Читать книгу Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South - David Crane - Страница 11

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.

I am ready to insist upon these conditions to the point of resignation if, in my opinion, their refusal perils the success of the undertaking.

If there was a certain amount of shadowboxing here, behind that first point lay a quarrel that went to the heart of both Scott’s and Markham’s understanding of the position of commander. From the earliest planning stages of the expedition two distinct naval and scientific elements had been envisaged, but what had never been satisfactorily established in all the arguments of the previous year was either the balance of power between the two or the ultimate authority over any landing party.

In Markham’s own mind, fixed as it was with a theological fury on the indivisibility of a naval command, there had never been and never could be any confusion, but in a lapse of concentration he had opened the door to his opponents. In October 1899 he had received a request for a testimonial for Melbourne University from a Professor Gregory of the Natural History Museum, and in an unusual show of unity with his Royal Society opponents, met Gregory the following month with the counter suggestion that he should become the Director of Civilian Staff on the forthcoming expedition. With the benefit of hindsight, Markham managed to convince himself that Gregory’s size, voice and habit of ‘nervously pulling his moustache’ had never inspired confidence, but at the time he seemed the ideal candidate for the job. ‘I was influenced by his proved success in organisation and the management of men in a most difficult expedition (British East Africa),’ Professor Edward Poulton, an Oxford zoologist with a speciality in butterflies, and an object of particular contempt to Markham, later wrote of Gregory, ‘by the wide grasp of science which enabled him to bring back valuable observations and collections in so many departments. His ice experience in Spitzbergen and Alpine regions was also of highest importance, together with the fact that his chief subject was geology, a science which pursued in the Antarctic Continent would almost certainly yield results of especial significance … No one was more competent to state the probable structure of the Antarctic Continent and its relation to that of the earth. This opinion of Prof. Gregory’s qualifications for the position of scientific leader of an Antarctic expedition is I know widely held among British scientific men. In their wide combination and united as they are to tried capacity as a leader they are unique, and an expedition with Prof. Gregory f or its scientific chief, with as free a hand as English law would permit, was bound to yield great results.’

If Markham had paused for a moment, he must have known that the last thing he wanted on his naval expedition was a scientist of this kind of stature, but by the time he realised the threat the damage was done. In the early January of 1900 Gregory had sailed for Australia with what seemed to him a clear understanding of their agreement, and in a letter posted in Egypt on his way out, he spelled out his idea of the command he was accepting. Gregory envisaged a small and carefully chosen landing party, with two scientists supported by a cook, porter, two sailors, one reserve, a ‘medical man of endurance, resource and pluck’, equipped with a three-roomed house, two observatory huts, stables, two boats, sledges, dogs and fuel for two years. ‘As the main object of the landing party would be to solve the problem of the nature of the countryside,’ he had written in a letter that in some bizarre aberration Markham had ‘approved’, ‘which is a geological and geographical problem, it seems to me that it would be better for the organization of the land party to be placed in the hands of the scientific leader … The captain would, I hope, be instructed to give such assistance from the crew as may be required in dredging, tow-netting etc, to place boats where required at the disposal of the Scientific staff … In regards of the Captain, it seems to me that the main desiderata are considerable experience of sailing ships and of ice navigation which would be most likely combined in a whaling captain.’ The advantages of a naval commander, Gregory conceded, were obvious, ‘but sailing is a neglected art in the navy. Further, it seems doubtful whether a first-rate naval officer would in the present condition of affairs be willing to bury himself in the Antarctic for three years, and whether the admiralty would give the necessary leave of absence to one of its best men.’

It seems likely that Markham’s ‘approval’ of this plan is one of the first signs of old age and failing powers that would become increasingly worrying over the next three years. For some time he had been suffering from sporadic ill health, but it is impossible to believe that the younger Markham would have allowed gout or pneumonia or anything else to cloud his judgement in a way that was so potentially crippling to Scott’s prospects.

With Gregory not expected back from Australia until December, however, there was nothing to do but go on as if nothing had happened, and after a crash course in magnetism at Deptford, Scott joined Markham in Norway to look at equipment and meet the men whose experience he so badly needed. ‘It is quite clear that our Hydrographer Dept is behindhand & old fashioned as regards all these matters,’ Markham had written to him after a cruise with Nansen had opened his eyes to the oceanographic advances being made abroad, ‘while it will not be to our credit if our Antarctic work is not quite up to date. I think it quintessential that you should come out here in September … Nansen and Hjort will be delighted to see you.’

Scott never needed much encouragement to bring himself up to date with technical innovations, and while his magnetic course kept him busy through September, he was in Oslo by 9 October. From Oslo he went up to a new health hydro to join Markham and his wife Minna, and on the next day, he recorded in the blue hardcover notebook he had bought himself for the journey, boarded the Michael Sars, the state-owned oceanographic ship.

It is unusual to have a diary of Scott’s from this period, because unlike most naval officers, to whom a journal was second nature, he never seems to have kept one before going south. It is possible that they have simply disappeared, but if the odd, aborted fragments from his early career are any guide, there would seem to have existed in Scott an ingrained habit of reserve that extended even to the private page. There is certainly nothing in this journal to suggest anything of a private life; what it conjures up instead is the curiosity, excitement and openness that Scott brought to almost everything he did at this time. In her memoir of him his sister spoke of his need for a wider and more challenging world than the navy, and in Norway he found himself in his element, doing what he did best with the kind of men for whom science and practical invention merged in the precise way he admired.

