258 THE LAST CRUISE OF THE CARNEGIE 



and a fish's eye were recovered. Tony, the cabin-boy, collected 

 some teeth, which he cleaned for souvenirs. 



During the oceanographic station on this day we had to repeat 

 the deep-series of water-bottles, because the messenger which 

 was sent down the wire to reverse them had become caught by 

 the tentacles of some marine animal like a jellyfish. This crea- 

 ture had plagued us before and we were to meet him again and 

 again. While we were at work on deck someone noticed smoke 

 rising from the roof of the electrical laboratory. It was discovered 

 that a distilled water-bottle had acted as a lens and had set fire 

 to a towel. We at once made canvas covers for the bottles to 

 prevent a more serious accident in the future. 



But May 2 was a blue-letter day in our calendar. Seven hours 

 elapsed in collecting our samples, instead of the usual three. The 

 surging of the vessel in the rough sea fouled the piano-wire and 

 bottle-series. To untangle them we were forced to sacrifice two 

 thousand meters of the wire. Not content with this setback. 

 Father Neptune had more tricks up his sleeve, and the deep-series 

 had to be repeated three times for various reasons — and all this 

 was in the rain. 



To cheer us up after these discouragements a dinner was ar- 

 ranged for May 5, to celebrate our hundredth oceanographic 

 station and the end of one year at sea. The printed menu, giving 

 fanciful names to very familiar dishes, did its part to disguise the 

 fact that we were living by grace of the can-opener. 



Crossing the 180th meridian took May 6 out of our log-book, 

 although there were two Greenwich mean noons on May 7. 



The trade-winds we were now enjoying carried the pilot-bal- 

 loons out of sight in ten minutes or less. Although our supply 

 of hydrogen was low we tried tying two of them together to make 

 them visible for longer periods. 



The fresh winds, together with the fairly strong currents in our 

 neighborhood, caused an excessive surface-drift of the vessel. 

 The angle of the bottom-sampling wire reached 75° from the verti- 

 cal on May 9; and Captain Ault decided to modify the method so 

 as to allow the use of two sixty-pound weights instead of one. But 

 it would use far more power than we could spare to bring these 



