Читать книгу Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South - David Crane - Страница 12

This is an awful ship for keeping our whites clean.

Charles Royds, diary, 22 August 1901

The same routine, all day at work & keeping watch & watch at night, a little bit rough I think.

Thomas Williamson, journal, 9 August 1901

FOR ALL HIS ANXIETIES over his mother, Scott would have been an odd creature if he had not been relieved to see England finally dip out of sight. With the forgettable exception of Torpedo Boat 87 almost a decade earlier, this was his first command, and if he had been in control of Discovery for over a year, it had been only the most notional authority, beset by the hydrographers and professors on the one side and the benign but autocratic presence of Sir Clements Markham on the other.

But now it was his ship, and if the Instructions he carried with him ran to twenty-seven paragraphs and thousands of words, they at least enshrined the principle of autonomy for which Markham had fought so hard. ‘INSTRUCTIONS TO THE COMMANDER OF THE NATIONAL ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION AND THE DIRECTOR OF THE SCIENTIFIC STAFF’, the document was headed:

1: INSTRUCTIONS TO THE COMMANDER

The Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society, with the assistance of His Majesty’s Government, have fitted out an expedition for scientific discovery and exploration in the Antarctic Regions, and have entrusted you with the command.

The objects of the Expedition are (a) to determine, as far as possible, the nature, condition and extent of that portion of the South Polar lands which is included in the scope of your Expedition; and (b) to make a magnetic survey in the southern regions to the south of the 40th parallel and to carry on meteorological, oceanographic, geological, biological and physical investigations and researches. Neither of these objects is to be sacrificed to the other.

There was a genuine value in a set of Instructions of this kind, in as much as it established the notional priorities of the expedition, but it was the clauses that freed Scott and not tied him to London that were so crucial. ‘Owing to our imperfect knowledge of the conditions which prevail in Antarctic seas,’ Markham had written in Paragraph 17, emancipating Scott at a stroke from any prearranged assumptions about the ship’s movements in the south, ‘we cannot pronounce definitely whether it will be necessary for the ship to make her way out of the ice before the winter sets in, or whether she should winter in the Antarctic regions. It is for you to decide on this important question after a careful examination of the local conditions.’

Scott soon had early reminders, too, of how important it was that he should be free to make his own decisions. At the Dundee trials in May Discovery had only been tested under steam, and they had not crossed the Bay of Biscay before it became obvious that it was only in a force 7 or 8 on the Beaufort Scale that they were going to manage anything like the eight knots needed under sail. The problem, as Scott saw it, was the ‘terribly small’ area of sail that Discovery carried, a design deficiency he dressed up rather differently for the benefit of his worried mother. ‘The ship is a magnificent sea boat,’ he wrote to her from Madeira, where Discovery had moored on 15 August, ‘smooth and easy in every movement, a positive cradle on the deep. We only sigh for more sails. Ours are made for temperate seas, so they look rather like pocket handkerchiefs in a light Trade; they are so small that even in a hurricane they couldn’t capsize the ship.’

‘It is quite impossible for me to describe the delight of getting your letter,’ she wrote back from Arromanche in Normandy, where she was still on holiday with Grace. ‘It is so good of you to tell me all the details of the ship and her sailing powers & so sweet of you to tell me of small sails & the safety of these in high winds. I prize every detail and read and reread what you say … ’

Discovery was in fact no more sluggish than might have been expected, and certainly outperformed the German Gauss on the voyage south, but if anything was to be done during the first season in the ice, there was no margin for delay. In his first official ‘Letter of Proceedings’ Scott estimated that the best that could be hoped for was an average speed of 6¾ knots, and even if they missed out Melbourne and headed straight for Lyttelton, that still put their original estimates for arriving well out of reach.

There was soon a more serious problem, with the leak that had been discovered back in the East India Docks on the Thames. Skelton and Royds had been trying to warn Scott about it since London, but it was only when two feet of foul-smelling water was found washing around the forward holds a week out of Madeira that, as an irritable Royds wrote in his diary, ‘the skipper at last woke up to the fact that the ship leaked’. The cause of the problem was almost certainly unseasoned timber, which only added to a growing disillusionment with the work of the Dundee Shipbuilders’ Company. Scott had already sent off a long list of their ‘enormities’ to the ship’s designer, and it is not just his journal from these first weeks that is littered with outbursts against Discovery’s contractors. The ‘ship building firm was in my opinion most dilatory in performing the work’, Skelton had complained the day they sailed; ‘not only were they dilatory but I consider them to have performed their contract in a most scandalous manner’. ‘Those responsible for the leakage out [sic] to be strung up,’ was the twenty-four-year-old seaman Thomas Williamson’s more succinct verdict, and by the time they had finished rescuing, cleaning, disinfecting, restoring or jettisoning slime-covered cases there would have been few dissenters on board.

