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

If there were going to be problems, it was as well they should happen in Lyttelton and not in the south, while Scott still had the chance to weed out the troublemakers. The Australian warship Ringarooma had already been helping with their refit, and now the navy came to his rescue again, taking his worst offenders into custody, and releasing in their place two volunteers, a ‘big AB named Jesse Handsley’ whom Scott ‘liked the look of’, and another ‘very fine strapping AB’ destined to play a major role in Antarctic history, the twenty-four-year-old Kerryman Tom Crean.

It was not just the crew that was a worry. After Discovery’s brief exposure to ice, the old problem was compounded by a fresh leak in the bow compartments. Back in England her immense strength had seemed a triumph of design, but now that the leaks had to be found, the very thickness and complexity of her linings became a serious drawback, making it virtually impossible, even after two sessions in dry dock, for men unfamiliar with her construction to trace the trouble to its source.

For all the difficulties, however, it would be perverse for these weeks in New Zealand to be remembered for them, because in many ways there was no happier period in Discovery’s history. From the day she arrived there had been far more enthusiasm for the expedition than had ever been shown in England, and with all the hospitality ashore and endless crushes of visitors on board, Scott’s only ‘puzzle’ was ‘How we get along with our work.’

With the curious exception of Wilson, in fact, who did not like the naval officers they met, did not think much of Maori women, and thought the Haka a bogus piece of Sunday-school flummery, a strong note of gratitude runs through all the journals and letters from the time. ‘We had a visit from the Maorie ladies,’ a more appreciative Duncan recorded. ‘They are all original Natives of New Zealand, some of them were rigged up in their own style of dress & they looked splendid.’ ‘I for one will never forget this,’ wrote Williamson of all the kindness they had been shown, and Scott was every bit as thankful. After the initial drunkenness the men had begun to behave ‘in a manner worthy of the ship’, and with that worry off his shoulders, he was able to enjoy a temporary respite from ship life at the home of a cousin – ‘an excellent chap’ – called Robert Scott, and his wife – ‘was a Miss Bowan – Mrs Bowan is Sir Clements’ sister’, he threw in for his mother’s benefit, ‘a charming woman … delightful simple & nice … overflowing with kindness & good nature’, who seemed to touch Scott’s heart in a way that few people ever did. ‘For my own part,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘I must ever remember with gratitude the extraordinary kindness shown me … it has been truly delightful to find in this far spot … English flowers, birds & trees, English faces and English welcomes.’

In spite of Scott’s fears, the work was getting done, and by 21 December Discovery was ready to leave. A service of blessing was held on board by the Bishop of Christchurch, and to the cheers of the huge crowds and the sound of bands, Discovery cast off her warps and steamed slowly out of the great, drowned amphitheatre of Lyttelton harbour, her Plimsoll line sunk beneath the weight of coal, stores, huts, dogs and sheep that now crammed every inch of her upper deck. ‘Cheers followed cheers,’ Scott wrote, ‘until, as we entered the open sea, with a last burst of cheering and a final flutter of handkerchiefs, our kind friends turned away, and slowly we steamed out between the war-ships that seemed to stand as sentinels to the bay.’

With his troublemakers safely out of the way, and the distractions of the shore receding behind them, Scott must have been counting his blessings when disaster struck from nowhere. One of the young naval seamen called Charles Bonner had climbed up earlier to the crow’s nest on the main mast to return the cheers, and was scrambling up higher to stand on the wind vane when the spindle snapped, a cry was heard below, followed by the hideous ‘thud of a fall’ as ‘the poor fellow hit the corner of the winch house with his head, completely smashing his skull & scattering his brains’. ‘He appears to have been sober when he went up,’ a shaken Scott wrote that night on a scrap of paper inserted in his journal, ‘but it afterwards transpired that a bottle of whisky was handed to him by another seaman named Robert Sinclair, whilst he was at the main mast head … his remains were placed on the poop … a dreadful example of the effects of our revelry.’

