“Watch her now, Bartlett,” I cautioned. “Wide open to the sea till the water shows halfway in the boiler sight glass, then shut off! Careful now; it’ll only take a few minutes. Don’t overfill her!”
But I might have spared both my thanks and my caution. Bartlett waited a moment for the water to rush through from the sea into the empty boiler, then feeling no vibration in the pipe to indicate flow, stooped, pressed his ear near (but not too near) the frost-coated sea cock, and listened carefully. Not a murmur of running water. Bartlett lifted his head.
“No water coming through, chief.”
No water? I felt sick. Then that long disused seachest must be plugged with ice! Frozen solid where beyond the valve it passed through our thick wood side to the sea, totally beyond our reach for thawing out, effectively blocking off any flow of water. We could not fill our boiler!
I cursed inwardly. Literally we were sunk now. Caught with no steam, boilers empty, unable to get water into them to raise steam, what good to us now was all the coal we had saved for our exploring by that economy? There the saved coal lay, worse than useless in the bunkers, serving only to ballast down the ship that she might sink the faster under us!
Thump, thump! Thump, thump!
From on deck came a welcome sound. The carpenters had at last got the handles rigged. The hand pump was starting! With four men on each side swaying over the bars, vigorously putting their backs into each stroke, that steady thumping gave me new hope. If the hand pump, inefficient though it was, could only keep the leak from gaining too fast on us, I still had a chance! Water to fill the boiler? Why bother about the sea? We were standing in an ocean of salt water right there in our fireroom and more was coming in all the time! All I needed was time enough to get a boiler full of it off the submerged floorplates into that port kettle, and I could light off!
“Bartlett, forget that sea cock! On top of that port boiler with you and your wrench. Open up the manhole there, then stand by the opening to receive water in buckets! Boyd, get Sharvell and Iversen out of the bunkers, get some buckets, and form a line to pass water up to Bartlett as soon as he gets that manhole open!”
Bartlett scrambled over the furnace fronts and up on top of the boiler. Boyd passed up his torch to illuminate the work, and I tossed up a sledge hammer to help him start the bolts on the manhead. While Bartlett labored over the bolts and Boyd and the other coalheavers scurried through the engine room and the fireroom collecting all the buckets, I stood a moment before the port boiler, sizing up the situation.
Where was all that water coming from anyway? There was no sign of damage, no sign of leak in the machinery spaces. From forward, probably; we had got some very bad raps on the bow during the morning’s excitement. Perhaps an underrunning floe had rammed our stern, opened up our forepeak. If such were the case, that hand pump running on deck forward was in the best location to hold down the water, to keep it from rising too rapidly here amidships. I listened an instant to the rapid thump, thump of the oscillating handles, then caught mixed with the noise a husky cry from the men at the pump,