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The Naval Salute is made by bringing up the right hand to the cap or hat, naturally and smartly, but not hurriedly, with the thumb and fingers straight and close together, elbow in line with the shoulder, hand and forearm in line, the thumb being in line with the outer edge of the right elbow, with the palm of the hand being turned to the left, the opposite being the case when using the left hand …

Should a Petty Officer or man be standing about, and an officer pass him, he is to face the officer and salute; if sitting when an officer approaches, he is to rise, stand at attention, and salute. If two or more Petty Officers or men are sitting or standing about, the Senior Petty Officer or man will call the whole to attention and he alone will salute.

Manual of Seamanship (1908)

I have never realized to such an extent the truth that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ as this last year during which I have seen a little of the inside of the ‘Royal Navy’, God help it.

Edward Wilson, diary, 18 August 1902

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to understand Scott’s character or the expeditions he led unless it is remembered that from the age of thirteen until his death at forty-three, his whole life was led within this world. In everything but name Discovery and Terra Nova were naval expeditions, and nothing in their triumphs or failures, in the process of decision-making or the centralisation of control, in the cult of man-hauling or the chivalric traditions of sledging, in the relationships of its members with each other, of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, of navy and civilian, navy and scientist, navy and soldier, navy and merchant service and even navy and navy – wardroom and mess deck, executive and engineering – makes any sense unless seen against the background of the world that had closed round Scott when he entered Britannia.

For any boy joining Britannia at this time, as a novel based on Scott’s life put it, there was a weight of history and expectation that was both a burden and an inspiration. The origins of the Royal Navy in anything like its modern form date back to the seventeenth century, but it was in the 120 years after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the long series of wars with France that established Britain as a world power, that its traditions, reputation and special place in the national life were set in stone.

From the St Lawrence River to the Indian Ocean, from the West Indies to the Mediterranean, from the Baltic to the Southern Atlantic, the navy saw active service, carried out sieges, supported amphibious operations, fought fleet actions, defended Britain’s trade routes, and acted as a potent instrument of diplomacy. During this period there were certainly some spectacular reverses, but in the almost continuous years of warfare that followed on the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739 – the navy was fighting for fifty out of the next seventy-five years – a tradition of professionalism, brotherhood, mutual confidence, experience, aggression, courage, flare and independence was created that reached its apogee in the charismatic genius of Nelson. ‘An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends without looking out for directions in the middle of the fight,’ wrote a Spanish observer after the battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797, in which Nelson had displayed just these qualities,

and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confidence on the certainty that his comrades, actuated by the same principles as himself, will be bound by the sacred and priceless law of mutual support. Accordingly, both he and all his fellows fix their minds on acting with zeal and judgement on the spur of the moment, and with the certainty that they will not be deserted. Experience shows, on the contrary, that a Frenchman or a Spaniard, working under a system which leans to formality and strict order being maintained in battle, has no feeling for mutual support, and goes into action with hesitation, preoccupied with the anxiety of seeing the commander-in-chief’s signals, for such and such manoeuvres.

Nelson, Collingwood, Jervis, Duncan, Rodney, Hawke, Howe – Trafalgar, the Nile, Cape St Vincent, Camperdown, Quiberon Bay, the Glorious First of June – these were names and battles that still held their place in the popular imagination in the Victorian age, and if the nineteenth-century navy could not match them, that was not entirely its fault. The defeat of Napoleon in 1815 had left Britain as the sole global power and her navy in undisputed possession of the seas, and in the ‘long calm lee of Trafalgar’ it was inevitable that her role would change from that of the fighting force that had won Britain’s eighteenth-century empire to the service that would have to police it.

If in many ways, however, the navy was no more than a victim of its own unparalleled success, in the transition from a war footing to peacetime duties it had undoubtedly lost its way. In every generation there were individuals who could see what needed to be done, but as the old fighting machine settled into its new role, the old ‘purser’ turned into the new ‘paymaster’ and the old working-class ‘tarpaulin’ captain disappeared from the bridge, the instinctual, lateral-thinking, individualist, anti-hierarchical ‘autocrat’ of Nelson’s navy gave way to the ‘authoritarian personality’ and the culture of deference, inflexibility, secretiveness, meticulousness, obsessive cleanliness and social rigidity that dominated the Victorian service.^*

The period in Royal Naval history in which Scott joined the service has not been called the ‘Dark Ages’ for nothing, and few institutions have ever offered so many hostages to satire as the late-Victorian navy. At the height of its prestige in the 1880s it was the equal in size of any other five navies in the world combined, and yet within a generation its ships and its reputation were both gone, leaving behind only memories of whitewashed coal piles and exquisitely choreographed collisions, of choleric captains, holystoned decks and the endless ‘bull’ of a peacetime service devoted to order, cleanliness, appearance, uniformity and uniforms.

