A First Rate Tragedy Read online

  As a midshipman most of Scott’s time was spent learning the operational duties of running a warship. He kept watch on the quarter deck, helped direct the men during drills and took charge of parties of ratings ashore. He didn’t have a natural ability to command and in later life he would lack the easy assurance of his rival Shackleton. As a young officer it must have been hard for him to know how best to assert himself. The picture we have is of an anxious, eager young man masking shyness and uncertainty as best he could. The navy was not a place that tolerated weakness. Cool assurance and decisiveness were the necessities for a successful career and Scott had to conceal the introspective side of his character. Perhaps that is why as a young man he turned to writing a diary. It was a safety valve, allowing him to admit his doubts and fears without laying himself open to ridicule or sympathy, both of which he would have hated and which would have damaged his prospects. There was certainly neither time nor place for dreaming.

  Again he overcame the obstacles deep within himself and his captain recorded that he had served ‘with sobriety and to my entire satisfaction’. This view was shared by his next commander on the brig H.M.S. Liberty who described him as ‘zealous and painstaking’. On the battleship HMS Monarch, he was rated ‘promising’ and at the end of 1886, the year he joined HMS Rover of the training squadron, the verdict was ‘intelligent and capable’. All of this boded well for a solid if not a brilliant career. Yet Scott had to make his mark because he had few family connections to push him up the tree and little private income. An ambitious young man, he knew his career would have to be built on merit.

  After the Rover – and his encounter with Sir Clements Markham – Scott studied at the Royal Naval College, passed his exams with ease and was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in 1888. As the year drew to its close he found himself en route to join the cruiser H.M.S. Amphion at Esquimault, British Columbia. The last leg of his journey turned into a nightmare but accounts of it show Scott at his very best. In San Francisco he boarded a tramp steamer heading north to Alaska. A ferocious storm blew up which was to last for most of the voyage. Another Englishman, Sir Courtauld-Thompson, a fellow-passenger, later described what happened. The ship was packed with miners and their wives, many of whom were soon sick and terrified. Women lay with their children on the saloon floor, while the men turned to such drinking and quarrelling as the heaving, pitching ship would allow. The crew had other matters to attend to and the young Scott took charge.

  Though at that time still only a boy, he practically took command of the passengers and was at once accepted by them as their Boss during the rest of the trip. With a small body of volunteers he . . . dressed the mothers, washed the children, fed the babies, swabbed down the floors and nursed the sick . . . On deck he settled the quarrels and established order either by his personality, or, if necessary, by his fists.

  At the same time he apparently managed to be cheerful – a characteristic he valued in others during his Polar journeys: ‘. . . by day and night he worked for the common good, never sparing himself, and with his infectious smile gradually made us all feel the whole thing was jolly good fun.’2

  This account of a confident, competent young man is curiously at odds with an entry in his diary from around that time and may again reflect the improving light of hindsight. Scott wrote in his diary:

  It is only given to us cold slowly wrought natures to feel this dreary deadly tightening at the heart, this slow sickness which holds one for weeks. How can I bear it? I write of the future; of the hopes of being more worthy; but shall I ever be? Can I alone, poor weak wretch that I am bear up against it all? The daily round, the petty annoyance, the ill health, the sickness of heart . . . How, how can one fight against it all? No one will ever see these words, therefore I may freely write – ‘what does it all mean?’3

  Even allowing for the uncertainty that often afflicts people in young adulthood this is a bleak view. Scott was one of those people who was at his best in a crisis because it meant there was something to be done. He needed distractions from the uncertainties inherent in an agnostic like himself. ‘Sometimes it seems to me that hard work is the panacea for all ills, moral and physical,’ he would later write.4 Periods of melancholic depression would dog him throughout his life.

