"Blubber" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about this time and brought in great profits. The original method was to sight the whale from a lookout on shore, push out in a boat, capture him and return to the shore with the carcass. The oil was extracted from the blubber and readily sold. As whales became scarce around the New England islands the whalers pushed off into the ocean in small vessels. Within fifty years at least sixty craft were engaged in the venture. By degrees larger and larger vessels were built until ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... and a wick made from cotton calking, came the hunting for our winter's meat and the building of the second hut. It was a simple affair, now, to go forth in the morning and return by noon with a boatload of seals. And then, while I worked at building the hut, Maud tried out the oil from the blubber and kept a slow fire under the frames of meat. I had heard of jerking beef on the plains, and our seal-meat, cut in thin strips and hung ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... hand ruffled the bushy hair that grew on his almost browless head. "Once," he agreed dolefully. "Now I—many thing I don't remember." His face, flat-nosed and blubber-lipped, grew bleak and plaintive as he gazed upon instruments ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... yielding and resisting in its reckless disarray. But I was not a painter—only a longshore mooncalf—and my eyes swam and my tongue swelled till I thought it would stick between my teeth as those of poor rogues do on the gallows, and I was chickenish enough to wish to blubber. And while I stood there, stockish and stupid, the pair became aware of me. I do not think I made any noise, but their eyes dropped from each other and turned on me, and the man scowled a little, without loosening his hold, but the woman, no whit troubled, flung one arm away from ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... eaten by the natives is that which is incomparably best suited to the climate. In the frozen regions, and every cold country, the best of all nourishment is that which contains a large proportion of fat and oil. In Britain, we read with disgust of the Greenlander eagerly swallowing whale-oil and blubber; but in his country, it is precisely what is best adapted to sustain vital energy. Europeans in the position of Franklin's crew would become acclimatised, and gradually accustomed to the food of the natives, even before their own provisions were exhausted; and after that, we may be ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... The blubber is also arranged by nature as a means for keeping their bodies warm. True fishes are cold-blooded animals, and not sensible to ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 34, July 1, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... 'tis not for you To blubber o'er Max Taubles for he's dead. By Heaven! my hearty, if you only knew How better is a grave-worm in the head Than brains like yours—how far more decent, too, A tomb in far Corea than a bed Where Peter lies with Peter, ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... provided with a meal, the Esquimaux fed themselves. It was a primitive feast. The men simply bit off chunks of fat and blubber and ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... his throat. He was insensible five days. Then he came to himself and heard voices; daylight was streaming through a hole cut in the whale's roof. He climbed out and astonished the sailors who were hoisting blubber up a ship's side. He recognized the vessel, flew aboard, surprised the wedding party at the altar ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fig-tree covering acres with its profound shadow, the animalcules of ocean's lowest deep, minute enough to dance in myriads on the point of a needle, and the Finner whale, hugest of beasts, that disports its ninety feet of bone and blubber on ocean's billowy heights, the flower that a girl wears in her hair, and the blood that courses through her veins, are, each and all, smaller or larger multiples or aggregates of one and the same structural unit, which, again, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... know of. In regard to whales and their peculiarities you can make almost any assertion without fear of successful contradiction. Nobody ever knows any more about them than you do. You are not hampered by facts. If someone mentions the blubber of the whale and you chime in and say it may be noticed for miles on a still day when the large but emotional creature has been moved to tears by some great sorrow coming into its life, everybody is bound to accept ...
— "Speaking of Operations—" • Irvin S. Cobb
... he was otherwise employed! Seals are more abundant, and are the chief dependance of the natives, their flesh serving for food, their skins for clothes and covering to their tents and boats, and their blubber for oil or for exchange. Catching the seal was formerly a tedious and laborious process, but now they are generally taken in nets, which the natives have ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... tallow-nuts, pompions, and squashes; Baked frogs, "en surprise," from a forest on fire, Flamingoes, removed by a huge Lammergeyer; Gulls, ravens, herons, boobies, bald-coots, water-hens, And yards of strung ortolans, linnets, and wrens; Loons, noddies, and nuthatches cook'd in a stew, Whale blubber "en gras," and guanas "au bleu;" Jerk'd beef from the south, and large watersnake broth, And a great dish of pemmican brought from the north; Green branches of trees from the beaver's damp hut, Bowls of milk from the cow-tree and ...
