Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

cruised alongside the ship for a few hundred yards, blowing and showing the
very stumpy dorsal fin and square head of this species. The whole of its brown
body - length about 25 feet - was clearly visible to me looking down from the
bridge. Then it sounded. We altered course for another group of sperm whales,
identified by their puffy spouts, but they scattered and I didn’t get such a good
view. Dudley gave an amusing talk on ‘South America from the windows of
Whitehall’.
Next day’s morning watch was quite uneventful. I watched a bosun bird:
the wings were white with black tips, tail long and the bill red. With rapid
plover-like wing beats it passed across our bows from SE to W - a red-billed
tropic bird. An immature wandering albatross was seen at the same time.
Between 4 and 6 o’clock we passed large flocks of black-browed and yellownosed
albatrosses, sitting on the water. There were numbers of black-capped
petrels and a few Schlegel's. In the afternoon I assisted in the pulling of two
teeth from ‘Greaser’ Cox, a lower right molar and a wisdom tooth - part of my
dental training! Dr Slessor talked to us Base Leaders about the medical stores.
Next day as I woke Lobos Island – breeding ground of fur seals - was
abeam to starboard, with the long grey line of the Uruguayan coast on the
horizon. In the early morning, uniform grey light, it was uninspiring. I saw my
first two Dominican gulls following the ship and by the end of the watch they
had increased to twenty. We passed the Banco Ingles lightship at 10.36 am, the
Pilot boarded at 1.15 pm and at 1.50 pm we entered the harbour. The harbour
birds were: Patagonian black-headed gull and Bigua cormorant. At 2.20 pm we
moored alongside; 16 days 2 hours and 13 minutes from St Vincent, having
traveled 3,717 nautical miles.
Montevideo, my first foreign city
The port officials came aboard and the formalities were completed. The
mail was delivered but it was incomplete; I had only two letters - from Freda
Woods and Oliver Barclay (a Cambridge friend). We were allowed currency of
10 pesos a day (a peso being equivalent to about 2sh 6d) and went ashore at 4.30
pm. Montevideo was my first experience of a foreign city. Mr Botterell, the
agent for Royal Mail Line had told us that we could make use of the English
Club at Calle 25 de Mayo, so we made tracks there to ‘up-homers’ as David said
- a naval term. We found the club eventually, with difficulty due to language
problems. We had a beer and met Tom Torry. He was going out to a little cafe
in Pocitos, where he usually went on a Saturday and took David, Derek and
myself along. It turned out to be a very ‘continental’ cafe shaded by plane trees.
We sat at a table outside and a friendly waiter called Vasquez served us; he was
Spanish and had come over fairly recently. We drank caña - a local jungle-juice -
and ate olives and peanuts and talked about Uruguay, Argentina and Home.
We met various other members of the English colony in Montevideo: two ‘Jocks’
who were in the wool trade; Mr and Mrs Settle who invited us out for the
following afternoon and Eleanor, their young daughter of five, who was a
charmer. Mrs Settle was a nurse at St Thomas's before coming out to Uruguay.
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