Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South

There was a lighter side to Britannia life, too, and if there was little privacy, there was the band and dancing in the evenings, the playing fields, the tennis and racquets courts, the ship’s beagles, and Totnes and the freedom of the river on summer half-holidays. On these occasions the cadets would be given hampers of food and lemonade and ginger beer, and after rowing upstream past the Anchor Stone in the middle of the Dart where Raleigh had smoked his pipe, would swim and watch the salmon-netting before drifting back downstream in the evening, tying up among a small flotilla of boats behind the Totnes pleasure steamer while trippers threw them cakes.

There are no surviving letters of Scott’s from Britannia – nothing to suggest that he was there except the memorial in the chapel erected by his term – but for a fourteen-year-old grandson of a despised ship’s purser, anonymity itself was a victory.* It is no coincidence that the future Earl Beatty was a failure there, but if Scott’s aim was assimilation he could not have done it better, coming out of Britannia the average product of an average term in a system designed to produce the average – tenth of his term in his first exams, sixth at the end of his second and eighth in the third, with a numbing catalogue of ‘Satisfactories’ and ‘Very Satisfactories’ relieved only by a brace of ‘Fairs’ and one ‘Unsatisfactory’ in French.

His final examinations in July 1883 followed the same pattern. He scored a total of 1,457, coming sixth in Mathematics, ninth in Extra Subjects, thirteenth in seamanship, and seventh overall in a term of twenty-six. He passed out with First Class Certificates in Mathematics and Seamanship, and a Second in Extra Subjects. Of a possible year’s sea-time – to count against the time needed, in the slow grind of promotion, to qualify for his lieutenant’s exams – he was allowed eleven months. His ‘Attention Paid to Study’ was rated ‘Very Moderate’, his abilities ‘Very Good’, and his conduct ‘as noted on Cadet’s Certificate in Captain’s own writing’, also ‘Very Good’.

He would have looked at those before him in the list and those below and seen nothing either to fear or to hope. Four years before him there had been Jellicoe, the year behind him Beatty, but there were no stars in his term. There were any number of future admirals there, and fourteen out of the twenty-six would make the crucial step of post-captain, but there was no one except Scott himself whose name would ever reach the wider public. None of this, though, helped. Without money, without ‘interest’, without a naval pedigree, without a war to fight, he was ready for that gentlemanly anonymity the Outlands Scotts had been aiming at.

THREE Scott’s Navy

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.