— The Quadrupeds' Pic-Nic • F. B. C.
... as a small ham. During winter when the frozen ground is covered with snow and no pasturage is to be found, it is said that they live on the fat stored in these tails, in the same manner as camels exist for considerable periods on their humps, seals on their blubber, and bears by sucking ...
— Through Siberia and Manchuria By Rail • Oliver George Ready
... careful not to disturb the seals. I did not want any of them until the weather got cold enough to freeze their flesh. I thought of oil from their blubber, but I had nothing to hold it. When I had finished my hut I began to hunt about to see if I could find drift-wood, but I could only find a few pieces in the cove, and gave it up, for I did not see how I could anyhow keep up a fire ...
— A Chapter of Adventures • G. A. Henty
... fresh; therefore, when a housewife is in doubt, she should make an effort to apply them. Fish should not give off any offensive odor. The eyes should be bright and clear, not dull nor sunken. The gills should have a bright-red color, and there should be no blubber showing. The flesh should be so firm that no dent will be made when it is touched with the finger. Fish may also be tested for freshness by placing it in a pan of water; if it sinks, it may be known to be fresh, but if it floats it is ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 3 - Volume 3: Soup; Meat; Poultry and Game; Fish and Shell Fish • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... five or six feet long. Either to get their food of small fish, or in play, they keep swimming and diving near the tops of the breakers. Fishermen catch them with a strong hook and use the thick, leathery skin for straps or strings, while they try oil out of their blubber or fat. ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... Tangier, a more pretentious establishment, owned by one Martin—surname unknown. Martin was a character. He was an unmitigated coloured gentleman, blubber-lipped and black as the ace of spades, with saffron-red streaks at the corners of his optics. He was a native of one of the West India Islands, I believe, but I will not be positive. Mahomet Lamarty pressed me to tell him in what English ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... seeing that his exhortations produced no effect upon the apparently dying Edith, dropped upon his knees, and began to blubber and lament over her, as if overcome by his feelings, promising her a world of Indian scalps, and a whole Salt River full of Shawnee blood, if she would only look up and see how he went ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... tappen preventing its too rapid consumption; and if you run across them during this time—even along in March just before they wake up—they are about as fat as when they went in. I have taken a slice of fat from a black bear six inches thick—regular blubber. I remember," continued the man, "one winter I was 'log hauling' in the western part of this State. We had our eyes on a big tree, and one morning when it was about ten degrees below zero I tackled it to warm up. I hammered ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... thatch over low foreheads, and partially shading their little, bleary red eyes. Hideous are they to very deformity. Nor is their ugliness diminished, but rather heightened, by a variety of pigments—ochre, charcoal, and chalk—laid thick upon their faces and bodies with an admixture of seal-oil or blubber. The men are scantily clothed, with only one kind of garment, a piece of skin hung over their shoulders and lashed across the chest, and all the women wearing a sort of apron skirt ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... and usually has two or three demure little ladies in faded black beside him,—generally in the early part of the day, he seems literally to vomit up his notes. Apparently with much labor and effort, they gurgle and blubber up out of him, falling on the ear with a peculiar subtile ring, as of turning water from a glass jug, and not without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... consumption of food. The normal ration of a healthy being is trebled to counteract the enormous evaporation of bodily heat. Fat is the staff of life. The Esquimo, settled along the coast by the Bering Sea, takes his meal of ten pounds of blubber and feels a better man. By imitative methods the white man survives the awful cold ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... sob, wail, bawl, squall, whimper, blubber, pule, bewail; shout, call, exclaim, yell, scream, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... cook believes in oil, and, to us, living in the town, every passing breeze will offer indisputable evidence, not only of the lengths to which this belief will go, but of the Pentateuchal effects which can be obtained by a fearless application of heat to rancid blubber. Fifthly, since we can get nothing else, and the thought of another winter in England is almost as soul-shaking as that of living again amid French furniture, I suppose we'd better take it, always provided they fill ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... arter him), his long hair—his beautiful eye. He is a first chop article that; but, oh Lord, he is too shockin' fat altogether. He is like Mother Gary's chickens, they are all fat and feathers. A wick run through 'em makes a candle. This