Fred ripped off the blubber like Velcro.
Divers soon found more debris, including several iron trypots, cauldrons in which blubber was boiled down into oil, the ultimate goal of the lucrative but highly speculative whaling trade.
Blubber was boiled to produce oil for use in lamps in four oil houses on the harbourside.
Cherry's teeth chattered so violently that they shattered, while Wilson was blinded in one eye by a blob of boiling blubber from a camp stove.
"Whales are cute, but at the same time, I want to eat them," Kayoko Nagano, a 44-year-old homemaker, said over lunch at a restaurant here that offered fried whale tail, grilled whale-tongue wafers, boiled blubber chunks and blood-red slices of whale sashimi.
What could the sound and stench of boiled blubber and seared flesh have been like, for those who lived here year round?
Their bodies, which floated after death, were towed to shore for stripping and boiling of the thick blubber and processing of the baleen.
From the 1700s through the mid-1800s, oil extracted from the blubber of whales and boiled in giant pots gave light to America and much of the Western world.
Over the decades, the ship's harpooners took in more than 2,500 of the behemoths to dismember their carcasses and boil their blubber down into more than 50,000 barrels of oil.
When boiled, whale blubber produced a highly prized, long-lasting, clean-burning oil, and that oil became one of the New World's earliest exports and remained a staple of international trade for nearly 250 years.
