Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South

It had been Scott’s decision to ask Lady Markham, a graceful tribute to the man who had almost single-handedly battered the expedition into being. ‘After waiting a short time in the office,’ Markham proudly recorded in his diary, ‘Minna was conducted to the platform before the stern … I followed, and there were also Mrs Peterson, the other directors, Scott, Armitage, Royds and Koettlitz … Keltie, Mill etc. Minna was presented with a pair of gold scissors, and at a signal she cut a ribbon. The bottle of wine was smashed against the bows, there was a pause of two minutes, and then the good ship “Discovery” glided into the sea – a beautiful sight – amidst tremendous cheers.’

The name ‘Discovery’ had only been finally chosen the previous June, but with Markham’s sense of history, it is hard to imagine her being called anything else. With certain modifications and nods in the direction of Colin Archer, she was to all intents and purposes Nares’s old ship, the sixth of a long line of ‘Discoveries’ that linked Scott’s vessel in an unbroken tradition of exploration with the great voyages of Vancouver, Cook and William Baffin.

If Scott was as alive as anyone to the romance of the name, however, he was more concerned with performance, and he would have been pleased with the successful trials in the middle of May. It had been estimated beforehand that she would make seven knots under steam, but in trials both with and against the tide, an average mean of nine knots and the performance of the engine gave them all the encouragement they needed. They might have been less sanguine if they had been able to test her capabilities under sail, but without either the money or the crew to do this, Scott would have to wait until the journey out to South Africa to discover how seriously she under-performed. Her sluggishness under sail would have serious consequences for the costs and timetable of the southward journey, and yet as with everything connected with the expedition, the sheer pressure of time and business meant that no one had the luxury of their German colleagues to think or plan properly ahead.

Back in London, Scott was busier than ever, ordering furs and sledges, negotiating the purchase of dogs, and cadging and wheedling his way to a full crew. From the day that he had taken on the command he had seen the expedition as an essentially naval affair, and he was determined to squeeze as many men out of a reluctant Admiralty as possible. ‘1 senior carpenter’s mate – F.E. Dailey (Ganges),’ an Admiralty file records his shopping-list and its own irritable – and belated – approval:

1 senior boatswain’s mate

1 ER artificer

4 leading stokers

6 petty officers

10 seamen

At the end of May, Scott and Markham were again in Dundee to take possession of the completed ship and steam her down to London. As they were being shown over it, an incident nearly cost Scott his life. ‘Went over Discovery with Scott etc,’ Markham’s diary records. ‘We then, including Royds, all went to see the screw lifted by tackle from the spanker boom, used as a derrick. We were all standing round watching, when the iron hook came in two, the block crashed down, and the screw went down – 2½ tons. Scott was standing exactly under the block, and would have been killed if Mr Smith had not got him to move a little, just a few seconds before. Mr Smith saved Scott’s life.’

Scott was none the worse for the episode, but the screw had jammed in its lifting shaft, and for two days the Discovery was back in dry dock. With time to spare for the first time in months, Scott took out the ship’s dinghy, and the next day drove with his hosts to see Glamis Castle ten miles north of Dundee. On 3 June, though, Discovery was again ready, and in ‘fine weather with a smooth sea’ and Markham ‘very comfortable in the captain’s cabin’, began the first leg of her long journey south.

By the next day Discovery was off Flamborough Head, and passing Yarmouth on the fifth, came into her East India Dock billet on the Thames at 2 p.m. on the sixth, Scott’s thirty-third birthday. Even at this late stage they were still eight men short of a full crew, and with the Admiralty authorising only twenty-three volunteers, Scott was forced to recruit the remainder where he could, taking on four unknown men from the great pool of London’s maritime labour force, and another three from Dundee with experience on northern whalers.

The last thing that Scott had wanted was to mix naval and merchant men in this way, and with the defection of Gregory and the loss of his one outstanding scientist, George Simpson, to the Admiralty’s medical board, there were also still gaps in his civilian staff. It seems astonishing that a National Antarctic Expedition could have brought itself to such a pass, but with little more than a month to go Scott was still without a physicist and a geologist, the two men most crucial to the expedition’s geographical programme and cooperation with the German Gauss.

