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

It was a bathetic world for an ambitious young naval officer to find himself in, but Scott did not flinch. He had been prepared to sacrifice his career prospects in the immediate aftermath of the financial crash so that he could be at Devonport near his family, but with Archie dead and another £120 to be found, the only thing that concerned him now was promotion.

He might still sometimes wonder ‘whether the game is worth a candle’, but that was just idle talk. In letter after letter he comes back to the subject, and the endless speculation, manoeuvring and jobbing that the whole business of joining ‘the ranks of the advancers’ entailed: ‘if this can be worked I shall have little to grumble at’; ‘in with all the Flagship now’; ‘the Flag Captain is rather a friend of mine thanks to Ettie’; ‘Fraser would of course be only too delighted for me to succeed him’; ‘I can only hope to become known to their successors’; ‘I trust he will not forget me’.

Even before his father’s death he had been aiming high, applying for a berth in the senior Royal Yacht, Victoria & Albert, that would have put him at the heart of that unrivalled nexus of connections and patronage that effectively ran the service. ‘I want you to tell father the following about the Yacht of my year,’ he wrote home with that clear thinking and lack of resentment that always characterised his attitude to what he called the navy’s ‘much gilded’ youth: ‘I fear it will disappoint him – next to my name in the Navy List he will find Stanley – Michael Colme-Seymour & Goodenough – Stanley is a godson of the Queen, son of the Earl of Derby, a nice chap, popular and has war service (though only Egyptian) – Michael Seymour is of course the son of the Admiral which is saying a great deal as by the time of selection, his father will be at Portsmouth in command … Goodenough is very well connected, has been in the Yacht and in the Mediterranean Yacht, has many personal friends in high places, war service and altogether an excellent chance. Mike Seymour tells me all three people will try for the billet – so you see I fear there’s a very poor chance for me.’

Scott was right – Colme-Seymour got the post – but if he failed with the Yacht, he was more successful in his next ambition, joining the flagship of the Channel Fleet under the command of Prince Louis of Battenberg in July 1897. Among all the ships Scott served in, the Majestic and ‘Majestics’ would always hold a special place, and over the next three years he forged many of those key loyalties and friendships – Skelton, Barne, Evans, Egerton, Campbell – that would last his life. It was in Majestic, too, that Scott established himself beyond any question in his profession. He was not sure whether Prince Louis ‘liked’ him or not, ‘but at any rate’, he told his mother, ‘he thinks me able for my work which is the main thing’. ‘I think I said I would tell you about our doings at Palma Bay,’ he reported home in the same letter.

Well, they were most successful. We had a great time at our various exercises and everything went swimmingly; they left everything in my hands and I was a great man bossing the whole show. On the second day the Admiral came ashore and I showed him around the different arrangements – of course he knew very little about it, but by judiciously working his fads in, I think we made the whole thing popular … I am quite pleased with myself because it is the first time anything of the sort has been done in the Channel. On the last day we had a night attack of which I drew out the whole scheme; altogether I feel the torpedo department has asserted itself to some purpose. Now that Hickley leaves they are about to give me his work as well as my own – having no one else they can entrust it to. It suits me on the whole as having now established myself as a competent torpedo man, my policy is to show myself able to do the general duties … and I think there is no doubt I shall be able to manage the ‘Vernon’ next year, if I want it; it is satisfactory to think that promotion is more or less certain within something like a limited time and one joins the ranks of the advancers. Meanwhile I know you will like to hear that everything flourishes with my work here.

For all the cheery triumphalism of this letter – Scott was always wonderfully good in that way with his mother, endlessly ready to indulge maternal pride at the expense of his own innate hatred of ‘show’ – it touches on the one aspect of his career prospects that worried him. ‘Everything went well,’ he wrote home from Port Mahon again the following week, ‘and the Admiral was exceedingly nice about it so that I think my character as a torpedo man is established … But I have my eye also on another thing which is I fear a bit out of my reach. When Campbell [his future best man] is promoted I should like to be thought of as first lieutenant. They may not think me sufficiently good as a general service officer however, which worries me a bit, and since it would have to be done against the gunnery people I fear they won’t see it in the same light. However I shall wait my opportunity – and as Hickey’s work has come down on me as well, it may come that way.’

