SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC
DAVID CRANE

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

MAPS

NOTE ON DISTANCES, TEMPERATURES AND WEIGHTS

1 St Paul’s, 14 February 1913

2 Childhood and Dartmouth

3 Scott’s Navy

4 Crisis

5 Enter Markham

6 Preparations

7 South

8 Into the Ice

9 Harsh Lessons

10 Antarctic Night

11 Man Proposeth … God Disposeth

12 The Southern Journey

13 Survival

14 A Second Winter

15 Last Season

16 A Long Wait

17 Escape from the Ice

18 The Reluctant Lion

19 The Pull of the South

20 Of Lions and Lionesses

21 Marking Time

22 Making Ready

23 South Again

24 Challenges

25 Return to the Ice

26 Depot-Laying

27 Disaster

28 Winter

29 The Barrier

30 Without Priority

31 Ars Moriendi

P.S. IDEAS, INTERVIEWS & FEATURES …

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE BOOK

READ ON

EPILOGUE

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOTES

PRAISE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

MAPS

The known extent of Antarctica in 1893

Present-day Antarctica

Ross Island and McMurdo Sound

Scott’s Southern Journey, November 1902–January 1903

Frustration: Mist obscured the view up the inlet to a Nunatak that would have shown them that it was a glacier

The Conquest of the Western Mountains

The Discovery Expedition, 1901–04

Disaster: February – March 1911

Polar Journey, 1911–12

NOTE ON DISTANCES, TEMPERATURES AND WEIGHTS

Unless stated, all distances are given in geographical (i.e. nautical) miles. One geographical mile equals 1.15 statute miles, or c.2,025 yards (1,852 metres). Temperatures are given in Fahrenheit and weights in imperial measures.

ONE St Paul’s, 14 February 1913

I am more proud of my most loved son’s goodness than for anything he has done and all this glory & honour the country is giving him is naturally a gratification to a Mother’s heart but very little consolation – you know how much my dear son was to me, and I have never a bitter memory or an unkind word to recall.

Hannah Scott, 21 February 1913

Your children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying ‘What mean these stones?’

Joshua IV. 21. Scott Memorial, Port Chalmers, New Zealand

IN THE EARLY HOURS of 10 February 1913, an old converted whaler ‘crept like a phantom’ into the little harbour of Oamaru on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island and dropped anchor. For many of the men on board this was their first smell of grass and trees in over twenty-six months, but with secrecy at a premium only two of her officers were landed before the ship weighed anchor and slipped back out to sea to disappear into the pre-dawn gloom from which she had emerged.

While the ship steamed offshore in a self-imposed quarantine, the officers were taken by the nightwatchman to the harbour master’s home, and first thing next morning to the Oamaru post office. More than two years earlier an elaborate and coded arrangement had been set in place to release what everyone had then hoped would be very different news, but with contractual obligations still to be honoured, a cable was sent and the operator confined to house arrest until Central News could exploit its exclusive rights to the scoop the two men had brought.

The ship that had so quietly stolen into Oamaru harbour was the Terra Nova, the news was of Captain Scott’s death on his return from the South Pole, and within hours it was around the world. For almost a year Britain had been learning to live with the fact that Scott had been beaten by the Norwegian Amundsen in the ‘Race for the Pole’, but nothing in any reports from the Antarctic had prepared the country for the worst disaster in her polar history since the loss of Sir John Franklin more than sixty years earlier. ‘There is a dreadful report in the Portuguese newspapers,’ a bewildered Sir Clements Markham, the ‘father’ of British Antarctic exploration and Scott’s first patron, scrawled from his Lisbon hotel the following day, ‘that Captain Scott reached the South Pole on January 18th and that he perished in a snow storm – a telegram from New Zealand … If this is true we have lost the greatest polar explorer that ever lived … We can never hope to see his like again. Telegraph if it is true. I am plunged in grief.’

If there had ever been any doubt of its truth in London, it did not last long, and with Scott’s widow, at sea on her way to New Zealand to meet her husband, almost alone in her ignorance, the nation prepared to share in Markham’s grief. Less than a year earlier the sinking of the Titanic had brought thousands to St Paul’s Cathedral to mourn, and within four days of the first news from Oamaru the crowds were out in even greater force, silently waiting in the raw chill of a February dawn for a memorial service that was not scheduled to start until twelve.

There could have been nowhere more fitting than the burial place of Nelson and Wellington for the service, no church that so boldly embodied the mix of public and private sorrow that characterised the waiting crowd. During the second half of the old century Dean Stanley had done all he could to assert the primacy of Westminster Abbey, but as London’s Protestant cathedral, built by a Protestant for a Protestant country, St Paul’s spoke for a special sense of Englishness and national election as nowhere else could. ‘Within the Cathedral all is hushed and dim,’ recorded The Times’s correspondent. ‘The wintry light of the February morning is insufficient to illuminate the edifice, and circles of electric light glow with a golden radiance in the choir and nave and transepts. Almost every one attending the service is in mourning or dressed in sombre garments. Gradually the building fills, and as it does so one catches glimpses of the scarlet tunics of distinguished soldiers, of scarlet gowns, the garb of City aldermen, and of the golden epaulettes of naval officers shining out conspicuously against the dark background of their uniforms. The band of the Coldstream Guards is stationed beneath the dome … and this, too, affords a vivid note of colour. Behind the band sit a number of bluejackets.’

