422 SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION 



of water as fast as they could be given from one to the other from the very 

 bottom of the stokehold to the upper deck, up little metal ladders all the 

 way. One was of course wet through the whole time in a sweater and 

 trousers and sea boots, and every two hours one took these off and hurried 

 in for a rest in a greatcoat, to turn out again in two hours and put on the 

 same cold sopping clothes, and so on until 4 a.m. on Saturday, when we had 

 baled out between four and five tons of water and had so lowered it that it 

 was once more possible to light fires and try the engines and the steam pump 

 again and to clear the valves and the inlet which was once more within reach. 

 The fires had been put out at 11.40 a.m. and were then out for twenty-two 

 hours while we baled. It was a weird night's work with the howling gale 

 and the darkness and the immense seas running over the ship every few 

 minutes and no engines and no sail, and we all in the engine-room, black as 

 ink with the engine-room oil and bilge water, singing chanties as we passed 

 up slopping buckets full of bilge, each man above slopping a little over the 

 heads of all below, him ; wet through to the skin, so much so that some of 

 the party worked altogether naked like Chinese coolies ; and the rush of 

 the wave backwards and forwards at the bottom grew hourly less in the 

 dim light of a couple of engine-room oil lamps whose light just made the 

 darkness visible, the ship all the time rolling like a sodden lifeless log, her 

 lee gunwale under water every time. 



December 3. We were all at work till 4 A.M. and then were all told 

 off to sleep till 8 a.m. At 9.30 A.M. we were all on to the main hand pump, 

 and, lo and behold! it worked, and we pumped and pumped till 12.30, when 

 the ship was once more only as full of bilge water as she always is and the 

 position was practically solved. 



There was one thrilling moment in the midst of the worst hour on Fri- 

 day when we were realising that the fires must be drawn, and when every 

 pump had failed to act, and when the bulwarks began to go to pieces and 

 the petrol cases were all afloat and going overboard, and the word was sud- 

 denly passed in a shout from the hands at work in the waist of the ship try- 

 ing to save petrol cases that smoke was coming up through the seams in the 

 after hold. As this was full of coal and patent fuel and was next the engine- 

 room, and as it had not been opened for the airing, it required to get rid of 

 gas on account of the flood of water on deck making it impossible to open 

 the hatchways; the possibility of a fire there was patent to everyone and 

 it could not possibly have been dealt with in any way short of opening the 

 hatches and flooding the ship, when she must have floundered. It was there- 

 fore a thrilling moment or two until it was discovered that the smoke was 

 really steam, arising from the bilge at the bottom having risen to the heated 

 coal. 



Note 4, p. 15. December 26. We watched two or three immense blue 

 whales at fairly short distance; this is Balanoptera Sibbaldt. One sees first 

 a small dark hump appear and then immediately a jet of grey fog squirted 

 upwards fifteen to eighteen feet, gradually spreading as it rises vertically 

 into the frosty air. I have been nearly in these blows once or twice and 