It was not as though the scientist he already had – Reginald Koettlitz, a former member of the Jackson – Harmsworth expedition, or the ‘exceedingly bald’ Thomas Hodgson, his marine biologist – were national names, but not even Poulton can have envisaged the situation now facing Scott. He was luckier than he might have been in getting another old polar hand in Louis Bernacchi to accept the vacant role of physicist, but with nobody of proven ability to fill Gregory’s shoes, he had no choice but to fall back on a twenty-one-year-old Cambridge oarsman with a Second in the Natural Science Tripos from Cambridge that summer, Hartley Ferrar.

It was little wonder that a scientist like Poulton thought it would have been better that the expedition should be abandoned than sail on these terms, but it was Scott who had to live with the consequences, and no one could have denied him the one piece of real fortune he had with his scientific staff. The previous November he had interviewed a talented ornithologist and water-colourist called Edward Wilson for the post of second doctor, and had been impressed enough to ignore a history of tuberculosis and an infected arm and put him straight onto the books.

A subsequent medical board – at which the scrupulous Wilson had gone back into the room to confess to his tuberculosis – had advised against the appointment, but Scott had no intention of losing a second good man. At such a late stage it would have been almost impossible, anyway, to find a replacement, and so long as Wilson was willing to risk his health and life, Scott was happy to abet him. ‘I think,’ Wilson wrote with that absolute trust in the controlling purpose of a beneficent God that stayed with him to the end, ‘I am intended to go. If I had tried to get it I should have many doubts, but it seems given to me to do. If the climate suits me I shall come back more fit for work than ever, whereas if it doesn’t I think there’s no fear of my coming back at all. I quite realize that it is kill or cure, and have made up my mind that it shall be cure.’

There was one more scare, when their engineer, Skelton, found a leak in Discovery and she went again into dry dock, but with coaling and stowing still to be done, no one could be persuaded to take this with the seriousness it deserved. It must have seemed to Scott, in fact, that a greater threat to the ship came from the visitors, with a chaotic scrum of families, friends, admirals, donors, old ‘Arctics’, ticket-holders and sightseers all pressing to see Discovery before she sailed. The visitors were so numerous, Thomas Williamson, a young naval seaman recruited from HMS Pactolus, complained, ‘you had scarcely breathing’. ‘The relatives were frequently on board,’ Markham recalled with all his old, almost forensic, fascination with the peculiarities of human behaviour, ‘and it was most interesting and rather pathetic to see them finding great consolation in furnishing and arranging the cabins. Scott had his dear old Mother, and his sisters Mrs Macartney, Mrs Campbell, Mrs Brownlow, and Miss Scott. Charlie Royds had his mother and his sisters. Barne had his mother Lady Constance and sister. Shackleton had his fiancée and her two sisters. Dr Koettlitz and Dr Wilson had their wives. Mrs Armitage was near her confinement … ’

With the leak apparently mended, the filthy scramble to coal the ship could at last begin, and 240 tons were loaded into the main bunker, and another sixty into the small bunkers either side of the engine room. On 15 July, another ceremony took place on board that brought home to crew and families the imminence of departure. ‘The bishop came up from below in his robes,’ Markham recalled, ‘preceded by his chaplain with the Crozier.’ Drawn up, waiting for him between the hatching and the main mast, stood the officers and men, and behind them, crowding the ship, their families. ‘The Bishop’s address’ – ‘Behold how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity’ – ‘was excellent and very impressive,’ Markham noted, ‘and the men, led by Royds, sang their hymns well.’ ‘Oh! Almighty God,’ the Bishop finally prayed, ‘Who has appointed all things in heaven and earth in a wonderful order, be pleased to receive into Thy most gracious protection all who sail in this ship. Grant that our labours may show forth Thy praise and increase natural knowledge, preserve us in all dangers of body and soul, nourish us in one spirit of gentle unity, and bring us home O Father in love and safety through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’

It is an image to savour. The Bishop’s blessing, the final prayer of dedication that Scott cherished all his life, the First Lieutenant in his naval uniform leading the lower deck in the hymns, the choice of hymns themselves – ‘Fight the good fight’, ‘Lord Thou hast been our refuge’ and the great sailors’ hymn, ‘Eternal Father’ – no service could have better captured the peculiarly English cultural baggage that the men of the Discovery took with them when they went south. In his account of the first nightmare winter ever spent in Antarctica, Frederick Cook recalled that there was not so much as a bible on board Belgica. In Discovery that would have been inconceivable. For an English and naval expedition, uneasily straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the institutional trappings of late-Victorian religion, along with the sense of order, hierarchy and deference they underpinned, were as real and ever-present as the science, the modernity, agnosticism and spirit of enquiry that drove them.