The danger of finding himself typecast as a technical specialist was no idle fear, but in the June of 1899 a change of captain and ship’s personnel in Majestic gave him the opportunity he wanted. ‘Egerton joined today,’ Scott wrote to his mother from Portsmouth on the twenty-eighth; ‘things have occurred as I expected and I am commander until de Chair arrives in England. He will be telegraphed for when Bradford is promoted but as he is at Zanzibar the journey will occupy some time, so here I am till the end of August or thereabouts – of course it is a wonderful opportunity but means work unending as my own torpedo work has to go on somehow.’

If Scott had found in Prince Louis a captain who thought of him first and foremost as a ‘first rate’ torpedo man, in George Egerton, his old commander in Vernon, he had secured himself a powerful patron and friend. In the Dixonian dichotomy of ‘autocrat’ and ‘authoritarian’ Egerton’s credentials would almost certainly put him on the ‘wrong’ side of the fence, but that did not stop him being in many ways the beau idéal of a Victorian naval officer, spirited, brave, charming well-connected and – best of all in a culture that raised chivalric effort over mere efficiency – an old ‘Arctic’ from the disastrous but heroic Nares expedition of 1875.

Scott was not the sort of young officer who would naturally impose himself, but as the man in Majestic who knew the ship better than anyone, he was well placed to make a mark with his new captain. By the middle of September de Chair had taken up his post as commander, but while he was still ‘green’ in the job he, too, inevitably depended ‘pretty much’ on Scott’s advice and knowledge. It was, as Scott said, hard work but a comfortable situation. ‘The new Captain is very pleased with the ship,’ he reported home the following month, ‘as I am the only link with the past, so to speak, and knowing the game from experience … my position is a very strong one.’

Strong as his position was, it is another remark of Scott’s, a chance comment from a diary fragment – ‘The naval officer should be provided by nature with an infinite capacity for patiently accepting disappointments’ – that probably more accurately reflects his mood at this time. ‘In 1899,’ Grace recalled, ‘coming home in H.M.S. Majestic he said he must look out for something to take him out of the general rut of the Navy, a service he was devoted to, but he wanted freedom to develop more widely. All this time he had been realizing that he had really something to say, in some form or other as yet unknown. How could he express himself fully?’

It was the old angst of the Amphion diary fragment, only maturity had sharpened a vague adolescent dissatisfaction into a more intelligent need for growth. The 14,900-ton, first-class, twin-screw, armoured Majestic was hardly a ‘sleepy hollow’, but in its own way it was every bit as restricting and stultifying. Including Dartmouth, Vernon and that ‘farce’ of an institution, as Jellicoe labelled the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, where Scott had gone in preparation for his lieutenant’s examination, he had been doing more or less the same thing for nineteen years, and again the Majestic’s ship’s log is the best guide to just what that meant: Weighed for Vigo. Anchored Vigo. Weighed for Gibraltar. Anchored Gibraltar. Weighed for Aranci. Anchored Aranci. Governor visited ship. French Admiral visited ship. Italian Royal Yacht Savoia with King and Queen of Italy passed through the lines. Royal salute. King and Queen arrived on board. Royal Salute. Weighed for Cagliari. Anchored Cagliari … Ship dressed in honour of King and Queen of Portugal. Royal Salute. Annual pulling regatta. Sailing regatta. Vice Admiral’s Cup.

At the end of March 1900 Majestic was at anchor at Berehaven, in attendance on the old Queen on her historic visit to Ireland. ‘We leave here on Saturday, arriving at Kingstown on Monday,’ Scott wrote home with a barely restrained irony, as if the whole purpose of the navy was to amuse some Imperial reincarnation of Miss Havisham. ‘The Queen comes on Tuesday, when we man ship and cheer and fire guns and generally display our loyalty.’

Grace was right. Scott needed something different. Her memoir, like those of all Scott’s early biographers, shows the same desire to give shape and meaning to his early years, to see them in quasibiblical terms as a kind of preparation for the ministry of sacrifice that was his polar career. Nevertheless, Grace’s portrait of frustration rings true. Again, brother and sister, speaking from their very different worlds, the one from the dressmakers’ shop, the other from one of the most formidable battleships of the pre-Dreadnought age, could see things in the same light. ‘What he wanted,’ she went on, were ‘great interests and expansion of life with new experiences … in contact with men of the big world [with] all sorts of experiences and interests.’

