Lot Essay
'"Six-fifteen. Getting dark. Have rowed several miles northwest. Forced to stop and camp owing to danger in the darkness of the boats getting crushed by the crowding floes. Just then a long floe barred our course, so we hauled up on it. There was the added inducement of plentiful food - a crabeater seal was there before us. It was soon killed and cut up. As we hauled up the boats, secured them and the stores and pitched the tents, Green, aided by How, cooked the best cuts!"
The "galley" as we loftily called the stove that he used, had been made by Hurley from the five-gallon ash bucket of the Endurance. A metal cup in the base held methylated spirit which fired sliced blubber in a small pan above. This volatized and fired big chunks of blubber in the top pan. This attained a fierce heat, above which food was cooked in a three-gallon pot resting on two iron bars. Milk made from True milk powder was boiled in the big aluminium pot of the Nanseni cooker. Three iron supports kept the galley off the snow, and a funnel at one side guided the smoke and oily blobs away from our precious food. Our sooty-faced cook was a marvel. It seemed like a miracle when he prepared a splendid hot meal of hoosh and seal meat with tea or hot milk in thirty-five minutes from lighting the blubber fire. His only shelter from a blizzard was a piece of canvas stretched round four oars stack upright in the snow. Clouds of oily black soot poured from the funnel ... Watches were set, and by 8P.M. all, except the two lookouts, were in their sleeping bags.
The nor'west swell rolled our ice floe to and fro, rocking us gently to sleep ... ' (F.A. Worsley, Shackleton's Boat Journey, New York, 1987, pp. 39-40)
The "galley" as we loftily called the stove that he used, had been made by Hurley from the five-gallon ash bucket of the Endurance. A metal cup in the base held methylated spirit which fired sliced blubber in a small pan above. This volatized and fired big chunks of blubber in the top pan. This attained a fierce heat, above which food was cooked in a three-gallon pot resting on two iron bars. Milk made from True milk powder was boiled in the big aluminium pot of the Nanseni cooker. Three iron supports kept the galley off the snow, and a funnel at one side guided the smoke and oily blobs away from our precious food. Our sooty-faced cook was a marvel. It seemed like a miracle when he prepared a splendid hot meal of hoosh and seal meat with tea or hot milk in thirty-five minutes from lighting the blubber fire. His only shelter from a blizzard was a piece of canvas stretched round four oars stack upright in the snow. Clouds of oily black soot poured from the funnel ... Watches were set, and by 8P.M. all, except the two lookouts, were in their sleeping bags.
The nor'west swell rolled our ice floe to and fro, rocking us gently to sleep ... ' (F.A. Worsley, Shackleton's Boat Journey, New York, 1987, pp. 39-40)