Scott would, in fact, have made a good Norwegian. ‘So many things discussed that it becomes absolutely necessary to start this journal,’ he scrawled on the tenth, and the next two weeks were filled with notes, memos, questions, sketches and snatches of conversation. Nansen, too, was as generous with his time and advice as Markham had promised. ‘Nansen joined us for dinner … Nansen rejects asbestos … Many interesting scraps of conversation with Nansen … N. spoke of Borchgrevink as a tremendous fraud … Nansen’s name will go far here … ’ From scurvy to the size of boats, from sledges to ski, sextants, theodolites, ships’ plans, insulation, thermometers, propellers, drag nets, matting, moccasins, wool, provisions, grain and even dogs, Scott got all he could out of him. ‘Discussed dogs,’ Scott recorded a conversation on the eleventh with the arch-man-hauler of Ecclestone Square.‘He [Markham] is evidently yielding – and we must do something soon.’

The note of urgency – of impatience, even – in that entry is typical, because the more Scott was impressed with what he saw and heard in Norway, the more alarmed he was at the gaps the journey had exposed in British preparations. In memo after memo to himself he noted issues that would have to be raised back in England, and if he found that for all his ‘very nice manners … there was not much to learn’ from the Duke of Abruzzi, he was the first to recognise his own ignorance. ‘Saw many instruments but could not quite follow what each was for.’ ‘Nansen, and two Germans at the Grand Hotel,’ he noted on the fifteenth – ‘terrible trouble not knowing any language but my own.’ ‘Met Nansen who gave me some papers on titration – must look the matter up but confess to being considerably at sea at present.’

That same evening Scott dined with Nansen and his wife and daughter, and after hearing Markham lecture at the university on Peru, left for Gothenburg and Copenhagen. On his first day in Copenhagen he had dinner with Maurice Baring from the embassy, and after an evening at the music hall was ‘trotted off’ to the zoo the next day to see a musk-ox by a ‘dear simple minded old gentleman with equal simple minded wife’. But even with the occasional musk-ox, music hall, concert recital – ‘horrible looking person with magnificent voice,’ he noted of the Marquis de Souza – to leaven his journey, the coming expedition was never far from his thoughts. ‘What was principally brought to my attention notice and serious consideration,’ he anxiously scrawled in Copenhagen, ‘is … that the crew is ridiculously large in the eyes of all foreigners – this point is again & again driven home – the crew must be largely reduced.’

It was not all one-way traffic, however, and if Scott’s sense of national pride had taken a denting in Norway, it was wonderfully restored by reading the American Frederick Cook’s account of his Antarctic experience on the train journey on to Berlin. Cook had been a member of de Gerlache’s Belgica expedition that had been trapped for a year in the ice of the Bellinghausen Sea, and his maudlin narrative of emotional breakdown and moral disintegration among a foreign crew was just the tonic Scott’s patriotism needed. ‘Read Cook,’ he noted on the twentieth; ‘they must be a poor lot except Lecointe whom alone appears to have had some guts – the food seems to have been very bad.’

If this seems a sweeping judgement on a crew that also included the young Roald Amundsen, Scott was soon brought back to a less insular view of international exploration by the forwardness of German preparations. ‘Two personal points of great interest transpired,’ he wrote on the twenty-first, his own unresolved relations with Gregory clearly in his mind after a meeting with the Gauss’s expedition leader, Erich von Drygalski: ‘He has emancipated himself from all control. He has refused to be subject to any orders.’

The following day Scott was in Potsdam with Drygalski, looking at instruments and discussing magnetism and the chemistry of seawater. After paying a final visit to Baron Richthofen, Markham’s opposite number in Berlin, he left for Hamburg on the twenty-third and the next day caught the train for England, ‘fully impressed with our backwardness’ and determined to ‘put things in order’. ‘The German expedition was to sail from Europe at the same time as our own,’ he later wrote, ‘but its preparations were far more advanced. In Berlin I found the work of equipment in full swing; provisions and stores had already been ordered; clothing had been tried, special instruments were being prepared, the staff of the expedition had been appointed and were already at work, and the “Gauss” was well on towards completion. I was forced to realise that this was all in marked contrast with the state of things in England, and I hastened home in considerable alarm. I found, as I had expected, that all the arrangements which were being so busily pushed forward in Germany were practically at a standstill in England; many of them, in fact, had not yet been considered.’

At the root of the problem, and in marked contrast to the freedom Drygalski enjoyed, were the various committees that controlled every aspect of expedition planning. It was hard to imagine that anywhere but England a national venture of such a scale should have to wait on the social movements of men who were as likely to be on the grouse moors as anywhere else, but until Scott could extract himself from the financial shackles of committee control, there could be no real hope of narrowing the gap with the Germans.

Another month – and another bad-tempered rearguard from Wharton – was wasted before Scott was allowed a measure of financial independence, but he still had nothing like the support that Drygalski enjoyed in Germany. At the end of June Markham had appointed the young Cyril Longhurst to the post of Expedition Secretary, but with the First Lieutenant and engineer busy with the ship’s preparations in Scotland, the third naval officer on the China Station, his biologist working out his notice at Plymouth Museum, his senior doctor just back from Brazil, his navigator still unconfirmed in the job, and half the scientific staff as yet unappointed, the vast bulk of the administrative work inevitably fell on Scott himself.

