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<p>[Page 76]</p><p>as the committee [representative], fought with the fishing society and several other interested parties over the whale, and eventually it was decided that the yields from the animal were to be shared by all. Many began to dream of huge profits, and a nice little poem by Matthiessen, “The Whale of Trial Bay”, with illustrations by Wiese, aptly describes the excitement and other events in the camp during those days. I for my part can only say that apart from the entertainment provided by the eventual landing of the whale and the slaughter, which in the first 2 days brought a welcome break from the camp monotony, I’d rather we hadn’t set eyes on the whale, nor it on us. At first we tried to roast the meat and eat it, but it was so terribly fibrous and tough that we soon abandoned the effort. The foul smell of decomposition that soon followed haunted my nose for several weeks and the beach became quite unattractive for a long while. The yields from the animal were a complete flop, too. The [indecipherable] were too short to be worth anything, and the fish-liver oil proved to be difficult to harvest, we had to boil it but eventually</p>