ANOTHER SPRING 463 



Nelson was pumping, kneeling at the end of the table next 

 the bulkhead which divided the officers' and men's quar- 

 ters : his head was level with the lamp, and the indicator 

 was not showing a high pressure. Wright was standing 

 close by. Suddenly the lamp burst, a rent three inches long 

 appearing in the join where the bottom of the oil reservoir 

 is fitted to the rest of the bowl. Twenty places were alight 

 immediately, clothing, bedding, papers and patches of 

 burning oil were all over the table and floor. Luckily every- 

 body was in the hut, for it was blowing a blizzard and 

 minus twenty outside. They were very quick, and every 

 outbreak was stopped. 



On September 5 it was blowing as if it would rip your 

 wind-clothes off you. We were bagging pemmican in the 

 hut when some one said, "Can you smell burning?" At 

 first we could not see anything wrong, and Gran said it 

 must be some brown paper he had burnt ; but after three or 

 four minutes, looking upwards, we saw that the top of the 

 chimney piping was red hot where it went out through the 

 roof, as was also a large ventilator trap which entered the 

 flue at this point. We put salt down from outside, and the 

 fire seemed to die down, but shortly afterwards the ven- 

 tilator trap fell on to the table, leaving a cake of burning 

 soot exposed. This luckily did not fall, and we raked it 

 down into buckets. About a quarter of an hour afterwards 

 all the chimney started blazing again, the flames shooting 

 up into the blizzard outside. We got this out by pushing 

 snow in at the top, and holding baths and buckets below to 

 catch the debris. We then did what we ought to have done 

 at the beginning of the winter — took the piping down and 

 cleaned it all out. 



Our last fire was a little business. Debenham and I were 

 at Hut Point. I noticed that the place was full of smoke, 

 which was quite usual with a blubber fire, but afterwards 

 we found that the old hut was alight between the two roofs. 

 The inner roof was too shaky to allow one to walk on it, 

 and so, at Debenham's suggestion, we bent a tube which 

 was lying about and syphoned some water up with com- 

 plete success. Our more usual fire extinguishers were 



