Whichever version of Markham’s headhunting is correct, Scott was very lucky to receive the appointment. The government refused to fund the Royal Geographical Society’s scheme, and business (doubting if the expedition would produce many commercial opportunities) was equally unhelpful. The Royal Society was asked to add the prestige of its ancient name to the project and a joint steering committee was set up to promote and manage the whole enterprise on the strict understanding that the purpose of the expedition should be purely scientific. Once that was agreed, the Royal Society argued that the leader should be a scientist, not a sailor. A resolution to that effect was narrowly defeated at a meeting of the steering committee only because Royal Society members were absent.
Scott did not receive an official letter of appointment until June 1900, twelve months after the supposed meeting in Buckingham Palace Road. During the intervening year, another attempt had been made to put a scientist in overall command. Scott, who had, no doubt, been told by Markham about the continuing controversy, replied to the eventual offer with what amounted to six stipulations. His letter began, ‘I must have complete command of the ship and shore parties. There cannot be two heads.’4
Markham, who had probably drafted Scott’s demands, accepted them in every detail and preparations for the great adventure began. The two men visited Dundee where the keel to the expedition ship, the Discovery, was being laid. The hull had been designed to withstand the pressure of the Antarctic pack ice, but because of the intended research into the Pole’s magnetic field, it was to be made almost entirely of wood. That specification confirmed Markham’s promise that the expedition’s purpose was not ‘to make a dash for the South Pole’ but to complete a ‘systematic exploration of the whole region’. On 31 July 1901, the Discovery left Dundee. On its way south it called at Cowes, where King Edward interrupted his duties at the Royal Regatta to present Scott with the Royal Victorian Order (Second Class).
The journey to the Antarctic Circle typified, in microcosm, the pattern of each of the four Edwardian polar expeditions. The men’s behaviour exceeded the call of duty, but the success of the operation was imperilled by mistakes which could have been avoided. The Discovery leaked so badly that the sailors talked of ‘Dundee hull’, a criticism of the design, the workmanship and the reliance on wood. Seawater was taken in from a different point every day, ruining stores and equipment. The constant need to man the pumps was accepted with fortitude by a crew in which the mixture of Royal Navy and merchant service worked with greater harmony than the pessimists had expected. The high spirits of the third lieutenant responsible for ‘holds, stores, provisions and deep water analysis’ made a special contribution to the maintenance of high morale. His name was Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton’s formal application to join the expedition, made while he was serving with the Union Castle Line, had been rejected, but he had met the son of one of Markham’s few commercial sponsors and persuaded him to intercede with the Discovery’s First Lieutenant. His boundless enthusiasm won him a place on board.
So the two great polar explorers of Edwardian Britain set sail together on the first of the four Edwardian Antarctic Expeditions. The two men were similar in temperament – determined, self-confident and resourceful – but came from widely different circumstances. Scott, although a proud Royal Navy officer, was humiliatingly poor. Shackleton, despite serving in the merchant marine, was the son of an Irish landowner who could afford, in early middle age, to move to London and study medicine and, at the same time, send his son to Dulwich College.* Both men were dedicated to ships and the sea, though Shackleton exhibited a more ebullient affection than the reticent Scott would allow himself to reveal. Shackleton convinced his biographer that ‘he went off one fine day and shipped on a sailing vessel at a shilling a month’.6 Scott was temperamentally incapable of such braggadocio. Yet, both extravert and introvert possessed what are commonly regarded as the essential features of leadership – including an unshakeable belief in duty and destiny – qualities more suited to a ‘dash to the south pole’ than to ‘a general exploration of the whole region’.
The Discovery crossed the Antarctic Circle on 3 January 1902, sailed south along the eastern shore of Victoria Land and, after a brief landing at Cape Crozier, arrived at McMurdo Sound where Scott had decided – without either consulting or telling his officers – to spend the summer and test both his men and their equipment. The exercises were planned to end with four officers – including Shackleton and Edward Wilson, the second medical officer – and eight men taking four sledges on to the great ice Barrier† under the supervision of Scott himself. The captain injured his leg in a skiing accident and Charles Royds, First Lieutenant of the Discovery, took command. On 4 March 1902 they set out for what was to be a characteristic Antarctic disaster.