His energy, though, seemed inexhaustible. He was now living with his mother and sisters again, above a shop in the upper half of a house at 80 Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea. ‘The horror of slackness,’ Barrie wrote, ‘was turned into a very passion for keeping himself “fit” … Even when he was getting the Discovery ready and doing daily the work of several men, he might have been seen running through the streets of London from Savile Row [the old RGS building] or the Admiralty to his home, not because there was no time … but because he must be fit, fit, fit.’

The difficulties only increased when at the beginning of December Gregory arrived back from Melbourne to oversee the scientific preparations for the expedition. At their first meeting he had given Scott a copy of the original plan that Markham had so inexplicably endorsed, and a dinner on the tenth to thrash out their differences only showed how far apart they were. ‘I may as well say,’ Gregory wrote to Poulton, irritated at what he saw as Scott’s trespassing on his territory,

I do not think Scott at all a good man for the post.

His forte is that he is very prepossessing.

It is his first command & for a man who talks so much about discipline I think it is a pity for his first command to be so unusual.

I think he is a poor organizer, his departments are in arrears & he is so casual in all his plans. He appears to trust to luck things which ought to be a matter of precise calculation.

He has no experience of expedition equipment.

Instead of looking after his own work, he has apparently devoted most of his time to making himself acquainted with mine … On questions of furs food sledges ski ie things which are in his department his ignorance is appalling.

He is a mechanical engineer not a sailor or surveyor. And he does not seem at all conscious of these facts or inclined to get experience necessary.

Personally I like Scott but I am sorry he does not stick to his own work, instead of devoting so much of his energies to jumping mine.

This was rich coming from a man who had just swanned in from Australia, but he had no more intention of giving in to Scott, than Scott had of playing ferry master to Gregory. ‘Before perusing your article,’ Scott wrote to the RGS librarian, John Scott Keltie, some time in January, in a letter marked and triple-underlined ‘Strictly Private’, ‘I am writing to tell in strict privacy that the situation between Gregory & myself is in the nature of a deadlock. It is a great matter of regret to me but I still hope he may take a view more consistent with mine.’

If Scott really still had hopes that he could ‘manage’ him, they did not last long, and on 22 January – the same day that the old Queen died – Gregory sent a memorandum to Markham reiterating his demands. ‘A preposterous draft of instruction for himself arrived from Gregory,’ Markham noted in his diary that evening – ‘quite inadmissible’ as he later wrote. ‘He wanted a position equal to Scott’s, to have a deciding voice as to the route, to be consulted in everything, to have charge of observations and sole command on land, but he conceded that Scott might be in charge during times of stress and danger at sea … I sent the draft back, telling him it was out of the question.’

Behind Scott stood Markham, behind Gregory the Royal Society, but for both sides the issue – scientific or civilian command? – was the same, and for both sides the one tactic was to produce a definition of the commander’s role that would force the other into resignation. ‘Dear Gregory,’ Markham wrote on 30 January, conveniently forgetting his own earlier endorsement, ‘I am exceedingly sorry if you have been inconvenienced and led to suppose that the organization of the expedition was other than it is, and must be. I thought my views were perfectly well known … I must regret the loss of your services if this is to be, but trust that you will not have been much inconvenienced, as I believe you were coming home on leave at this time, under any circumstances.’

As far as Markham was concerned, Gregory had only himself to blame for his ‘misconception’, and two days later he circulated a memorandum among RGS members of the Joint Committee reminding them exactly where their loyalties lay. Dr Gregory had turned down a position analogous to that of Sir Wyville Thomson in Challenger, Markham explained with all his old economy of truth, demanding instead ‘that he should be Director of Science generally, that he should have executive control with regard to routes, the sole executive command of landing parties and of everything on land. This is impossible because Captain Scott has already been appointed by the two Presidents … to be Commander of the Expedition, involving executive control of everything connected with it, and undivided responsibility. It would be a breach of faith to take away from that position, and it would ruin the Expedition, for it would lead to the loss of Captain Scott’s services … A divided command is but another name for failure and disaster. Your President could not agree to the change, and, if it is made, would have to give up all responsibility and withdraw from all active concern in the Expedition.’

With rather more enemies about him than friends, one would have thought the threat of resignation a dangerous card for Markham to play, but the old ragtag alliance of professors, hydrographers, time servers, jobbers, incompetents and half-senile apostates was playing a still riskier one. As early as 27 January, Poulton had sounded out the expedition’s newly appointed second-in-command, Albert Armitage, suggesting to him that if they could force Scott into resignation, the position could be his. ‘How far,’ he concluded, with an Iago-like instinct for the weak spot of a merchant service man, ‘anything but the ambition of a few young naval officers is likely to be satisfied by this Expedition you may judge by this article in the PG [a piece on the coming expedition in the Pall Mall Gazette] … ’

‘It was a rotten letter from someone who might have known better,’ and Poulton probably knew it himself the moment he sent it. He had only written it in the first place because he believed Scott responsible for the piece of naval self-glorification in the Pall Mall, but by the time he realised his mistake it was too late to prevent his letter escaping into the public domain – ‘If a murderer were to write to you,’ Scott had asked Armitage with a nicely sophistical twist, ‘saying that he intended killing someone, and marked it “Confidential”, would you hold it so?’

