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.
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