A week later an exhausted Skelton was complaining that things were still as bad as ever, but one unscheduled benefit of the leak was that the stores had all to be systematically repacked. There had been so little time to complete preparations in London that no one on board really knew where anything was, and with half the stores going separately to Melbourne, and the one man who knew anything about the system going with them, equipment was endlessly being lost or turning up buried ‘in the cutter or some other marvellous stow hold’.

The work had at least given Scott a chance to gauge the men under him, and if he was impressed with Shackleton, he was doubly grateful that he had persuaded Skelton to join him from Majestic. ‘I cannot sufficiently express my admiration for their efforts,’ he reported in his second Letter of Proceedings, after a dead calm and temperatures in the 140s had turned the stokehold into a living hell, ‘and more especially for the unfailing perseverance and skill of Mr Skelton the Chief Engineer and Mr Dellbridge the artifice engineer.’

In spite of these teething problems, however, and the inexperience of the crew in handling a sailing ship or taking soundings, the atmosphere on board was good. ‘It’s a blessed thing we get so much heavy work,’ Edward Wilson wrote contentedly after three weeks at sea, ‘because none of us need ever feel the want of exercise at all. The Captain turns to with all of us and shirks nothing, not even the dirtiest work. Royds works well and had most of the work on the ship itself to do. Shackle and Barne and I are a trio, and one is never dirtier than the other two, and all three as a rule are filthy. We three generally sleep down aft the poop in moonlight as bright as day, except when driven below by rain. Hodgson is always on the go. I think that Shackleton has so far done more hard work than anyone on board.’

Wilson was in no doubt either of the pivotal role Scott played in the well-being of the ship. ‘He is a most capable man in every way,’ he wrote again later in the voyage, when he had had time to take fuller stock of his skipper, ‘and has a really well-balanced head on his shoulders. I admire him immensely, all but his temper. He is quick tempered and very impatient, but he is a really nice fellow, very generous and ready to help us all in every way, and to do everything he can to ensure us the full merit of all we do. He is thoughtful for each individual and does little kindnesses which show it. He is ready to listen to everyone too, and joins heartily in all the humbug that goes on. I have a great admiration for him, and he is in no Service rut but is always anxious to see both sides of every question, and I have never known him to be unfair.’

There were obviously tensions and irritations – the state of the bald, untidy, hopelessly civilian Hodgson’s laboratory, Koettlitz’s idleness, the ever-present threat of having Shackleton spout Swinburne or Browning at you on watch – but Hugh Mill had never been in ‘pleasanter company’. ‘Captain Scott has shown a power that I must own surprised me in mastering the details of the scientific work,’ he reported home, as clear as Wilson as to where the credit lay; ‘he is greatly liked and respected by everyone on board, and has I believe mastered the art – more difficult than any of the scientific work – of preserving the necessary discipline & the equally necessary confidence and friendly feeling between all on board.’

If there was any early difficulty on board, in fact, it was curiously not between navy and civilian, or navy and merchant, or wardroom and mess deck, but between Scott and his First Lieutenant, Charles Royds. By the end of the expedition there was nothing that the two men would not have done for each other, but in these first weeks differences of temperament and habits – and differences at heart, one suspects, between Scott’s style of command and Royds’s amour propre as the First Lieutenant responsible for the running of the ship – spilled out in the stream of grumbles that bubble up time and again in Royds’s journals.

It was invariably Scott’s impatience that upset him – ‘I expected to be blamed for it and was not disappointed … Captain much upset and of course I got the blame, someone has to, so it might as well be the 1st Lieut.’ – but he was as new to his job as Scott was. Many years later one of the seamen on the expedition recalled ‘Charles Rawson Royds’ as ‘absolutely Navy from top to toe’, and of all the ship’s executive officers he seems to have found it hardest to adjust to the grime, the stench from the flooded holds and the slacker codes of Discovery life.