If Poulton’s attempt to withdraw his bribe represents a certain restoration of decencies, however, it did not represent any weakening, and at a meeting of the Joint Committee a week later, the Gregory faction countered with a set of Instructions that would have given their man the final say in all the key questions touching the expedition. ‘My Dear Armitage,’ Scott wrote on the ninth, ‘Things are now in a condition from which I can see no way out but resignation.’

‘I called and found him very much depressed over the whole business,’ Armitage recalled. ‘He said that he would resign and that I had better take over, etc etc. I persuaded him to wait and talk the matter over the following day. Sir Clements, Scott and I had a pow-wow over it, and the two of us got Scott to stick to his guns.’

Other than Armitage’s account – and he always had a tendency to be the hero of his own narratives – there is no evidence that Scott thought of giving in, though Markham too noted the ‘visible effect’ the whole business was having on him. Even Markham himself was beginning to feel the strain, but after another bad-tempered committee meeting that saw him jeered out of the room, he bounced back with a series of manoeuvres and countercoups that restored the critical control of the ship’s future movements and overall control to Scott. ‘Scott came in the morning,’ Markham triumphantly noted in his diary for 7 May, ‘and told me that yesterday Goldie’s [Markham’s henchman] committee telegraphed … asking Gregory if he agreed. Gregory answered no, which the committee considered to be a resignation.’

The ‘Gregory question’ had been ‘a tale of dullness, intrigue … spite … malignity’ and ‘incompetence’ from the first, as Markham put it, but that did not stop it having its repercussions for Scott. It is impossible to say whether the science carried out by the expedition would have been any better or different if Gregory had been in charge, but the price of Markham’s victory was not just the continued hostility or scepticism of the RS towards all the expedition’s scientific results, but the grotesque association of Scott’s name with naval amateurism.

If there is any one certainty in all this, it is that the only man who emerged from the whole tawdry business with any credit is Scott. It was not his fault that the RS and the whole scientific establishment lacked the guts to stand up to Markham. He was not to blame, either, for that mix of arrogance and folie de grandeur that Gregory brought to all their negotiations. ‘It will be understood what an enormous weight of anxiety and worry was added … by this intolerable nuisance,’ Markham for once wrote without exaggeration. ‘It would have driven most men out of their senses. It had a visible effect on Scott: but he bore it with most wonderful prudence, tact, and patience.’

It was not just Markham who was impressed, and even Gregory and his circle could scarcely find a hard word for him personally. ‘I admire immensely Scott’s powers of organization,’ Gregory’s friend and scientific successor for the duration of the journey to South Africa, George Murray, wrote to Markham at the height of the controversy, ‘even among affairs that must have been unfamiliar to him. Moreover I am sure we will be all of us happy on board which means so much as regards getting the best work out of men.’ ‘I went to see Scott,’ recalled Armitage, ‘and dined with his mother and sister and him. I was charmed by him from the first … I will say at once that I never met a more delightful man than Scott to work with during our collaboration in our preparations of all matters in connection with the expedition.’

The relations between Scott and his second-in-command would deteriorate badly in the Antarctic, but there is an interesting illustration of just how close they were at this time. On 9 April Scott was initiated into Freemasonry at Drury Lane Lodge No. 2127, and in the following month ‘passed’ at an emergency meeting of the same Lodge, the first step on a ladder of Masonic enlightenment that saw him ‘raised’ at the St Alban’s Lodge No. 2597 in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1904 before finally resigning from Navy Lodge No. 2612 in 1906.

It is hard to imagine Scott attracted to the flummery of Freemasonry – difficult to hear him asking to have his Throat cut and his Tongue ripped from the Roof of his Mouth, and his Heart plucked from under his Left Breast before being staked out a Cable’s length from the Shore if he broke his vow of secrecy – but there can have been nothing in its more benevolent tenets that would have been at odds with his own principles. It is impossible to be sure what if any were Scott’s beliefs at this stage of his life, but for a naval officer Freemasonry would have been more of a career move than anything else, a gesture of belonging that knitted him more closely to a powerful, if largely invisible, service establishment. Albert Markham, George Egerton, Lord Charles Beresford, Francis Bridgeman, Pelham Aldridge, John Jellicoe – the list of senior naval officers Scott knew who had Masonic links is a lengthy one, but perhaps the most interesting name in this connection is that of his proposer, Albert Armitage. Only another Mason would be able to say with any certainty what if any obligations that relationship postulated, but if there is probably no cause for anti-Masonic hysteria here, it is at least worth bearing in mind in the light of the two men’s mutual conduct on the expedition.^*

With only months to go, however, both Scott and Armitage had other things to think of, and after the best part of a year had been wasted, preparations were multiplying by the day. There were food and medical supplies to be worked out, applications to be sifted and interviews held, medicals and dental examinations to be arranged, and the myriad other tasks that poured into the two rooms that Scott and Longhurst shared in the Burlington Gardens University Building. ‘To Savile Row,’ the tireless Markham noted in his diary, ‘where Crease had prepared a feast of Pemmican and other samples of preserved meats, for Scott’; ‘with Scott to Savile Row, where we had a long consultation with Dr Koettlitz, respecting the provision and the scale of dietary … ship committee where Scott distinguished himself … Scott on estimates … Scott came with an excellent memorandum on the magnetic observations … Scott came to settle about letters to Berlin with reference to cooperation … Scott about a notice to invite volunteers … Scott … asking the War Office for a captive balloon … ’

As well as the expedition work, there were also the social obligations that went with the command. ‘Scott at the RGS evening … Scott to dinner … Scott at paper on Lake Rudolph – Nile journey … Anniversary dinner – Scott there … ’ Exhausting though all this may have been, he was becoming very good at it. There was nothing Armitage admired in Scott more than his deft touch with the difficult men who were his employers, but behind the charm there was real metal. ‘I am of course aware that the latter amount has been definitely ordered,’ he wrote smoothly to the American Compressed Food Company, having first explained that he was halving his original order, ‘but I do not think it would be satisfactory to you that the fact should be known that we were obliged to leave behind a quantity of your pemmican owing to its not being up to our requirements.’