In the same year Scott, at least, found what he was looking for. In his letter home from Berehaven, he had announced with mock pomposity that June should ‘bring me to greater dignity’. That ‘dignity’ – commander’s rank – duly arrived on 30 June 1900. And with it came the command that was to transform his life.

FIVE Enter Markham (#ulink_46c8f5b5-4eb5-5755-9b8a-f846334b0d6c)

It is almost a reproach to civilization that we have arrived at the close of the nineteenth century without knowing the whole of the superficial appearance of this little planet.

The Duke of Argyll, 1897

TO THE RIGHT of the main entrance of the Royal Geographical Society in London’s South Kensington is a portrait bust that once seen is hard to forget. It is not a particularly impressive piece of sculpture or portraiture, but there is something in the expression of the face, in the fastidious curl of the lip and the shape of the brows, that wonderfully evokes the personality of a man who for more than forty years lorded it over the Society with all the democratic instincts of a Renaissance prince-bishop.

The man was Sir Clements Markham, official Geographer to Sir Robert Napier at the sack of Magadala in Ethiopia, introducer of the quinine tree into India, President of the Royal Geographical Society, President of the Hakluyt Society, great Panjandrum of Victorian clubland and – with the exceptions of Scott’s mother and wife – the most important figure in his life.

In recent years the reputation of anyone who was ever close to Scott has tended to suffer by a simple process of contagion, but it is fair to say that had their paths never crossed, Markham’s unrivalled capacity for self-serving, misrepresentation, scurrilities, slanders, snobberies, affectations, infatuations and vindictiveness was well up to earning him his own posthumous opprobrium without help from anyone else.

For all that, it would be a mistake – a mistake his enemies never made more than once – to underestimate this formidable man or what he achieved. For the best part of two decades he was the driving force behind British polar exploration, and for every flaw in his character there was its opposite quality in equal measure – a chivalry to soften the snobbery; a hatred of cruelty to temper his waspishness; a largeness of imagination to match his pettiness; and, above all, a capacity for loyalty and friendship as complete, unshakable and intemperate as any of his hatreds.

Clements Markham was born in 1830, the son and grandson of clergymen, the great-grandson of an admiral, and the great-great-grandson of the formidable William Markham, Archbishop of York. Like so many families of a similar social and financial position the Markham generations had regularly alternated between Church and navy, and after school at Cheam and Westminster the fourteen-year-old Clements duly reported with his fellow applicants aboard the St Vincent at Portsmouth to be examined for a naval cadet. After writing out half the Lord’s Prayer, he was told he had passed, and then ‘a fat old doctor made his appearance, and, punching them violently in the wind, asks “if it hurts?” On their replying in the negative, he reported them medically fit for the service.’

An exquisite drawing of him done about this time by George Richmond shows a ‘ringer’ for the young Thomas de Quincey, but it is a moot point whether it was the faculty of imagination or just temper that most severely disabled Markham for naval life. By the time he had finished his first cruise to South America he had more than had his fill of it, and not even a brief foray ‘in the vanguard of English chivalry’ during the long search for Sir John Franklin in the Arctic was enough to reconcile his ‘volatile, emotional, strong willed and impulsive’ nature to the discipline or brutality that marked the old navy in the last years of sail.

For all his loathing of the harsh punishments of naval life, and his deep resentment of any authority other than his own, Markham never lost his deeply romantic and nostalgic attachment to the service itself. During his first cruise in Collingwood he had fallen under the spell of the son of the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, and in many ways the charismatic and brilliant William Peel – VC, KCB and Byronically dead by the age of thirty-five – is the clue to Markham’s whole character, the ‘Rosebud’ he would eternally mourn, the unattainably glorious, handsome, well-connected ‘beau idéal’ of manliness and gentility that as an old man Markham would scour the gunrooms of the Royal Navy’s ships in a rheumy-eyed search to replace.