The death cast a pall across the whole ship. ‘Very dull day, on board, not a word spoken scarcely,’ Williamson wrote in his journal the next day, ‘every man going about his work as silently & quietly as possible, afraid that the least sound would disturb the dead. In the evening myself and another of his messmates washed poor Charlie put a union jack over him and laid him quietly to rest on the poop all ready for the internment [sic] tomorrow on our arrival at Port Chalmers.’

The captain of Ringarooma had steamed on to Port Chalmers to arrange the funeral, and at the inquest Scott made sure there was no word of the whisky. That same evening, at six o’clock on 23 December, the twenty-three-year-old Able Seaman Bonner was buried with naval honours in the graveyard high above the harbour, looking out to open sea and the flanks of hills that might have been Scott’s Devon. ‘We gave full naval honours of course,’ Scott would later write of another funeral to his mother, ‘you know how solemn & impressive such a ceremony is – but after such a funeral as you know the band plays a quickstep & the signs of mourning are discarded – This I think, is in the spirit as well as in the act and it is right and proper.’

Bonner had been hugely popular on the mess deck, but even in the small, tight-knit community of Discovery, life left ‘little time for sad thought’. ‘The cheers of the accompanying ships did not seem to stir so much,’ Williamson wrote on the next day, ‘for we still had sad memories of the last few days, when we passed HMS Ringarooma they gave us three hearty British cheers & a few more besides, & of course as Englishmen & brothers in arms as most of us are, we could not hold it any longer, so we bucked up spirits & gave them something of a return, the best we could under our circumstances.’

For Scott there was the aftermath of Bonner’s death to deal with, his few possessions to be sent home, and the man who had passed him whisky to be considered. On the day of the funeral, Sinclair had stolen a pair of trousers belonging to the cook’s mate and deserted, ‘much depressed’ at his role in Bonner’s fall, and doubting if he could ever live it down in the ship: ‘On the whole,’ Scott added in his journal, ‘I am inclined to doubt it also and think he took the wisest course and the best for all concerned.’

In the circumstances Scott decided to postpone their Christmas celebrations, but they headed south with his mind relieved of at least one worry. He still could not know at this stage whether Discovery would winter in the ice or return to Lyttelton, but the news from London that had reached them in New Zealand, that Markham had raised the funds for a relief ship at least meant that if things turned bad their ‘line of retreat’ was ‘practically assured’.

On board, minds hovered between what lay ahead and what they had left behind. At dinner on Christmas Day, the toasts were ‘The King’ and ‘Absent Friends’. Even Scamp now was gone, left behind at Christchurch, where he had ‘continued to distinguish himself on all sides’. ‘My dear girl,’ Scott had scribbled to his sister Ettie in a sudden spasm of affection, ‘Give the chicks my love & a kiss for yourself … You know what you have been to & what you will always be to your loving brother Con.’

‘At home they are just going to bed,’ wrote Shackleton, in an improbable maudlin blend of sentimentality and faux highmindedness, ‘and all the little ones were hanging their stockings up for the wonderful Father Christmas, who never fails to think of the children who believe in him so. We, but children in the greater world, pray that our request may be granted to do high good work, not just for ourselves, but for the name of England [Celts note], and for all those who have trusted us with the great adventure that we are setting out upon.’

‘Rather erotic lines,’ he wrote more convincingly the next day about a volume of Swinburne’s poetry given him by one of the officers in Ringarooma, and the lightening of spirits was general. Even the unpoetical Skelton was more than usually prepared to indulge Shackleton’s cultural evangelicalism. Reading Stephen Phillips’s ‘Paolo and Francesca’ to Skelton, Shackleton recorded optimistically, ‘though as a rule he thinks poetry of any description rubbish, thinking it, perhaps, not in keeping with the idea of an up-to-date engineer; he rather likes these’.

