A First Rate Tragedy (6 page)

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

3

‘Ready, Aye, Ready’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equally important was the crew. As with so much else this became a fruitful source of argument. The navy had agreed to provide a small naval core. Scott wanted men with the sense of discipline learned in the navy and frankly doubted his ability to deal with any other sorts of men. He was therefore delighted to number three naval officers among his crew. Lieutenant Charles Royds was appointed as Scott’s first lieutenant and meteorologist, and Scott was able to welcome two of his messmates from the
Majestic
. Reginald Skelton was appointed engineer lieutenant while the cheerful Michael Barne became second lieutenant and took charge of the deep-sea apparatus.

However, Markham had to turn to the Merchant Navy to find
a deputy leader. He invited 36-year-old Albert Armitage, a P&O officer, to serve in this capacity and as navigator. Armitage had useful experience of Arctic exploration, having been navigator in the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition to Franz-Josef Land in 1894–7, a feat for which the Royal Geographical Society had awarded him a medal. If anything he had expected to be offered the leadership of the British Antarctic expedition and was inclined to turn the offer down. However, the siren voice of Sir Clements wooed him. ‘See Scott before you refuse,’ he urged.
³

An evening with Scott in Chelsea, where he was living with his mother and sisters, won him over: ‘I was charmed by him from the first. He said to me, “You
will
come with me, won’t you? I cannot do without you.”’
⁴
Scott could be irresistible when he chose and Armitage was unable to refuse, though he foresaw a role as a kind of dry-nurse to the less experienced man. He apparently attached certain conditions to his agreement, in particular that his appointment should be independent of Scott, though under his command, and that he would be landed with a team and supplies for two years. He also demanded that his pay should be no more than £50 per year lower than Scott’s. In his disillusioned later years he was to claim that only the promise about his pay was kept. He alleged that, arrived in Antarctica, Scott appealed to him to forgo the other promises on the grounds that he could not do without him.

At the time, however, Armitage was concerned to find himself the focus of some Machiavellian activities as the learned societies continued to slog it out. He was approached informally to see whether he would consent to be commander if Scott resigned and to his credit refused. In fact it was he and Sir Clements who joined forces to persuade Scott to stick to his guns in the face of renewed hostility about a naval officer being in absolute command. The
crisis duly passed and Armitage was able to give his attention to buying sledging equipment and clothing. However, he was unable to convince Scott and the expedition’s advisers that it would be better to take fewer men and more dogs. This lack of ‘horse sense’ as he called it worried him.
⁵

Scott also turned to the Merchant Navy for an executive assistant and an engaging and highly ambitious Anglo-Irishman, Ernest Henry Shackleton, now made his appearance. From Scott’s perspective he was to prove something of a Trojan horse but in the
Voyage of the Discovery
, Scott’s painstaking and moving account of his first expedition, he described him as ‘always brimful of enthusiasm and good fellowship’. Shackleton was educated at Dulwich College, where he found lessons tedious and was usually near the bottom of the class, though adept at avoiding punishment. On leaving school he decided not to follow his father into the medical profession. The sea was the life for him. His father could not afford the cost of entering him as a naval cadet so he instead began his sailing life as apprentice on a merchant vessel bound for Valparaiso. It was hard and dirty work and ‘a queer life and a risky one’ as he confided to a friend.
⁶
His captain found him pig-headed and obstinate but he got on well with the men, untroubled by social barriers that might have prevented him, a future officer, from befriending ordinary seamen.

By the age of twenty-five Shackleton was a merchant officer with the Union-Castle line, a confident garrulous man with a love of the poet Browning whom he could quote ad infinitum. His fellow officers liked him though they found him an atypical young officer. Scenting an opportunity for fame and possibly the fortune that might help him win the woman, Emily Dorman, on whom he had set his heart – Shackleton had told his prospective father-in-law that his fortune was all to make, but he intended to make it
quickly – he applied for the Antarctic expedition, though he had no special desire to go to the Antarctic and little interest in scientific research. At first he was turned down. However, even more than Scott he possessed the power to charm and became friendly with Cedric Longstaff, the son of the expedition’s quiet and pleasant benefactor Llewellyn Longstaff, during a voyage taking troops out to South Africa in March 1900. The result was that Longstaff senior asked whether a place could be found for this charismatic officer. Armitage made some enquiries, the response was universally positive and Shackleton was in. In high glee he took leave from the Union-Castle Line and reported ready for anything.

Shackleton was to play a vital part in the quest for the South Pole but he was never among Scott’s inner circle. Not so Edward Adrian Wilson, the man who over a decade later would die next to Scott ‘with a comfortable blue look of hope’.
⁷
Over the years Wilson has probably been the least criticized and most admired of the men who reached the South Pole. He was born in Cheltenham in 1872 to a family with strong Quaker ancestry on his father’s side. The family motto was
res non verba
, ‘deeds not words’, a sentiment of which he wholeheartedly approved. He was a teetotaller with an innate dislike of crudeness or vulgarity but he was no prig. He had a delightful sense of the ridiculous and a quiet power which drew people to him. He was regarded as friend and mentor by many of his companions. Paradoxically, while he loathed self-pity, he always responded with sympathy and understanding to the real problems of others. He was a follower of Ruskin and a decided ascetic reflected, to an extent, in his tall, lean aquiline appearance which a friend compared to that of a thoroughbred horse.