There seems little doubt that there was a homosexual strain in this passionate attachment to youth – there would be ‘talk’ of it in Discovery – but what exactly that means is harder to say. There was clearly nothing that Markham liked more than an evening ‘larking’ with some good-looking ‘middie’ in a ship’s gunroom, and to the fastidious taste of the epicure the old man brought an almost Linnaean rigour and method, cataloguing, listing, and ranking his newest favourites in journal entries of ten and twelve pages long that ranged, in his small spidery hand, from pedigree and family coat-of-arms to colouring, shape of lip and tilt of nose. There is not a shred of evidence, however, nothing in fact but the odd snatch of naval gossip, to suggest that his predilection for youth was anything more than that. Throughout his life he had a fierce and dogmatic hatred of exploitation in any form, and if his interest in young midshipmen had an erotic tinge, it was of the sentimentalising, romantic and snobbish kind, homage to the pedigree and birth of a chivalric caste for which physical good looks merely stood surety.

The whole question of Markham’s sexuality would be an utter irrelevance if it were not for its slight bearing on Scott’s reputation, and for the broader concern that it has diverted attention from the achievements of a remarkable man. After leaving the navy in 1851 Markham had entered the civil service, and with the influence he achieved there, and subsequently in the India Office, exploited a position at the heart of the Victorian establishment to push the geographical and historical interests that alongside the navy and its young officers were the ruling passions of his life.

If there was nothing in which Markham was not interested, however, and nothing that a life of travel, exploration, research, archaeology, collecting, writing and power-brokering did not entitle him to an opinion on, it was polar exploration that brought the disparate sides of his personality into sharpest focus. In many ways no one would ever challenge the hold of Sir William Peel on his imagination, but alongside Peel loomed those other titans of his youth, obscure heroes of even more obscure voyages, naval officers like McClintock, Osborn, Mechan, Vesey and Hamilton, who had so heroically retarded the cause of human knowledge and British exploration in the nineteenth-century navy’s long quest for those twin chimeras of a North-West Passage and the North Pole.

The modern history of polar exploration dates back to the years immediately following the end of the Napoleonic War. For centuries before then seamen and speculators had dreamed of a navigable northern route linking the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, but it was only when reports from whalers of changing ice conditions off Greenland coincided with a glut of unemployable naval officers that the Admiralty decided that the Arctic offered a perfect solution to the baleful spectre of peace. ‘To what purpose could a portion of our naval force be … more honourably or more usefully employed,’ demanded John Barrow, the influential Second Secretary to the Admiralty, in 1816, ‘than in completing those details of geographical and hydrographical science of which the grand outlines have been boldly and broadly sketched by Cook, Vancouver and Flinders, and other of our countrymen?’

The Arctic was by no means Barrow’s only goal – he was as happy to commit lives and money to Timbuctoo as to Baffin Bay – but it was in the polar regions that his obsessions bore the bitterest fruit. Within two years of his call a dual expedition under the command of John Ross and David Buchan had been dispatched, the first of a long series of futile and harrowing journeys in search of the Passage or the Pole that reached its tragic climax in 1845 when Sir John Franklin, that ‘knight sans peur et sans reproche’ – or ‘the man who ate his boots’ as he was more familiarly known – disappeared into the ice with the Erebus and Terror and was never seen again, perishing with all his men in a prolonged agony of disease, starvation, cold and cannibalism that gripped and horrified the nation for more than a decade.

The long, rancorous and ruinously expensive search for Franklin ought to have put paid to public and Admiralty enthusiasm for good, but when it came to polar exploration memories were notoriously short, and by 1875 Britain was ready to try again. ‘No one on board our two ships can ever forget the farewell given to the discovery vessels,’ wrote the expedition commander, George ‘Daddy’ Nares, of the scenes at Portsmouth in May of that year when Alert and Discovery sailed for the Arctic. ‘Closely packed multitudes occupied each pier and jetty … troops in garrison paraded on the common, the men-of-war in port manned their rigging, and as we passed greeted us with deafening cheers, whilst the air rang with the shouts of spectators on shore and on board the steamers, yachts and small craft which crowded the water.’

The object of the Nares expedition was the Pole, the motive the old one of national prestige, but for all the excitement and confidence, the result was very much what any dispassionate observer of British Arctic exploration might have predicted.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the autumn of 1875 Alert had hit an impenetrable wall of ice in 82°27'N, and the next spring, after a brief flirtation with dogs, Nares’s men reverted to doing what naval expeditions traditionally did best in these circumstances, and settled down to the grim business of man-hauling their massive sledges towards the distant Pole.

In the culture that had grown up over the previous half-century, in fact, no other mode of exploration was really acceptable. As early as 1822 Parry had experimented with Eskimo dog-sledging, but long before Nares’s voyage the heroics of men like Leopold McClintock, criss-crossing the ice in the search for Franklin with their heraldic pennants flying above their sledges, had made manhauling with all its attendant miseries the British way.

