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

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.

FOUR Crisis

Lives there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said This is mine own, my native land Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned As home his footsteps he hath turned From wandering on a foreign strand.

Sir Walter Scott,

(mis)quoted in Scott’s address book

THE TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD SCOTT his family welcomed home in the summer of 1891 was not the homesick boy who had gone to sea in Amphion. In their memories of these last, unclouded months together as a family, his sisters would recall a more physically and mentally alert Con, stronger, more robust, more incisive, more curious, more navy. ‘He felt that things requiring to be done,’ Grace recollected, ‘must be well arranged, and must not attend on slower wits … matters once well considered and decided upon must not be allowed to be hampered by afterthoughts and questions. Details should be minutely arranged, then off and get it done with.’

His few surviving letters from this time convey the same impression, though the final phase of his journey home from Esquimault hardly bears it out. He had gone down with fever at Malta and been forced to miss Cannes, where the Amphion was on guard duty for the Queen, and on his recovery made his own way back by land from Brindisi. He had ‘looked forward to a few days in Paris’, he wrote to the O’Reillys, but ‘hating timetables and all those sorts of things’, had ‘attached’ himself to a civil engineer he had met, and woke up in Milan ‘where I didn’t ought to have been’ with no luggage and nothing to do but ‘console’ himself with a day in the cathedral.