Everything went wrong. The dogs fought each other and then went lame. The stores had been badly packed and burst open, and therefore strange mixtures of food had to be heated and eaten together. A typical meal was a conglomeration of tinned peas, chocolate and cheese. On the second day, wading through snow which was far thicker than they had anticipated, they advanced only five miles. On the fourth, Royds, realising that a rapid advance was beyond some of his companions’ capabilities, sent most of the party back to the ship while he, with the two strongest men, pressed on. After another five days, they reached the edge of the Barrier, then, with only five days’ rations left, turned for home to retrace the steps of a journey which had taken them nine days to complete.
Their miscalculation was to be repeated by every British Antarctic expedition. The absolute necessity of limiting the weight of their loads required them to carry just enough food to see them through their estimated journey time. Then, because the going was more difficult than they had anticipated, they fell behind their own schedule. As a result, they were left to choose between turning back or facing the Antarctic terrain (and summer temperatures of fifty degrees of frost) on half the rations which had been judged essential to their survival. They usually battled on. Not surprisingly, they did not always survive.
Royds was lucky. He completed the return journey to the ship without accident or injury. The men who (for their own safety) had returned earlier did not fare so well. They were within four miles of safety when visibility suddenly sank to zero. Instead of waiting for the snow cloud to pass, they decided – not least because they could make neither hot food nor drink – to press on. Although they did not know it, they were on a ledge halfway up a steep, ice-covered slope, yards away from a cliff edge, high above the half frozen sea. Three men lost their footing and plunged down the slope but were miraculously caught in patches of soft snow. Two stumbled over the cliff edge. The survivors struggled back to the ship.
The search then began for the two lost men. Shackleton was sent in the Discovery’s whaler to the bottom of the cliff – ‘the worst part of it’, according to Edward Wilson. ‘There was a rough sea and the drift was racing down the slopes and burying the boats in frozen spray.’7 Wilson himself took a sledge party north. Neither of the missing men was found. Almost four days later, one of them walked into camp. He had been trapped in a snowdrift and had slept, for most of the time, in the torpor that snow makes irresistible.
The expedition settled in the ship for the winter, amusing its members with entertainments which ranged from amateur theatricals to the publication of the South Polar Times, edited on board by Ernest Shackleton. Then, on 2 November 1902, Scott, Wilson and Shackleton set out south. There was no doubt about their intention. Wilson recorded in his diary, ‘Our object is to get as far south in a straight line on the Barrier as we can, reach the Pole if possible, or find some new land.’8 As part of his preparations for the ‘walk into the absolute unknown’9 he wrote a farewell letter to his fiancée, beginning (as such letters always do) with the hope that she would never read it.
On 25 November the three men reached the 80th parallel – beyond which there were no maps. Once again, because they had advanced more slowl
y than they had anticipated, the food began to run out. The weaker dogs were shot and fed to the stronger animals. Wilson was struck down with snow blindness which he attempted, unsuccessfully, to conceal. At latitude 82° 17’ south and still 480 miles from the Pole, they turned back. They had travelled 300 miles further south than any other explorer and retained enough energy to make occasional diversions from the homeward route to collect geological samples. The dogs died, or were shot, one by one. The few that survived were allowed to follow the sledges while the men pulled. ‘No more clearing of tangled traces, no more dismal stoppages, and no more whip’, wrote Scott.10 Then Shackleton became short of breath and began to spit blood – certain symptoms of scurvy. All unnecessary equipment was jettisoned and Scott and Wilson pulled the last sledge home with Shackleton stumbling by their side. ‘As near spent as three persons can be’,11 on 3 February 1903 they were reunited with their comrades. They had covered 900 miles in ninety-three days and completed the first glorious failure of Edwardian exploration.