There was a decency about Royds, a deep sense of loyalty, and a refined civility that would all come out strongly in the south, but as a young man there also was a certain prissiness – ‘girlishness’ his mess-mates called it – that had somehow grafted itself onto the conventional stiffness of the well-connected naval officer. To the rest of the wardroom the state of the ship was a matter for nothing more than the occasional good-humoured comment, but for Royds every speck of coal dust that got on his whites was a personal affront to a soul ideally created for the Mediterranean Squadron and the Grand Harbour at Valetta.

If he was right about one thing, it was Scott’s ‘impatience’, a recurring theme of journal after journal of the men who served under him. When the terrible Jacky Fisher was at the Admiralty he would ‘emblazon’ his papers – and people, he claimed – with the word ‘RUSH’, and as Discovery made its slow way south there were times when Scott’s men must have imagined the same demonic stigmata blistering itself on his brow – “‘Knock off everything”,’ a weary Royds parodied Scott’s style of command, “‘up anchor”, “No steam up”, “clean lower deck”’.

Like Fisher, wandering around with a plaque around his neck saying ‘Give me something to do’, Scott wanted things done and he wanted them done immediately. He could never understand how anyone could waste the opportunities that Discovery had dropped into their laps, and like some reprieved victim, liberated at last from the deadening torpor of naval life, he was determined to press his own, exhausting freshness of vision on everyone around him.

Discovery’s sluggishness under sail also fretted at his patience. ‘A better pace,’ he confided to his journal, ‘produces better spirits,’ and if he added ‘in me at least’, he could not imaginatively grasp any different view of things. How could the scientists not seize every opportunity to perfect their skills, he would wonder in letters home. Why were they not as endlessly eager as he was? ‘These delays are very damping to the spirits,’ he complained in his journal after one altercation over tow-netting. ‘Patience is difficult but the daily tasks proceed. Had to expostulate with Murray on the disgusting state of Hodgson’s laboratory with fruitful results – but I fear there are still pangs to be endured from the latter’s untidiness & want of hygienic perception – Oh for more wind.’

It was not just Royds Scott could annoy; he could just as easily bring the lower deck to a full and historic sense of its grievances. The Discovery had not been three days into her voyage before Williamson was complaining of his workload, but there is an underlying feeling that a lot of this is no more than routine lowerdeck grumbling. Seamen like Williamson – one of the great moaners of Discovery, and one of the first to serve with Scott again on his second expedition – knew that it was an officer’s world. They knew, as any self-respecting able-bodied seaman or army private has always known, that the promotions and the credit would not be coming their way. They knew, with all the force of the biblical injunction to the serpent, that between them and the officer there could be no accommodation. They were not meant to like their captain. Complaint was not just a pleasure and privilege, it was a duty. They might see things partially, but they saw them plain. Read Royds’s journal, and one can almost see the hairs on the back of his neck as Scott reads out the Bishop’s prayer; read Williamson, and it is just the ‘usual amount of church Service’.

It is this persistent note of scepticism that gives Discovery’s lower-deck journals their interest, adding an almost Shakespearean texture to the picture of expedition life. In Markham’s or Scott’s accounts it is inevitably the nobility of the work that is played up, but in the journals of Williamson or James Duncan what we hear is the antidote – the voice of a Dolabella puncturing the glory of a Mark Antony – of the Clown eating away at the narcissistic tragedy of a Cleopatra – of Robert Bolt’s ‘Common man’ casting his jaundiced eye over the vanities and self-delusions of heroism and martyrdom.

With one single exception, however, the other quality that marks all these journals is an utter lack of resentment of ‘things as they are’. Whatever the different politics of the men in Discovery, there seems to have been a vein of almost Salisburyesque conservatism running through the ship, a good old-fashioned John Bull belief that the barbarian was at the gate, and that only the familiar structures of discipline and self-discipline stood between them and the chaos of egotism, megalomania, betrayal, greed, brutality, stupidity, mendacity, murder and cannibalism that the long history of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration suggested as the alternative.

It would be a mistake, in any case, to read any more into these journals than into the occasional spasm of irritation that similarly marks Royds’s or Scott’s diaries. In some ways they bring us as close as we can ever get to Discovery, and yet of their very nature they are dangerous historical tools, safety valves for all the petty and momentary resentments of day-to-day life among thirty-odd men living together in the cramped discomfort of a ship for three years.