The West Siberian dogs that had joined them at Lyttelton were also playing their less cultured part, carrying on where Scamp had left off. Scott had deputed the arrangements for them to Armitage back in London, and a Whitstable seaman, Isaac Weller, had been signed on to ship them over to New Zealand and look after them in the ice. Each dog now, though, was assigned to the special care of a seaman, and the move was soon paying some unexpected and ambiguous dividends. ‘Had to make an example of Page & Hubert,’ Scott noted a week into their voyage, after there had been complaints over the food, ‘later very annoyed to find that half a joint of meat being given to the dogs – when will these people wake up to the fact that they are not on a picnic.’ ‘I myself call mine Clarence,’ Williamson engagingly recorded, ‘after a young boyfriend of mine in Lyttelton NZ.’

They were also making good progress southward, and with the wind fair and all ‘handkerchiefs’ spread, they were in a latitude of 61°S by the last day of the year. That evening Bernacchi felt sure enough to bet a bottle of champagne and port that they would see ice before dinner, but if there were bergs out there, Armitage’s hot punch was enough to guarantee that no one in the wardroom saw them that night. On the stroke of midnight, Ferrar, as the youngest member of the wardroom, struck the bell sixteen times, ‘which is the custom on this occasion’, and grog was served to the men. ‘Midnight,’ Skelton’s journal recorded, ‘… several glasses – joined hands & sang “Auld Lang Syne”. Everybody very merry – walking the bridge & joking until nearly 2.00am.’ ‘What indeed may or may not the next two months see?’ Scott asked himself. ‘All one can say is we are prepared – the rest is in the hands of an all seeing Providence, we can only hope for good fortune.’

In the months to come he would look back on an entry like that, and wonder how they could ever have been so innocent. Over the last eighteen months he had done all that any single man could do to ‘prepare’ himself for his command, but though he could not yet know it, his whole professional life had been a kind of anti-preparation for the job, an indoctrination into habits of thought and ways of doing things that would be a positive danger in the conditions they were now entering. As Scott stood on the bridge, or peered into the fog from the crow’s nest, searching for a lead through the pack, there was nothing out there that he could control, nothing he could predict, nothing that behaved as he wanted or expected it to, or prayed that it would. In a world where the bergs flowed one way and the current another, where the old stable landmarks shifted and changed, where nothing under you or around you was what it seemed, what use were the rational certainties of the Vernon technocrat? In a world in which each man would have to think and act for himself, what price was going to have to be paid for the habit of childlike dependency the navy had foisted on it its lower decks? In a world where visibility might be no more than a few feet, what hope was there for a culture of communications or chains of command that had made initiative in its officers a crime?

Nobody could have been less ‘prepared’ than Scott as they entered into this world, but for the time being ‘Providence’ was doing its best to keep them alive. By the morning of 3 January 1902 they had crossed the Antarctic Circle, and were through the scattered ‘outriders of the pack’ and battering a path through the real thing, their eyes trained in a constant vigil on the sky for those telltale darker patches that meant open water. ‘The position of the officer of the watch’ in these conditions, Scott recalled, ‘was no sinecure: he had to be constantly on the watch in the pack to avoid contact with the heavier floes and to pick out the easiest path for the ship. When the pack was open his best position was in the “crow’s nest”, where he could first see the open patches of water and the heavier streams of ice, but in thicker pack he could often handle the ship better by “conning” from the bridge, and at such times he had to be constantly giving fresh directions for the movement of the helm.’

