Try-works
furnace on a whaling ship
A try-works, also try works and tryworks, is a furnace used to heat blubber from whales for the recovery of oil on a whaling ship.
The try-works is located abaft the forehatch. It is constructed of brick and attached to the deck with iron braces. Two cast-iron try-pots are set into the furnace. A reservoir of water under the bricks keeps the furnace from scorching the wood of the deck. The process of removing oil from blubber is known as "trying out". It is similar to the rendering process for producing lard by heating or frying fatty pork.
Context
Early in the history of whaling, vessels had no means to process blubber at sea and had to bring it into port for processing. Later, whaling vessels carried a try-works, a brick furnace with a pair of try-pots built onto the deck. The try-works was constructed aboard the vessel before it left port.
“Try-works” enters the record as furnace on a whaling ship. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Try-works, furnace and whaling can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7848835. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Try-works” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.