ICELAND 93 



land to erect guns, hideous buildings, and mile upon mile of 

 barbed wire. 



When the surveyors went ashore they found the Icelanders 

 pleasant enough and happy to help them in locating the old survey 

 marks whenever they could: they would offer them glasses of 

 fresh milk and smile and pass the time of day. 



During the long summer days with practically no real night 

 Commander Jenks was able to keep his men in the field 1 8 hours 

 a day. In order to get the greatest efficiency he kept the same 

 officers on the same work day after day. Lieutenants B. G. O'Neill 

 and G. P. D. Hall were the two junior surveying officers and 

 these he kept in the boats, sounding continuously from 6 o'clock 

 in the morning, crossing and re-crossing the fjord on their lines 

 of soundings, until even the Arctic summer night became too 

 dark for them to see to fix; this would be about 10.30 p.m., 

 after which they would spend three or four hours in the chart 

 room inking- in the day's work. These two young lieutenants felt 

 they should be in destroyers or the Fleet Air Arm, hitting the 

 enemy, but they were left little time to ponder on these 

 possibilities during the hectic days of surveying. 



Lieutenant D. L. Gordon had a neater hand than even most 

 surveyors and Jenks selected him for the drawing of the collector 

 tracing. Onto this he transferred details from all the field boards, 

 so that on the day the field work was finished there would be a 

 complete record of the work on tracing cloth from which copies 

 could be printed by a-sunprint process onboard for use within the 

 Fleet until the Admiralty produced the properly printed chart. 

 'General' Gordon, as he has always been called in the Surveying 

 Service, has a fine sense of humour and can give an amusing 

 account even of his employment as a draughtsman for 1 8 hours 

 a day ; and he needed his sense of humour as he drew thousands 

 upon thousands of minute figures denoting the soundings on the 

 many surveys Challenger completed in Iceland. He worked the 

 same hours at his chart table as the men in the field, day after day 

 throughout the summer and autumn of 1 940 ; vagaries of the 

 weather never held him up on his steady plodding work. 



Those working in the boats were often overtaken by sudden 

 storms of intense fury. Out of a clear blue sky and without 

 warning the wind would come sweeping down the mountainsides, 