critter is all hair and blubber, if he goes too near the grate, he'll catch into a blaze and ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the Russians ate blubber," observed Harold, somewhat unfeelingly, though I don't think he saw the joke; but I managed to reassure him, sotto voce, as to there being something solid in the background. He was really ravenous, and it was a little comedy to see the despairing contempt with which he regarded ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not be then as now, for it freezes," said the bailiff, blowing his fingers. "Come, old fellow, pack up and let us be off; you can blubber as you go along. Who the devil can help the youngun's ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... ten feet away from the fleeing craft— now but eight— now five! Ten seconds more and the big head, like the blunt stern of a battle ship, forced forward by the tons of blubber, flesh, bone and fat behind it would strike the Mermaid and crush ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... old woman and her grandson were living alone in a small hut. They had no men to hunt for them and they were very poor. Once in a while, but not often, some of the Inuit took pity on them and brought them seal's meat, and blubber for their lamp. ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... Pope, and Swift, and Prior, and Peterborough—Pope, with his truly playful 'What is Prudery?' Swift, with his charming lines to Stella; Prior, with his 'Dear Chloe, how blubber'd is that pretty face!' and Peterborough, with that masterpiece of the ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... from the Soldan?—a negro, De Neville, is he not?" said a female voice, easily recognized for that of Berengaria. "A negro, is he not, De Neville, with black skin, a head curled like a ram's, a flat nose, and blubber lips—ha, worthy ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... with a little dart the boy was on his feet. His yelling dropped to a mad blubber. He had ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... calf, and be prepared to play upon it implacably. In some localities the blacks were wont to manufacture nets for the capture of dugong, and nets are still employed by them under the direction of white men; for the flesh of the dugong is worthily esteemed, and oil from the blubber—sweet, and limpid as distilled water—is said to possess qualities far superior to that obtained from the decaying livers of cod fish in the restoration of health and vigour to constitutions enfeebled and wasted ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the Angekoks deceived them when they pretended to go to the other world for advice, they demurred. "Did you ever see them go?" he asked. "Well, have you seen this God of yours of whom you speak so much?" was their reply. When Egede spoke of spiritual gifts, they asked for good health and blubber: "Our Angekoks give us that." Hell-fire was much in theological evidence in those days, but among the Eskimos it was a failure as a deterrent. They listened to the account of it eagerly and liked the prospect. ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... going on dip a small brush into cold water and wipe off the sides and edge of kettle; the different grades the sugar goes through in boiling are as follows:—1st grade, broad run; 2d grade, small pearl; 3d grade, large pearl; 4th grade, the small blubber; 5th grade, the large blubber; 6th grade, to a crack; 7th grade, caramel; boil the sugar for a few minutes and dip the point of a spoon into it; if the sugar falls in large drops from the spoon it has reached ...
— Desserts and Salads • Gesine Lemcke
... for table. She wore it twisted in a hard, horny knob at the top of her head, which strained her blue-green eyes, and gave them the expression of those of a choked grimalkin. Her nose turned divinely upwards; her blubber lips turned downwards with a grievous, watery expression. Her cheeks were red; so was her nose; so were her eyes at times, when the horny knob took a harder twist than usual. She had small, hairy ears, ornamented with enormous jewels. Her neck was short, and three stubborn ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... Jane's bein' more ailin' than usual, an' the thickness of the air with the shower, that arter I saw everythin' was shipshape, I guess I flopped some. I'll forgive myself this once; but if it happens again, Davy Thomas, yer'll write t' the government sure as yer born an' tell 'em what a blubber-head ye air." ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... Russell—[a waterman]—to the Half-way house, and there eat and drank, and upon a very small occasion had a difference again broke out, where without any the least cause she had the cunning to cry a great while, and talk and blubber, which made me mighty angry in mind, but said nothing to provoke her because Creed was there, but walked home, being troubled in my mind also about the knavery and neglect of Captain Fudge and Taylor, who were to have had their ship for Tangier ready by Thursday last, and now ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Robinson began to blubber the moment George took his hand, spite of the money lost. "We worked hard for it, too, good folks, and risked our lives as well as our toil;" and George and Robinson sat hand in hand upon the bench, and turned their heads away—that it ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... hundred and twenty feet, and thought he might register 'A 1,' at the proper office. Captain Patterson called him a 'bow head,' good for a hundred barrels of oil and a large quantity of bone. The Colonel proposed engaging him to tow us into port. Covert wished his blubber piled in our coal bunkers; the artist sketched him, and the draughtsman thought of putting him on a Mercator's projection. For my part I have written the little I know of his life and experiences, but ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... These vestiges cannot be reasonably accounted for, unless they are the degenerate hinder limbs of a remote four-footed ancestor. Furthermore the unborn whale possesses a complete coat of hair, which is afterwards replaced by blubber; but hair is a thatchlike coat to shed rain, as the way the hairs lie on a terrestrial mammal indicates. We are therefore forced to conclude that whales have originated from four-footed animals walking about on land, ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... our aft-scuppers when I went a-whalin in the little 'Grampus'—and Lord love you, Pumpo, you poor land-swab, she WAS as pretty a craft as ever dowsed a tarpauling—there was a woman on board the 'Grampus,' who before we'd struck our first fish, or biled our first blubber, set the whole crew in a mutiny. I mind me of her now, Natty,—her eye was sich a piercer that you could see to steer by it in a Newfoundland fog; her nose stood out like the 'Grampus's' jibboom, and her woice, Lord love you, her woice sings in my ears even ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... are naked; and this may be advantageous to them for gliding through the water; nor would it be injurious to them from the loss of warmth, as the species, which inhabit the colder regions, are protected by a thick layer of blubber, serving the same purpose as the fur of seals and otters. Elephants and rhinoceroses are almost hairless; and as certain extinct species, which formerly lived under an Arctic climate, were covered with long wool or hair, it would almost appear as if the existing species of ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... snows day after day, And hope for help, and pray and pray; Have seal-hide and sea-lice to eat; Melt water with your body's heat; Sleep all the fell, black winter through Beside the dear, dead men you knew. (The walrus blubber flares and gleams — O God! how long a minute seems!) ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... "if you blubber, I'll give you a hiding. You have stumbled on a passage you can't construe. Well, who has not? But we don't shed the briny about it. Here, let me have a go ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... good Cooper; having brought home but eleven Tuns. The Cubbs, by his relation, do yield but little, and that is but a kind of a Jelly. That which the old ones render, doth candy like Porks Grease, yet burneth very well. He observed, that the Oyl of the Blubber is as clear and fair as any Whey: but that which is boyled out of the Lean, interlarded, becomes as hard as Tallow, spattering in the burning and that which is made of ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... is that?" said the Boxer, showing his white teeth and blubber lips in a furious grin, whilst the eyes which he fastened on the poor burgher blazed up once more, as if he was ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... "if you don't tell me how you managed it, I'll sit down right here on the sidewalk and blubber like a child." ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... powerful tail; now the creature was seen to be in its death-flurry, tumbling about and turning over and over in its agony. At length it lay an inert mass on the surface, and the boats came back, towing it in triumph. Next there was the work of "cutting in," or taking off the blubber which surrounded it; the huge body being turned round and round during the operation, as the men stood on it cutting off with their sharp spades huge strips, which were hoisted with tackles on deck. Last of all came the "trying out," when the blubber, cut into ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... received, and when at length Fred Pinckney found a moment to whisper in George Marshall's ear, he said, with characteristic drollery, "By Jupiter? I'll be glad when the coach comes. I can't stand so much crying; it's more like a funeral than a wedding. If they are obliged to blubber this way when a fellow marries, I ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... much, Rowland, perhaps I love her a trifle better than you do at this very moment; still I am not selfish enough to come between you, and would rather try absence and the northern latitudes; only just be honest. I'm not quite such a piece of blubber as not to be capable of constancy, though I may have been a rover until now; but when I see a girl walk right away from me, and refuse to wait for me to go home with her, and go straight off to another man, never mind if he was my father, instead ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... "Don't blubber, Cassius," said Mr. Yollop consolingly. "You see, my dear Alice, Mr. Smilk thinks,—and maintains,—that you did him a dirty trick when you had him turned out into a wicked, dishonest world. He was living ...