The Morning, an old Scandinavian whaler which Markham had bought to act as relief ship, had arrived in McMurdo Sound a week earlier. Scott still had work to do before he could return, but Shackleton was adjudged too sick to remain in the Antarctic. Much against his will, he returned to Britain on board the relief ship. Seven ratings from the Discovery, who had chosen not to sign on for the homeward journey, travelled with him. Typically, Scott insisted that he had always intended to dismiss them. According to rumour, he had intended to do the same with Shackleton but had offered him the choice of sailing north ‘sick or in disgrace’.12
There were two conflicting explanations of Scott’s dissatisfaction with his third lieutenant. One was a childish argument in which both men called each other bloody fools.13 The other was Scott’s belief – apparently confirmed by implication during a lecture Scott gave in London – that Shackleton had behaved less than heroically during the return journey in 1903. Scott wrote to the Daily Mail to correct what he claimed to be a false impression. ‘Mr Shackleton … displayed the most extraordinary pluck and endurance.’14 But the damage had been done. The two men’s undoubted rivalry in the race for the Pole was assumed to be inflamed by personal antagonism.
There is no doubt that Scott came to resent Shackleton’s intrusion into what he regarded as his own territory. During his last, fatal expedition he made constant denigratory references to Shackleton’s account of his polar journeys, The Heart of Antarctic.15 Shackleton, for his part, saw his rivalry with Scott in such bitter terms that when he got home he was prepared to encourage a young Norwegian to make a dash which might have beaten both of them to the Pole. Better anyone than Scott.16
It was not only the rumour of dissent which added the excitement of controversy to Scott’s polar ambitions. He took so long to prepare for his journey north and home that the Discovery was iced in before he was ready to set sail. So, despite attempts to blast a way out of McMurdo Sound, he was forced to remain in Antarctica another full winter. The sponsor suspected that he had planned his entrapment because he wanted to remain south for longer than his contract allowed and accused him of disobeying orders. Thereafter Captain Scott was known as a ‘difficult officer’.
Colonel Sir Francis Younghusband was a Boys’ Own Paper hero. Although a scholar, he was also a man of action. When his friend George Nathaniel Curzon (then the Viceroy of India) asked him to lead an expedition to the Forbidden City of Lhasa, he saw his mission as part of ‘the Great Game’ of keeping Russia and Russian influence out of India. His formal task was to persuade the Dalai Lama to respect the commercial treaty which united India and Tibet. And at first he did no more than carry out his orders. Accompanied by an escort of Sikh riflemen he advanced across the border which divided India from Tibet, in the northern summer of 1903, camped at Khamba Jong and made clear that unless the Dalai Lama fulfilled the obligations of his treaty with Queen Victoria, he would advance on the Forbidden City of Lhasa.
The treaty in question had been signed by China and the government of India but – then, as now – Tibet was under Chinese rule and it was the Imperial Parliament which had promoted the initiative which it hoped would make the Dalai Lama look to Britain rather than to Russia. Lord Curzon’s letters expressing disquiet that the Treaty was being flouted had been returned from Lhasa unopened – convincing the always suspicious Viceroy that the Dalai Lama was in league with the Czar. The Russians assured the British Foreign Secretary that they had no territorial ambitions or acquisitive intentions, but Younghusband’s expedition continued on its way to Khamba Jong in the belief that at least it would induce the Tibetans to prove their good intentions by increasing trade on terms favourable to India. The Dalai Lama procrastinated and equivocated. London, anxious to avoid a confrontation, persuaded Curzon to recall Younghusband to India.
