A First Rate Tragedy

by Diana Preston

  All this activity had been watched with growing concern by Sir Clements Markham, the man who was to play such a dominant role in Scott’s life and, some would say, in his death. The passion of Markham’s life was to bring a British Antarctic expedition into being and he was entirely clear about the form it should take. He did not advocate a dash to the South Pole. Neither did he believe that this was what British science desired. Instead he was convinced that what it wanted was a steady, continuous, laborious and systematic exploration of the whole southern region, with all the appliances of the modern investigator, and that this exploration should be undertaken by the Royal Navy. However, it was implicit that, should there be a scramble for the Pole, Britain should get there first.

  Markham was born in 1830, a bare four days after the foundation of the Royal Geographical Society he was to boss, bully and cajole into championing his cause. He became a naval officer. He also became something of an explorer manqué. In 1851, as a young midshipman he sailed on an expedition to discover what had happened to Franklin and struck up an admiring friendship with Lieutenant Leopold McClintock who pioneered the sledging techniques later adopted by Scott. McClintock advocated the establishment of depots of supplies in advance of major sledging trips. He was also a firm believer that fit, well-trained men were more reliable beasts of burden than dogs. Manhauling was best.

  The expedition failed to uncover Franklin’s grisly fate. This task was left to McClintock to complete a few years later. By then, however, Markham had quitted the navy to throw himself into full-time exploration in Peru. He was forced to change his plans when his father died, leaving him penniless. Undefeated, he managed to transfer from a dull job clerking in the Inland Revenue into what was to become the India Office. Here he used his considerable persuasive powers to convince his seniors that the Peruvian cinchona tree whose bark produced quinine should be introduced into India. Soon he was off on his travels again, smuggling seedlings from Peru to India and helping to establish a successful quinine industry there.

  Next came a spell as a geographer on loan to the British military expedition which defeated the Emperor of Abyssinia at Magdala. He was also elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. This was the perfect playground for a man of his talents and interests. The Society’s audiences were eager to hear the latest travellers’ tales and Markham became a dominant figure. According to the Society’s librarian, ‘There was a rich fullness of life in the Royal Geographical Society in the early nineties of the nineteenth century . . . Sir Clements Markham . . . overflowing with enthusiasm like a boy, used to stage a series of brilliant evening meetings to commemorate the deeds of Prince Henry the Navigator, Columbus, Franklin and others . . .’6

  His romantic infatuation with the heroic exploits of the Elizabethan voyagers, in particular, masked a steely determination, obstinacy and truculence. Many found this combination wearing but these qualities helped him to achieve his great aim – the mounting of a British Antarctic Expedition. In 1893, on his election as President of the Society, he promptly announced that the equipping and dispatch of an Antarctic expedition would be the chief object of his term of office, and appointed an Antarctic committee which he, naturally, chaired. He had been preparing for this moment for years and was anxious to lose no time. Delay would only allow foreign rivals to steal Britain’s rightful thunder.

  Rivals like Borchgrevink for instance. The Norwegian was not noted for either his modesty or his tact and had addressed the International Geographical Congress in London in 1895, proudly laying out the achievements of his first Antarctic voyage and declaring his intention to mount another expedition. To Markham it seemed he had flung down the gauntlet. He had done his best to thwart Borchgrevink’s plans for further exploration, including casting doubts on the seaworthiness of the Southern Cross, so it had been a severe blow when Sir George Newnes agreed to fund his second 1898 expedition.

  However, the 1895 Congress had passed a unanimous resolution demanding that Antarctic exploration should be given the highest priority. Thus encouraged, Markham assailed the Treasury and the Admiralty for funds. When this failed he turned to his own Society and persuaded them to vote £5,000 and to launch a public appeal. An astute operator, Markham had realized for some time that it would take more than patriotic fervour to secure the backing he needed. He had to have the scientific establishment on his side and the Royal Geographical Society was not sufficient. He needed that even more august body the Royal Society. Honeyed words besought the Royal Society to lend its ‘great name’ to the enterprise and, in February 1898, it graciously agreed.

  Gratifying as this was, by March 1899 Markham still only had £14,000. He needed a Sir George Newnes of his own and he found him in the shape of the wealthy businessman Llewellyn Longstaff, who put up £25,000. Markham was delighted. To his even greater pleasure the Treasury then promised £40,000 if an equal sum were raised privately. Markham succeeded and could now turn his attention to the important issue of who should lead the expedition. Markham had firm views. Despite the involvement of the Royal Society, it was axiomatic to him that the leader should not be a scientist but a naval officer with the cool well-disciplined mind only naval training could give. Although the advancement of science was an important part of the enterprise, what really mattered to Markham were geographical exploration and the chance for young naval officers to make their mark.

  For the leader must also be young. Sir Clements believed strongly that this was a task requiring not only the physical resourcefulness and courage of youth, but also its intellectual flexibility. ‘Elderly men’, he wrote, ‘are not accessible to new ideas, and have not the energy and capacity necessary to meet emergencies.’ Furthermore, they were ‘stiff old organisms’ hindered, not helped, by experience!7 He may also have found younger men more malleable.