— Yollop • George Barr McCutcheon
... replied Jack; "I never was a good hand at piping my eye, but I know that I should be inclined to blubber if I thought there was a chance of ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... expenditure of powder,' rejoined Robert. But Arthur, boy-like, sprang up-stairs with the rifle, which had often done execution among the wild-fowl of his native moorlands. Certainly it was a feat to hit such a prominent mark as that mountain of blubber; and Arthur felt justly ashamed of himself when the animal beat the water furiously and ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... enormous strength, as are many of the pure-blooded West African negroes; but one completely lost sight of his splendid physique in contemplation of the expression of low cunning and ferocious cruelty that blazed out of his small, narrow eyes and contorted his wide, flat nostrils, his thick, blubber lips, and his unnaturally prominent chin and jaws; he was the very embodiment and picture of all the most savage and debasing passions that characterise the worst specimens of humanity, and reminded me of nothing so much as a combination of snake, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... artillerymen; soldiers from the metropolis and from the colonies; French farmers and African sharpshooters; red heads, faces of Mohammedan olive and the black countenances of the Sengalese, with eyes of fire, and thick, bluish blubber lips; some showing the good-nature and sedentary obesity of the middle-class man suddenly converted into a warrior; others sinewy, alert, with the aggressive profile of men born to fight, and experienced in ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... nothing to blubber for," he said; "you can go in and see her if you like t-omorrow morning the first thing. You may go now and sleep ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... his back was turned to us his shoulders would jerk up as if he was cold, and he seemed to shudder from inside, and now and then I'd hear a grunting sort of whimper like a boy that was just starting to blubber. But father wasn't weeping, and bees weren't stinging him; it was the bee that stung mother that was tickling father. When he went into the house, mother's other eye had bunged for sympathy. Father was always gentle and kind in sickness, and he bathed mother's eyes and rubbed ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... came to a stile; but in getting over he fell and hurt himself, and beginning to blubber, forgot what he was sent for. So he stood a little while to consider: at last he thought he recollected it, and began ...
— More English Fairy Tales • Various
... indeed, originated in New England, but had been practised by all maritime peoples of whom history has knowledge, while the researches of archeologists have shown that prehistoric peoples were accustomed to chase the gigantic cetacean for his blubber, his oil, and his bone. The American Indians, in their frail canoes, the Esquimaux, in their crank kayaks, braved the fury of this aquatic monster, whose size was to that of one of his enemies as the bulk of ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... the other. This was his specific for sea-sickness, and for three days he behaved about as well as a fractious child who sadly wants a good whipping. It is no discredit to a man to be sea-sick. Nelson, we are told, was so far human. But it is somewhat unmanly for an officer to whine and blubber like a baby, and yet we have several times seen this phenomenon abroad. When we came into Naples this lachrymose hero was again in full feather, boots, spurs, and sword, stalking the quarter-deck as if no tub and ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... longs to see all his friends about him, and large fires are immediately kindled to announce the fortunate and joyful event. Notice of the feast having been thus given, and a due invitation forwarded, he rubs himself all over with the blubber, and his favourite wives are served in the same manner, after which, he begins to cut his way into the flesh of the whale, the grain of which is about the firmness of a goose-quill; of this he chooses the nicest morsels, and either broils them on the fire, or cooks them by cutting them into ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... absolutely gentlemanlike type, couldn't be? He never went so far as to rate himself, with exaggeration, a gentleman; but he would have maintained against all comers, with perfect candour and as claiming a high advantage, that he was, in spite of that liability to blubber, "like" one; which he was no doubt, for that matter, at several points. Like what lady then, who could ever possibly have been taken for one, was Kate Cookham, and therefore how could one have anything—anything of the intimate and private order—out with her fairly and on the plane, the only ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... with that withered shrimp of a tyrant. It was a miracle that he had not died suddenly long since. Unlike the cowardly Melanesians, the people were high-stomached and warlike. In the big graveyard, at head and feet of the graves, were relics of past sanguinary history—blubber-spades, rusty old bayonets and cutlasses, copper bolts, rudder-irons, harpoons, bomb guns, bricks that could have come from nowhere but a whaler's trying-out furnace, and old brass pieces of the sixteenth century that verified the traditions of the early Spanish navigators. Ship after ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... their dirty tents or still filthier winter turf-caves, than which the Augean stables were a cleaner place of abode. Within the tent the savages stripped themselves naked. The reek of all abominations mingled with the smoke of seal-oil and burning blubber, and the temperature even on the coldest day