If the big chap who succumbed to heart failure that night had lived a few days longer, he would have wondered still more at me or anyone else surviving a day's work in the hold.
For the thermometer ran up incredibly ... hotter and hotter it grew ... and down there in the hold we had to shovel out the excrement every morning after breakfast. It was too infernal for even the prudish Anglo-Saxon souls of us to wear clothes beyond a breechclout, and shoes, to protect our feet from the harder hoof.
Our eyes stung and watered from the reek of the ammonia in the cattle-urine. What with the crowding, the bad air (despite the canvas ventilators let down) and the sudden change from green pasturage to dry, baled food, most of the beasts contracted "the skitters." This mess was what we had to shovel out through the portholes ... an offensive-smelling, greenish, fluidic material, that spilled, the half of it, always, from the carefully-held scoop of the shovel.
Cursing, with the bitter sweat streaming off our bodies and into our eyes, and with an oblique eye to guard from heat-maddened, frantic steer-kicks,—each day, for several hours, we suffered through this hell ... to emerge panting, like runners after a long race; befouled ... to throw ourselves down on the upper deck, under the blue, wind-free sky and feel as if we had come into paradise....
"I wish I had never come back to this hell-ship, at Brisbane!"
"I wish I had never come aboard at all at Sydney!"
At such times, and at other odd ends of leisure, I brought my Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament from my bunk, and with the nasty smell of sheep close-by, but unheeded through custom—I studied with greater pleasure than I ever did before or since.