dutch sent seven men, led by Jacob Segerszoon van der Brugge, to over-winter at Smeerenburg in 1633–34.
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Tyee Company whaling station, August 1910 Whale tied up at the float Tyee Company whaling station, July 1911 Tyee Company whaling station, 1910 Whale oil tanks at Tyee Company whaling station, July 1911 Flensing a whale at the Tyee Co. whaling station moorings at the Tyee Company whaling station, photo by John Nathan Cobb Commercial operations in fishing and sea hunting were established inside the bay at Point Gardner by the Tyee Company who sought to take advantage of the unexploited waters of southeast Alaska. They established their operations on Admiralty Island at Murder Cove in 1907 using the first American-built steam-powered whaler, the 97-foot "Tyee Junior", which was equipped with a harpoon gun on the bow. Consequent to a declining whale population, the company closed its operations in 1913.
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The teeth are much wider than those of the strap-toothed, and a peculiar denticle on the tip of the teeth present on both species is much more pronounced in the spade-toothed whale. The common name was chosen because, in life, the part of the tooth that protrudes from the gums (unlike the strap-like teeth of strap-toothed whales) has a shape similar to the tip of a flensing spade as used by 19th-century whalers. Despite the rather similar dentition, the spade-toothed whale and strap-toothed whale seem to be only distantly related. The present species' relationships are not known with certainty, though, because this species is very distinct morphologically, and the DNA sequence information is contradictory and is currently not good enough to support a robust phylogenetic hypothesis.
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Makah flensing a whale at Neah Bay, Washington, 1910 Semi-underground structure (qargi) with bowhead whale bones, Tikiġaġmiut, Point Hope, Alaska, 1885 A whale's massive carcass would provide a coastal community with considerable amounts of meat and fat, without the danger and effort of venturing onto the open ocean to harpoon a living leviathan. (An additional resource, in the treeless Arctic, was the long bones, useful for construction.) Whale meat is still valued in some countries; blubber can be eaten (especially welcome in very cold climates) or processed into whale oil, once a widely used fuel. The bounty and good fortune inherent in this find are recognised in etymology: "The meaning of the word 'drift-whale' in Icelandic, 'hvalreki,' has the same meaning as 'wind-fall' – an unexpected good incurred at no cost", according to Sigrún Davíðsdóttir, London correspondent of the Icelandic national broadcaster RÚV. Two anthropologists, Thomas Talbot Waterman and Alfred Louis Kroeber, who worked with Yurok informants in California, classified drift whales as a gathered resource, rather than a product of hunting, as those beneficiaries ran no risk.
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