necessary to prepare hot milk for all hands during the night, in order to sustain life till dawn.  This meant lighting the Primus lamp in the darkness and involved an increased drain on our small store of matches.  It was the rule that one match must serve when the Primus was being lit.  We had no lamp for the compass and during the early days of the voyage we would strike a match when the steersman wanted to see the course at night; but later the necessity for strict economy impressed itself upon us, and the practice of striking matches at night was stopped.  We had one water-tight tin of matches.  I had stowed away in a pocket, in readiness for a sunny day, a lens from one of the telescopes, but this was of no use during the voyage.  The sun seldom shone upon us.  The glass of the compass got broken one night, and we contrived to mend it with adhesive tape from the medicine-chest.  One of the memories that comes to me from those days is of Crean singing at the tiller.  He always sang while he was steering, and nobody ever discovered what the song was.  It was devoid of tune and as monotonous as the chanting of a Buddhist monk at his prayers; yet somehow it was cheerful.  In moments of inspiration Crean would attempt “The Wearing of the Green.”

On the tenth night Worsley could not straighten his body after his spell at the tiller.  He was thoroughly cramped, and we had to drag him beneath the decking and massage him before he could unbend himself and get into a sleeping-bag.  A hard north-westerly gale came up on the eleventh day (May 5) and shifted to the south-west in the late afternoon.  The sky was overcast and occasional snow-squalls added to the discomfort produced by a tremendous cross-sea—­the worst, I thought, that we had experienced.  At midnight I was at the tiller and suddenly noticed a line of clear sky between the south and south-west.  I called to the other men that the sky was clearing, and then a moment later I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds but the white crest of an enormous wave.  During twenty-six years’ experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic.  It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days.  I shouted, “For God’s sake, hold on!  It’s got us!” Then came a moment of suspense that seemed drawn out into hours.  White surged the foam of the breaking sea around us.  We felt our boat lifted and flung forward like a cork in breaking surf.  We were in a seething chaos of tortured water; but somehow the boat lived through it, half-full of water, sagging to the dead weight and shuddering under the blow.  We baled with the energy of men fighting for life, flinging the water over the sides with every receptacle that came to our hands, and after ten minutes of uncertainty we felt the boat renew her life beneath us.  She floated again and ceased to lurch drunkenly as though dazed by the attack of the sea.  Earnestly we hoped that never again would we encounter such a wave.