If the burden of things still fell on Scott, at least his staff was beginning to take shape. Albert Armitage had joined from the merchant service in December, and most of the naval and scientific personnel were in place by the spring. A medical doubt still hung over the choice of a second doctor, but by the end of February the list of executive officers was complete with the appointment of Michael Barne – ‘a charming young fellow … and a relative of mine which is also in his favour’, Markham noted – and a twenty-three-year-old merchant officer with the ear of the expedition’s greatest benefactor, Llewellyn Longstaff, and valuable experience in square-rigged ships, Ernest Shackleton.

If there was one thing too that hydrographers, ‘Arctics’, scientists and Clements Markham were united in, it was the recognition that the key to success lay in the right ship and the right men to handle it. In the earliest days of planning Markham had looked for a suitable whaler to do the job, but with the delicacy of the instruments required for their magnetic programme ruling that option out, it was decided to commission a purpose-built ship. The obvious place for this was Norway, and the obvious man to build it Colin Archer, the designer of Nansen’s Fram, but national sensibilities made this a delicate issue. ‘Colin Archer is no doubt a man of great skill and experience,’ Sir William White, the greatest of all British warship designers, warned Markham, ‘but it would be a matter of great regret that a ship to carry a British Antarctic expedition should be built outside these islands. We have only a few wooden-ship builders left, but they are quite capable of doing all you want.’

If public money had been involved at this stage, White might have had a valid point, but it was Longstaff’s donation that had made a new ship possible, and the advice effectively cut the expedition off from both Archer’s expertise and the stocks of seasoned timber at his disposal. The consequences of this would later be felt by those who had to sail her, but no Ship Committee chaired by Sir Leopold McClintock was going to ignore an appeal to patriotism, and in the place of a new design emerged a modified version of the old Discovery that twenty-five years earlier had gone with Nares to the Arctic.

The design of the vessel was put in the hands of the Admiralty’s chief constructor, William Smith, and with the contract awarded to the Dundee Shipbuilders’ Company, the keel was laid on 16 March 1900. The ship that rose on the stocks over the next twelve months was 172 feet long and thirty-four feet at the beam, barque rigged, with a displacement of 1,620 tons, a comfortable speed under steam of something like seven knots, an iron exclusion zone of thirty feet around the magnetic observatory, an overhanging stern to protect the ‘Achilles heel’ of the ship, a massively reinforced and raked stem, and an ‘internal arrangement’ – Scott recalled with a blind affection he never showed for any other home – of a strength that no one who had only travelled in a modern steel ship could conceive. ‘The frames, which were placed very close together,’ he wrote, ‘were eleven inches thick and of solid English oak; inside the frames came the inner lining, a solid planking four inches thick; whilst the outside was covered with two layers of planking, respectively six and five inches thick, so that, in most places, to bore a hole in the side one would have had to get through twenty-six inches of solid wood.

‘The inner lining,’ Scott went on, ‘was of Riga fir, the frames of English oak, the inner skin, according to its position, of pitch pine, Honduras mahogany, or oak, whilst the outer skin in the same way was of English elm or greenheart. The massive side structure was stiffened and strengthened by three tiers of beams running from side to side, and at intervals with stout transverse wooden bulkheads; the beams in the lower tiers were especially solid, being eleven inches by eleven inches in section, and they were placed at intervals of something less than three feet.’

A measure of this strength can be gauged from photographs of her on the stocks, and that must have been how Scott first saw her when he came off the night train for Dundee at the beginning of December 1900. The day-to-day supervision of her progress was left in the capable hands of his engineer, the tirelessly hard-working, inventive and cheerfully irascible old ‘Majestic’ Reginald Skelton, but there were always details that needed Scott’s attention. In ‘1¼ days,’ George Murray wrote to the RGS librarian Hugh Robert Mill two months later, ‘I have settled the deck plan for winches, reels, sounding gear, trawling and dredging gear, special tow netting and thermometer and water bottle gear, and the fittings for the Biological and physico-chemical workshop. Many matters which could have taken weeks of committees (joint and disjointed) Scott and I have settled quietly … Scott is a good chap and a first class organiser. I think he will go all the way and Armitage too.’

It had been only eleven months since the keel had been laid, but just over three weeks later, Scott, along with Armitage and Sir Clements and Lady Markham, was again heading north, via the Waverley Hotel in Edinburgh, for the launch of the ship. At midday on 21 March 1901 Scott showed Markham over her, and after lunch with the President of the Dundee Council of the Scottish Geographical Society, invited forward Markham’s wife Minna to perform the ceremony.