With only days left before they sailed, there was little time for anything more spiritual than the last, rushed preparations. There were still a hundred things to do, and as many again that would never be done in time. The novelist A.E.W. Mason wanted to see over the ship. Sir Erasmus Ommaney, one of the last frail links with Ross’s expedition, wrote begging Scott to escort him around her. Sir George Nares and Sir Joseph Hooker, old adversaries, had to be accommodated. There were lectures to give, speeches to make, the Worcester training ship to be visited, pay scales to be finalised, wills to be completed, teeth to be stopped, and a last ritual dinner at the Athenaeum with the very men who had spent the last year trying to stop Scott going to be endured. ‘The venerable white President down from his stellar regions … the great physiologist … the equally great physicist … the man responsible for the safe navigation of the world’s waters … the one who had revolutionised surgical practice’ were all there, Armitage recalled twenty-five years later, in a richly Orwellian image of Pig and Man sitting down in amity together, ‘to show us, the officers and scientific staff of the expedition, that although there might have been differences of opinion between the two great societies, there was nothing but a feeling of utmost friendliness for us … We were quite convivial at the close of dinner … Before we left the room with the famous round table we sang “For they are jolly good fellows”, to which they responded in like fashion.’

A week later on 31 July, Scott and Discovery were at last ready to make their escape. At twelve o’clock Markham and his wife Minna, along with Scott’s mother and his sister Grace, went on board at the dock gate. There, also, were Sir George Goldie, Markham’s staunchest ally in the last battle against the RS, Cyril Longhurst, the expedition secretary, relatives and a watching crowd of hundreds. ‘At 1 sharp,’ Scott noted in the first entry of his Expedition Journal, ‘left E.I. Docks … Ship’s company not so disorganised as I had expected. Naval people splendid – three merchant seamen intoxicated.’

As Discovery moved slowly down river on the tide, ‘all the steamers on the Thames’, the expedition’s new geologist, Hartley Ferrar, wrote in his diary, ‘blew their horns’, and the boys of the Worcester, manning the rigging of the training ship, ‘sang Auld Lang Syne’. At Greenhithe most of the visitors were put ashore, and by next evening Discovery had crossed Spithead and was anchored off the pier at Stokes Bay. On 3 August George Murray arrived with Dr Hugh Mill, the RGS librarian, who was accompanying the ship as far as Madeira, and two days later the last of the men returned from leave, including among them Wilson, back from a brief honeymoon, having been married less than three weeks before.

At nine that morning Discovery, with Sir Clements Markham and his cousin Albert, McClintock and Scott’s mother aboard, steamed across to Cowes and made fast to a buoy near the Royal Yacht Osborne. Scott had come a long way since he had been turned down for a berth on the Yacht, and at twelve the new King and Queen came alongside, with Princess Victoria. ‘As His Majesty came over the side,’ Markham noted with a wonderful bit of courtier’s mummery, ‘he called me, and I knelt and kissed hands, being the first time I had seen him since the accession, also the Queen.’ Markham then introduced Scott to the King and Queen, and Scott presented his officers. The men, drawn up on the port side, were inspected, and then Scott’s mother presented. ‘The King and Queen then went round the upper-deck, and the living deck,’ Markham continued, ‘taking the greatest interest in everything. On returning to the upper deck the King came and talked to me, speaking in high terms of Scott and his crew. The men were drawn up on the starboard side. After mentioning his grief and anxiety over his sister who was dying [Victoria, the Dowager Empress of Germany and the Kaiser’s mother, died that same day, one more small incident in the deteriorating relations between Britain and Germany], he spoke to Albert and McClintock. Then he made an excellent speech to the men, and turning to Scott, His Majesty decorated him with the Victorian Order (MVO).’

