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

If Markham was in need of an ally, he could not have found a more influential one; but between Murray’s plea and his ambition lay a fundamental difference that was to bedevil the whole future of British Antarctic exploration. In his lecture Murray had argued for two largely civilian parties to be landed at widely separate points, but to Markham any scheme that relegated the role of the navy to little more than a glorified ferry service and robbed her officers of an opportunity to test their courage defeated the whole point of polar exploration.

And here in miniature is the history of the next twenty years, the clash of visions between the scientific establishment, determined to fund an expedition in its own image, and a Clements Markham equally bent on reliving the naval glories of the Franklin era. In terms of argument there ought never to have been a contest, but in Markham, Murray and all the other scientists of the Royal Society who followed him to the slaughter were up against a natural street-fighter prepared to bully, beg, lie and do anything else required to get his way. In letters, speeches, articles, memoranda, conferences and lectures – lectures to the Royal United Services Institute, to the Imperial Institute, on the role of the colonies, the role of the navy – the same vision was pushed with an energy

astonishing in a man of seventy. Over the next six years meetings both within and without the RGS would generate violent outbursts of temper, and yet whenever it came to the point, it was inevitably Markham who would stand his ground, Markham whose vision, energy and sheer persistence could grind his opponents into acquiescence, submission or – better still – resignation.

It was the same, too, when it came to prising funds out of a government reluctant to commit money or naval personnel at a time when British isolationism was looking particularly exposed. When he first approached the government the response was no more encouraging than it had been a decade earlier, but Markham was not a man to be deflected from a sense of Britain’s destiny by international embarrassments like the Jameson Raid or tensions with the United States over Venezuela, and the following year another approach extracted a more sympathetic response. ‘Referring to the communications which have passed between the First Lord of the Admiralty and yourself,’ he was told in that de haut en bas tone so typical of Admiralty communications, ‘… I am commanded by my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to state that they have taken the matter into careful consideration, and while they regret to be unable to take any direct part in the organising of such an expedition, at the same time they regard the enterprise as one which is important in the interests of science. Although the present exigencies of the Naval Service prevent them from lending officers, as they would necessarily be out of reach for a protracted period in case of being required for the active duties of the Fleet, Their Lordships will watch the results with great interest and will be prepared to aid in the outfit of an Expedition by the loan of instruments, further they would be happy to place at the disposal of those chosen to conduct an Expedition any experience which may have been gained in the past and which might possibly be useful.’

It was not much, but it was enough for Markham, and forging a reluctant partnership with the Royal Society, he launched a public appeal to fund an expedition under the joint auspices of the two Societies. At the beginning there seemed little more public enthusiasm for the cause than there was in government circles, but when in 1899 a gift of £25,000 was followed in quick succession by a promise of royal patronage and an invitation from Germany to collaborate on a scientific programme, Markham knew he could go back to the Treasury with an irresistibly strong hand. ‘On grounds of polity alone,’ read a letter almost identical in tone to that sent by the Royal Society to the government of the day before Cook’s first great voyage over a century earlier, ‘we submit that it is not the time for our country, so long the mother of discovery and of maritime enterprise, to abdicate her leading position.’

At a time when the situation in South Africa made Britain’s isolation seem chillier than ever, it was more than even Lord Salisbury’s government could resist, and a meeting with the First Lord of the Treasury Arthur Balfour on 2 June 1899 produced a promise of £45,000 on the condition that the Societies could match the sum from private funds. The grant still left the Societies three thousand short of the £90,000 they required, but with Markham’s again the crucial voice, the RGS voted to raise the money through the sale of investments, and Markham had won.

The danger for Markham was that at the moment of victory he was going to have to pay the price for having brought the scientific establishment, in the form of the Royal Society, into partnership to get his way. He was realist enough to know that he could never have won over the government without its support, but now that the British National Expedition – as it was somewhat euphemistically called – was a reality, differences over where it should go, why it should go and who should lead it could no longer be fudged.

