Stoking on the Terra Nova
Edward Wilson kept a comprehensive journal of the voyage to Antarctica and one theme which came up time and again was stoking. He wrote the following description for saturday 9th July..
All the others in the wardroom are now taking turns at stoking. Two hours at a time is considered enough, however, for everyone now. Evans has proved the strongest of all, and has carried through a complete four hours watch by himself and without help. Rennick came up after an hour and nearly fainted on the upper deck, but went down again and finished his two hours’ watch with Birdie Bowers. The heat increases every day now in the stokehold, every day two or three degrees, and it is really trying work there. One has enormously heavy tools to use, prickers and devil rakes, about 12 feet of solid iron to reach the back of the furnaces with. One has to throw coal into each of the three furnaces every ten to fifteen minutes, and this in the front of a heat and glare that scorches one’s eyes and makes them burn. One has then to spread the fire in the furnace and keep each one bright over the bars which run back 7 or 8ft and are about 3 to 4ft across the front. The fire has to be glowing about 6 inches deep allover this. Then one has to break up the clinker with a ‘devil’, an iron rake with three teeth which one can barely lift off the ground after two or three hours in the heat. While one is shovelling in coal one gets stung by what are called ‘stokehold flies’, which make one jump for the moment. They are drops of hot oil off the engines working over one, which catch one on the back of the neck as one stoops to shovel coal into the furnaces. Between the shovelling, which takes 7 or 8 minutes in every quarter of an hour, one has to get the coal out of the side bunkers, breaking up the large lumps with a sledge hammer, and measuring it all into a three foot bucket of solid iron. This has to be dragged across to each furnace in turn -and the floor is of hot iron plates- then one has to rake out the ashes and from time to time send them up in a hoist after wetting them with water from a hose as they are often red hot. If between all these odd duties one finds a minute to lean against or sit back upon a stationary part of the engines, it either scalds or burns one. Everything is too hot to touch and one works in so little clothing, except for thick soled boots and thick leather gloves. I think that three hours of this at 4 a.m. on a cup of cocoa only was the hardest work I have ever put myself to. One has to get accustomed to the sweating in trimming coal for the bunkers are all of iron and almost as hot as the engine- room. Perhaps the most trying part of stoking is the noise which is continuous and so excessive that Olle has to shout to one’s mate at the work, and as the noise is all a clanging and clatter of iron and metal and a roar from the furnace and from the working of the engines all around and above one, it is somewhat trying.
..sounds like hard work to me!