  Whom could he find worthy of the challenge? He had always taken a deep, and, it has been alleged latterly, perhaps improper interest in young naval midshipmen and cadets and their careers, sizing them up for his great quest. Captain Wilson Barker, commander of the Worcester, the Merchant Navy’s training ship, forbade his boys to accept invitations to his home. Whatever Markham’s deeper motives, perhaps not even acknowledged fully to himself, he certainly had plenty of opportunity to observe the navy’s fledgling stars. Markham tells in his book The Lands of Silence, published after Scott’s death, how he singled out Scott. His cousin Albert Markham, himself an Arctic explorer, was commodore of the Royal Navy’s Training Squadron which, in March 1887, found itself in the sparkling waters of the Caribbean, accompanied by Sir Clements.

  In West Indian sunshine a clutch of young midshipmen were making their final preparations to race their cutters across the Bay of St Kitts. This was just the kind of contest the 57-year-old Sir Clements relished and he watched eagerly from the bridge of HMS Active. The challenge for the young officers was to get their cutters under way, make sail and beat up to windward for a mile, round a buoy, then lower mast and sail and row back. It was an exciting race and three young men battled for victory – Tommy Smyth of the Active, Hyde Parker of the Volage and an 18-year-old from the Rover, Robert Falcon Scott. For a time it was touch and go between Scott and Hyde Parker but Scott won, little realizing that this victory was to be one of the defining moments of his life.

  The commodore, probably at Sir Clements’ prompting, invited Scott to dinner four days later – ‘a charming boy’ recorded Markham in his diary. Sir Clements talked to the young midshipman and fell under his spell. One of his colleagues was later to remark of Scott that no one could be more charming when he chose. With his intense blue eyes radiating intelligence and energy he made a deep impression on the older man. Markham later wrote in his book that this was the moment when he concluded that Scott was the man destined to command the Antarctic Expedition. However, this was romantic hindsight. Markham had his eye on some other promising young officers as well and the decision was by no means so clear-cut. Fate was to take a hand throwing Scott in Ma
rkham’s path on two further occasions.

  Markham came across Scott again at Vigo. By then Scott was torpedo lieutenant of the Empress of India. Markham found his earlier impressions confirmed. He was more than ever impressed by Scott’s ‘evident vocation’ for such a command.8 However, the critical encounter came in 1899 when Scott was serving as torpedo lieutenant in the Majestic. On a warm June day he was on leave in London and ‘chancing one day to walk down the Buckingham Palace Road, I espied Sir Clements on the opposite pavement, and naturally crossed, and as naturally turned and accompanied him to his house. That afternoon I learned for the first time that there was such a thing as a prospective Antarctic Expedition; two days later I wrote applying to command it.’

  As Scott himself wrote, at the time he had ‘no predilection for Polar exploration’. However, he had other aspirations that this adventure might help him to realize. The melancholy dreamer and the man of action that were two facets of his complex nature might both find fulfilment in the unknown continent. Also, Scott believed in fate.

  2

  Scott – The Early Days

  Each of the five men destined to journey to the South Pole and to die on the Great Ice Barrier was a complex character, but none more so than Robert Falcon Scott. He was not a natural leader. Although he had many inspirational qualities, the responsibility of leading an expedition, of being accountable for so many men’s lives, of taking the crucial decisions was a strain. He was haunted by a fear of being ‘below par’. He was also one of his own greatest critics, writing, ‘The inherited vice from my side of the family is indolence . . . I had to force myself into being strenuous’. In his farewell message to his wife when he knew he was facing death, he warned her to guard their son against the dangers of idleness. It was a warning from the heart and a moving testimony to his struggle to master the conflicting sides of his nature. He confessed to his wife early in their relationship that ‘I shall never fit into my round hole’.1

  Even as a little boy Scott was a curious mixture. His father called him ‘Old Mooney’ because he was such a dreamer. Physically quite weak, he was a late developer, with a horror of blood and a love of solitude. Yet he was also the first to devise daring games for his brothers and sisters including such alarming tricks as shinning up a porch, over the glass roof and dropping about twelve feet to the ground. A slip could have meant a fatal crash through the glass on to the stone floor below. He could be moody and difficult and given to explosive bursts of temper. He hated losing at any game. Yet he was also warm-hearted and affectionate with a huge capacity to charm and was deeply attached to his large family throughout his life.

  Scott was born on 6 June 1868 in Devonport to a middle-class family with a strong naval tradition and, according to family lore, a connection with Sir Walter Scott. It was also rumoured that a great-great grandfather had fought for Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden and subsequently fled to France with his wife and baby son. Whatever the case, some thirty years later this son, named Robert, returned to the British Isles, settled in Devon as a school master and told romantic tales of an uncle hanged after Culloden. He married a local girl and had four sons all of whom went into the navy.

