One want which was unavoidable was the lack of fresh water.  There was none to wash in, though a glass of water was allowed for shaving!  With an unlimited amount of sea water this may not seem much of a hardship; nor is it unless you have very dirty work to do.  But inasmuch as some of the officers were coaling almost daily, they found that any amount of cold sea water, even with a euphemistically named ‘sea-water soap,’ had no very great effect in removing the coal dust.  The alternative was to make friends with the engine-room authorities and draw some water from the boilers.

Perhaps therefore it was not with purely disinterested motives that some of us undertook to do the stoking during the morning watch, and also later in the day during our passage through the tropics, since the engine-room staff was reduced by sickness.  A very short time will convince anybody that the ease with which men accustomed to this work get through their watch is mainly due to custom and method.  The ship had no forced draught nor modern ventilating apparatus.  Four hours in the boiling fiery furnace which the Terra Nova’s stokehold formed in the tropics, unless there was a good wind to blow down the one canvas shaft, was a real test of staying power, and the actual shovelling of the coal into the furnaces, one after the other, was as child’s play to handling the ‘devil,’ as the weighty instrument used for breaking up the clinker and shaping the fire was called.  The boilers were cylindrical marine or return tube boilers, the furnaces being six feet long by three feet wide, slightly lower at the back than at the front.  The fire on the bars was kept wedge-shape, that is, some nine inches high at the back, tapering to about six inches in front against the furnace doors.  The furnaces were corrugated for strength.  We were supposed to keep the pressure on the gauge between 70 and 80, but it wanted some doing.  For the most part it was done.

We did, however, get uncomfortable days with the rain sluicing down and a high temperature—­everything wet on deck and below.  But it had its advantages in the fresh water it produced.  Every bucket was on duty, and the ship’s company stripped naked and ran about the decks or sat in the stream between the laboratories and wardroom skylight and washed their very dirty clothes.  The stream came through into our bunks, and no amount of caulking ever stopped it.  To sleep with a constant drip of water falling upon you is a real trial.  These hot, wet days were more trying to the nerves than the months of wet, rough but cooler weather to come, and it says much for the good spirit which prevailed that there was no friction, though we were crowded together like sardines in a tin.

July 12 was a typical day (lat. 4 deg. 57’ N., long. 22 deg. 4’ W.).  A very hot, rainy night, followed by a squall which struck us while we were having breakfast, so we went up and set all sail, which took until about 9.30 A.M.  We then sat in the water on the deck and washed clothes until just before mid-day, when the wind dropped, though the rain continued.  So we went up and furled all sail, a tedious business when the sails are wet and heavy.  Then work on cargo or coal till 7 P.M., supper, and glad to get to sleep.