Page 4 - Willem Barentsz

A little thing came up on the first trip. The ship was rolling like hell. During the technical sea trials,
which took a week, the sea was as smooth as a mirror. The measured mile at Falmouth had to be
postponed a few times, due to good weather fog. It was only on the way out that we found out that
the ship was rolling terribly. The whole trip everything was lashed and like a drunk man we waddled
into Cape Town. After installing staggered bilge keels (alternating up and down) this problem was
solved, but that was of no use to us on the first trip.

The "Willem Barendsz", I am talking about the second, was the largest ship ever built in the
Netherlands up to that time and certainly the most complicated. About 22,000 visitors were present
at the launch and about 600 cars were parked on the wharf. For 1954 a huge number.

The ship was of course entirely built to convert shot whales into oil and other products as quickly and
efficiently as possible. The number of deviations can therefore hardly be listed. Let's take a short walk
from back to front. On the stern there were 32 shift rolls with 23 bollards to moor the whales, which
were delivered to the factory ship. This mooring lasted until the time of processing. In addition to the
engine room for propulsion, there was a second with eight Scottish boilers to supply steam to the
factory and the deck equipment. The steam also served for the cargo pumps and heating, etc. Not
least to meet the enormous need for freshwater for ship and crew. Four turbine generators and two
diesel generators supplied 600 kW and 300 kW of electrical power respectively. On both sides of the
slipway was the accommodation for most of the crew. One deck above the other with cabins for
bacon cutters, flensers, bone sawers, potmen and lemmers. The lower corridors were named
"Woodstock" after a neighbourhood outside Cape Town.
When we walk forward over the slaughter deck, we see the two 40-ton winches on the middle
deckhouse, above the hell gate, which were needed to pull a whale on deck via the slipway. On top of
the deckhouse the spare claw, a kind of scissors weighing several tons, which closed around the body
behind the tail of a whale and gave it something to hold on to when pulling it up.

The slaughter deck. With a steam aw the backbone of a sperm whale is sawn in pieces. Oil was boiled
from the pieces