If the biologist Thomas Hodgson is to be believed, the only thing that really excited the Queen was Scott’s terrier, Scamp, but as Hodgson had not even recognised the Queen – ‘Very young … lame and deaf’ – he is possibly not the best witness. ‘We have had millions of visitors while we have been here,’ Hodgson wrote to his mother, as if numbers might somehow explain his failure of identification, ‘mostly aristocratic yet very mixed. We went in a mob to sign the King’s book on board the Osborne and as we came back a boat fouled us at the gangway and a fool went and jumped overboard and we had to haul him in like a drowned rat.’ The ‘fool’ had actually dived in to rescue one of the Queen’s Pekingeses, but even an anxious Skelton, ‘in spite of being much troubled with numerous ladies’, thought it ‘on the whole rather a good show’.

For Scott himself, it was a mixed occasion. He always hated fuss of any kind, especially anything that singled him out. In his journal entry for the day he forgot even to mention his MVO, only pencilling it later in the margin as an afterthought. For his mother, though, he was pleased. ‘My Dear little Phoebe & Esther,’ he wrote in big writing to his sister Ettie’s children, ‘This letter is to tell you that the King has made dear Uncle Con a Member of the Victorian Order, that is to say he has been given a very pretty medal which dear Granny Scott pinned to his coat.’ He was grateful, too, to his old captain for his thoughtfulness in arranging things. ‘It was entirely due to Egerton,’ he explained to the girls’ father, ‘that mother remained on board, and nothing as you say could have been more gratifying to her at such a time.’

It was a kindness that was not wasted on her. On holiday with Grace in France, where Scott had sent them to take her mind off his leaving, she wrote to him with a disarming pride of meeting the King and Queen. ‘People here like hearing about them. I never begin the subject, but of course if I’m asked I am only too pleased to tell them and recall my time of triumph in my son, for, after all, it is only the very few who actually shake hands with Royalty. Apart from that I like to think of the sweet sympathetic face that looked at me and smiled such interest in all she was looking at. And now, dear, one word of thanks for the holiday you are giving us both, and then good bye. God bless, keep and preserve you, my best of sons.’ Royalty was not enough, however, to take her mind long off her sadness at losing him. ‘I am not going to say one word about our feelings,’ she wrote three days later, ‘as your beautiful ship grew less & less till we lost her altogether: I shall rather tell you of the great kindness everyone showed us.’

Even the landscape of the coast brought back memories: ‘It was so lovely sitting on the shore,’ she wrote to him again a week later, ‘but this sort of life is too much like the old life at Devonport & brings it much to the front … Monsie [Grace] went to the stores about your V.O. ribbon and was directed to Spink & Sons and I hear from them that they have sent it.’ By the time she wrote that, Discovery was already off Madeira. After one last hectic day, she had sailed on the sixth. Scott and Murray had gone ashore for a final breakfast with Markham, and then retuned to the ship, ‘sad to see the last of this Grand old man and his companion Longhurst’.

Just before twelve o’clock Discovery finally slipped from her buoy, the house flag of the RGS and Blue Ensign and burgee of the Harwich Yacht Club – the Admiralty had forbidden them use of the Royal Navy’s White Ensign – fluttering at the mast. Slowly she made her way through the bobbing mass of boats and yachts crowding the Solent for Cowes Week and westward towards the Needles Channel. Off the small town of Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight the last of the families were put ashore – ‘a sad time indeed’, Scott scrawled in his journal, ‘but the womenfolk are always brave’. ‘How willingly one would dispense with these farewells,’ he later wrote in a passage that might have come straight out of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, ‘and how truly one feels that the greater burden of sadness is on those who are left behind! Before us lay new scenes, new interests, expanding horizons; but who at such times must not think sorely of the wives and mothers condemned to think of the past, and hope in silent patience for the future, through years of suspense and anxiety?’

Early the next morning the Start was still in sight, ‘but gradually it shaded from green to blue, till towards noon it vanished in the distance, and with it our last view of the Old Country’.