And given how claustrophobic this world was, the astonishing thing is not that there were so many rows or discontents in Discovery, but so few. The eleven officers lived and worked in a wardroom no more than thirty feet by twenty, with a long table down the centre, a large stove at the after end, a pianola, and a warren of small cabins leading off on both sides that provided them with their solitary, fragile measure of privacy. It was a world in which there was no escape for Scott, and no escape from him, and the conditions for the men were worse again. In terms of warmth and physical comfort they would certainly be better off than the officers in the ice, but as Discovery steamed slowly through the tropics, with the temperatures in the stokeholds stuck fast in the 140s, it was almost inevitable that the cramped, stifling conditions of a mess deck where a combustible mix of naval and merchant men ate, drank, worked and slung their hammocks in a space scarcely bigger than the wardroom, should spark off the first ugly incident of the voyage.

It occurred at the end of August, just three weeks into their journey, as Discovery crossed the equator, and Neptune and his consort hailed the ship and came aboard. A large seawater bath had been constructed amidships out of a sail, and a scaffold built above it, with a ducking stool secured by a rope for the victims. In the bath below, well primed with ‘a go of grog’, waited four tritons, and high on the platform, Neptune and his court, ‘with the doctor and his greasy soap pill, the barber and his foaming tallow lather and huge razor. After the victim had been interviewed, he was handed over to the tender mercies of the Tritons; and it was generally a gasping, almost breathless creature that emerged from the other end of the bath. Wilson was the first on Neptune’s list, and was the most lucky one, for the chair slipped and before he was even lathered, he was shot into the bath, so he escaped with merely a ducking. Ferrar, the geologist, did not take very kindly to the attentions of the operators, so on the platform he received a double dose, and he struggled a lot in the bath not knowing that under the disguise of wigs and oilskins were hidden the strongest men on the ship. The whole affair went off well, “though the men got a bit rough towards the end”.’

If that had been the finish of it, no one but Ferrar would have had anything to complain about, but by the end of the evening a combination of drink and heat had taken its toll. At the bottom of the trouble was a Brixham seaman taken on in London called John Mardon, and by the time things had been brought under order, one of the Dundee whaler men, Walker, had had his thumb bitten through to the bone and two more of the men had got themselves lined up for reprimands. ‘The party was rather too lavishly regaled with whisky,’ Scott primly wrote on 31 August, ‘and the merchant seamen appear to have saved their rum for the occasion. The result was an orgy in the evening with Mardon and his confreres behaving insubordinately. It gives an excellent opportunity of putting one’s foot down.’

The problem was not of Scott’s making – and there is no need to waste a second’s sympathy on Mardon – but what he lacked was the imagination or will to find anything other than naval solutions to the difficulties of a mixed lower deck. It is always very hard for anyone within the services to realise how their world might look from outside, but Scott in particular seemed incapable of seeing the surly independence of merchantmen as anything other than an affront to naval – and his – authority.

It was the first time he had to exercise any discipline, but it would not be the last, because the navy had treated its own seamen like children for so long that it was little wonder that they behaved like them whenever they had the chance. The root of the problem this time might have been the merchant recruits, but in these early days Scott’s own seamen were scarcely any better, only ever needing to sniff land or drink for ship standards to dissolve into the drunken indiscipline, irresponsibility and desertions that were endemic to any port the Royal Navy visited. ‘Some of the naval people thought they were in for a sort of picnic from which as they had signed articles they could not be excluded,’ an irritated Scott wrote back to George Egerton, his old Majestic skipper. ‘Nothing much happened but there was a bad feeling creeping in which I couldn’t lay hold of until it came to the surface on a little drink following the function of crossing the line … so having my opportunity I just walked into them properly – I pointed out that I could stop half their pay, all their grog and reduce them to starvation diet without even taking trouble to report the fact further, that I could discharge either naval or merchant seaman and make it pretty hot for them afterwards.’^*

It was not just on the lower deck that the voyage was beginning to take its toll. As a south-easterly trade wind pushed Discovery helplessly westward towards the South American coast, a sense of drift seems to have filled the ship. The southern night sky, with its Southern Cross – that great symbol of loneliness and despair in A.E.W. Mason’s The Four Feathers – brought home to everyone just how far they were from home. In the privacy of his cabin Wilson could take ‘spiritual communion’ and imagine himself in St Philips with his wife Ory, but there were days when the mere talk of England could make ‘old Shackles very homesick … and myself nearly as bad’. ‘Moderate wind and sea!’ Shackleton himself wrote in his journal. ‘Just think of it! Moderate wind and sea – instead of golden grain and harvest fields, and gentle winds that waft the warm scent from the hay ricks. We are nearly 6,000 miles from home.’

They were six days behind schedule, and Scott had already abandoned the idea of stopping in Melbourne, but these faltering spirits were enough to prompt him to break their journey at the ‘weird, blighted island’ of South Trinidad. The island was sighted on the morning of 13 September, and dropping anchor on its western side, Scott took two small boats and a landing party in on the heavy, shark-infested breakers that smashed up against its rocky shore. It was a dangerous operation, and if it is typical of Scott that he should have first checked that everyone could swim, it was even more so that he should have pushed on even when he found out that they couldn’t.

It says something too for the monotony of ship life that a place like South Trinidad could seem an attractive diversion, but after five weeks at sea ‘the shore looked too enticing … to be abandoned without an effort’. ‘There is not a single beast on four legs on it,’ Wilson, always the most visually acute of Scott’s men, wrote of it, with ‘thousands of white bleached tree trunks everywhere, and not one living tree of the kind to be seen’. The island was alive, he went on, ‘with birds that knew no fear, and with myriads of quick scrabbling shore-crabs that were the prey of fish; and land-crabs, large fat bloated anaemic-looking beasts with strange black eyes, sat in every hole and corner of the whole island and just slowly look at one. We fed them on potted meat and cheese and chocolate, and they ate it slowly and deliberately without ever taking their eyes off us. There was something horribly uncanny about these slow things; one didn’t know a bit how old they were; they might have been there since the island came up.’

A new specimen of petrel – Aestralat wilsoni – seemed reward enough for a six-hour delay, and that same night Discovery was again under steam and searching for the westerlies that would help preserve their depleted stocks of coal. With the winds as fitful as ever Scott soon had to accept that they could never make South Africa on time, but as so often with him acceptance brought with it no easing of spirit. Ross, he impatiently noted in his journal, ‘had crossed the line on December 3 1839 … with the aid of steam we beat him by a day. So much for ½ a century & more or what has happened to the trade wind’.

‘These twists of fortune are truly exasperating,’ he complained again on 24 September, eleven days on from South Trinidad, ‘& when the luck is adverse one feels inclined to profanity’. Only Scamp seemed completely indifferent to conditions. ‘Best of the sport on board was our mischievous little dog Scamp,’ Williamson wrote the next day; ‘every time we ran along the deck Scamp would sure enough run in between our legs and capsize you, therefore causing much merriment & laughter … all’s well.’

He was equally disrespectful of Divine Service, which his agnostic master would no more have missed than he would a wind or temperature reading. ‘Morning service as usual with interruptions,’ Wilson noted one Sunday. ‘Scamp, the dog tried to enter church when Koettlitz, who was sitting nearest the door seized him by the tail and swung him out again. Scamp gave tongue in a high-pitched voice and in three minutes pelted in again, having got past Koettlitz, and was silently applauded by the blue jackets who beamed upon him. Scamp is an Aberdeen terrier with all the cunning of a Scotchman and a blue jacket rolled in one, and an appetite which bears no mathematical relationship to his full stomach.’

Six days after South Trinidad, Discovery at last picked up the westerlies, and though they were again weaker than expected, progress was ‘slow but sure’. With the Cape less than a week away, Scott took a last opportunity to catch up on his letters home. ‘It is always woe betide me when I take a rest – as regards letter writing,’ he told his sister Ettie. ‘I did so for a whole month after leaving England regarding my desk full of letters with a most complacent and devil-may-care attitude result is when I once come to tackle the matter I find myself once more in a rush to get things off before our arrival at the Cape. There are so many and such different tasks to be floored in this time and I never could drive my pen at a respectable speed so this is only going to be a very short letter to be followed by a more flowery epistle for the general perusal of the family & which of course must first go to headquarters. It’s nice of you to write all those pretty things about “Cowes”. Whatever natural expansion my chest assumes under the small piece of ribbon, it is speedily deflated when I think of the very small deserving of it.’

On the afternoon of 3 October, after nearly two months at sea and with reserves running low, Discovery rounded Green Point and entered Table Bay. The next day Skelton began the hated business of coaling the ship, feeding 230 tons of coal down canvas chutes that passed through hatches in the wardroom ceiling and floor to the coal hold below. ‘Coaling is filthy,’ Royds characteristically complained (a complaint, it should be said, that Scott would have echoed – he never missed a chance as captain to get in a round of golf when there was coaling to be done), ‘and the ship is simply crowded with visitors, black, white and indifferent. Soldiers in uniform, some in plain clothes, Generals, Colonels, Captains, etc, all come to see the ship and gaze on the heroes to be!!! I say Rats to them all.’

It was not just the ship that was in a filthy state and ‘inundated with sightseers’; the crew were no better. ‘I had great trouble with some of my men,’ Skelton was writing within hours of Discovery docking, ‘in fact throughout the ship, the men were unsatisfactory – chiefly owing to the fact that their friends from the shore [were] bringing them drink.’ ‘From tonight my behaviour to the men will be a trifle different,’ an equally irascible Royds threatened. ‘If they won’t behave themselves for kindness, we will see what the other thing does, as things are now too much of a good thing, and can’t go on.’

Scott had not been at the Cape since his days in Boadicea, but with a troublesome crew and the town under martial law, he cannot have been sad to see the back of it the moment coaling was finished. In his brilliant study of the role of ‘ice’ in the English imagination, Francis Spufford makes the point that a naval officer could sail from London to the Antarctic and back without ever really leaving England, happily travelling down a ‘corridor of Britishness’ without touching a land where he could not find familiar faces or a familiar tongue, where he could not stay in a Government or Admiralty House, or where ‘the coins were not the same size and shape and denominated in sterling, where the officers were not fed mutton and sherry at dinners given by local notables and the men could not go to the pub’. It is a compelling vision – and one only has to think of Scott tongue-tied in Berlin for the want of a foreign language to recognise its truth – but Cape Town in October 1901 might possibly have provided the one exception. There might not have been much difference in physical terms from the place Scott had known as a midshipman, but in the course of three years of the Boer War something radical had changed, undermining in the process the assumption of English superiority that Discovery was supposed to embody.

It was not primarily that Britain’s military complacency had been severely dented, because for all the gloom and fear of guerrillas at the Cape, the army was at last beginning to bring the situation under control. The early reversals of the war had brutally exposed the amateurishness and incompetence of Britain’s forces, and yet in a sense what was even harder for a nation that prided itself on its moral superiority was the disgust of the international community and its own liberals for the barbarism of a conflict that had left twenty-eight thousand Boer women and children and more than fifty thousand Africans dead in her camps. ‘Now that I know what the duties of a soldier are in war,’ wrote Wilson, whose own brother was in the fighting, ‘I would sooner shoot myself than anyone else by a long, long way … It [the bombardment of Kronje] made me cry like a baby and I threw away the paper in perfect disgust. A nation should be judged on exactly the same ground as an individual. As a nation we have the vilest of sins which everyone extols as the glories of Imperialism.’

This was not the sort of heroism that had been dreamed of when Discovery sailed, and Scott seemed more than usually grateful to get away to the reassuring world of the naval base at Simonstown. ‘Took up my quarters at Admiralty House,’ he wrote in his journal on the fifth, after they had made the rough journey round from Table Bay: ‘found Armitage & Barne already installed there.’

The main object of their stay at the Cape was to prepare for the magnetic programme ahead, and for the ten days Discovery was at Simonstown, Armitage and Barne were installed in an Admiralty tent on the plateau behind the base, comparing their variable sea instruments with absolute values only attainable on land. While this was being done the resources of the naval dockyards were put at Scott’s disposal. Discovery’s rigging was reset, the ship was recaulked to the waterline, and naval divers were sent down to scrape the barnacles off her hull. In spite of the tensions of the war, too, Admiral Moore provided Scott with three more men. In addition to these, another two were recruited, Robert Sinclair, an employee of the Union Castle Line, and an Australian soldier called Horace Buckridge, who would bring to Discovery his own characteristic brand of colonial dissent.

