James Harkin

Yeah, echolocation.

I think that's the idea.

which is so cool in your face harpoonist eat it Ishmael is that the first line of Moby Dick eat it Ishmael it's Moby Dick from the Wales perspective yeah yeah

so Andy yeah we have established that you like crockery sure sandwich plate yeah you also like cutlery yeah so what do you think you would do with a mincing knife um is it a knife which has a mincing tool on the end so for mincing meat so is it like got a it's like got a grid of sharp metal on the end and I just shove it into the meat and that minces it

Not quite.

And remember, we're talking about whales.

Do they?

It pretty much is.

Oh, dear.

But not mince as in like... Mince just means chopping up smaller, right?

Yeah.

So if you were to get the blubber and you were to put it into the pot...

The smaller it is, the more surface area it has, the easier it is to melt down to turn into oil.

So they would use a mincing knife for that.

And they had all sorts of specialized cutlery on these whaling ships.

So as well as a mincing knife, they had a cutting spade.

They had a head spade.

They had a chopper.

They had a boarding knife.

which you would grab onto your bit of whale because you're doing all this stuff in the water, right?