SEVEN South (#ulink_1b6c59c2-3429-5dbc-9e90-307424bebc8e)

This is an awful ship for keeping our whites clean.

Charles Royds, diary, 22 August 1901

The same routine, all day at work & keeping watch & watch at night, a little bit rough I think.

Thomas Williamson, journal, 9 August 1901

FOR ALL HIS ANXIETIES over his mother, Scott would have been an odd creature if he had not been relieved to see England finally dip out of sight. With the forgettable exception of Torpedo Boat 87 almost a decade earlier, this was his first command, and if he had been in control of Discovery for over a year, it had been only the most notional authority, beset by the hydrographers and professors on the one side and the benign but autocratic presence of Sir Clements Markham on the other.

But now it was his ship, and if the Instructions he carried with him ran to twenty-seven paragraphs and thousands of words, they at least enshrined the principle of autonomy for which Markham had fought so hard. ‘INSTRUCTIONS TO THE COMMANDER OF THE NATIONAL ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION AND THE DIRECTOR OF THE SCIENTIFIC STAFF’, the document was headed:

1: INSTRUCTIONS TO THE COMMANDER

The Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society, with the assistance of His Majesty’s Government, have fitted out an expedition for scientific discovery and exploration in the Antarctic Regions, and have entrusted you with the command.

The objects of the Expedition are (a) to determine, as far as possible, the nature, condition and extent of that portion of the South Polar lands which is included in the scope of your Expedition; and (b) to make a magnetic survey in the southern regions to the south of the 40th parallel and to carry on meteorological, oceanographic, geological, biological and physical investigations and researches. Neither of these objects is to be sacrificed to the other.

There was a genuine value in a set of Instructions of this kind, in as much as it established the notional priorities of the expedition, but it was the clauses that freed Scott and not tied him to London that were so crucial. ‘Owing to our imperfect knowledge of the conditions which prevail in Antarctic seas,’ Markham had written in Paragraph 17, emancipating Scott at a stroke from any prearranged assumptions about the ship’s movements in the south, ‘we cannot pronounce definitely whether it will be necessary for the ship to make her way out of the ice before the winter sets in, or whether she should winter in the Antarctic regions. It is for you to decide on this important question after a careful examination of the local conditions.’

Scott soon had early reminders, too, of how important it was that he should be free to make his own decisions. At the Dundee trials in May Discovery had only been tested under steam, and they had not crossed the Bay of Biscay before it became obvious that it was only in a force 7 or 8 on the Beaufort Scale that they were going to manage anything like the eight knots needed under sail. The problem, as Scott saw it, was the ‘terribly small’ area of sail that Discovery carried, a design deficiency he dressed up rather differently for the benefit of his worried mother. ‘The ship is a magnificent sea boat,’ he wrote to her from Madeira, where Discovery had moored on 15 August, ‘smooth and easy in every movement, a positive cradle on the deep. We only sigh for more sails. Ours are made for temperate seas, so they look rather like pocket handkerchiefs in a light Trade; they are so small that even in a hurricane they couldn’t capsize the ship.’

‘It is quite impossible for me to describe the delight of getting your letter,’ she wrote back from Arromanche in Normandy, where she was still on holiday with Grace. ‘It is so good of you to tell me all the details of the ship and her sailing powers & so sweet of you to tell me of small sails & the safety of these in high winds. I prize every detail and read and reread what you say … ’

Discovery was in fact no more sluggish than might have been expected, and certainly outperformed the German Gauss on the voyage south, but if anything was to be done during the first season in the ice, there was no margin for delay. In his first official ‘Letter of Proceedings’ Scott estimated that the best that could be hoped for was an average speed of 6¾ knots, and even if they missed out Melbourne and headed straight for Lyttelton, that still put their original estimates for arriving well out of reach.