It had been Scott’s decision to ask Lady Markham, a graceful tribute to the man who had almost single-handedly battered the expedition into being. ‘After waiting a short time in the office,’ Markham proudly recorded in his diary, ‘Minna was conducted to the platform before the stern … I followed, and there were also Mrs Peterson, the other directors, Scott, Armitage, Royds and Koettlitz … Keltie, Mill etc. Minna was presented with a pair of gold scissors, and at a signal she cut a ribbon. The bottle of wine was smashed against the bows, there was a pause of two minutes, and then the good ship “Discovery” glided into the sea – a beautiful sight – amidst tremendous cheers.’

The name ‘Discovery’ had only been finally chosen the previous June, but with Markham’s sense of history, it is hard to imagine her being called anything else. With certain modifications and nods in the direction of Colin Archer, she was to all intents and purposes Nares’s old ship, the sixth of a long line of ‘Discoveries’ that linked Scott’s vessel in an unbroken tradition of exploration with the great voyages of Vancouver, Cook and William Baffin.

If Scott was as alive as anyone to the romance of the name, however, he was more concerned with performance, and he would have been pleased with the successful trials in the middle of May. It had been estimated beforehand that she would make seven knots under steam, but in trials both with and against the tide, an average mean of nine knots and the performance of the engine gave them all the encouragement they needed. They might have been less sanguine if they had been able to test her capabilities under sail, but without either the money or the crew to do this, Scott would have to wait until the journey out to South Africa to discover how seriously she under-performed. Her sluggishness under sail would have serious consequences for the costs and timetable of the southward journey, and yet as with everything connected with the expedition, the sheer pressure of time and business meant that no one had the luxury of their German colleagues to think or plan properly ahead.

Back in London, Scott was busier than ever, ordering furs and sledges, negotiating the purchase of dogs, and cadging and wheedling his way to a full crew. From the day that he had taken on the command he had seen the expedition as an essentially naval affair, and he was determined to squeeze as many men out of a reluctant Admiralty as possible. ‘1 senior carpenter’s mate – F.E. Dailey (Ganges),’ an Admiralty file records his shopping-list and its own irritable – and belated – approval:

1 senior boatswain’s mate

1 ER artificer

4 leading stokers

6 petty officers

10 seamen

At the end of May, Scott and Markham were again in Dundee to take possession of the completed ship and steam her down to London. As they were being shown over it, an incident nearly cost Scott his life. ‘Went over Discovery with Scott etc,’ Markham’s diary records. ‘We then, including Royds, all went to see the screw lifted by tackle from the spanker boom, used as a derrick. We were all standing round watching, when the iron hook came in two, the block crashed down, and the screw went down – 2½ tons. Scott was standing exactly under the block, and would have been killed if Mr Smith had not got him to move a little, just a few seconds before. Mr Smith saved Scott’s life.’

Scott was none the worse for the episode, but the screw had jammed in its lifting shaft, and for two days the Discovery was back in dry dock. With time to spare for the first time in months, Scott took out the ship’s dinghy, and the next day drove with his hosts to see Glamis Castle ten miles north of Dundee. On 3 June, though, Discovery was again ready, and in ‘fine weather with a smooth sea’ and Markham ‘very comfortable in the captain’s cabin’, began the first leg of her long journey south.

By the next day Discovery was off Flamborough Head, and passing Yarmouth on the fifth, came into her East India Dock billet on the Thames at 2 p.m. on the sixth, Scott’s thirty-third birthday. Even at this late stage they were still eight men short of a full crew, and with the Admiralty authorising only twenty-three volunteers, Scott was forced to recruit the remainder where he could, taking on four unknown men from the great pool of London’s maritime labour force, and another three from Dundee with experience on northern whalers.

The last thing that Scott had wanted was to mix naval and merchant men in this way, and with the defection of Gregory and the loss of his one outstanding scientist, George Simpson, to the Admiralty’s medical board, there were also still gaps in his civilian staff. It seems astonishing that a National Antarctic Expedition could have brought itself to such a pass, but with little more than a month to go Scott was still without a physicist and a geologist, the two men most crucial to the expedition’s geographical programme and cooperation with the German Gauss.

It was not as though the scientist he already had – Reginald Koettlitz, a former member of the Jackson – Harmsworth expedition, or the ‘exceedingly bald’ Thomas Hodgson, his marine biologist – were national names, but not even Poulton can have envisaged the situation now facing Scott. He was luckier than he might have been in getting another old polar hand in Louis Bernacchi to accept the vacant role of physicist, but with nobody of proven ability to fill Gregory’s shoes, he had no choice but to fall back on a twenty-one-year-old Cambridge oarsman with a Second in the Natural Science Tripos from Cambridge that summer, Hartley Ferrar.

It was little wonder that a scientist like Poulton thought it would have been better that the expedition should be abandoned than sail on these terms, but it was Scott who had to live with the consequences, and no one could have denied him the one piece of real fortune he had with his scientific staff. The previous November he had interviewed a talented ornithologist and water-colourist called Edward Wilson for the post of second doctor, and had been impressed enough to ignore a history of tuberculosis and an infected arm and put him straight onto the books.

A subsequent medical board – at which the scrupulous Wilson had gone back into the room to confess to his tuberculosis – had advised against the appointment, but Scott had no intention of losing a second good man. At such a late stage it would have been almost impossible, anyway, to find a replacement, and so long as Wilson was willing to risk his health and life, Scott was happy to abet him. ‘I think,’ Wilson wrote with that absolute trust in the controlling purpose of a beneficent God that stayed with him to the end, ‘I am intended to go. If I had tried to get it I should have many doubts, but it seems given to me to do. If the climate suits me I shall come back more fit for work than ever, whereas if it doesn’t I think there’s no fear of my coming back at all. I quite realize that it is kill or cure, and have made up my mind that it shall be cure.’

There was one more scare, when their engineer, Skelton, found a leak in Discovery and she went again into dry dock, but with coaling and stowing still to be done, no one could be persuaded to take this with the seriousness it deserved. It must have seemed to Scott, in fact, that a greater threat to the ship came from the visitors, with a chaotic scrum of families, friends, admirals, donors, old ‘Arctics’, ticket-holders and sightseers all pressing to see Discovery before she sailed. The visitors were so numerous, Thomas Williamson, a young naval seaman recruited from HMS Pactolus, complained, ‘you had scarcely breathing’. ‘The relatives were frequently on board,’ Markham recalled with all his old, almost forensic, fascination with the peculiarities of human behaviour, ‘and it was most interesting and rather pathetic to see them finding great consolation in furnishing and arranging the cabins. Scott had his dear old Mother, and his sisters Mrs Macartney, Mrs Campbell, Mrs Brownlow, and Miss Scott. Charlie Royds had his mother and his sisters. Barne had his mother Lady Constance and sister. Shackleton had his fiancée and her two sisters. Dr Koettlitz and Dr Wilson had their wives. Mrs Armitage was near her confinement … ’

With the leak apparently mended, the filthy scramble to coal the ship could at last begin, and 240 tons were loaded into the main bunker, and another sixty into the small bunkers either side of the engine room. On 15 July, another ceremony took place on board that brought home to crew and families the imminence of departure. ‘The bishop came up from below in his robes,’ Markham recalled, ‘preceded by his chaplain with the Crozier.’ Drawn up, waiting for him between the hatching and the main mast, stood the officers and men, and behind them, crowding the ship, their families. ‘The Bishop’s address’ – ‘Behold how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity’ – ‘was excellent and very impressive,’ Markham noted, ‘and the men, led by Royds, sang their hymns well.’ ‘Oh! Almighty God,’ the Bishop finally prayed, ‘Who has appointed all things in heaven and earth in a wonderful order, be pleased to receive into Thy most gracious protection all who sail in this ship. Grant that our labours may show forth Thy praise and increase natural knowledge, preserve us in all dangers of body and soul, nourish us in one spirit of gentle unity, and bring us home O Father in love and safety through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’

It is an image to savour. The Bishop’s blessing, the final prayer of dedication that Scott cherished all his life, the First Lieutenant in his naval uniform leading the lower deck in the hymns, the choice of hymns themselves – ‘Fight the good fight’, ‘Lord Thou hast been our refuge’ and the great sailors’ hymn, ‘Eternal Father’ – no service could have better captured the peculiarly English cultural baggage that the men of the Discovery took with them when they went south. In his account of the first nightmare winter ever spent in Antarctica, Frederick Cook recalled that there was not so much as a bible on board Belgica. In Discovery that would have been inconceivable. For an English and naval expedition, uneasily straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the institutional trappings of late-Victorian religion, along with the sense of order, hierarchy and deference they underpinned, were as real and ever-present as the science, the modernity, agnosticism and spirit of enquiry that drove them.

With only days left before they sailed, there was little time for anything more spiritual than the last, rushed preparations. There were still a hundred things to do, and as many again that would never be done in time. The novelist A.E.W. Mason wanted to see over the ship. Sir Erasmus Ommaney, one of the last frail links with Ross’s expedition, wrote begging Scott to escort him around her. Sir George Nares and Sir Joseph Hooker, old adversaries, had to be accommodated. There were lectures to give, speeches to make, the Worcester training ship to be visited, pay scales to be finalised, wills to be completed, teeth to be stopped, and a last ritual dinner at the Athenaeum with the very men who had spent the last year trying to stop Scott going to be endured. ‘The venerable white President down from his stellar regions … the great physiologist … the equally great physicist … the man responsible for the safe navigation of the world’s waters … the one who had revolutionised surgical practice’ were all there, Armitage recalled twenty-five years later, in a richly Orwellian image of Pig and Man sitting down in amity together, ‘to show us, the officers and scientific staff of the expedition, that although there might have been differences of opinion between the two great societies, there was nothing but a feeling of utmost friendliness for us … We were quite convivial at the close of dinner … Before we left the room with the famous round table we sang “For they are jolly good fellows”, to which they responded in like fashion.’

A week later on 31 July, Scott and Discovery were at last ready to make their escape. At twelve o’clock Markham and his wife Minna, along with Scott’s mother and his sister Grace, went on board at the dock gate. There, also, were Sir George Goldie, Markham’s staunchest ally in the last battle against the RS, Cyril Longhurst, the expedition secretary, relatives and a watching crowd of hundreds. ‘At 1 sharp,’ Scott noted in the first entry of his Expedition Journal, ‘left E.I. Docks … Ship’s company not so disorganised as I had expected. Naval people splendid – three merchant seamen intoxicated.’

As Discovery moved slowly down river on the tide, ‘all the steamers on the Thames’, the expedition’s new geologist, Hartley Ferrar, wrote in his diary, ‘blew their horns’, and the boys of the Worcester, manning the rigging of the training ship, ‘sang Auld Lang Syne’. At Greenhithe most of the visitors were put ashore, and by next evening Discovery had crossed Spithead and was anchored off the pier at Stokes Bay. On 3 August George Murray arrived with Dr Hugh Mill, the RGS librarian, who was accompanying the ship as far as Madeira, and two days later the last of the men returned from leave, including among them Wilson, back from a brief honeymoon, having been married less than three weeks before.

