o the point
as people searched out dry spots here and there to finish the night
in oilskins and greatcoats on the cabin or ward-room seats, I thought
things were becoming interesting.

Some of the staff were like dead men with sea-sickness. Even so
Cherry-Garrard and Wright and Day turned out with the rest of us and
alternately worked and were sick.

I have no sea-sickness on these ships myself under any conditions,
so I enjoyed it all, and as I have the run of the bridge and can ask
as many questions as I choose, I knew all that was going on.

All Friday and Friday night we worked in two parties, two hours on and
two hours off; it was heavy work filling and handing up huge 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 off and
hurried in for a rest in a greatcoat, to turn out again in two hours
and put in 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