6l2 
SCOTT'S LAST EXPEDITION 
buckets 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 of! 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 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 1 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 
Friday 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 suddenly passed in a shout from the hands at work in the 
waist of the ship trying 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 possi- 
bility of a fire there was patent to everyone and it could not possibly 
have been dealt with an any way short of opening the hatches and 
flooding the ship, when she must have foundered. It was therefore 
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, />. 22.— December 26. We watched two or three immense 
blue whales at fairly short distance; this is Balamoptcra Sibbatdi. 