Almost every memoir of the nineteenth century enshrines some particular favourite – the officer who thought he was the ship’s boiler, and lay in his bed all day puffing out imaginary steam; the young Lord Charles Beresford who kept an elephant on board; the captain who would fly-fish from the poop deck for his first officer; the fitness fanatic Sir Robert Arbuthnot, who sentenced a sailor to death for blistered feet – but against stiff competition, perhaps Sir Algernon ‘Pompo’ Heneage gets the nod.

A man of wonderful and unabashed vanity, Heneage would break two eggs over his blond hair every morning, and take off his uniform for prayers because no Royal Navy captain should be seen kneeling to a higher deity. It was the same Algernon Heneage who instituted the practice of white kid gloves for the captain’s inspection, progressing through a terrified ship, his cox’n behind him carrying another dozen clean pairs on a silver tray, as Heneage groped behind pipes and down lavatory bowls for the traces of dirt that could damn an executive officer’s career for ever.

Perhaps the most alarming thing, however, about the dandified Heneage – he had 240 dress shirts in the Pacific, and sent them home to be laundered in London and returned in air-tight crates – was that he was by no means unique. There was a kind of magnificence about his self-esteem that gave him a semi-legendary status even during his lifetime, but as the letters and recollections of junior officers from future First Sea Lords down to the young Scott make plain, the petty tyranny and small-mindedness he embodied was the norm rather than the exception in a navy bent on turning its officers from fighting men into what the great naval reformer Jacky Fisher called ‘a sort of upper housemaid’.

It is not the whole story, of course, and even during the Pax Britannica of the late Victorian age, a number of Scott’s term in Britannia would see active service before they were out of their twenties. It is certainly true that the navy had fought no fleet action since the last bizarre fling of the Nelson navy at Navarino in 1827, but for most of the years since it had been on duty somewhere or other, its midshipmen and junior officers learning their trade and winning some forty-odd VCs in the long, unglamorous war against slavery or in campaigns that ranged from the Baltic to the Crimea and from the Sudan and the relief of Lucknow to China, Burma and the South Seas.

The oddity of it was, however, that in a service where captains would rather jettison shells than risk dirtying their ships by firing them, the most insidious temptation for a young midshipman of Scott’s generation lay in everything that had been best in the navy rather than what was worst. From the day in 1757 that Admiral Byng was shot on his own quarterdeck ‘pour encourager les autres’,^* every naval cadet was brought up to know that valour was the better part of discretion, and for a man like Scott, Shackleton’s famous quip that a ‘live donkey’ was better than a ‘dead lion’ could have been no more an option than it would be for those other Britannia-reared officers who unswervingly followed Admiral Craddock to the bottom of the sea in the hopelessly unequal Battle of Coronel less than three years after Scott’s own death.^*

In Scott’s case it would always be the virtues of naval life – the call to duty, the demands on courage – that exercised their tyranny over him, and casting its seductive, deadly light over these values was the Victorians’ obsession with medieval chivalry and a mythical Camelot. The cult of medievalism this stemmed from went back to the Romantics and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, but over the succeeding generations it had somehow entwined itself round other concepts of English gentility, lending a pseudo-historical legitimacy and glamour to those ideals of amateurism and cleanliving, games-playing Christianity that became such an integral part of an ethic that elevated the Grail-like quest with all its attendant hardships and inbuilt glorification of failure above any vulgar insistence on mere victory.

The history and traditions of naval polar expeditions during the nineteenth century, which will be examined later in their proper context, would eventually confront Scott with this culture in its most absolute form, but there was another and no less chimerical development that had an equally injurious effect on the training of the young nineteenth-century naval officer. One of the great mysteries of the Victorian service is the way in which it succeeded in misinterpreting the Nelson legacy as badly as it did; but nothing in its catastrophic misunderstanding of its own past was more perverse than its belief that the secret of Nelson’s genius lay in his total mastery of the battleground, rather than an ability to promote individuals of the same independent stamp as himself.