The new Secretary of State for India, St John Brodrick, was opposed to ‘permanent entanglements’ in Tibet, but Curzon was determined to settle the issue in India’s favour once and for all. When trade did not improve as the Treaty required and the Dalai Lama had promised, he persuaded London to approve the despatch of a second and overtly punitive expedition. ‘The advance’, Brodrick told Curzon, ‘should be made for the sole purpose of obtaining satisfaction and as soon as reparations are obtained, a withdrawal should be effected.’17 Neither the Viceroy nor Younghusband accepted Brodrick’s view. Nor did they agree with each other. Curzon wanted guarantees of improved trade and the assurances that future Russian overtures would be rejected. Younghusband hoped to free the Tibetans – ‘slaves in the power of ignorant and selfish monks’.18
Younghusband was by nature a man of independent action. Twice in the 1880s he had crossed Central Asia, travelling from Peking to India through the unexplored Mustagh Pass and, in the process, proving that the Karakoram Mountains were the watershed between India and Turkestan. At the end of the century he had explored and charted the Pamir mountain range. He was not the ideal leader of a trade delegation – even one which proposed to do business by force of arms.
In December 1904, Younghusband – accompanied by 2,000 troops, mostly Gurkhas under the command of Brigadier MacDonald – marched north, intending to make their first camp at Gyantse. They were slowed down by the bitter winter temperatures and disconcerted by the large number of Tibetans who followed them, apparently out of curiosity rather than any hope of halting or delaying the column’s progress. At one point, Younghusband became so frustrated by their silent presence that he rode out alone to confront the monks who were in command of the accompanying Tibetans. They would only discuss dates for the expedition’s withdrawal.
In March the expedition met passive resistance. The huge mob of Tibetans who blocked Younghusband’s path showed no sign of flight, but MacDonald thought that they should be disarmed. In the scuffles which followed, a Sikh was shot. It was then that the Gurkhas opened fire. Hundreds of Tibetans were slaughtered.
Younghusband reached Gyantse in April. That was as far as his orders took him, but he believed that the situation had changed and, in the absence of new instructions, decided to press on to Lhasa. By 3 August 1905, it was a city forbidden to Westerners no more. Assurances about future trade and friendship with Britain were offered and accepted. It sounded like a triumph for active imperialism, but the Westminster government – having, by then, heard about the Tibetan deaths – lost its nerve and Brodrick publicly expressed his disapproval. The King persisted in regarding Younghusband as a hero and insisted that he become a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire.
When, in the winter of 1903, it became clear that Younghusband would lead a second expedition to Tibet, Marc Auriel Stein – who was waiting to take up his appointment as both Inspector General of Education and Superintendent of Archaeology in Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province of India – decided that he must become a part of it. He had no interest in trade or the ‘Great Game’. He simply wanted to see the Forbidden City. It remained forbidden to him. When he asked that his
future employers should suggest his name to the Viceroy, his request was rejected out of hand. ‘It would obviously be inconsistent and illogical for Colonel Dean (the Chief Commissioner for the two provinces) to recommend an officer, whose services he has so recently approved, to be sent away indefinitely to work away outside the Province before that officer had even joined his appointment in the Province.’19 Stein took up his appointment in early 1904. It did not satisfy him for long. In October 1905, he left for Kashmir to prepare for a second expedition to Chinese Turkestan.
Stein’s plan was to travel through the Hindu Kush along what was called the Wakham Corridor, but the British agent for the area insisted that that part of the route – the Lowerai Pass – was too dangerous to travel until the summer. When rebuffed, Stein always applied for help to higher authority. Permission was readily granted and he set out on 19 April 1906.
Snow still covered the Lowerai. All that was possible had to be done to prevent weight and vibration causing the snow to slip away beneath their feet. No carrier was allowed a load of more than forty pounds, and fifteen-minute intervals separated the twelve detachments into which the expedition was divided. The pass was negotiated without incident and Stein believed that he would achieve the object of his early start – a guarantee that neither the Germans nor the French would make the first surveys of Chinese Turkestan. The Congress of Orientalists had divided the region between the Great Powers’ archaeologists, but the boundaries had not been drawn with any great precision and Stein knew that he was in a race. The first expedition to cross the Lop Desert would win the treasure and the glory.
The Edwardians Page 46