Nares had warned his officers that ‘the hardest day’s work’ they ‘had ever imagined, let alone had, would not hold a patch’ on the miseries of man-hauling, and he had not been exaggerating. He had put Sir Clements’s gloomily evangelical cousin Albert Markham in command of the northern sledging party, and by the time Markham had hacked, stumbled, dragged and prayed his way through a nightmare ice-scape of hummocks and fissures to a dispiriting and utterly meaningless farthest north of 83°20’N – celebrated with the Dean of Dundee’s whisky and a rendition of ‘The Union Jack of Old England’ – two-thirds of his ill-equipped, ill-fed, ill-clothed and scurvy-ravaged team were all but done. ‘Hardly one of them was recognisable,’ Dr Moss, the Alert’s surgeon, wrote on their eventual return to the ship – a miracle in itself of endurance and courage that is almost impossible to comprehend. ‘The thin, feeble voices, the swollen and frost-bitten faces and crippled limbs, made an awful contrast to the picked body of determined men we had seen march north only two months before.’

There are many more tragic episodes in British Arctic exploration – only one of Markham’s team died – but as a vignette of the culture that sent ship after ship out in search of the polar Grail the Nares expedition would be hard to beat. It had been absolutely plain to John Ross forty years earlier that there was nothing of any commercial or national value to be gained out of the Arctic. But to see it in utilitarian terms of miles surveyed, rivers charted or the Magnetic Pole located, or money wasted, is to miss the spirit that underpinned the whole venture, from Barrow’s first expedition to the moment when, with only nine of his fifty-three crew fit for service, Nares abandoned hopes of the Pole and blasted a path out south for his ice-bound Alert. ‘In laying down their lives at the call of duty our countrymen bequeathed us a rich gift,’ Francis McClintock – the only man in Markham’s eyes to compare with Scott – said on the fiftieth anniversary of the Franklin expedition of the navy’s legacy to future British explorers, ‘another of those noble examples not yet rare in our history, and of which we are all so justly proud, one more beacon light to guide our sons to deeds of heroism in the future. These examples of unflinching courage, devotion to duty, and endurance of hardships are as life-blood to naval enterprise.’

The British were not the only ones drawn to the Arctic by Franklin’s ghost: there were Germans, Austrians and Americans – notably Elisha Kane, that most successful of self-publicists, Isaac Hayes, and the tragic figure of Charles Hall – but nothing in their history of disputed claims, alleged poisoning, desertion, mutiny and incompetence could seriously threaten British complacency. By the end of the nineteenth century explorers like the American Robert Peary and the great Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen had introduced new techniques and new approaches to polar exploration, but for Markham the only model was the unwieldy, overmanned and ill-equipped British expedition perfected during his youth, the supreme virtues those British virtues of endurance, courage, discipline and duty that had taken his cousin Albert to the empty triumph of his farthest north. ‘In recent times much reliance has been placed upon dogs for Arctic travelling,’ he told a Berlin audience in 1899, in defiance of all that skis and dogs had done to revolutionise polar travel, ‘yet nothing has been done with them to be compared with what men have achieved without dogs. Indeed, only one journey of considerable length has ever been performed in the Arctic regions, with dogs – that by Mr Peary across the inland ice of Greenland … and all his dogs, but one, died, owing to overwork, or were killed to feed the others. It is a very cruel system.’

In the greatest of all polar books, The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard called polar exploration ‘at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised’, but for old Sir Clements, comfortably ensconced in Ecclestone Square with his blank maps in front of him, that was the whole point of the poles. There is no doubt that his interests in exploration and geography were as genuine as Barrow’s had been, and yet it was the purity and the misery of the adventure that seduced him, the opportunity it offered the chivalry of England to test itself in a quest that united pointlessness, patriotism and personal heroism in ways that nothing before the Somme would ever equal.