The result of this reading of history – abetted by crucial developments in flag signalling that gave any commander a potential 330,000 signals^† – was a culture that made independent thought a crime and raised abstract theory and complex orders above the traditional empiricism that had been the great strength of the British navy. To all intents and purposes Nelson had left his captains to get on with their jobs, but by Scott’s day the only prerequisite of a good subordinate was not ‘Duty’ in the overmastering sense that Nelson had used the word, but blind, unquestioning obedience. ‘A good deal has been said of late as to the freedom being given to inferiors to question and disobey the orders of a superior officer,’ the Duke of Cambridge told cadets in the aftermath of the Camperdown tragedy of 1893, when in the depths of peace and the clear light of a Mediterranean summer’s day Albert Markham had rammed and sunk the Victoria with the loss of Sir George Tryon, Britain’s greatest admiral since Nelson, and 433 other lives rather than disobey a patently ludicrous order. ‘Discipline must be law, and must prevail. It is better to go wrong according to orders than to go wrong in opposition to orders.’

Conformity, obedience, centralisation, abstract reasoning, unthinking bravery, chivalric idealism, unswerving duty in the narrowest sense of the word – these, then, were the battle cries of the navy Scott joined, and even if he could have foreseen the tragedy they would bring him to almost thirty years later it is unlikely that he would have had the strength to resist them. There were obviously Young Turks in every generation who had the self-confidence or the independence of means to buck the system, but for a fifteenyear-old of Scott’s background and circumstances, without the connections or social assurance of a Tryon or a Beatty, conformity was not just a temptation but a sine qua non of survival.

The mature Scott would be only too bitterly aware of the cost of conformity, but it is hard to know whether the young cadet already felt it. There is a vast wealth of correspondence, journals, notes, memoranda and jottings surviving from the second half of his life, but from the summer of 1883 when he first went to sea until he took over Discovery and became a ‘public man’ there are no more than a few dozen letters and a couple of diary fragments to give any sense of an interior life.

The career of a peacetime naval officer leaves so faint a biographical trace that almost everything beyond a skeleton of dates and ships is conjecture. From the time Scott left Britannia to the day he was appointed to command Discovery there is scarcely a day that cannot be accounted for, but apart from the dry details of a ship’s movements or the laconic entries on a service record there is nothing but the occasional ‘RFS’ initialled in a log book to lift him out of the anonymity of a service that spanned and policed the world.

It is curious to know at once so much and so little about a man, and yet, as in Britannia, it is the opacity of surviving records that offers the bleakest clue to Scott’s new life. After a last boyhood summer at home he had sailed out to South Africa in the Euphrates with a fellow cadet from the same term at Dartmouth to join HMS Boadicea, and the ship’s log for 4 October 1883 records with characteristic indifference their arrival: ‘9.am Read articles of war and returns of courts martial, out launch and P boat. Joined Lieut Roope and Messrs Dampier & Scott, mids from HMS Euphrates.’

As a midshipman Scott was still a pupil under instruction, and in many respects life in Boadicea’s gunroom would only have been a more bruising extension of his Britannia existence. His mornings would at least in theory be spent in navigation lessons, but with watches to keep and sights to take, men to manage and the ship’s boats to run, instruction invariably lost out to the endless demands of ship life.

It was only twelve months before, too, that the fleet at Alexandria had fired its guns for the first time since the Crimea, and as long as Rear Admiral Nowell Salmon, with a face that wouldn’t look out of place on Mount Rushmore, was flying his flag in Boadicea, Scott would need no reminder of what was ultimately expected of a naval officer. In the Crimean War Salmon had served against the Russians in the Baltic, and then as a young lieutenant in the Shannon’s Naval Brigade during the Indian Mutiny made his name winning one of the four naval Victoria Crosses awarded at the relief of Lucknow.

And even in the depths of peace, the occasional entry in the ship’s log betrays the kind of personalities and frictions that lay behind the orderly façade of naval life. ‘Mr Kirkby gunner was cautioned by Capt and his leave stopped for 1 month for not being fit for duty in the morning supposed from having taken too much liquor the night before,’ records the log for the day after Scott’s arrival. ‘Sublt the Honble Francis Addington,’ runs a second entry, for 2 January 1884, ‘was cautioned by Capt for unofficerlike conduct in using abusive and disgraceful language to one of his shipmates in the gun room on Xmas day.’ ‘British barque Guyana in want of medical assistance arrived,’ the Boadicea’s log for 29 January notes with a wonderfully mild detachment, ‘Capt having stabbed the 2nd mate and assaulted one of the crew with an iron belaying pin.’ For the most part, though, the life of the ship, with its interminable provisioning, coaling and sailmaking, its mending, scrubbing and drilling, its cutlass exercise, sail and signalling drills, its exchanges of courtesies and diplomatic visits, went on with the unruffled calm of an organisation supremely sure of its role in the world.