At the heart of all Markham’s problems was the lumbering Joint Committee, set up in June 1899 and comprising members of both Societies, appointed to oversee every aspect of the planning of the expedition. With its greater prestige and authority there had always been a danger that the RS would dominate this, and with little but his own willpower and the record of the RGS in raising funds to help him, Markham faced an endless struggle to control ‘the rag, tag and bobtail professors’ and the endless sub-committees they spawned. ‘We initiate the whole thing,’ he bitterly complained in August 1900, only two months after Balfour had given the go-ahead to the expedition, ‘raise all the funds, for geographical exploration, and then these mudlarkers [the biological sub-committee] coolly ask us to turn our expedition into a cruise for their purposes.’

‘Murray talking rubbish,’ he scrawled in one typical complaint. ‘Murray very troublesome and wasting our time.’ ‘I think Murray is trying to wreck the expedition.’ ‘He is an ill conditioned bully.’ ‘Murray’s conduct looks as if he was trying to do all the harm he can … This committee will strangle the Expedition with red tape if not checked … Futile chatter.’ ‘Greely pompous and egotistical … all progress all work impossible’. ‘Professors know nothing and only care about their own hobby’. ‘The important questions must be left to one man’ – from June 1899 till the sailing of the expedition, Markham’s diaries and letters are peppered with expressions of his frustration at sharing power and at the sheer dilatoriness of committee life.

At the core of these battles were real principles – the nature of the expedition, the integrity of British science, the quality of international cooperation – and the one battle that mattered more than any was over the appointment of the expedition’s leader. There was room in even Markham’s universe for give and take over the location or duration of the expedition, but if there was one thing over which he would rather have seen the whole project collapse than give in, it was his vision of a National Antarctic Expedition sailing with a naval officer and not a scientist at its head. There was probably no subject to which Markham had devoted more time either, and none on which he felt himself so uniquely qualified to judge. From the middle of the 1880s the search for the right man had been his personal quest, and over the fifteen years since there could hardly have been a suitable midshipman Markham did not get to know, and whose name, appearance and background did not find their way into his journals.

He knew what he wanted, which historical models to copy and which to avoid, and with his customary obsessiveness had made charts, drawn up lists, cross-referenced expeditions and compared performances in page after page of meticulous notes. Parry, he noted, was twenty-nine when he did his best work, Franklin thirty-three, McClintock twenty-nine, Osborn twenty-eight to thirty-two, Mecham twenty-two to twenty-six, Vesey twenty-one to twenty-five, Ross less successful at forty-three than he had been when younger. At fifty, Crozier was a quarter of a century too old. In the search for Franklin all the real work was done by the young. Nares was fine in Challenger, but no good for ‘really severe work’ in the north. The young men on that expedition had been excellent then, but were now past it. ‘He should be a naval officer,’ Markham summed up the evidence; ‘he should be in the regular line and not in the surveying branch, and he should be young, not more than 35; but preferably some years younger than that. All previous good work in the Polar region has been done by young officers in the regular line: those in the surveying branch who have been employed on Polar service have been failures. Old officers, all past 40, have failed and have been unable to take the lead in expeditions they nominally command.’ There were various reasons for this, he went on, because while surveying called for ‘close attention, diligence and endurance, it does not bring out those other qualities which are needed in the leader of an expedition into unknown regions. Nor is the discipline and order of a surveying vessel, the sort of system … essential for the well being of an exploring expedition.’

The other objection to the surveying branch, in Markham’s eyes, was that it had never been a path to promotion or distinction, and did not attract the kind of officer ‘conscious of ability, or who are ambitious, the class of man we want’. ‘Such are the young men to be found in the regular line,’ he triumphantly concluded, prejudice and snobbery gloriously vindicated by precedent, ‘generally as gunnery or torpedo lieutenants, because they see that to excel in those lines is the quickest way to promotion. Among them are many young officers ambitious for distinction, enthusiastic, anxious for opportunities to win a name; at the same time able, resourceful, lovers of order and discipline, and accustomed to the management of men. It is among these that the best leader of an expedition is to be found.’

If Markham had got his expedition ten years earlier, his choice of leader would have been Scott’s new captain in Majestic, but at forty-six Egerton – ‘the beau ideal [a favourite phrase] of a Polar commander’ – was too old. Over the years other possibles on the list had also fallen away for one reason or another, but on 11 June 1899, less than a fortnight before the crucial meeting with Balfour, the officer whom he had already identified as ‘the best man next to Egerton for the job’ appeared at Markham’s Ecclestone Square home. ‘(Sun) to church with Minna,’ Markham’s diary for 11 June bathetically recorded the historic occasion. ‘Mrs & Miss Nuttall came to bid us farewell, then young Robert F. Scott wanting to command the Antarctic Expedition.’

