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Then we searched for fresh water, and found three iron tanks nearly full in the after-hold. The water stunk with keeping, as though it had grown rank in the bilge, but after it had stood a little while exposed to air it became sweet enough to use. There was no fear then of our perishing from hunger and thirst whilst the whaler kept together.
Jean. A good many transport men and horses, and men of other units, were killed and wounded near. It was what might be called a rough night in the Ypres Salient! "A message came to us at 5 a.m. that I must proceed to Bilge Trench to be temporarily attached to D Company in Wood's place. Colonel Best-Dunkley calls it the front line, and considers it such in his dispositions.
The great ship, which usually rested even-keeled on two waves, and whose bilge keels under normal conditions rendered rolling impossible, began to pitch and roll like a leviathan at play. The decks, swept by gigantic seas, were injured wherever was anything to injure. Bulwarks were torn away as though they had been compact of paper.
Her engines were in perfect order, her furnace so new that the grate bars were still unsealed from heat; the maker's name-plate was still bright on the boilers; her hull was quite dry, with less than six inches of water in her bilge. She had no cargo, except four or five tons of raw metal ingots used as ballast. The coal in her bunkers was nearly exhausted.
"Do I win?" "No, Bilge," I said sadly, "you lose." But I mustn't dwell on the days that followed the long quiet days of lazy dreaming on the raft, during which I slowly built up my strength, which had been shattered by privation. They were days, dear reader, of deep and quiet peace, and yet I cannot recall them without shedding a tear for the brave man who made them what they were.
I noticed a great quantity of broken ice sinking and rising in the dark green curls of the billows, and big blocks would be hurled on to the schooner's bed and then be swept off, sometimes fetching the bilge such a thump as seemed to swing a bellow through her frame.
The bilge pump is dependent on the main engine. To use the pump it was necessary to go ahead. It was at such times that the heaviest seas swept in over the lee rail; over and over again the rail, from the forerigging to the main, was covered by a solid sheet of curling water which swept aft and high on the poop.
I heard Dick begin to rise, and then some one seemingly stopped him, and the voice of Hands exclaimed: "Oh, stow that! Don't you get sucking of that bilge, John. Let's have a go of the rum." "Dick," said Silver, "I trust you. I've a gauge on the keg, mind. There's the key; you fill a pannikin and bring it up."
We listened to these sounds for hours, unable to see anything and having nought else to distract our attention, until Tom, becoming somewhat affected by the smell of the bilge water in the hold as well as by the unaccustomed rocking movement of the brig, began to feel sea-sick and fretful. "I declare this is worse than the Doctor's," he complained.
The ship had been forced much further up the beach than before, and she had now in her bilge above nine feet of water, which reached higher than the lower-deck beams.
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