There are no surviving letters of Scott’s from his time in Boadicea, but in the ship’s log one can follow him over the next two years, as the wooden-cased iron corvette did its imperial rounds from Simon’s Bay and the Congo to Accra and Lagos and back to repeat the same leisurely sweep all over again. ‘All yesterday was spent at Sierra Leone,’ a future shipmate of Scott’s wrote home of another such cruise with the Duke of Connaught aboard, giving a vivid glimpse of the assumptions, prejudices and cultural remoteness of the world that lay behind all these anonymous entries in the Boadicea’s log book, ‘and a most amusing time we had of it. We arrived there at 7a.m. and landed at 9 and never, never, in my life, have I seen such enthusiasm as was displayed by all the niggers and seldom have I seen more ludicrous contrasts. Addresses were presented at the Town Hall which were read out by The Town Clerk, a large typical nigger with rolling eyes, who was in a barrister’s wig and gown … In the garden at Government House the Duke received deputations from native chiefs in all sorts of ridiculous garments – some of them with tinsel crowns, and one in a naval cocked hat with military plumes … A deputation from the Coloured Freemasons and from the African Ladies of the Colony. We were all quite intrigued to know who the African Ladies were, when there appeared about a dozen negresses, dressed in the very latest Parisian fashions picture hats, hobble skirts and all the rest of it … one had to rub one’s eyes to be sure one wasn’t dreaming – it was more like a scene from a very extravagant musical comedy than anything else.’

St Helena – where in the 1880s naval visitors would have a woman in her sixties pointed out to them as Napoleon’s daughter – Ascension, River Gambia, Sierra Leone, Monrovia, Accra, Lagos – it was August 1885 before Scott would again be in England, but his time in Boadicea had gone well. There is a sameness about captain’s reports that gives very little away, but if a ‘VG’ for conduct and abilities, and ‘Temperate’ for habits, are no more than the standard comments, Captain Church was sufficiently impressed to take the seventeen-year-old Scott with him when he moved from Boadicea to Monarch.

Before Monarch, though, there was the rest of the summer, and Grace would always remember these last family holidays, when Con came home from sea and Archie, bound for the Artillery, was on leave from Woolwich or his station at Weymouth. There was still their eighteen-foot boat with the big lug sail, and ‘As to horsemanship, Con was a fairly good rider – good enough to win trophies when he was stationed at Lima – but not so good as Archie who was an exceptionally good huntsman, though he never possessed a horse of his own. The two brothers seized all opportunities of being together for a few days’ leave; Archie coming home in his cheery way described days of golfing when he had to find both balls – Con being lost in day-dreams besides a bunker or on a green, maybe enchanted by a view or lost in a problem, anyway quite oblivious of his surroundings.’

By the middle of September, however, Scott was with his new ship, and a part of the Channel Squadron in the armour-plated Monarch. It was the same life and the same routines as in Boadicea, and if his time under Nowell Salmon had brought him face to face with the navy’s past, HMS Monarch, with both Rosslyn Wemyss, a future First Sea Lord, and John Jellicoe lieutenants in the ship, afforded an equally uncompromising vision of its future. It is a moot point whether or not this glimpse would have been reassuring, but it must at least have brought home to a young midshipman with almost nothing in the way of ‘interest’ to call on that promotion would be a long, slow haul. From his earliest days in Britannia Jellicoe had clearly been destined for the top, but if ‘Old Biddy’ – as Rosslyn Wemyss was familiarly known in court circles – was going in the same direction it owed as much to all those social, political and royal connections that Scott lacked as to any transcendent abilities.

The descendant on his father’s side of the last Scottish Lord High Admiral, and on his mother’s side of the last English one, the great-grandson of William IV and his mistress Mrs Jordan, the heir to one of the great names in Scottish history and to a lineage that fancifully traced itself back to Shakespeare’s Macduff – an intriguing thought, when one remembers what happened to his children – ‘Rosy’ Wemyss might have been designed to show Scott what he was up against. He had entered Britannia four years ahead of Scott in the same term as the future George V, and his naval life since had taken him via a berth on the royal cruise in Bacchante that spawned half the navy’s future leaders in a seamless rise that pointed inexorably to the Royal Yacht Osborne and a guaranteed future.

With his meagre midshipman’s pay of £30 a year, and whatever his father could do to help, Scott’s future must have looked a lot more circumscribed, but at least he was doing what he could to make it his own. Another series of ‘VG’s when he left Monarch was followed by a similar verdict from his next captain in the corvette Rover, and his examinations the following year for sublieutenant bore out their judgement, with Scott obtaining First Class Certificates in four of the five disciplines, and a Second in Gunnery.

He soon had his chance, too, to practise his profession in as exacting conditions as anything but actual war could provide. At the beginning of July 1888 he was appointed to the gunboat Spider at Portsmouth, and when it joined its flotilla at Lough Swilly later the same month he was lucky enough to find himself at the heart of the most dramatic and politically significant manoeuvres the Victorian navy ever carried out.

It is almost impossible now to realise the place that the Royal Navy then held in the national affections, the interest that was taken in everything it did, the column inches it could command in the newspapers, and the keen attention with which the manoeuvres were followed. Underpinning this interest was a patriotic belief in the navy’s superiority over any force in the world, so when in the summer of 1888 an inferior ‘enemy’ fleet under Sir George Tryon – which included Spider – broke out of a close blockade and created mayhem up and down the coasts of Britain, ‘sinking’ merchantmen, ‘wiping out’ towns and holding whole cities to ransom, the nation took fright.^*

In one sense, Tryon’s unorthodoxy and swagger was just what England expected – proof again that the Nelsonian spirit was alive and well – and yet at the same time, if a Royal Navy admiral could do this, what was to stop an enemy doing the same? ‘It is enough to make one tremble to think of what would befall [Liverpool],’ wrote The Times’s correspondent, on board Tryon’s Ajax as his six ironclads, three torpedo boats and five cruisers dropped anchor unopposed in the Mersey, ‘if we were really a foreign enemy’s fleet, and there is evidently no reason in the world why one should not some fine day do as we have done unless some more efficient means are taken to prevent it. It seems to me almost incredible that an enemy’s fleet of inferior – and very much inferior – strength should be able, without the slightest attempt at resistance by the British naval forces, to force a blockade in one port and then still without opposition, to storm up the Mersey and exact whatever ransom it pleases, with the alternative of utterly destroying Liverpool … What Sir George Tryon has done a French or German admiral might do and could do.’

In the short term this exercise had profound effects, leading in the Naval Defence Act of the following year to the adoption of the ‘two-power standard’ – the idea that the Royal Navy should equal the combined strength of any two foreign powers – and in the longer term it fed into the invasion paranoia of the years before the First World War. For any impartial observer Tryon’s triumph had also revealed the fundamental flaws that radicals within the service had long recognised, and if anything was needed to point up the moral it was the fact that Albert Markham – polar explorer, ‘authoritarian’ supreme, and the man who six years later would ram the Victoria and kill Tryon – was the hapless commodore of the ‘British’ force that had let the ‘enemy’ ‘B’ Fleet give it the slip.

These manoeuvres were Scott’s last excitement for some time, and at the end of August 1888 he left Spider for the second-class cruiser Amphion, and another long haul away from England and family on the Pacific Station. ‘My dearest old Gov,’ he wrote to his father on the voyage out, with ‘a heavy following sea’ the Amphion ‘nearly turned on end & performed capers. Everything on board was miserable – I was cold, I was dirty, I was slightly seasick, very homesick, hungry, tired & desperately angry – the wardroom was upside down, my cabin was chaotic & stuffy. In dull despair I sat myself in an armchair in the wardroom & determined not to move till the weather moderated – I should have kept my promise if the chair hadn’t broken – I was cursed by the infuriated owner. Shall I describe to you what sleeping over [the] screw is? First the bunk shakes from under you (in itself a pleasant sensation – very) then a sudden stop with a loud noise best written as “Wumph” that’s when the sea strikes the stem – then the screw seems to stop – up goes the stem again accompanied by the most infernal rattling … shaking the whole ship. Imagine all this accompanied by a motion which would land you on the floor if you were not tucked in. And yet through all this I slept a sweet, gentle refreshing sleep accompanied by a hideous nightmare and from which I woke with a very bad head and promptly spilled my water can over my cabin … My dear old chap! I don’t think I can really go on. I will say goodnight and goodbye with heaps of love to everyone.’

Scott was always good on the physical miseries of ship’s life, but it was the Amphion’s captain, Edward Hulton, who was guaranteed to bring out the best in him as a letter-writer. ‘Alas! the skipper remains fussy,’ he complained on the same voyage; ‘he is an extraordinary man – at all hours of the night on watch you are liable to a flying visit from a spectral figure. There is no waste of time, from the moment he sees you until he is again lost from view, you are subjected to a running fire of orders (all utterly unnecessary – par parenthesis). The end of this storm gradually lessens in sound until the words become indistinct. After a time you don’t pay much attention, but it still would be annoying if it were only for the number of times you have to say “yes sir” in reply.’

‘Captain Hulton still affords great amusement,’ he could still write at the end of his time in Amphion. ‘I was walking back with him at Gibraltar from a dance the other day; he said he knew a short cut which we proceeded to find, we hadn’t got very far when we heard the familiar “alt, who goes there” (Gib simply bristles with sentries). “Friend” said the Captain. “There ain’t no friends in Gibraltar” answered the voice. “But my good man I am the Captain of the man of war etc etc” “Can’t ’elp that – yer can’t pass” “But really my good man I belong to the Navy, the Royal Navy, I’m a Captain.” “Can’t ’elp that – there’s soldiers and there’s officers and there’s ’nabitants but there ain’t no friend and yer’d better go back again.” He went.’

Scott was not always so elastic in his spirits, and sandwiched between these two letters is a fragment of diary, undated but probably belonging to the summer of 1890, that conveys a very different picture. ‘After many more or less futile efforts,’ he wrote, ‘I again decide on starting a diary. It being therefore my wish in starting such a work (for work in the sense of labour it undoubtedly is) merely to please myself, I make the experiment of transcribing my thoughts, hoping that the disappointment that will necessarily meet me in the inefficiency of my pen, will in some measure be compensated by the interest stored up for future years, when the mutability of time, ideas and sentiments will have undergone their common evolution … How I have longed to fix some idea, only so I may build from it – but though the words or general meaning may remain in what is written, the attraction has vanished like some will-o’-the-wisp and I find myself sitting idea-less and vacant … The vague argument that something must be done to express myself on paper even as an ordinary gentleman should, urges me on; there comes too a growing fear of my own thoughts; at times they almost frighten me … ’

There is nothing unusual in these juvenile maunderings, except perhaps that a young naval sub-lieutenant’s anxieties and ambitions should take so specifically literary a form. Of all the great explorers of the Heroic Age Scott was the only one – Nansen not excepted – who had the literary talent to make imaginative sense of his life, and if this early diary shows an almost embarrassing lack of promise it is fascinating that the same compulsion to give shape to his experience that filled his last hours should have equally exercised the young Scott.

There has never been a shortage of men of action who have wanted to be artists – General Wolfe famously declared that he would rather have written Gray’s ‘Elegy’ than take Quebec (which must have been a bit of a ‘facer’ to the men under his command) – but the man who is both is a rarer animal. The conditions of the First World War inevitably threw up a number of poets who were forced into the unfamiliar world of their natural opposites, but in the deeply philistine naval culture within which Scott was brought up – a culture suspicious of the intellectual life in any form – the rarity of such an ambition must have brought an acute sense of loneliness.

And it was not just his inability to express himself that troubled him, but a deeper malaise that hovers somewhere between adolescent mawkishness and the ‘black dog’ from which he never escaped. ‘It is only given to us cold slowly wrought natures to feel this drear deadly tightening at the heart,’ the diary continues after a half-page has been ripped out, ‘this slow sickness that holds one for weeks. How can I bear it. I write of the future; of the hopes of being more worthy; but shall I ever be – can I alone, poor weak wretch that I am, bear up against it all. The daily round, the petty annoyances, the ill-health, the sickness of heart – how can one fight against it all. No one will ever see these words, therefore I may freely write – what does it all mean?’

If it seems impossible now to know what – if anything specific – lay behind this passage, its tone inevitably draws attention to the one period of Scott’s naval life over which there is any uncertainty. A lot has been made of a brief gap in his service record while he was on the Pacific Station, and while there is not a shred of evidence to suggest he had put up any sort of ‘black’ that was later covered up, it does seem likely that Scott was ill on the Station’s depot ship, Liffey, at Coquimbo for a few weeks in the autumn of 1889.^*

The only professional risk Scott ever ran, however, was not that he would be a bad naval officer, but that he would turn himself into only too good a one, and whatever lay behind the diary entry never surfaced in his work. He had been lent by Hulton to Caroline and then Daphne shortly after they had arrived at Esquimault in British Columbia, and an independent account of Scott’s journey back from Acapulco in the City of New York to rejoin his ship hardly suggests anything like a physical or mental crisis. ‘In the late winter a quarter of a century ago,’ Sir Courtauld Thomson later wrote in a letter that Barrie wove into his legend of the Young Scott, Scott himself always looked back with particular fondness to his time on the Pacific Station, and he made friends there that he would keep all his life. In professional terms Esquimault was possibly the least interesting of all the navy’s global stations, but if the dress code spelled out in Standing Orders is anything to go by – Helmets to be worn with White Undress; Frock coats to be buttoned close up; Undress Coats with Epaulettes, Gold Laced Trousers and White Waistcoats for Balls; Mess Jackets for Dinner; Dress, White or Blue for Dinner; Undress, Dark Coats and Hats for Sundays ashore – there were all the social compensations of naval life at the apogee of British seapower.