With this new world they had entered, wrapped in a heavy pall of leaden skies, came new rhythms, new wildlife, and a new diet. At the edge of the ice the albatross, their constant companion in the southern seas, had fallen away, leaving them to their own gruesome business. The slaughter of the sheep had started, and to their frozen carcasses, hung from the rigging as in some grisly Ottoman man-of-war, were now added the first seals. ‘My seal started off at a tremendous rate around the floe,’ a jubilant Skelton wrote on the fifth, celebrating their delayed Christmas Day with his own joyous slaughter of the innocents; ‘with Michael heading it off and sticking it with his knife – it was a most amusing sight; they chased it into the middle, & then the Skipper gave it a shot through the head with his pea rifle, which stopped it – we then hauled them both on board, mine still alive so it was killed with a knife – must have been very game; they were both small young bulls, very good skins, no scars – We had seal liver for breakfast, neither of them very nice. Church in forenoon with Christmas hymns.’ Scott might not have shared his engineer’s bloodlust – ‘he hates the sight of our butcher’s shop’, Wilson wrote – but he was again determined to make sure that Belgica’s errors were not repeated. Whenever a sheep had to be killed Scott would move himself to the other side of the bridge until it was over, but that did not stop him drilling into his Dundee whaling men the need to conquer their historic aversion to the taste and stench of blubber. We ‘are now eating seal flesh regularly’, he wrote with satisfaction, throwing in for good measure their newest and most recherché term of culinary comparison, ‘and most of us like it. I must own to some squeamishness myself but even I [thought] the steaks & joints good though the kidneys & liver come amiss … the meat is certainly greatly superior to penguins.’

Two days later, with their luck still holding, and Discovery’s massive overhung bow doing its job, they emerged from the pack into a world of clear seas and blue skies. ‘Our pleasure in once more reaching open water may be imagined,’ Scott wrote, and the pleasure was increased when at 10.30 that night their champagne celebrations were suddenly broken ‘by the shout of “Land in sight”. It made us almost feel like explorers,’ Scott wrote in his journal that night, and ‘All who were not on deck quickly gathered there, to take their first look at the Antarctic Continent; the sun, now near the southern horizon, still shone in a cloudless sky, giving us full daylight. Far away to the south-west could be seen the blue outline of the high mountain peaks of Victoria Land, and we were astonished to find that even at this great distance of more than 100 geographical miles we could easily distinguish the peaks of the Admiralty Range.’

With the worst of the pack behind them, a course was set for Robertson Bay, an inlet formed by the long peninsula of Cape Adare where Bernacchi had spent the winter of 1896 with Borch-grevink’s Southern Cross expedition. After a tortuous path through another stream of pack forty miles from the coast, they forced their way through a last heavy band of ice guarding the entrance to the bay and, the next afternoon at 4 p.m., dropped anchor in the shelter of a low, triangular spit of land. With Royds left in charge of the ship, a boat was lowered and Scott and the rest of the wardroom made their way through the fringe of grounded floe and onto the desolate plateau of pebbled basalt that stretched back three-quarters of a mile to the foot of cliffs.

In the centre of this beach, an incongruous relic among the great colonies of Adélie penguins to whom the world seemed to belong, stood Borchgrevink’s hut. Around it were scattered provisions and, inside, a letter addressed ‘to the Captain of the next Expedition’. Scott read it out aloud to his men. It was ‘rather ridiculous’, wrote Skelton, another John Bull convert to the anti-Borchgrevink movement, ‘& one only wonders how such a man could have ever impressed anybody with his fitness to command an expedition – full of bad spelling & punctuation, there wasn’t a word of use to anybody’.

Meteorology, geology, biology, climatology – in every discipline, in fact, except the geographical exploration that was all Markham really cared about – Borchgrevink had bequeathed a legacy Discovery’s men might have envied, but if the sight of the first grave on Antarctica was not enough to dent English complacency, the ice soon exacted its revenge.

(#litres_trial_promo) After leaving a canister with details of their progress for the relief ship Markham had obtained, they stood out to sea and almost immediately found themselves caught in a stream of pack that carried them helplessly towards a chain of grounded bergs.