At nine that morning Discovery, with Sir Clements Markham and his cousin Albert, McClintock and Scott’s mother aboard, steamed across to Cowes and made fast to a buoy near the Royal Yacht Osborne. Scott had come a long way since he had been turned down for a berth on the Yacht, and at twelve the new King and Queen came alongside, with Princess Victoria. ‘As His Majesty came over the side,’ Markham noted with a wonderful bit of courtier’s mummery, ‘he called me, and I knelt and kissed hands, being the first time I had seen him since the accession, also the Queen.’ Markham then introduced Scott to the King and Queen, and Scott presented his officers. The men, drawn up on the port side, were inspected, and then Scott’s mother presented. ‘The King and Queen then went round the upper-deck, and the living deck,’ Markham continued, ‘taking the greatest interest in everything. On returning to the upper deck the King came and talked to me, speaking in high terms of Scott and his crew. The men were drawn up on the starboard side. After mentioning his grief and anxiety over his sister who was dying [Victoria, the Dowager Empress of Germany and the Kaiser’s mother, died that same day, one more small incident in the deteriorating relations between Britain and Germany], he spoke to Albert and McClintock. Then he made an excellent speech to the men, and turning to Scott, His Majesty decorated him with the Victorian Order (MVO).’

If the biologist Thomas Hodgson is to be believed, the only thing that really excited the Queen was Scott’s terrier, Scamp, but as Hodgson had not even recognised the Queen – ‘Very young … lame and deaf’ – he is possibly not the best witness. ‘We have had millions of visitors while we have been here,’ Hodgson wrote to his mother, as if numbers might somehow explain his failure of identification, ‘mostly aristocratic yet very mixed. We went in a mob to sign the King’s book on board the Osborne and as we came back a boat fouled us at the gangway and a fool went and jumped overboard and we had to haul him in like a drowned rat.’ The ‘fool’ had actually dived in to rescue one of the Queen’s Pekingeses, but even an anxious Skelton, ‘in spite of being much troubled with numerous ladies’, thought it ‘on the whole rather a good show’.

For Scott himself, it was a mixed occasion. He always hated fuss of any kind, especially anything that singled him out. In his journal entry for the day he forgot even to mention his MVO, only pencilling it later in the margin as an afterthought. For his mother, though, he was pleased. ‘My Dear little Phoebe & Esther,’ he wrote in big writing to his sister Ettie’s children, ‘This letter is to tell you that the King has made dear Uncle Con a Member of the Victorian Order, that is to say he has been given a very pretty medal which dear Granny Scott pinned to his coat.’ He was grateful, too, to his old captain for his thoughtfulness in arranging things. ‘It was entirely due to Egerton,’ he explained to the girls’ father, ‘that mother remained on board, and nothing as you say could have been more gratifying to her at such a time.’

It was a kindness that was not wasted on her. On holiday with Grace in France, where Scott had sent them to take her mind off his leaving, she wrote to him with a disarming pride of meeting the King and Queen. ‘People here like hearing about them. I never begin the subject, but of course if I’m asked I am only too pleased to tell them and recall my time of triumph in my son, for, after all, it is only the very few who actually shake hands with Royalty. Apart from that I like to think of the sweet sympathetic face that looked at me and smiled such interest in all she was looking at. And now, dear, one word of thanks for the holiday you are giving us both, and then good bye. God bless, keep and preserve you, my best of sons.’ Royalty was not enough, however, to take her mind long off her sadness at losing him. ‘I am not going to say one word about our feelings,’ she wrote three days later, ‘as your beautiful ship grew less & less till we lost her altogether: I shall rather tell you of the great kindness everyone showed us.’

Even the landscape of the coast brought back memories: ‘It was so lovely sitting on the shore,’ she wrote to him again a week later, ‘but this sort of life is too much like the old life at Devonport & brings it much to the front … Monsie [Grace] went to the stores about your V.O. ribbon and was directed to Spink & Sons and I hear from them that they have sent it.’ By the time she wrote that, Discovery was already off Madeira. After one last hectic day, she had sailed on the sixth. Scott and Murray had gone ashore for a final breakfast with Markham, and then retuned to the ship, ‘sad to see the last of this Grand old man and his companion Longhurst’.

Just before twelve o’clock Discovery finally slipped from her buoy, the house flag of the RGS and Blue Ensign and burgee of the Harwich Yacht Club – the Admiralty had forbidden them use of the Royal Navy’s White Ensign – fluttering at the mast. Slowly she made her way through the bobbing mass of boats and yachts crowding the Solent for Cowes Week and westward towards the Needles Channel. Off the small town of Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight the last of the families were put ashore – ‘a sad time indeed’, Scott scrawled in his journal, ‘but the womenfolk are always brave’. ‘How willingly one would dispense with these farewells,’ he later wrote in a passage that might have come straight out of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, ‘and how truly one feels that the greater burden of sadness is on those who are left behind! Before us lay new scenes, new interests, expanding horizons; but who at such times must not think sorely of the wives and mothers condemned to think of the past, and hope in silent patience for the future, through years of suspense and anxiety?’

Early the next morning the Start was still in sight, ‘but gradually it shaded from green to blue, till towards noon it vanished in the distance, and with it our last view of the Old Country’.