  Scott duly joined the Amphion, a second-class cruiser and in August 1889 was appointed full lieutenant. He was making very respectable progress in his career but years of watch-keeping, of interminable drills and exercises lay ahead before he could reasonably expect his own command. Scott weighed this up and found it unattractive, so he decided to specialize and applied for torpedo training. His captain described him as ‘a young officer of good promise who has tact and patience in the handling of men. He is quiet and intelligent and I think likely to develop into a useful torpedo officer’. With this helpful endorsement Scott entered the Vernon torpedo schoolship at Portsmouth in 1891.

  He enjoyed life on this old wooden hulk and was intrigued by the possibilities of the torpedo. This was not a new weapon but it was only with the development of the self-propelled torpedo that the navy had begun to take it seriously. In the past decade the navy had built up a fleet of over 200 torpedo boats. Scott now learned about torpedoes and also about all the electrical and mechanical equipment of a warship, except that concerned with propulsion. He was also close to his home and family again. Archie had been commissioned into the Royal Artillery and the two brothers were able to take leave together. They played tennis and golf, rode and took their sisters sailing. Scott was working hard too and was able to write to his father that ‘I look upon myself now as an authority on the only modern way of working a minefield and such like exercises . . .’5

  However, he went home to Outlands for Christmas in 1894 to hear disastrous news. His father had sold the brewery some years earlier and had been living off the proceeds, but the money had either been spent or invested badly and the family was ruined. Scott put thoughts of his own career aside to help his sixty-three-year-old father pick up the pieces. Archie played his part as well, abandoning his career as a Royal Artillery Officer and signing up with a Hausa regiment in Nigeria, where the pay was better and the expenses less. Scott, who had never been extravagant, now had to make his meagre lieutenant’s pay stretch even further.

  Making the best of it, he applied for a transfer to HMS Defiance, the second of the navy’s two torpedo training ships based at Devonport so he could be even nearer to his family. Outlands was let to a linen draper, and John Scott found a job managing a brewery in Somerset. Although the practical arrangements were soon made it must have been a wrench to part from the family home. Scott visited it in later years and never lost his affection for the old place, carving his initials in a tree. Yet at the same time, this was an opportunity for his family to break out of their confined little world. Three weeks after the crash Rose became a nurse. Ettie, good-looking and vivacious and a star of the local amateur theatricals, decided to go on the stage, joining a touring company whose leading lady was Irene Vanbrugh. Scott, whose artistic side was strongly attracted to the theatre, urged her on, soothing his mother’s fears that it was not quite respectable.

  Once his family was safely settled Scott applied for a seagoing ship. In 1896 he was appointed torpedo lieutenant of the battleship H.M.S. Empress of India and it was now at Vigo that he again met Markham after an interval of nine years. The impression he had made on the older man was confirmed, not that Scott was aware of Markham’s close interest. In 1897 he transferred to the battleship H.M.S. Majestic. The Majestic was only two years old, had cost nearly one million pounds and her armament included four of the new twelve-pounder guns. She was also the flagship of the Channel Fleet and Scott’s last naval post before Markham put him on the long, ultimately fatal road south.

  It was also his last posting before family tragedy struck. Just four months after Scott had joined the Majestic his father died of heart disease and dropsy, leaving barely over £1,500. Scott and Archie each made arrangem
ents with speed and generosity. Archie was able to contribute £200 a year from his Hausa Force pay. Scott’s whole salary was little more than that but he managed to find £70 a year towards his mother’s upkeep. She moved to London with her daughters Grace and Rose who had set up as dressmakers, taking rooms over a milliner’s shop in Chelsea and even more daringly, given their conventional middle-class backgrounds, going to Paris to study the fashions. Again Scott applauded their move and wrote to his mother that ‘I honestly think we shall some day be grateful to fortune for lifting us out of the “sleepy hollow” of the old Plymouth life’.6 His feelings for Hannah verged on veneration – ‘If ever children had cause to worship their mother . . .’ he once wrote to her.7

  But the sacrifices he now made for her debarred him from any social pleasures. He had to think carefully about buying even a glass of sherry – or accepting one, given that he could not repay the hospitality. Taking a woman out to dinner was impossible, which must have been galling for a man who had his share of youthful infatuations and liked pretty and intelligent women. It was all he could do to keep his uniform looking reasonably spruce. His friend J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, was later to suggest that the gold braid on his uniform grew tarnished and that he probably had to darn his socks. Certainly the sheer dreariness of having to worry about money all the time was something that never left him. The dreamer, the enthusiast and the idealist had to take second place to the pragmatist. Doubts had to be put aside, insoluble philosophical questions avoided and uncertainties mastered. And there was more sadness ahead. In 1898 Archie came home on leave ‘so absolutely full of life’ as Scott wrote to their mother.8 A month later he went to Hythe to play golf, contracted typhoid and was dead. An even greater burden now fell on Scott, though Ettie had married William Ellison-Macartney, MP for South Antrim, who generously offered to contribute to Hannah’s upkeep.

  So this was the state of affairs when, just a few months after Archie’s death, Scott had his chance encounter with Sir Clements Markham in the Buckingham Palace Road. The succession of blows which had fallen on him since those days of gaily racing cutters under a cloudless sky at St Kitts had made him determined to seize his opportunities. His ambition was if anything more acute, but he had begun to feel ‘unlucky’, as if a malign fate were pursuing him. He sensed he must fight back or go under. When Sir Clements told him of the expedition he was determined to command it.

  3

  ‘Ready, Aye, Ready’

  And so the great adventure was on its feet. Sir Clements Markham’s dreams were assuming substance and that substance seemed personified in the 31-year-old Scott. Though he was not tall, only five foot nine inches, he was broad and deep-chested with a narrow waist and hips. He exuded calm professionalism.

  Furthermore Markham shared Scott’s belief in fate and that it was providence which had guided Scott out of Victoria Station and into his path. Scott certainly felt the strangeness of it all: ‘How curiously the course of one’s life may be turned,’ he later wrote. When, two days after their meeting, Scott applied to command the expedition, Markham supported him, though he proceeded cautiously. This was, after all, his life’s work, and despite the impression he gave in The Lands of Silence, he had actively considered other possible leaders. He consulted Scott’s captain on the Majestic, George Egerton, a man with experience of Arctic exploration who wholeheartedly endorsed Scott. He also consulted some of the naval grandees including the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty. Their view was equally positive.

  Yet there now followed what Markham called ‘long and tedious’ wrangles. The problem was the joint committee set up by the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society to manage the expedition. The Royal Society members slightly outnumbered their geographical colleagues. More importantly, they had very differing views. The scientists of the Royal Society wanted the primary aim of the expedition to be scientific. Markham’s colleagues saw the goal as geographical discovery, while Markham had his young naval officers to promote. Scott soon became the meat in this particular club sandwich. As Markham wrote scathingly: ‘The dream of professors and pedants that an undertaking is best managed by a debating society of selected wiseacres has a never ending fascination, but it is a mere dream.’1

  An increasingly irritable Markham argued that the leader must be a young naval officer in the regular service – a man of action, discipline and resource, as well as a man of tact and discretion. He also reminded his critics that the Royal Navy had played a dominant role in Polar exploration since the days of Cook. The Royal Society, however, was unhappy. Why could a scientist not be in charge? it asked indignantly, reawakening an issue debated just as vigorously in Cook’s day. The Admiralty, on the other hand, wanted a naval surveyor to run the show. At one stage the two disgruntled societies joined forces against Markham the common enemy. To Scott, back at sea now with the Channel Squadron as a torpedo lieutenant, his chances were looking slim. However, he was underestimating Markham. Whiskers aquiver with indignation, Markham fought off the plots and counter-plots until, in June 1900, he was at last able to sign Scott’s appointment. On 30 June Scott was promoted commander.