It was the first time they had seen what the pack could do, and become aware of what Scott at his most Markhamesque called ‘its mighty powers’. With Armitage aloft in the crow’s nest, they twisted and turned Discovery in an effort to avoid the heaviest floes, struggling desperately against the tide that was forcing them consistently towards the shore. It was one of those hours, Scott recalled, ‘which impress themselves on the memory for ever’. Above them, the sun shone out of a cloudless sky, its rays reflected in myriad gleams among the pack. Behind them were the snow-covered mountains and the glassy water of the bay. The air, Scott remembered, was ‘almost breathlessly still; crisp, clear and sun-lit, it seemed an atmosphere in which all Nature should rejoice; the silence was broken only by the deep panting of our engines and the low measured hush of the grinding floes; yet, beneath all ran this mighty, relentless tide, bearing us on to possible destruction’.

It was the bewildering contrast of appearance and reality that baffled Scott’s imagination, the co-existence of beauty and danger in so extreme a form. At such an early hour of the day, too, only the few men who were on the bridge were aware of their predicament, and the knowledge that down below the rest of the crew lay asleep in their hammocks, unconscious of any danger, seemed to heighten further the incongruity of the scene. Slowly, though – so slowly that no one recognised the moment of release – the tide began to slacken, the tight-packed floes loosened, and by 8.20, five hours after they had weighed anchor, Discovery ‘won through’ to open sea and safety. ‘For me,’ Scott wrote, ‘the lesson had been a sharp and, I have no doubt, a salutary one; we were here to fight the elements with their icy weapons, and once and for all this taught me not to undervalue the enemy.’

If this sounds ominously like the language of naval chivalry, Scott’s men soon had to accustom themselves to another ‘naval’ aspect of his leadership. ‘The Captain is strangely reticent about letting a soul on the ship know what even his immediate plans are,’ Wilson complained after a sudden decision of Scott’s to land on Coulman Island, another in the chain of possible ‘post-boxes’ chosen in London for Discovery, ‘so we are all taken more or less by surprise whenever a landing is made. I think perhaps he is right as a rule, because it means that we must have things ready at all times, but in the case of letters one would like more notice.’

‘The only objection to the work is that the Skipper is so capricious,’ Hodgson wrote home in a similar vein a week later, ‘and no-one knows what is to be done till 5 minutes before it is done.’ It is intriguing to think what the young Scott might have thought of his own behaviour, but between the midshipman who railed in Amphion at his captain, and the commander who could do a fair imitation of him when he chose, lay that familiar, time-honoured gap that separates a hospital consultant from his houseman self.

These were only momentary irritations, and as Scott took Discovery slowly southwards, holding close to the coastline, they were soon too busy again, laying down food for the winter, to worry about much else. ‘As so often in the Antarctic’, he wrote, they ‘resolved to turn night into day’, and began the wretched job of stocking their rigging with all the seal they could kill. ‘It seemed a terrible desecration,’ Scott wrote, ‘to come to this quiet spot only to murder its innocent inhabitants and stain the white snow with their blood … Some of us were glad enough to get away on our ski and to climb the steep slopes at the end of the creek.’ Their slaughter, though, had given them a chance for their first successful dredge, and Hodgson and Koettlitz were in their element. ‘Hodgson was awfully pleased & tremendously excited about it,’ Skelton recorded, one hunter delighted for another. ‘Sponge, starfish, seaeggs, worm – 70 different species in all.’

‘Hodgson is glorified,’ wrote an equally happy Scott, but that was nothing compared to Koettlitz’s joy five days later. Throughout the voyage old ‘Cuttlefish’ had been something of a figure of fun in the wardroom, a combination of touchiness and a certain residual ‘foreign-ness’ making him the natural butt in particular for Shackleton’s high spirits. “‘Moss! Moss!!”’ Koettlitz’s tormentor recorded in his diary on the twentieth. “‘I have found moss!!!” I said, “go on, I found it!” He took it quite seriously, and said, “Never mind, it’s moss, I am so glad!” The poor fellow was so overjoyed that there were almost tears in his eyes.’

