56 WORST JOURNEY IN’ THE WORLD 
best, and behaved up to our best traditions at a time when 
his own outlook must have been the blackness of dark- © 
Hess.4 5% 
Characteristically Bowers ends his account : 
i 
“Under its worst conditions this earth is a good place | 
to live in.” 
Priestley wrote in his diary : 
“If Dante had seen our ship as she was at her worst, I 
fancy he would have got a good idea for another Circle of 
Hell, though he would have been at a loss to account for 
such a cheerful and ribald lot of Souls.” 
The situation narrowed down toa fight between the in- 
coming water and the men who were trying to keep it in 
check by baling her out. The Terra Nova will never be 
more full of water, nearly up to the furnaces, than she was 
that Friday morning, when we were told to go and do our 
damndest with three iron buckets. The constructors had 
not allowed for baling, only for the passage of one man at 
a time up and down the two iron ladders which connected ~ 
the engine-room floor plates with the deck. If we used more 
than three buckets the business of passing them rapidly up, 
emptying them out of the hatchway, and returning them 
empty, became unprofitable. We were divided into two 
ganes, and all Friday and Friday night we worked two 
hours on and two hours off, like fiends. 
Wilson’s Journal describes the scene: 
“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 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.” 