climbed steadily away up above a hundred. Sometimes I thought it must be the smell that sent it up. The natives had apparently learned their vices from the Russians and their habits of personal cleanliness from monkeys. For ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... they have made new subjective explanations of things, including explanations of the latest ascertained facts. And this, I doubt not, they will go on doing to the end of time. Gentlemen, a metaphysician is a medicine man. The difference between you and the Eskimo who makes a fur-clad blubber-eating god is merely a difference of several thousand years of ascertained facts. That ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... there were no seabirds upon the carcass now, nor did I see the triangular fin of a shark anywhere about. They had ripped and torn at the carcass sufficiently, however, to release copiously the oil from the casing of blubber, or fat, with which the whale ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... snib, snub. Bl imply a blast; as blow, blast, to blast, to blight, and, metaphorically, to blast one's reputation; bleat, bleak, a bleak place, to look bleak, or weather-beaten, black, blay, bleach, bluster, blurt, blister, blab, bladder, blew, blabber lip't, blubber-cheek't, bloted, blote-herrings, blast, blaze, to blow, that is, blossom, bloom; and perhaps blood ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... Glumdalclitch miss'd her pleasing care, She wept, she blubber'd, and she tore her hair: No British miss sincerer grief has known, Her squirrel missing, or her sparrow flown. She furl'd her sampler, and haul'd in her thread, And stuck her needle into Grildrig's bed; Then spread her hands, and with a bounce ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... with each other, they expanded their blubber lips, and showed their white fangs, as if they grinned at the thoughts of the expected tragedy, the startled commons could scarcely help believing that they were actually the familiar spirits with whom the witch had communed, and who, her time being out, stood ready to assist in her dreadful ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Europeans as they appeared to be, yet they knew and dreaded our fire-arms; nothing would tempt them to take a gun in their hands. They begged for knives, calling them by the Spanish word "cuchilla." They explained also what they wanted, by acting as if they had a piece of blubber in their mouth, and then pretending to cut instead of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... characteristic. His face was thin and scored with scars, mainly long and narrow. These, in a measure, testified to his past. His mouth, half hidden beneath a straggling mustache, was his worst feature. One can only liken it to a blubber-lipped gash, lined inside with two rows of yellow fangs, all in a more or less bad state ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... onions an' set out bravely, an' th' people watched th' fam'ly to see what other form th' lunacy wud take. Afther awhile he ayether come back or he didn't. Sometimes th' Esqueemo lady didn't care to lave her pleasant home in th' land iv perpetchool blubber an' in that case th' hardy mariner remained in th' frozen north. I niver cud see th' advantages iv life in th' Artic regions. 'Tis thrue th' nights is six months long an' sleep is wan iv th' spoorts that age hasn't deprived me iv. It mus' be a gr-reat counthry f'r burglars. But f'r a plain ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... is worth no more than the carcase of a whale that has been stripped of its blubber. I say, Miles, there would be no need of the windlass to heave the ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... found a quantity of whale's blubber, they would eat as much of it as they could, and hide the rest. Yet their improvidence gave them no concern. Even when they had been without food or fuel for days together, they would be as gay and good-humoured as usual. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... will never find a first-rate race or an enlightened age, in its moments of highest reflection, that ever gave more than a passing bow to optimism. Even Christianity, starting out as "glad tidings," has had to take on protective coloration to survive, and today its chief professors moan and blubber like Johann in Herod's rain-barrel. The sanctified are few and far between. The vast majority of us must suffer in hell, just as we suffer on earth. The divine grace, so omnipotent to save, is withheld from us. Why? There, alas, is your ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... goggling eyes which were turned always upon me were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred. I dipped the nose of my monoplane downwards to escape it. As I did so, as quick as a flash there shot out a long tentacle from this mass of floating blubber, and it fell as light and sinuous as a whip-lash across the front of my machine. There was a loud hiss as it lay for a moment across the hot engine, and it whisked itself into the air again, while the huge flat body drew itself together as if in sudden ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... one way abeout it; I was beound to dew somethin', instead o' goin' to set deown and blubber; and as I layed stretched eout in bed one Sunday morning, in Marm Smith's tavern, in the cockloft among the old stuff, I spies a darn'd ole consarn that took my fancy immazin'! As Deb Brown said, when she 'sperienced rele-gen, I felt my sperrets raisin' me clean eout ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... was a melancholy phase of life he saw here in this little "world-forsaken" colony. "Every summer two or three merchants or peasant traders, generally from Pustozersk, come for the purpose of bartering with the Samoyedes, and sometimes the