The two men had in fact met in the street a few days earlier, when Scott first learned of the expedition, but it would have been more than Markham could have borne to leave the decisive moment of his life to a chance meeting or an afterthought to Mrs and Miss Nuttall. ‘On June 5th, 1899’ – not the eleventh of the diary – ‘here was a remarkable coincidence,’ he later wrote with a more suitable eye for the workings of destiny, ‘a remarkable coincidence. I was just sitting down to write to my old friend Captain Egerton about [Scott], when he was announced. He came to volunteer to command the Expedition. I believed him to be the best man for so great a trust.’

And Markham had had his eye on Scott for so long too, had seen the potential in him so early, that there must have come a time when he forgot that Scott had once been no more than sixth on his list of possible leaders for the Antarctic. The two men had first come across each other twelve years earlier when Scott was a midshipman in the Training Squadron, and Markham’s diary recorded the occasion. ‘In the forenoon there was a service race for cutters,’ the entry for 1 March 1887 reads. ‘The Rover’s boat won (mid-Scott) but the Calypso (Hyde Parker) held the lead for a long time.’

That race made enough of an impression on Markham for him to recall it in detail a dozen years later, and yet Scott was just one of a score of midshipmen to catch his eye that spring. Markham was cruising – if that is the right word – with the Training Squadron as a guest of his cousin Albert, and not even the death of another boy in Rover who fell overboard and drowned was enough to dispel the rosy haze through which he looked out on a world of young men dressing up as girls or listening to his yarns against a backdrop of Caribbean skies and seas. ‘The day was lovely,’ Markham’s diary happily runs on, ‘with a smooth sea, and light breeze. The ships crowded all sail. “Calypso” shooting ahead. It was the prettiest sight imaginable … Went with Woollcombe to the tailor, to try on his female attire … Told ghost stories to Woollcombe [later captain of the Valiant at Jutland and a future admiral], Tremayne [despatches at Jutland, and another admiral], Smyth, and Ommaney, during the first watch … Skylarking with Smyth under the poop … I never met nicer, better mannered, more warm hearted young fellows. God bless them!’

It was, in fact, another nineteen-year-old from the same term in Britannia as Scott, Tommy Smyth, who for a long time, before he went off the rails, commanded Markham’s deepest affections and hopes. Smyth had passed out of Britannia in second place, five above Scott, and in terms of family, looks, temperament and aristocratic connections was everything that Markham wanted. ‘My bright young friend Tommy Smyth brings such sunshine into the house,’ he wrote on their return from the West Indies. ‘The boy has a very warm place in my heart: he has rare gifts of intellect and heart, not weak but a little wild – and all the better for that – brimming over with merriment and fun … went fast asleep with his head on my shoulder.’

If it was a Tommy Smyth that Markham wanted, in fact – and looks, birth, connections and a sunny nature the principal criteria of judgement – then the wonder of it is that he should have ended up with Scott at all. It is certainly true that Markham had identified him as an officer of ‘great ability’, but it is doubtful if he had any more idea of what he had got himself when Scott came to see him than the navy had when they let him go.

It would have been odd if he had done, because anyone who could dismiss the whole surveying and engineering branches with Markham’s breathtaking arrogance was unlikely to have recognised the practical and scientific bent that was at the heart of Scott’s genius. He would have known that as a torpedo officer Scott possessed a certain technical aptitude, but for all the subsequent claims over the appointment, the truth is that Markham – and those who allowed him to wield such unfettered powers – were luckier than they knew or deserved when they found themselves Scott.

It would be harsh to blame Markham, though, because the navy establishment was not designed to recognise the worth of an officer like Scott. He did not have a great naval name like Hyde-Parker, the boy he beat in the cutters’ race. No one said that Scott reminded him of his father or his uncle. Nobody suggested he would sooner go into battle or spend a polar winter with him than any man in the service. No captain thought him one in a thousand. All, when brought to think of him, spoke simply in terms of ‘entire satisfaction’ … ‘ a most promising officer’ … ‘a zealous and painstaking young officer … of most value to the service’. ‘You have nothing to thank me for,’ Lord Louis of Battenberg had written to him on quitting Majestic, as if Scott’s existence in his ship had come as something of a surprise to him. ‘I required a reliable first Lieut. & was glad to get him.’