Cocooned once more in a familiar world, however, there were the inevitable dinners to be endured, entertainment to be returned, speeches to be made – ‘As usual didn’t know what to say but stumbled through a few sentences with more than customary credit’ – and the regulation hordes of visitors eager to see the ship. ‘Heard an amusing yarn of lady being asked why she was coming on board this ship,’ Royds noted, ‘replied that in case of any disaster think how interesting it would be to know that she had actually spoken to and seen the officers!! Nice way of looking at things and not very bright for us.’

By 14 October the refitting was complete, Armitage’s and Barne’s magnetic work done, and Discovery ready to leave on the next leg of their journey to New Zealand. As she made her way out between the warships of the fleet, Scott was moved to one of those hymns to the corporate, interdependent life of the navy that sit so touchingly alongside his own private frustrations. ‘As we got under weigh,’ he recorded in his journal, ‘all ships cleared lower decks & cheered – a grand send off – our small company did their best to respond. Thus ends an experience that makes one totally proud of a glorious profession – added to the practical benefits of our visit, one is deeply touched by the real kindness and sympathy shown by all; men and officers have had a glimpse of the real efficiency and meaning of our navy.’

The dismissal of Mardon had done the trick, and with the men ‘working very well’, and ‘little to complain of on the score of wind’, as Scott put it with a nice understatement, the ship was at last coming into her own. In the heavy following seas she was a mite ‘livelier’ than Williamson found comfortable, but while rolls of up to forty-seven degrees each way were commonplace, ‘it was rarely, if ever necessary to shorten’ those ‘handkerchief’ sails that Scott had reassured his mother about. The ‘worse all this gets’, an exhilarated Wilson wrote in the middle of the Roaring Forties, ‘the more we all enjoy it! Our dinner was all over the ward-room this evening,’ he cheerfully recorded, ‘the crockery is fast disappearing in small pieces. It is the funniest sight … everything all round seems to be tumbling about one’s head. The noise is indescribable.’

Wilson’s good humour is wonderfully engaging, and there is something deeply English in a sensibility that could ‘domesticate’ even the southern oceans. ‘The waves we are amongst now,’ he was writing five days later, as if Discovery were in some neo-Georgian landscape that a Brooke or a Housman might have found comfortingly familiar, ‘are, without any exaggeration, comparable in length and height to the rise from our pigeon gates, at the foot of the Crippets [the family home on a low spur of Leckhampton Hill in the Cotswolds], up to the rabbit warren above, and about the same depth.’

The next day the whole of Leckhampton Hill almost came down on them when a ‘monstrous sea’, ‘towering’ to the topsails, hit Discovery side on. Wilson was on the bridge with Barne and Scott when ‘an enormous wave broke right over the ship. We all three hung on to the stanchions and rails and were swept clean off our feet. We were simply deluged, and I burst out laughing at the Skipper who was gasping for breath. He had been nearly a minute under water. The whole of the upper deck was afloat. The water had flooded the magnetic house; laboratories, fo’c’sle and wardroom; galley filled with steam, winter clothes just brought up from the hold for distribution all swamped, and they call this a dry ship!’ ‘Didn’t we just laugh,’ he added, and not even the sight of a corpse from some unknown ship floating past or Williamson’s conviction that his ‘checks were in’ were enough to dispel the sense that this was ‘indeed … living’.

After the torpor of their voyage through the tropics, there was a palpable excitement that they were at last approaching the edge of an unknown world. There are few things still that can feel so excitingly alien as the first sight of ice at sea, and on 16 November, as Scott temporarily altered course and took Discovery southwards to record the changes in the magnetic force and dip^* as they approached the Magnetic Pole, they saw it for the first time. ‘Fast ice seen about 10AM,’ Scott noted in his report for the two Societies, ‘and amid much excitement we watched small pieces of decayed drift ice gradually growing in size and number and assuming more fantastic shapes … The intense blue of the small seaswept holes and caverns … was noticed with delight.’ ‘A most marvellous sight,’ an excited Skelton noted in his journal, ‘quite the most wonderful I have ever seen.’ ‘The sky was grey with snow falling,’ Wilson wrote, ‘the breakers were white on a dark grey sea, and the ice only had its whiteness broken with the most exquisitely shaded blues and greens, pure blue, cobalt, and pale emerald, and every mixture in between them. I never saw more perfect colour or toning in nature.’