Syrianes, too, for their wares—bearskins, blubber, and sealskins, reindeer-skins, and such like—giving in exchange tea, sugar, flour, household utensils, etc. No transaction takes place without the drinking of brandy, for which the Samoyede has an insatiable craving. When the trader has ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... the boats are able to approach near enough to allow lances to be thrown at him, which, penetrating through the blubber, pierce his vitals, and cause him to run again as swiftly as before. Again he sinks, and again appears on the surface; the column which he now spouts forth is tinged with red. The boats again approach, the more lances are driven into his sides, but he is not yet ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... sailing vessels of those days, after long and perilous voyage, made harbor there; the old shipmasters built solid homes on the island shores; its merchants grew rich on the whaling vessels, that went forth to hunt for these monsters of the great deep, and came back laden with oil and blubber and whalebone and ambergris. But all this was changed now. Steam had come to supplant the white wings that had borne the old ships on their wide ocean ways. As Captain Jeb said, "the airth had taken to spouting up ile," and made the long whale hunts needless and unprofitable. But, though ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... name gives no idea of the animal as it exists in full life and activity. When we speak of a Bird or an Insect, the mere name calls up at once a characteristic image of the thing; but the name of Jelly-Fish, or Sun-Fish, or Sea-Blubber, as the larger Acalephs are also called, suggests to most persons a vague idea of a fish with a gelatinous body,—or, if they have lived near the sea-shore, they associate it only with the unsightly masses of jelly-like substance sometimes strewn in thousands along the beaches after a storm. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... threw her eyes up to heaven, and said, "Blessed be God, that we have still wherewithal to live. There are tens of thousands in this world, dear children, who would count our poverty riches." And with this she kissed my two sisters, who began to blubber, as girls always will do, and threw their arms round her neck, and then round my neck, until I was half stifled with their embraces, and slobbered all ...
— The Fatal Boots • William Makepeace Thackeray
... must beg the reader to remain unaffected in his conviction that there is a vital difference between liquids that coagulate into butter, or congeal into India-rubber. Oil, when used simply, will always mean a vegetable product: and when I have occasion to speak of petroleum, tallow, or blubber, I shall generally call these substances ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... in Reeves's book as "bundles of blubber." It is not necessary to refer once more to the fact that "blubber" is the criterion and ideal of "beauty" among the Pacific Islanders, as among barbarians in general. Consequently their love cannot have been ennobled by any of the refined, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... BLUBBER. The layer of fat in whales between the skin and the flesh, which is flinched or peeled off, and boiled for oil, varying from 10 to 20 inches ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... fish of all kinds, whale fins, whalebone, oil, and blubber, not caught by and cured on board British vessels, when imported into Great Britain, are subject to double aliens duty. The Dutch, as they are still the principal, were then the only fishers in Europe that attempted to supply foreign nations with fish. By this regulation, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... Bruce gasped. "An airplane at the present end of the Hudson Bay Railroad! What's doing now? What are they up to? Going to quit construction here and use planes the rest of the way? Fancy freighting wheat, fish, furs and whale blubber by airplanes!" Both lads laughed at ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... repeat; He shall state 'tis the nation's imperial will That you do not your dangerous promise fulfil; But snug in this closet put all into motion, Nor hazard your life with these sons of the ocean. You shall say, "I have sworn by my glory to go;" } They shall all of them blubber out "No, no, no, no!} It must not, thou world's second saviour! be so. } If you go, mighty Chieftain! and should not escape, All Gallia, the world, will be cover'd with crape[A]! Oh! stay where you are; on our knees we implore!" ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... timber and the tide-rush help to launch the vessel from the skids. There were no saws in the settlement. Planks had to be hewn out of logs. Iron, there was none. The rusty remnants of old wrecks were gathered together for bolts and joints and axes. Spruce gum mixed with blubber oil took the place of oakum and tar below the water-line. Moss and clay were used as calking above water. For sail cloth, there was nothing but shreds and rags and tatters of canvas patched together so that each mast-arm looked like Joseph's coat ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... floe, and we manoeuvred the ship alongside. Hudson jumped down, bent a line on to the seal, and the pair of them were hauled up. The seal was 4 ft. 9 in. long and weighed about ninety pounds. He was a young male and proved very good eating, but when dressed and minus the blubber made little more than a square meal for our twenty-eight men, with a few scraps for our breakfast and tea. The stomach contained only amphipods about an inch long, allied to those found in the ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... "Brand my whale blubber, she's turnin' again!" Chow gulped. The missile's arc, as it veered around to follow, painted a streak of light ...
— Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X • Victor Appleton
... of herring and other fish-curing establishments, whales' blubber, and similar fish refuse, are all useful as manure, and are employed whenever they can be obtained. They are not usually employed alone, but are more advantageously made into composts with their own weight of soil, and allowed to ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... all nonsense; I am talking impossibilities—a little weak in my mind, I suppose. Forget it, there's a good fellow; say nothing about it. And so you buried them? Ah, me! ah, me! And George did chief mourner. I suppose he blubbered freely; he always could blubber freely when he liked. I remember how he used to take folks in as a lad, and then laugh at them; that's why they called him 'Crocodile' at school. Well, he's my master now, and I'm his very humble servant; perhaps one day it will be the other way up again. What, must ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... animal's back. He cut steps with his ax in the slippery carcass, and got up to it as well as he could, extracted it by cutting and pulling, and threw it down into his boat, but not till he had taken the precaution to stick a great piece of blubber on the barbed point. He then sawed and hacked under difficulties, being buffeted and bothered with thousands of birds, so eager for slices that it was as much as he could do to avoid the making of minced fowl; but, true to his gentle creed, he contrived to get three ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... they have no patience. Nearly everyone is munching away at a lump of raw walrus flesh. All their faces are more or less greasy and bloody. Even Myouk's baby—though not able to speak—is choking itself with a long, stringy piece of blubber. The dogs, too, have got their share. An Eskimo's chief happiness seems to be in eating, and I cannot wonder at it, for the poor creatures have hard work to get food, and they are often on the ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne
... posted at the door, With blubber lip and nostril, he descries. Nor will he see again, nor e'er before Had seen a visage of such loathsome guise: Ill-favoured — such was Aesop feigned of yore: If there, she would have saddened Paradise. Greasy and foul and beggarly her vest; Nor half ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... inferior race. Equality anywhere, means ultimately, equality everywhere. Equality at the polls means social equality; social equality means intermarriage and corruption of blood, and degeneration and decay. What gentleman here would want his daughter to marry a blubber-lipped, cocoanut-headed, kidney-footed, etc., ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... on his way before the stars were out of the sky. He took Warrigal's horse, Bilbah, back with him; he and Starlight was going off to the islands together, and couldn't take horses with them. But he was real sorry to part with the cross-grained varmint; I thought he was going to blubber when he saw father leading him off. Bilbah wouldn't go neither at first; pulled back, and snorted and went on as if he'd never seen only one man afore in his life. Father got vexed at last and makes a sign to old Crib; he fetches him such ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... with innocence, and never more. Religion, worn by thee, attractive show'd, And with its own unborrow'd beauty glow'd: Unlike the bigot, from whose watery eyes Ne'er sunshine broke, nor smile was seen to rise; Whose sickly goodness lives upon grimace, And pleads a merit from a blubber'd face. Thou kept thy raiment for the needy poor, And taught the fatherless to know thy door; 30 From griping hunger set the needy free; That they were needy, was enough to thee. Thy fame to please, whilst others restless be, Fame laid her shyness by, and courted ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... carefully she stripped the skin from the carcass. Beneath this she found a two-inch layer of blubber, which must be more than ninety per cent oil. Under this was a compact mass of dark meat. This would be good if it was cooked. She sat down to think again. The fat seemed to offer a solution. It ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... with sardonic amusement. He was in his late forties, running a bit to blubber, but still looked strong and capable. He waited until Tod Denver ran down, waited and ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... have six months day and six months night. You have read of Laplanders, and how they drive reindeer in their sledges, and live upon reindeer milk; and you have read of Esquimaux, who hunt seals and walrus, and live in houses of ice, lighted by lamps fed with the same blubber on which they feed themselves. I need not tell you ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley |
