Читать книгу Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South - David Crane - Страница 10

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.^* 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.’

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.