Above all – and again here is an echo of Barrow – it was the opportunities exploration offered the young naval officer to distinguish himself in peacetime that drew Markham’s eyes to the ice. Even he could see that in the age of the great pre-Dreadnoughts seamanship of the old school was of only limited value, but at a time when professionals, politicians and journalists were all exercised by the problems of a peacetime navy, Markham saw in the challenge of polar exploration an answer that united his own faith in youth with the demands of the nation. ‘Although it is not the same work as is required in general service,’ he wrote in 1900 to George Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty, ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer and just the sort of ‘inimical’, half-foreign, and half foreign-educated financier most in need of a lecture on the traditions of the Royal Navy and the virtues of man-hauling, ‘the work involved in the stress of contest with the mighty powers of nature in the Antarctic regions, calls for the very same qualities as are needed in the stress of battle.’

A muted, but real, sense of national disappointment at the failure of the Nares expedition to return with any real achievement to its credit had effectively forfeited Britain’s interest in the north to other nations, but that still left the south. In the mid-1880s a committee including Markham had been set up by the British Association for the Advancement of Science in order to promote a government-funded expedition, but it was not until 1893, when he became President of the RGS, that Markham at last had the position, contacts and institutional clout to push his interests successfully.

It was a long and stubborn fight, involving lobbying, fundraising, begging and bullying, but the man and the hour were well matched. In 1887 the Treasury had turned down the BAAS request with barely a second thought, but by the middle of the 1890s national, maritime, commercial, patriotic and scientific interests were all beginning to converge on the Antarctic region as an essential theatre of future exploration. There were outstanding questions of meteorology, geology, marine biology, geodesy, currents, tides and atmospheric electricity that only an expedition could answer, but above all it was in the unresolved navigational problems of the southern oceans that Markham saw the sprat to land his mackerel. The key to these navigational problems lay in a fuller understanding of terrestrial magnetism, and for the fifty years since Sir James Ross’s voyages the position of the South Magnetic Pole had effectively been ‘lost’, making it impossible for scientists to verify for the southern hemisphere Carl Gauss’s calculations for predicting the forces of the earth’s magnetic field.

Interesting as these questions were to Markham, however, and willing as he was to play the scientific card when it suited, they took second place to the limitless opportunities for geographical exploration that the Antarctic regions offered. It is almost impossible now to grasp just how little was then known of the region, and for an Englishman imbued, as Markham was, with a deep scepticism of anything in the way of exploration not carried out under the aegis of the Royal Navy, the short history of Antarctic discovery was shorter and more problematic still.

The history of cartographic fantasy had a long and colourful pedigree, but in British eyes it was only with James Cook’s voyages of the 1760s and 1770s that the age of speculation ended and polar exploration in any modern sense began. Before Cook’s discoveries it was still possible to believe in the existence of habitable regions of unknown size in the south, but once he had become the first navigator to cross the Antarctic Circle and circumnavigate the globe in a high southern latitude, the limits and nature of any such continent were fixed. ‘The greatest part of this Southern Continent (supposing there is one),’ Cook had written, with the authority of a sixty-thousand-nautical-mile journey behind him, ‘must lie within the Polar Circle where the sea is so pestered with ice that the land is thereby inaccessible. The risk one runs in exploring a coast in these unknown and icy seas, is so very great, that I can be bold to say that no man will ever venture [by sea] farther than I have done, and that the lands which may lie to the south will never be explored. Thick fogs, snowstorms, intense cold and every other thing that can render navigation dangerous one has to encounter, and these difficulties are greatly heightened by the inexpressibly horrid aspect of the country, a country doomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays, but to lie forever buried under everlasting snow and ice.’

For almost fifty years there was nothing to suggest that Cook would be proved wrong, but in the first half of the nineteenth century the drive of the whaling and sealing men and the journeys of Bellinghausen, D’Urville and the American Wilkes in 1840 began a piecemeal discovery of southern land. By the time that Wilkes returned to civilisation something like a seventy-degree arc of the Antarctic Circle south of Australia had been claimed, while farther west detached sightings of Kemp Land, Enderby Land and – still farther west again – Graham Land, Alexander Land and Peter I Island had sketched out the possible configurations of a southern continent.

