As mountaineering was not in my own immediate programme, I assisted Mr. Wilkins with bird-shooting and photography—gentle sports compared with the efforts of the others. By 3 p.m. Mr. Douglas had returned, after having fixed the contours roughly and ascertained the greatest height for the purpose of the finished survey.
We arrived back on the _Quest_ by four, anchor was weighed at seven; thereafter an exhaustive series of soundings were taken, and certain errors in earlier surveys were rectified. At breakfast time we anchored in Falmouth Bay, Tristan da Cunha, where we were promptly besieged, as before, by swarms of curious islanders, who gave us as much attention as though we were a strange ship arrived for the first time.
In order that the isolated denizens of this lonely isle should know in future what events progressed in the outer world, Mac and Watts went ashore to erect the mast for the Reverend Rogers’s wireless aerial. I busied myself with shipwork, though the pig hampered me greatly by an insistent determination to thrust her snout into my wash-bucket. Oompah dredged overside and caught a young octopus, surely the ugliest brute on earth, a veritable devil-fish, bright red in colour and with arms full three feet in length—an ugly customer to tackle even then; so what its great-grandfather could have been like is best left to the imagination. We had him crawling lopsidedly about the poop for a time, where he looked like some creature of an evil nightmare; and then, when we’d tired of his ugliness, he was handed over to Mr. Wilkins, who entombed him in a noble jar of methylated spirit.
In the afternoon Naisbitt, Oompah and I went ashore, to discover Mac and Watts, more or less assisted by a hundred or so of the islanders, trying, with the aid of tackles, ropes, improvised sheerpoles and Portuguese windlasses and the like, to raise a sixty-foot hollow steel pole into a vertical position. With a patch on a patch and a patch over all, as they say at sea, they promised to be successful. Amid a breathless suspense the structure was elevated—up and up, swaying like a fishing-rod; but at the critical juncture the principal contraption buckled and broke, the islanders flying like chaff before the wind; and as the damage was irreparable, the experts had to content themselves with erecting about two-thirds of the original length and hope for the best, though I doubt if even now the Tristan da Cunha wireless station is functioning to any epoch-making extent; for Mr. Rogers admitted that he had not mastered the Morse code and was ignorant of not a few technical details.