  There was one last threat. In February 1900, at the height of the wrangling, a distinguished geologist, John Gregory, had been appointed to lead the scientific staff. He was not the type likely to appeal to Markham, being ‘a little man with a very low voice, always nervously pulling at his moustache’.2 He arrived in England in December 1900 from the University of Melbourne under the unfortunate impression that, while Scott might command the ship, he was to be in command of the landing party. Sir Clements quickly disabused him, which led to an unedifying squabble between the country’s most distinguished leaders of science and exploration. Needless to say the old campaigner had his way. Gregory was asked to serve under Scott, refused and resigned.

  Scott had barely a year from the time of his appointment to make all the preparations before the departure of the expedition which was to be his first independent command. The problems seemed awesome. He needed provisions, clothing and equipment for the most hostile conditions on earth, of which he had no personal experience. He was truly a novice. As The Times rather sourly remarked, ‘As youth is essential, one without actual Polar experience has had to be selected . . .’. Scott also had to pick his men and learn what he could about Polar travel in general and sledging in particular. By his own admission he was ignorant, and the recent fate of the Belgica, trapped and adrift in the ice with some of its sailors going insane, must have weighed on his mind.

  He was given a small office in Burlington House which became the heart of his operation and crammed with strange objects from socks made of human hair to wolf skins. In early October he went to Norway to visit the celebrated Arctic explorer and acknowledged expert on sledging, Fridtjof Nansen. Nansen’s saucer-shaped vessel the Fram had made a journey as audacious as any Viking’s. Nansen had allowed her to drift with the Polar current right across the Arctic, thereby proving that the Arctic region was an ocean, not a continent. Nansen – tall, powerful, fair-haired and approaching forty – was impressed with the young commander’s earnestness and wry humour and was generous with his advice. In particular he warned Scott that it was vital to take the right supplies and equipment. He also urged him to take sledge dogs, which Scott did, sending to Russia for them.

  From Norway Scott travelled to Berlin to consult Professor von Drygalski, who was to lead a German Antarctic expedition. He was shocked to find the Germans very much better prepared and hastened home in considerable alarm, determined to drive his own plans along. To do this he had to have a much freer hand and Markham helped him to get rid of some interfering subcommittees so he could get on with the job.

  As well as everything else, Scott had to find time to visit the expedition’s ship, the Discovery, whose keel had been laid in March 1900 by the Dundee Shipbuilders Company. She was the first vessel in Britain to be purpose-built for scientific exploration since Halley’s Paramore of 1694. She w
as also one of the last wooden three-masted sailing ships to be constructed in Britain. The name Discovery had a noble pedigree – other explorers like Baffin, Hudson and Cook had sailed in ships of that name and there was a tradition that it was lucky. (Indeed, the name is still used in the space shuttle programme.) Whatever the case, to Scott she was one of the finest craft afloat. The shipbuilders had taken their inspiration from the traditional British whalers which, in the ever-widening quest for their prey, had evolved a design capable of battering through the ice.

  The Discovery was built of wood – a skill which Scott noted was already passing away – and had a formidable strength. Her frames were of solid English oak and her lining of Riga fir. She had no portholes or sidelights, and daylight filtered into the living spaces through central skylights and small round decklights. Her sides were 26-inches thick and her projecting bow, already eleven feet of solid wood, was further reinforced with steel plates to help her nose her way through the ice-pack and resist pressure. Her stern was rounded and overhanging to give protection to the rudder, an innovation Nansen had pioneered successfully with the Fram. Because the uncertainties of voyages of exploration meant she might run out of coal, she was equipped with sail and steam – a combination Scott was familiar with from his naval training days. When completed, the Discovery cost just over £50,000, perhaps some £2,500,000 in today’s money. She also had a carefully constructed observatory for the taking of magnetic observations. To be effective it was important that there should be no iron or steel within a 30-foot radius of it. The designers managed to achieve this, though on the voyage out consternation was caused by the discovery that someone had hung a parrot in a metal cage within the exclusion zone. The expedition’s instruments were lent by the Admiralty and included astronomical, magnetic and meteorological equipment and seismographs as well as sounding gear and dredging nets.