I had to find my way from San Francisco to Alaska. The railway was snowed up and the only available transport at the moment was an ill-found tramp steamer. My fellow passengers were mostly Californians hurrying off to a new mining camp and, with the crew, looked a very unpleasant lot of ruffians. Three singularly unprepossessing Frisco toughs joined me in my cabin, which was none too large for a single person. I was then told that yet another had somehow to be wedged in. While I was wondering if he could be a more ill-favoured or dirtier specimen of humanity than the others the last comer suddenly appeared – the jolliest and breeziest English naval Second Lieutenant. It was Con Scott. I had never seen him before, but we at once became friends and remained so till the end. He was going up to join his ship which, I think, was the Amphion, at Esquimault, B.C.

As soon as we got outside the Golden Gates we ran into a full gale which lasted all the way to Victoria, B.C. The ship was so overcrowded that a large number of women and children were allowed to sleep on the floor of the only saloon there was on condition that they got up early, so that the rest of the passengers could come in for breakfast and the other meals.

I need scarcely say that owing to the heavy weather hardly a woman was able to get up, and the saloon was soon in an indescribable condition. Practically no attempt was made to serve meals, and the few so-called stewards were themselves mostly out of action from drink or sea-sickness.

Nearly all the male passengers who were able to be about spent their time drinking and quarrelling. The deck cargo and some of our top hamper were washed away and the cabins got their share of the waves that were washing the deck.

Then it was I first knew that Con Scott was no ordinary human being. Though at that time still only a boy he practically took command of the passengers and was at once accepted by them as their Boss during the rest of the trip. With a small body of volunteers he led an attack on the saloon – dressed the mothers, washed the children, fed the babies, swabbed down the floors and nursed the sick, and performed every imaginable service for all hands. On deck he settled the quarrels and established order either by his personality, or, if necessary, by his fists. Practically by day and night he worked for the common good, never sparing himself, and with his infectious smile gradually made us all feel the whole thing was jolly good fun.

I daresay there are still some of the passengers like myself who, after a quarter of a century, have imprinted on their minds the vision of this fair-haired English sailor boy with the laughing blue eyes, who at that early age knew how to sacrifice himself for the welfare and happiness of others.

Such a life came at a cost, of course, and a lieutenant’s pay of £182.10S a year can only have been just enough to keep up those appearances about which Scott was always morbidly sensitive. In his future years he would have to watch every wardroom drink he bought and pass over every entertainment that had to be paid for, but at Esquimault at least he seems to have been able to hold his own in a society eager to embrace an engaging and attractive young naval officer. He rode, canoed, dined out, and in the handsome Victoria home of Peter O’Reilly, a prominent figure in local life, and his wife, found a welcome that helped ease his homesickness. For many years after Scott kept up a fitful but affectionate correspondence with Mrs O’Reilly and her daughter Kathleen, and in 1899, on the eve of his new life in polar exploration, was still writing of ‘ever fresh memories of good times’ at Esquimault.

There was never a suggestion at the time, however, or in any of the subsequent correspondence, of a warmer friendship with Kathleen, and Scott was just one of any number of officers who washed through the O’Reillys’ hospitable home. ‘Warrender & Scott called,’ Peter O’Reilly noted in his journal for 4 May, six weeks after Scott’s return to Amphion. ‘Warrender & Scott called,’ he wrote again three weeks later; ‘Warrender & Scott arrived in their canoe’; ‘Scott called’; ‘Scott came to supper’; ‘Scott dined with us’; ‘Scott supper’; ‘Scott accompanied the Admiral to church & returned to supper’; ‘Kit: Warrender & Scott on horseback.’ ‘How lovely it must be at Victoria now,’ Scott wrote to Mrs O’Reilly on his return to England and the summer rain of Devon the following year. ‘I can imagine the delightful weather even in the midst of all the rain we are forced to endure here. What jolly times those were for me at Victoria! If anything were needed to recall them to memory – which nothing is – the strawberries and cream on which I chiefly keep my spirits up at present would be a constant reminder … I often feel I shall never have such times again as those days at Victoria which were so very pleasant thanks to your invariable kindness.’

On 19 October 1890 Amphion’s tour of duty came to an end, and she weighed for Honolulu on the first stage of the long journey back to England. The weather on leaving Victoria was foul, Scott wrote to Mrs O’Reilly – ‘as regards physical discomfort some of the worst I have ever endured. We had a gale of wind with a very heavy sea, in our teeth, the motion was awful and the pangs of sea-sickness attacked us all from the captain down to the “warrant officers’ cook’s mate” (usually supposed to be the most humble individual on board). The climax was reached on the night of the Government House Ball when it blew really hard: I had the middle watch, the rain and spray dashing in one’s face made it quite impossible to see ahead, so I turned my back on it and with a sort of grim pleasure tried to imagine what was going on at the ball.’

