and no sail, and we all in 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."

"There was one thrilling moment in the midst of the worst hour on Friday
when we were realizing 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 afterhold. 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 hatchway, the possibility of a fire
there was patent to every one, and it could not possibly have been dealt
with in 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."[46]

Meanwhile men were working for all our lives to cut through two bulkheads
which cut off all communication with the suction of the hand-pumps. One
bulkhead was iron, the other wood.