There was soon a more serious problem, with the leak that had been discovered back in the East India Docks on the Thames. Skelton and Royds had been trying to warn Scott about it since London, but it was only when two feet of foul-smelling water was found washing around the forward holds a week out of Madeira that, as an irritable Royds wrote in his diary, ‘the skipper at last woke up to the fact that the ship leaked’. The cause of the problem was almost certainly unseasoned timber, which only added to a growing disillusionment with the work of the Dundee Shipbuilders’ Company. Scott had already sent off a long list of their ‘enormities’ to the ship’s designer, and it is not just his journal from these first weeks that is littered with outbursts against Discovery’s contractors. The ‘ship building firm was in my opinion most dilatory in performing the work’, Skelton had complained the day they sailed; ‘not only were they dilatory but I consider them to have performed their contract in a most scandalous manner’. ‘Those responsible for the leakage out [sic] to be strung up,’ was the twenty-four-year-old seaman Thomas Williamson’s more succinct verdict, and by the time they had finished rescuing, cleaning, disinfecting, restoring or jettisoning slime-covered cases there would have been few dissenters on board.

A week later an exhausted Skelton was complaining that things were still as bad as ever, but one unscheduled benefit of the leak was that the stores had all to be systematically repacked. There had been so little time to complete preparations in London that no one on board really knew where anything was, and with half the stores going separately to Melbourne, and the one man who knew anything about the system going with them, equipment was endlessly being lost or turning up buried ‘in the cutter or some other marvellous stow hold’.

The work had at least given Scott a chance to gauge the men under him, and if he was impressed with Shackleton, he was doubly grateful that he had persuaded Skelton to join him from Majestic. ‘I cannot sufficiently express my admiration for their efforts,’ he reported in his second Letter of Proceedings, after a dead calm and temperatures in the 140s had turned the stokehold into a living hell, ‘and more especially for the unfailing perseverance and skill of Mr Skelton the Chief Engineer and Mr Dellbridge the artifice engineer.’

In spite of these teething problems, however, and the inexperience of the crew in handling a sailing ship or taking soundings, the atmosphere on board was good. ‘It’s a blessed thing we get so much heavy work,’ Edward Wilson wrote contentedly after three weeks at sea, ‘because none of us need ever feel the want of exercise at all. The Captain turns to with all of us and shirks nothing, not even the dirtiest work. Royds works well and had most of the work on the ship itself to do. Shackle and Barne and I are a trio, and one is never dirtier than the other two, and all three as a rule are filthy. We three generally sleep down aft the poop in moonlight as bright as day, except when driven below by rain. Hodgson is always on the go. I think that Shackleton has so far done more hard work than anyone on board.’

Wilson was in no doubt either of the pivotal role Scott played in the well-being of the ship. ‘He is a most capable man in every way,’ he wrote again later in the voyage, when he had had time to take fuller stock of his skipper, ‘and has a really well-balanced head on his shoulders. I admire him immensely, all but his temper. He is quick tempered and very impatient, but he is a really nice fellow, very generous and ready to help us all in every way, and to do everything he can to ensure us the full merit of all we do. He is thoughtful for each individual and does little kindnesses which show it. He is ready to listen to everyone too, and joins heartily in all the humbug that goes on. I have a great admiration for him, and he is in no Service rut but is always anxious to see both sides of every question, and I have never known him to be unfair.’

There were obviously tensions and irritations – the state of the bald, untidy, hopelessly civilian Hodgson’s laboratory, Koettlitz’s idleness, the ever-present threat of having Shackleton spout Swinburne or Browning at you on watch – but Hugh Mill had never been in ‘pleasanter company’. ‘Captain Scott has shown a power that I must own surprised me in mastering the details of the scientific work,’ he reported home, as clear as Wilson as to where the credit lay; ‘he is greatly liked and respected by everyone on board, and has I believe mastered the art – more difficult than any of the scientific work – of preserving the necessary discipline & the equally necessary confidence and friendly feeling between all on board.’

If there was any early difficulty on board, in fact, it was curiously not between navy and civilian, or navy and merchant, or wardroom and mess deck, but between Scott and his First Lieutenant, Charles Royds. By the end of the expedition there was nothing that the two men would not have done for each other, but in these first weeks differences of temperament and habits – and differences at heart, one suspects, between Scott’s style of command and Royds’s amour propre as the First Lieutenant responsible for the running of the ship – spilled out in the stream of grumbles that bubble up time and again in Royds’s journals.