‘At 4 pm,’ Scott continued, with that meticulous eye for ‘technical’ detail that would characterise everything he looked at in the south, ‘a strong ice blink’ – the reflection of ice in the sky – ‘was observed to the left and right and a line of white ahead, and in half an hour we had run into a loose pack of drift ice, amongst which were occasional small fragments of glacier ice showing blue and heavy in contrast.’ ‘The wind had died away,’ he later more atmospherically wrote, ‘what light remained was reflected in a ghostly glimmer from the white surface of the pack; now and again a white snow petrel flitted through the gloom, the grinding of the floes against the ship’s side was mingled with the more subdued hush of their rise and fall on the long swell, and for the first time we felt something of the solemnity of these great Southern solitudes.’

Six days later they had their next glimpse of what lay ahead, when the long, grim ridge of Macquarie Island, isolated in the southern ocean hundreds of miles from the nearest land, was sighted. Having lost time on the way to South Africa, Scott was anxious to press on, but with Wilson bribing Armitage with a bottle of liqueur to act as mediator, he was persuaded to make a brief landing. It was the first time that anyone on board had seen a penguin rookery, and it was a toss-up who was most excited, Wilson by the chance of collecting specimens, or Scamp, who spent his time in ‘a series of short rushes, made with suppressed growls and every hair bristling, but ending at a very safe distance’.

If Scamp was reluctant to mix it with Macquarie’s inhabitants, Shackleton and the rest of the crew were not so easily discouraged. ‘We saw great flocks of Penwings’ – and a sea elephant that they shot – the difficult but touchingly curious Dundee whaling man James Duncan wrote, with his inimitable spelling, ‘some hands started to skin him & this being their first attempt there was some sport in the finish they were blood from head to foot … we continued on our way Doctor spoting every little plant or moss & bagin it’.

It was not just the men’s first introduction to a penguin colony, but to penguin meat, and Scott was surprised to find ‘no prejudice more difficult to conquer than my own’. He knew well enough from Cook’s account of the Belgica the consequences of any squeamishness over diet, and was glad of the chance to introduce the crew to a regime ‘which it will so often be essential to enforce’. ‘Had penguin for dinner & penguin eggs for breakfast,’ he wrote in his journal on the twenty-fourth, ‘must own to a weak stomach in these matters but am rejoiced to see the excellent spirit shown by the crew – they all ate and most pronounced favourably where I rather expected a kicking against the pricks in a matter where they are usually so pig headed & obstinate.’

With Macquarie Island behind them, they were now less than six hundred miles south-west of New Zealand, and Scott could sit down to his 3rd Letter of Proceedings with a real sense that men and ship had come well through their ‘baptism of fire’. The experience of the voyage, he reported, ‘has been of excellent service to officers and men in learning to handle the ship and the sails, it has given confidence in the ship & in themselves which cannot be overvalued and I am pleased to say that the charge of inexperience which might reasonably have attached to the whole crew, in view of the small amounts of time they had spent in sailing ships, can now no longer be applied’.

Scott also felt that he had got to know his officers. To his mother he confessed – ‘entre nous’ – that of all the wardroom, he had most warmed to Barne, Skelton and Wilson. Wilson, in particular, impressed him. ‘He is indeed a treasure [one of Scott’s favourite terms] in our small company,’ he wrote in his journal just before they reached Lyttelton, ‘whose quick eye for every detail of colour & form, every action and every attitude of his studies can I think have rarely been equalled.’

‘There is one thing your husband will not have told you,’ he took the trouble to write to Wilson’s wife Ory, ‘and that is what a fine fellow we all think him. His intellect and ability will one day win him a great name; of this I feel sure. We admire such qualities … but his kindness, loyalty, good-temper and fine feelings are possessions which go beyond the word admiration and can simply be said to have endeared him to us all. How truly grateful I am to have such a man with me … ’

His officers had also had the chance to get to know Scott. ‘I like Captain Scott better than ever,’ Armitage, his second-in-command, wrote home. More to the point, as Discovery dropped anchor that night at Lyttelton, and the last stage of their journey came into focus, was Wilson’s judgement. ‘One of the best points about him too is that he is very definite about everything,’ he wrote home; ‘nothing is left vague or indeterminate. In every argument he goes straight for the main point, and always knows exactly what he is driving at. There will be no fear of our wandering about aimlessly in the Southern regions.’