Only George Egerton – Lord Louis’s successor in Majestic – seemed to have any real conception of Scott’s abilities, and even he had to warm himself to the task. ‘I am at a loss to name any officer who is likely to be more suitable,’ he had written in his initial response to Markham’s appeal. ‘Lieutenant Scott is an officer of great capabilities and possesses a large amount of tact and common sense. He is of strong physique and robust health – a scientist and an expert in electricity. Very keen, zealous, of a cheerful disposition, full of resource and a first rate comrade.’ ‘You certainly could not do better than put Scott in command,’ he wrote again from on board Majestic in Dublin Bay when he had had more time to think about it; ‘he is just the fellow for it, strong, steady and as keen as possible. Genial, scientific, a good head on his shoulders and a very good officer. I am in hope he will get his promotion in June, he deserves it.’

Scott himself was the first to admit that he had no knowledge of Antarctica and no great ‘predilection’ for polar exploration, but it is not hard to see what took him to Ecclestone Square. The idea that exploration on the eve of the ‘Fisher Revolution’ that would haul the navy into the twentieth century offered some magic route to promotion is utter nonsense, and yet what it did offer was both a physical and intellectual release from the straitjacket of service life that Scott had been craving since his days in Amphion.

And if he lacked the charisma and pedigree of Smyth, or even the focused ambition for exploration, he had a charm and tact that immediately sealed Markham’s support. ‘I told Captain Egerton about your wish,’ Markham wrote to him after his visit to Ecclestone Square, the first of a long stream of hints, warnings and instructions. ‘There could not be a better adviser. You will make a great mistake if you do anything at the Admiralty before you get the signal. I very well remember the way you won the service cutter race at St Kitz when you were in the “Rover”, and with the same combination of good judgement, prudence, and determination you will win again.’

It was a steep and unfamiliar learning curve for Scott. The appointment was not going to be straightforward, Markham explained three days later. Quite apart from the hostility of the Royal Society members who wanted a scientific leader, the factions within the RGS element also posed a difficulty. Sir George Nares wanted his son on the expedition. The powerful surveying lobby grouped around Sir William Wharton, the navy’s Chief Hydrographer, was going to demand a surveyor for the post. Lord Walter Kerr, the First Sea Lord, would be in Scott’s favour, Markham added with a final cautionary word, but it would be best ‘to do nothing until October beyond making interest with the naval officers on the Joint Committee’.

‘I see no possible danger in seeing the naval members of the Committee personally,’ Markham was warning again just two days later; ‘the mistake would be to make any application until the right time. Lord Walter Kerr would be the most important person to get on your side. Unluckily people are out of town until the autumn … Hoskins and McClintock are the most important to get on your side, as regards the Committee. Vesey Hamilton is luckily dead against Wharton and his surveyors … Sir George Nares is for the surveyor, but he seems to me to be getting into his dotage, and keeps maundering about his son going, whatever the subject of the discussion may be. He will be no good.’

‘You have your hands full indeed,’ Markham wrote once more on 1 August, determined to mark his protégé’s card as fully as possible. ‘I have told them to send you … Murray’s Antarctic paper of 1890, which is worth reading … They made (yesterday) Admiral Markham Secretary of the “Ship” sub-committee, so it is very desirable that you should square him … I have mentioned you to him … Success attend you.’ ‘I am glad you saw Sir Leopold McClintock and Admiral Markham,’ he wrote from Norway three weeks later. ‘The great thing will be to talk it over with Captain Egerton and get him to recommend you. His opinion will carry most weight … The only thing I am afraid of is that you will be considered too good – that the Admiralty may give leave to one of Wharton’s people about whom they care nothing, but may hesitate about a rising officer in the regular line.’

‘The hydrographers are directly responsible for all former disasters,’ Markham was complaining just over a month after he had first seen Scott, ‘for the Franklin catastrophe, for the searches invariably being sent in wrong directions … for having jobbed other failures into commands … for jobbing an old woman like Nares into the command in 1875 … Wharton has continually harassed and annoyed me, and now it is a success he wants to do the same; job the appointments, and get all the credit. If he succeeds there will be blunder after blunder ending in disaster like everything else they touch.’