With the season pressing on, there were other concerns, and for the last few days Scott had been searching with increasing urgency for a suitable wintering place. The natural harbour where Shackleton had found Koettlitz his moss seemed to offer one plausible fallback if nothing else could be found, but on the night of 21 January, as they pushed their way into the loose pack of McMurdo Sound, Scott saw for the first time the landscape that was to provide the backdrop to all his polar hopes. ‘To the right,’ he wrote, vividly conveying a sense of anticipation and uncertainty that had nothing to do with hindsight, ‘is a lofty range of mountains with one very high peak far inland, and to the south a peculiar conical mountain, seemingly ending the coastline in this direction; to the left is Mount Erebus, its foothills, and a glimpse of Mount Terror. The Parry Mountains cannot be seen ahead of us. In the distance there is a small patch like a distant island. Ross could not have seen these patches, and a remnant of hope remains that we are heading for a strait and not a bay.’

In technical terms Scott was right – McMurdo is a sound – but by eight the next morning the contours of the landscape ahead had resolved themselves into what for all practical purposes is a massive bay. As they pressed on southward into it, the apparent smudges of islands broadened out to suggest its southern limits, but if there was clearly no route through for Discovery, there seemed to be the next best thing. Without doubt, Scott added to his first description, McMurdo was a bay. ‘But,’ he went on – a possible gateway to the south, and the ‘great prospect of very good sledging work’ in his sights – ‘it is highly satisfactory to note that there were no mountains in the background and that as far as the eye can see there must be a straight or smooth level plain stretching far away directly south.’

He was again right – it was the northern edge of the Ross Ice Shelf – and with a second likely winter harbour sighted through binoculars on the west side of McMurdo Sound, Scott turned Discovery eastwards. Rounding Cape Bird at the north-west extremity of Ross Island, they steamed eastwards beneath the twin peaks of Erebus and Terror until at eight the next evening they found a gently shelving beach to the west of Cape Crozier with enough protection from grounded bergs to provide a landing.

Lowering an overladen whale boat, complete with sixteen men, magnetic instruments and a tin message cylinder, they pulled through the surf for the shore and launched themselves on the crest of a wave onto the beach. Scott found himself a spot in the middle of the biggest penguin colony they had seen to erect a post, and anchoring it with boulders, left their final message for the outside world. It did not, at the time, seem the most secure of connections. Even at a few hundred yards, for all their efforts to mark the spot, ‘it was almost impossible to distinguish it, and one could not help thinking, should disaster come to the expedition, what a poor reed was this on which alone we could trust to afford our friends a clue to our whereabouts’.

Once the post was up, and Bernacchi and Barne busy at their chilly magnetic observations, Scott, Royds and Wilson began the climb up to the highest of the nearby volcanic cones. With penguins occupying every available inch of land they were reduced to whatever scree was available, but after hard scramble and a still steeper climb up the rock faces above, they were at last above the stench-line, with a view to the south and east across the Great Barrier – Scott’s first sight of his final resting place – that extended indefinitely away in an immense blue-grey plain of ice.

One of the chief objectives of their first season was to discover whether there was land to the east of this ice shelf, and back on the ship Scott ordered Armitage to take Discovery close under the cliff that formed its northernmost edge. With only Ross’s description to go on, the endless variety and mutability of the ice wall came as a surprise to them, and ‘every few hours some new variation showed itself’, Scott wrote, with ‘now a sharp inlet or other irregularity of outline, now a change in appearance showing a difference in the length of time that the ice-face had been exposed’.

As they steamed steadily eastwards, taking meticulous observations as they went, Discovery passed the farthest south of any ship, and on the twenty-ninth reached the point where Ross had reported a strong suggestion of land to the south-east. Scott had already been in the Antarctic long enough to know how deceptive appearances could be, but soundings of only one hundred fathoms and rapid changes in the conformation of the Barrier suggested land must be close, ‘But what a land!’ Scott wrote. ‘On the swelling mounds of snow above us there was not one break, not a feature to give definition to the hazy outline. Instinctively one felt that such a scene as this was most perfectly devised to produce optical illusions in the explorer, and to cause those errors into which we had found even experienced persons to be led. What could be the height of the misty summit? And what the distance of that shadowy undulation? Instruments provide no answer – we could but guess.’

