Word: whaled
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While academic critics have been busy for a generation flensing Melville's whale and rendering it into midnight oil, they have neglected another great writer who made the sea his theater and the deck of a ship his stage. Joseph Conrad?monocled, with salt-rimed beard, at the wheel of a clipper?is too romantic a figure for modern fashion in literary heroes. Yet in his work, Conrad was not a romantic any more than Melville was a mere spinner of "sea yarns" or Shakespeare only a writer of historical pageants. His themes were the classic themes of character...
...with His Head. Drawn up the gaping skidway by steel cables thrumming on giant steam-driven winches, the whale reached the broad afterdeck. A gang of workmen, wielding long-handled flensing knives, sliced off the thick blubber in foot-wide strips. The winches whined again and dragged the naked, bloody carcass 50 ft. farther along the slimy, slippery, half-iced deck to stage two. Here another flensing gang sliced off the meat. A neat, well-directed blow, as from an executioner's ax, severed the backbone at the neck, and the gigantic head (20 ft. long in an average...
...Bigger Than Pigs. To find the whale's gland in a 20-ft. head, Andersen must show uncanny judgment, for a misplaced stroke of the saw could slash through the pituitary itself. In 1956 Andersen retrieved 871 pituitaries from 898 blue and fin whales, got a bonus of half a bottle of rum for every 50 glands. (On other ships, an estimated 30,000 more whale pituitaries were gathered.) An average season's catch of pituitaries will bring the owners of one ship little more than $2,000, but says a spokesman, "our policy is waste not, want...
Another source of ACTH is the tiny hog pituitaries (generally used in the U.S.), but it takes half a dozen of them to make a single average medical dose. The worldwide demand for the hormone is now so great that many manufacturers are turning to the far larger whale glands -the size of an egg. Melville's pelagic Cain now helps to supply doctors with a valued treatment for at least 30 diseases, from common and crippling rheumatoid arthritis to scleroderma...
...blue whale is the biggest animal that has ever lived-up to 100 It.. 150 tons. The finback reaches 80 ft. and 100 tons...