To Markham the answer to any such impasse was always the same – ‘the important questions must be left to one man’, he insisted – and in the spring of 1900 he wrote directly to the Admiralty to put forward Scott’s name. ‘I have written to Mr Goschen,’ First Lord of the Admiralty, applying for the release of two officers, he told Lord Walter Kerr, one ‘to take charge of the executive work of the Antarctic Expedition, and one to command.

On this permission will, I consider, depend the efficiency and success of the expedition. If a young commander and one lieutenant are allowed, no doubt the other watch keeper can be found among smart young fellows in the naval reserve; but these two are essential to give a tone to the expedition and leaven the rest as well as because such leaders cannot be found elsewhere.

Of volunteers, Lieut. Robert F. Scott, now in ‘Majestic’, is much the best man to command the expedition I think; and Lieut Charles Royds (‘Crescent’) would be the best as the one lieutenant …

With the heavy demands made on the service by the Boxer Rebellion in China and war in South Africa, the Admiralty were reluctant to lend anyone, but by 5 April the appointment of Scott and Royds had been confirmed. On the following day Markham wrote to congratulate Scott and reassure him on the score of promotion, and it was probably as well that he did not tell him just how strong the opposition remained. ‘I read my letter to Mr Goschen,’ Markham noted in his diary for 18 April, after he had finally broken the news of his fait accompli to the odd alliance of naval hydrographers and Royal Society entomologists his years of bullying had conjured into existence, ‘and the reply from him, and from the Secretary of the Admiralty appointing Scott and Royds. Captain Tizard immediately became most insolent, questioning my right to write to Mr Goschen, cross-questioning, and making a violent attack on the professional character of the officers. His real meaning is that no officer in the regular line is fit, only those serving in the surveying branch. His manner was most offensive.’ After all Markham’s manipulation and deceptions, there was probably no protégé of his the hydrographers could have accepted, but their opposition to Scott was not simply a matter of revenge. He might, they conceded, have the paper certificates to prove his ‘thorough grounding in seamanship, navigation, surveying, chemical & mechanical science’. He might well have got the best marks of his year – 980 out of 1000 – in seamanship. He might equally have done a special course in surveying at Greenwich, and written up the ‘whole question of mining survey’. None of that answered to their point. ‘That officer’s [Scott’s] certificates are without doubt remarkably creditable & show him to be possessed of a rare combination,’ Captain Mostyn Field – ‘Scott’s chief enemy’, Markham called him – wrote on 12 May, in a letter that remains as crucial now to any valuation of Scott’s capacities as it was then,

but qualifications for the command of an expedition to the Antarctic should, in my opinion, include experience as a responsible officer in a masted ship … Not less essential in the officer in Command, is a practical acquaintance with the practice of deep sea sounding, dredging, running survey, and magnetical & astronomical observations both afloat & ashore … Mere courses of instruction in these subjects cannot adequately take the place of years devoted to their practice under varied conditions, however talented an officer may be. 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 … It is one thing to take observations in a hut at Kew or the courtyard at Greenwich observatory, but quite another thing to get the same observations under conditions of service & especially such as prevail in the Antarctic … I regret that I cannot concur in the appointment of that officer.

The tone here is so disarmingly reasonable, so apparently unarguable, that it is easy to forget that the same objections would have applied to any young naval officer at the end of Victoria’s reign. It is certainly true that a candidate from the hydrographers’ branch would have been in a better position to carry out the oceanographic and surveying work of the expedition, and yet after a gap of more than twenty years in naval polar exploration, Field’s ideal of a commander no more existed among the junior officers of the surveying branch than did Markham’s incarnation of Arthurian chivalry in the executive line.