The discolourations of sand and dirt in the grounded bergs meant that it was more than a ‘moral certainty’ that they had discovered land, but as a thick fog descended over everything the clear visual proof they wanted was still missing. Throughout the next day Discovery groped her way slowly along the line of ice, but it was only as the bell sounded for their evening meal, and all but the officer of the watch were going below, that above the summit of an ice island ahead appeared two or three little black patches – ‘Two little points of bare black rock,’ a jubilant Shackleton wrote, ‘but Oh! how glad we were to see them, for it was land, real land, and the end of the great barrier was really found by us, and the theories and ideas can now be settled.’ ‘New Land. All’s well,’ a contented Williamson recorded, and Duncan was prepared to go one better, noting in his usual style that ‘Its local name is being Edwards land.’ ‘It is intensely satisfactory to have seen the land,’ Scott wrote in his journal that night, ‘for although we were morally certain of its existence – In such a stupendous glaciation doubts of all kinds are always on the top of one’s mind.’

This was hardly the extensive exploration of an unknown eastern land that Markham had envisaged, but that same evening, as they continued in a north-easterly direction, a near disaster made up Scott’s mind that it was enough. Discovery had steamed though thick fog into a narrow channel between pack and land before anyone realised they were in trouble, and was soon deep into a cul-de-sac of ice, lost among a shifting chaos of bergs and heavy pack with no way out but the southern end though which they had entered.

With Royds on watch, however, they continued along the same north-easterly course, until at 7.30 the next morning a massive wall of ice blocked their way. By this time Michael Barne had taken over from Royds, and with no other possibility open to him, began a series of manoeuvres that took them round every point of the compass in a lop-sided figure of eight that left them heading north into deeper trouble. Twelve hours after the nightmare had begun, Royds recorded the critical juncture: ‘There was a panic, and I was sent for hurriedly as it appears that Barne, finding no clear water, had turned and was in reality going back into the bay again. There was much swearing as to which was the way out, which was the berg we had watered close to etc., but I saw at once purely by luck that we were going wrong, and at last managed to convince the Capt., so we again turned back and at last got out of what at one time looked a very nasty position as young ice was forming thickly and very quickly.’

‘A strange thing happened during the night,’ an amused Wilson recorded, ‘The three watch-keepers spent the whole night in wandering round the big bay.’ Scott, though, was shaken. A kind of unspoken Masonry among the executive officers kept the extent of the danger to themselves, but they knew exactly how close they had come to sharing the Belgica’s fate. ‘The courses were logged and could have been eventually worked out,’ Scott wrote – the first entry in the new volume of his Antarctic Journals, and within a whisker of being the entry that marked the end of the expedition – ‘but the fact of one officer relieving the other and the similarity of the bergs and ice edge was most bewildering … the situation was very typical of the ease with which a ship could lose herself in the ice.’

And if tempers had frayed, it is not surprising, as Scott cannot have been the only officer who had had virtually no sleep. For several days the search for land had kept most of them up on deck around the clock, and Scott for one had been on the bridge for the whole of the night of the thirtieth/thirty-first, before taking his first brief rest after twenty-three hours of constant vigil. These were rhythms of life an executive officer was used to, but they were not conditions that any of them were familiar with, and after one more, half-hearted, attempt to find a passage north, Scott decided to turn back before new ice could threaten their McMurdo harbour.

There was time, however, for one detour, and on 3 February Scott took Discovery into a deep bight in the Barrier wall, and pushing on down a narrow creek, secured her with their anchors to the ice walls. While Armitage took a small party out onto the Barrier for their first incompetent experience of sledge work, the balloon equipment was set up, and the next day Scott made the first precarious ascent above Antarctica.

