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