If Field thought arguments were going to win him the case, however, he had misjudged his enemy. At the next meeting of the Joint Committee the old alliance of hydrographers and professors fought one last stand, but with the control of the vital naval subcommittee set up to resolve the issue slipping away from them and into the hands of Markham’s old ‘Arctics’ clique, they were finished. ‘There were six distinguished Naval Officers most of them with Arctic experience, who would insist upon Scott’s appointment,’ Markham wrote of the final, bitter end game. ‘Wharton’s hydrographic clique also numbered six, and they would strive to secure & job for the survey department with obstinate perversity … I saw the R.S. Secretaries and told them that if Wharton was allowed to continue the dead lock they would be responsible. But they could do nothing with him. At last I persuaded McClintock to have one more meeting and divide. The Committee met once more on May 24th, when Wharton and Tizard both heard some home truths. Some of the Clique were ashamed and staid [sic] away … On a division there was a good majority for Scott’s appointment, Wharton and Tizard had been the only dissentients.’

Markham had won. Wharton, unwell at this time, and presumably no better for his drubbings in committee, had given in. The following day Markham called a meeting of the Joint Committee to endorse the appointment. Markham proposed Scott, and Lord Lister, the President of the Royal Society – ‘always courteous, never taking a decided line, and caring nothing’ – seconded him. The motion was adopted unanimously. ‘We take the opportunity of offering you our congratulations, on assuming the conduct of an enterprise involving difficulties and responsibilities of no ordinary character,’ the two presidents wrote to Scott with an inscrutable show of unity.

Scott, in his turn, was no less silkily diplomatic. ‘My Lord and Sir,’ he replied on 11 June 1900, a year to the day since he had followed Mrs and Miss Nuttall into Ecclestone Square, ‘I am keenly alive to the great honour done me in the selection and sincerely hope that the trust reposed in me may be justified in my conduct of the enterprise and in my earnest wish to further its great scientific aims. I am grateful for your kindness in the applications you have made on my behalf to my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty and feel that while in your service, I can confidently leave in your hands, my interests in a profession to which I am devotedly attached.’

Scott had learned fast. But if he thought that his troubles were over, he was in for a brutal awakening. Wharton and his clique had been no more than stalking horses for a far more dangerous challenge.

SIX Preparations (#ulink_17792323-2224-5e98-a9f7-48dc52fb8ff6)

Oh Lord! What an expedition, but order will come.

George Murray, 26 February 1901

IT HAD BEEN AN odd twelve months for Scott. In the week before Markham finally brought Wharton to his knees he had been up in London on leave, but for most of the year during which the RS and the RGS had been locking horns over his nomination, Scott was in Majestic and more concerned with ship and home life than any remoter prospect of command.

With his appointment at the end of May this changed, and although his duties in Majestic did not officially end for another two months, he immediately found himself plunged into Antarctic business. In his book on his great 1893–96 journey in the Fram Nansen described the preparation as the hardest part of any expedition, and for a thirty-year-old naval lieutenant with scarcely more experience of the hostile world of the Royal Society than had his dressmaking sisters, it was harder again.

There is possibly nothing in Scott’s whole career that so clearly demonstrates the competence of the man – his intelligence, grasp of detail, ability to get on with people, or, for that matter, his tact and charm – than the astonishing way in which he rose to the challenge. There were times over the next year in which he came very close to buckling under the strain, but one only has to look at the letters and memos that poured from his desk to recognise that in his new independence here at last was a man who had found himself.

It is to Sir Clements Markham’s everlasting credit, too, that having for so long sung the song of youth, he was prepared, when the time came, to give it its head. ‘I am delighted to see your promotion in the Times,’ he wrote generously on 2 July 1900, the day after Scott was appointed commander. ‘In taking charge of Antarctic matters, you may rely on my support always … I consider that the commander is the man whose opinion should prevail, on all points. The old fossils (including myself) can compose the committees, can make themselves very useful from their experience and knowledge; but decisions should rest with a clearer and younger head.’

It helped that they saw things in virtually identical terms, but it would be a mistake to assume that when one reads Scott he is simply writing to another man’s dictation. ‘I must have complete command of the ship and the landing parties,’ he wrote in the first crucial letter after his appointment, a memo that bears the stamp of Scott’s mature style as clearly as it does that of Markham’s coaching.

There cannot be two heads.

I must be consulted on all matters affecting the equipment of the landing parties.

The executive officers must not number less than four, excluding of myself.

I must be consulted on all future appointments both civilian and other, especially the Doctors.

It must be understood that the Doctors are first medical men, and secondly members of the scientific staff, and not vice versa.