ces. As soon as
we could light up, we did, and got the other pumps under weigh, and, once
the ship was empty, clearing away the suction was a simple matter. I was
pleased to find that after all I had only lost about 100 gallons of the
petrol and bad as things had been they might have been worse....

"You will ask where all the water came from seeing our forward leak had
been stopped. Thank God we did not have that to cope with as well. The
water came chiefly through the deck where the tremendous strain,--not
only of the deck load, but of the smashing seas,--was beyond conception.
She was caught at a tremendous disadvantage and we were dependent for our
lives on each plank standing its own strain. Had one gone we would all
have gone, and the great anxiety was not so much the existing water as
what was going to open up if the storm continued. We might have dumped
the deck cargo, a difficult job at best, but were too busy baling to do
anything else....

"That Captain Scott's account will be moderate you may be sure. Still,
take my word for it, he is one of the best, and behaved up to our best
traditions at a time when his own outlook must have been the blackness of
darkness...."

Characteristically Bowers ends his account:

"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 to a fight between the incoming 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 gangs, 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 r