It is interesting to catch Scott’s own voice again – if for nothing else than to be reminded of just how young he still was – and all the more so as he wrote to Mrs O’Reilly with the same unguarded familiarity with which he treated his own family. ‘The “plant” thrives,’ he went on, clearly referring to a parting gift to him, ‘& to my messmates this is a matter of supreme wonder … it is not for nothing that I have learned the elements of botany … that plant has had a treatment which I venture to suggest, no plant has ever had before; once it grew very yellow, I dosed it with iron and other tonics, gave it nitrate, sulphurite, in carefully measured proportions, to my horror it seemed to grow worse, but I persisted in my treatment and eventually it recovered and has since flourished. In fine weather I take it on deck when I go on watch but I don’t spoil it, it is not allowed too much to drink nor too much fresh air.’

On the way home Scott and his messmates raced each other in growing beards, with Scott ‘bound to confess’, he wrote, that ‘I was a bad last – a brilliant idea struck me that checking my hair proper, would help to “force” the beard, so I had my back cut with one of those patent horse-clipping arrangements: it didn’t seem to do the least much good, but it gave me a very weird appearance.’

With a long voyage ahead of them, he continued, the ‘Admiral’ (Warrender, a future admiral, so a prophetic nickname for Scott’s friend as it turned out) and Scott ‘hit on a capital method of employing this spare time’ in writing a book – ‘not a novel, but a grave and important technical work’, designed to ‘epitomise’ the various seamanship manuals into one pocket-sized volume. ‘With this great end in view, we set and lay out our places, divide into heads and sub-heads, chapters and paragraphs and generally succeed in building up scaffolding, which would contain books about three times the size of any seamanship manual in existence. At first this was amusing, but after a bit it gets quite irritating. This is of course a state secret, and naval officers must not be told what is in store for them, nor, in case of non-publication, must they know what they have missed.’

It was ten days’ sailing from Victoria to Honolulu, where a week was spent in those social and diplomatic functions dear to Captain Hulton’s heart. ‘At Honolulu we employed our time firing salutes and anathematising mosquitoes,’ Scott wrote. ‘Besides such necessary visitors as the King etc, the Captain in the fullness of his heart must needs invite calls from all the consuls and other dignitaries in the place, their name is legion and they all have to be saluted, so we are everlastingly popping off guns.’

There were other things for Scott to worry about, apart from Hulton or the mosquitoes. He had applied for a place on the Torpedo course at HMS Vernon, and as the Amphion made its slow way back to England via Hong Kong, Aden and Suez, he became increasingly anxious over his prospects. ‘I was very despondent,’ he later confessed to Mrs O’Reilly, in a letter that probably shows as well as anything what anxieties lay behind the tone of his short-lived diary, ‘on account of my small chance of being selected for this Torpedo business; after that my spirits got lower & lower; each mail brought me what I considered to be worse & worse news – I knew there were only five vacancies and every letter from home informed me of an increased number of applicants for them – the number swelled from 20 to 30 and at last to 49 – I was in despair and gave up all hope; but a day or two brought the welcome telegram informing me that I was chosen and on the 20th of June I was on my road to England – I really think if I had not been taken this year I should have gradually lost all interest in the Service – it seems such a dismal look out to go on year after year with that dreary old watch keeping, going abroad for three years and coming home for six weeks and so off again. As it is there is a great deal of interest in the speciality I have adopted and at any rate there are a certain two or perhaps three years in England.’

If Scott had been anxious, he was right to be. Ambition, for a naval or army officer of intelligence, is not an option but a necessity. Cultural traditions might dissemble the fact, but the alternative to promotion is too dire to leave any alternative. Fail to get on the right Torpedo course, fail to get a Staff College nomination, fail to get on the ‘pink list’, fail to be seen doing the right job, fall six months behind your contemporaries – and the endless vista of naval or military life in all its undifferentiated and unimaginative dullness, stagnation and impotent subordination opens up.

For a young officer without interest, ambition was even more vital. It was, alongside his talent, all he had. It was not, in any narrowing sense, a mere matter of self-interest. It was not about power, or self-promotion, or any authoritarian instinct, but about professional fulfilment – about finding the space to think and develop – the mental and physical lebensraum that the naval and military life institutionally denies to failure or mediocrity. And for Scott, as he set foot on English soil again for the first time in two and a half years, and went down to Outlands to see his ‘great stay-at-home’ of a father, it would soon be about more. It would be about survival.