In the eyes of the British establishment, though, a faint but disparaging air of scepticism hung over these foreign voyages, relegating them to the margins and even the mythology of Antarctic exploration. In 1823 James Weddell had extended Cook’s farthest south by more than a degree into the sea named after him, but for all the inroads made by commercial skippers like Balleny, Biscoe and Weddell himself, it was left to another Royal Navy officer, Sir James Ross, to take the next decisive step in the process begun by Cook. Sailing in two old bomb vessels, Erebus and Terror, slow but strong, and strengthened in the bows against southern conditions, Ross crossed the Antarctic Circle in longitude 171°E on New Year’s Day 1841, and smashed his way into the heavy pack. Up until this point any captain faced with pack could do nothing but skirt it, but after five days buffeting a path through the ice, Ross ‘burst forth to the south in an open sea’, and on 8 January 1841 discovered the glorious mountainous country of Victoria Land.

In two journeys to this great open sea, Ross laid down with some accuracy the coastline and high mountain ranges of Victoria Land from Cape North in latitude 71° to Wood Bay in latitude 74°, and less definitely to McMurdo Bay in 77½°. In that same latitude and slightly to the east he discovered the two volcanoes named after his ships, and to the east of them, the ice wall of the Great Barrier now named in his honour. ‘After all the experiences and adventure in the Southern Seas,’ Scott himself later wrote of Ross’s achievements, ‘few things could have looked more hopeless than an attack upon that great ice-bound region which lay within the Antarctic Circle; yet out of this desolate prospect Ross wrested an open sea, a vast mountain region, a smoking volcano, and a hundred problems of great interest to the geographer; in this unique region he carried out scientific research in every possible department, and yet by unremitted labour succeeded in collecting material which until quite lately has constituted almost the exclusive source of our knowledge of magnetic conditions in the higher southern latitudes. It might be said that it was James Cook who defined the Antarctic Region, and James Ross who discovered it.’

More than a generation later, however, the problem for the geographers was still how to interpret the accumulated knowledge of a century of piecemeal discovery since the pioneering journeys of Cook in the 1770s. In 1874 Challenger under the command of George Nares had shown by dredgings and soundings that there must be continental land within the Antarctic Circle, but with still only a little over one-tenth of the Circle broached neither Challenger nor the subsequent Southern Cross and Belgica expeditions did much to clarify the problem of its extent.

The Belgica, under the command of Adrien de Gerlache, sailed from Antwerp in 1897 for the south with the intention of landing a small party at Cape Adare on Antarctica’s South Victoria Land. Before the ship got anywhere remotely near her target winter had set in, and Belgica’s resentful crew were condemned to the first Antarctic winter spent within the Circle, frozen helpless in the pack of the Bellinghausen Sea, at the mercy of the currents and the ice, ravaged by scurvy and tottering on the brink of madness as they brooded on the thought of a dead shipmate, his feet weighted to take him to the bottom, swaying backwards and forwards on the ocean bed hundreds of fathoms beneath their captive hull.

If Carsten Borchgrevink had been a British naval officer, it is possible that the Southern Cross expedition might have done more to dispel the ignorance and fear that was Belgica’s chief legacy to Antarctic knowledge than it actually did, but a Norwegian seaman/ schoolmaster was never going to be taken seriously. In 1894 Borch-grevink had become the first man to set foot on Victoria Land from aboard a small Norwegian whaler. Five years later, with the backing of the publisher Sir George Newnes, and in the teeth of the hostility and contempt of Clements Markham and a geographical establishment outraged to see British money financing a foreign adventurer, he took down the first expedition to over-winter on Antarctica.

Borchgrevink was ‘in many respects … not a good leader’, as the physicist on Southern Cross and on Scott’s first expedition, Louis Bernacchi, charitably put it, but whatever his faults he has never received the credit that he is due. The site of the expedition’s hut on the shore edge at Cape Adare effectively rules out any of the serious geographical exploration so beloved of Markham, but for a ‘small pioneering expedition without influence or backing’, the work carried out by Southern Cross across a range of scientific disciplines from magnetism to marine biology, penguins to atmospheric circulation and Antarctica’s cyclonic winds, ‘stands unchallenged’.

The Southern Cross and Belgica expeditions were the first expeditions of a ‘Heroic Age’ of Antarctic exploration that is often dated back to the day in 1893 when, at a lecture at the RGS, Professor John Murray of Challenger fame called for an expedition to resolve the outstanding geographical questions still posed in the south. ‘All honour,’ he declared, ‘to those who venture into the far north, or far south, with slender resource and bring back with them a burden of new observations. A dash to the South Pole is not what I now advocate, nor is it what British science desires. It demands rather a steady, continuous, laborious, and systematic exploration of the whole southern region.’