Quite why Scott should have gone up first is hard to say, but if the charitable explanation would have him leading boldly from the front, a rare case of ‘rank pulling’ seems more likely. ‘The Captain said he would like to go up first,’ Shackleton wrote in his diary, equally pleased at his skipper’s indignity and his own satisfaction at outdoing him, ‘so I got out, though I thought it a rather risky thing for he knew nothing about it, and we had to give him a number of directions just before he started.’ Once up, Scott jettisoned first a couple of handfuls of ballast and then a whole bag. ‘We shouted out that he must not throw the ballast out like that,’ Shackleton continued, ‘and then a thin piping voice came back “but I was coming down so fast!” After a short time he had had enough of it, and we hauled him down to earth, and I then went up and realised a height of 650.’ ‘If nobody is killed,’ Wilson added tetchily, ‘it will only be because God has pity on the foolish.’

With a torn fabric and a faulty valve developing, it was not just a ‘first’, but a ‘last’, and the first game of football played on the Barrier seems in retrospect the more significant precedent. But if the balloon they had had such hopes for had failed, and the first sledging party had been a chapter of amateurish errors, there was clearly nothing wrong with spirits on board that a mild embarrassment for the captain could not put right ‘The good spirits and willingness shown by all hands is beyond praise,’ Scott wrote gratefully that night. ‘If an individual can be selected, it is the boatswain – the work, hard manual labour he gets through in the course of the day is little short of wonderful.’

The next day – as if to underline what kind of thanks a man might expect for such heroics in the navy – the boatswain had his cat killed by one of the dogs. In spite of that, as Williamson philosophically concluded his one-line obituary, all was ‘well’ in Discovery. Two days later they had rounded Cape Bird, and by ten o’clock in the evening of 8 February they were deep into McMurdo Sound again, with Discovery’s bows grinding gently on a bank only yards from the shore. Backing away, they found deep water along the northern side of a projecting ice foot, and secured the ship. ‘We have now to consider the possibility of making this part of the bay our winter quarters,’ Scott wrote, and from the point of view of future sledging operations, it seemed that nowhere could be better. To the south-south-east a smooth, even surface stretched away into infinity, with every probability that the Great Barrier continued in that direction. Across the strait, the main coastline and all the geological opportunities it offered, was in easy range, while the proximity of Cape Crozier and their ‘post office’ hopefully kept open their connections with the outside world.

The following day they set out to explore the immediate surroundings, and found on the southern side of their ice foot ‘an excellent little bay’. Alongside it was a sheltered space that would do for their huts, and water shallow enough to preserve them from the threat of floating bergs. There was still sea ice on it, but it was cracked, and it seemed only a matter of days before it broke away. Crucially, too, there was no evidence of pressure from any direction.

Scott had now all but made up his mind to winter here, and Discovery was brought around the ice tongue into the bay. With the ice anchors well bedded and the small kedge buried in the snow for good measure, he took off across the sea-ice on a long exploratory walk with Skelton. After a momentary anxiety with some dangerously thin ice, they worked themselves into a position from which they could take fuller stock of where they were. It was only now that they could see for certain that they were on an island. From their vantage point a smooth, clean snow plain stretched to the furthest ridge of Terror, close to Cape Crozier, where the great ice-wall of the Barrier edge met land. To their right, through an angle of 120 degrees, was nothing but the vast, white expanse of the Barrier, and the way to the south. Safety and opportunity stood hand in hand. Mill’s suggestion of McMurdo, made on the way down to Madeira, had borne fruit. They had found their winter harbour. And if Markham’s vision of eastern exploration had been quietly shelved, what else could he have expected of a naval officer on his first independent command?

NINE Harsh Lessons (#ulink_fdf31773-a4a2-5e4b-ad65-06c63a707df1)

All experience must be purchased, and if an officer inexperienced in these matters be appointed, the price will be paid in time and material, neither of which can be afforded in an Antarctic expedition.