  The services tradition was still strong by the time of Scott’s father John, but he was considered too weak and delicate. He was brought up instead to run the Hoegate Street Brewery in Plymouth which his father and uncle had bought with the prize money won from the Napoleonic wars and which he duly inherited. After a family rumpus he also inherited Outlands, a pretty, rambling house set in a couple of acres just outside Devonport, which had been in the Scott family since 1819. John Scott married Hannah Canning, a handsome, energetic woman whose father was a Lloyd’s surveyor, Commissioner of Pilotage and a member of the Plymouth Chamber of Commerce. Two daughters, Ettie and Rose, came first, then Robert Falcon. After him came another daughter Grace, a brother Archie and finally Katherine.

  Neatly sandwiched in the middle of this big band of brothers and sisters Scott had a happy, carefree childhood. They made their own amusements because, although they lived in a comfortable house with plenty of servants, there was little ready money to spare. The big annual treat was to go to the pantomime at the Plymouth Theatre. Scott loved the mystery and the drama of the theatre and the magic of those yearly trips to see Robinson Crusoe or the Giant Grumble Grim stayed with him all his life.

  One of his sisters left a description of growing up at Outlands which depicts a life out of the pages of E. Nesbitt’s stories except they found no psammead in the sandpit! Hannah Scott spent much of her time nursing her elderly parents and John Scott was a fond but not very vigorous parent. As a result the children could largely please themselves, easily outmanoeuvring nurses and governesses. There were daring climbs over high locked gates to the village sweet shop in search of sherbet and humbugs and adventures floating in a tub down a stream that meandered through the shrubbery. At eight Scott apparently appointed himself ‘admiral’, devised a version of gunpowder and blew his enemy ‘the Terror Of Devon’ (actually a wooden plank) out of the water. ‘Con’, as his family always called him from his middle name, came to grief one day when his tub overturned, soaking him and his fetching but impractical black velvet suit. His sister recalled how his father seized him by the seat of his trousers in fits of laughter while the young Scott howled his eyes out.

  There were other mishaps. Scott cut himself quite badly while playing with his first penknife at the age of seven. Rather than make a fuss he plunged his injured hand into his pocket and wandered off as if nothing had happened. This story is often cited, in the way that ‘improving tales’ are attached to heroes in their youth, as early evidence of Scott’s heroic destiny and linked to the tale of his uncle who, mauled by a tiger, with imperial sang-froid cauterized the wound himself. However, though a remarkable piece of self-control Scott’s behaviour was probably practical rather than heroic – if he had made a fuss the knife would have been taken away. Also, the sight of blood made him faint.

  There are other insights into life at Outlands – the trips to the nearby parish church of St Mark’s with Scott wriggling about in his Eton suit and white collar; his departure every day to school in Stoke Damerel on his pony Beppo when he reached the age of eight and had outgrown his sisters’ governess; his affection for animals whether it was stout little Beppo, the family’s dogs or the peacock that shrieked and preened on the lawn. One day, as he jogged gently home from school he became distracted by a particular striking view. Dismounting to get a better vantage point he allowed Beppo to wander off. A small disconsolate figure came trudging up the drive with some serious explaining to do. He had, however, stopped to give Beppo’s description to every police station he passed, demonstrating that the dreamer had a strongly practical side as well.

  Nevertheless young ‘Con’ began to cause his parents concern. His bouts of dreamy abstraction seemed if anything to grow and he appeared backward at school compared with his younger brother, the energetic and cheerful Archie. He was sent to board at Foster’s Naval Preparatory School at Stubbington House, Fareham, to prepare him for competing for a naval cadetship and in the holidays his father made sure that he crammed. What Scott thought of all this can only be guessed. What is known is that he carved his initials in one of the forms, made reasonable but not startling progress, was popular and – initial carving aside – reportedly one of the best-behaved boys the school had ever had.

  On the eve of his thirteenth birthday Scott sat successfully for the cadetship exam and on 15 July 1881 left Outlands for the harsh discipline of the naval training ship HMS Britannia moored in the River Dart. He quickly knuckled down, recognizing the need to conceal the sensitive, solitary side of his nature. There is photograph of him as a naval cadet – an earnest-featured young boy with hair neatly brushed under his cap gazing at the camera with the faintest suggestion of a smile. Crammed in with 150 other cadets he was subjected to a regime that demanded punctuality, precision and presence of mind. The penalti
es for those who were lax or failed to concentrate or conform were severe. He learned to sleep in a hammock and was initiated into the mysteries of seamanship, including navigation, astronomy, physics and geometry. There were physical challenges too. First-term boys were expected to climb to the foremast head and by the second term they had to exhibit their daring by climbing a dizzying 120 feet above deck.

  Scott found the necessary reserves of concentration and did well, despite the tiresome discovery that, like Nelson and Captain Hornblower, he suffered from seasickness, something that would trouble him all his life. The family was delighted when he passed his exams and was duly rated a midshipman. He joined H.M.S. Boadicea, the flagship of the Cape Squadron, in August 1883.

  Slight, delicate and reserved – before going to Stubbington House the family doctor had prophesied that he was too narrow-shouldered and -chested for the navy – life aboard the Boadicea with her company of nearly 450 was probably rather a strain. It was certainly a rigorous existence. The diet would have comprised such unappetizing items as salt beef, salt pork, pea soup, cabbage and potatoes, plus cocoa and hard biscuit.