For all the trappings of the occasion, however, the statesmen, foreign dignitaries and diplomats, it was the simplicity of the service that was so striking. On the stroke of twelve the King, dressed in the uniform of an admiral of the fleet, took his place, and as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and the Dean of St Paul’s processed with the other clergy into the choir, the congregation sang ‘Rock of Ages’. The Lord’s Prayer was then read, followed by the antiphon ‘Lead me Lord in Thy Righteousness’, and Psalms XXIII – ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ – and XC – ‘Lord Thou Hast Been Our Refuge’.

It was a short service, without a sermon. ‘Behold I shew you a mystery,’ Dean Inge read from 1 Corinthians XV:

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.

O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?

As St Paul’s ringing challenge faded away, the sounds of a drum roll swelled, and the Dead March from Saul filled the cathedral. For all those present this was a moment of almost unbearable poignancy, but with that ceremonial genius that the imperial age had lately mastered, the most memorable and starkly simple was still to come.

As the Prayer of Committal was read, the names of the dead – Robert Falcon Scott, Lawrence Oates, Edmund Wilson, Henry Bowers, Edgar Evans – filled the ‘stricken silence’ of the dimly lit church with their absence. ‘As we go down to the dust,’ the choir sang, just as they had done to the same Kieff chant at the memorial service for those lost on the Titanic, ‘and weeping o’er the grave we make our song: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Give rest, O Christ, to Thy servants with Thy Saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.’

With a final hymn sung by the whole congregation, and a blessing from the Archbishop, the service was over. The National Anthem was sung to the accompaniment of the Coldstreams’ band, and as the sound reached the streets outside the vast crowd of some ten thousand still waiting took it up. The King was escorted to the south door, and to the strains of Beethoven’s ‘Funeral March on the death of a hero’, the congregation slowly dispersed.

For all its simplicity and familiarity, it had in some ways been an odd service, combining as it did the raw immediacy of a funeral with the more celebratory distance of a memorial. It might have been only four days since the news from Oamaru reached England, but by that time Scott and his men had been dead for almost a year, their bodies lying frozen in the tent in which they had been found. ‘There is awe in the thought that it all happened a year ago,’ the Daily Sketch had written on 11 February, shamelessly milking the idea for all the pathos it was worth. ‘When Amundsen came back in the spring of last year and Polar discussions were in all men’s mouths and newspapers – even then, the Englishmen, the goal accomplished, lay quiet in the snows. Through the months since … while wives and friends set forth for meetings and counted time, they lay oblivious. All was over for them long ago.’

For the families of the dead there could be nothing but bitterness in the thought, but for the nation as a whole it made the transition from grief to celebration that much easier. In its columns the Sketch might ‘quiver in unison’ with the ‘lonely pathetic figure’ of Scott’s wife ‘on the far Pacific’, but the lapse of time had an important psychological impact, subsuming the recent past into a longer historical narrative in a way that enabled the country to metamorphose the reality of that tent into an icy shrine, and Scott and his men into the quasi-legendary heroes they immediately became.

Above all else, however, it was a sense of absence rather than presence that contributed most profoundly to the mood of national mourning in a way that looked forward to the psychology of the Cenotaph and the Unknown Soldier rather than back to any precedent. During the November of 1920 the hundreds of thousands who filed past the tomb of the Unknown Soldier could all superimpose their own image on the nameless and rankless corpse, and in a similar way the men and women who mourned Scott all had different ideas of precisely what they were mourning.

To some the meaning of the deaths of Scott and his men was religious, to others secular; to some they were the embodiment of Christian sacrifice or English chivalry, to others again of pacific courage or scientific dedication. ‘No more pathetic and tragic story has ever been unfolded,’ The Times’s leader announced on the twelfth, just twenty-four hours after the country had begun to digest the news, ‘than that of the gallant band of Antarctic explorers whose unavailing heroism now fills the public mind with mingled grief and admiration … Nothing in the painful yet inspiring narrative is more touching than the fidelity with which CAPTAIN SCOTT and his comrades, fighting for their very lives with the remorseless forces of Nature, clung in ever increasing peril and weakness to the scientific records and geological specimens which it was the primary object of their expedition to secure. It is thus that they snatched victory out of the jaws of death … The admiralty regards them, and the Navy honours them, as “killed in action”, and the civilized world will endorse the verdict.’

There was something, however, about the response to Scott’s death that differentiates it sharply from the mourning over the grave of the Unknown Soldier. There can be no doubting the reality of people’s grief when the news reached England, but it was a grief shot through with a sense of gratitude to the men who had restored to them their emotional birthright as Englishmen. ‘The keynote of this wonderful “In Memoriam”,’ the Daily Sketch proudly wrote, ‘was at once its simplicity and its quiet exultation.’ ‘To mourn!’ it demanded, the day after the memorial service. ‘Yes, we had come to mourn – yet not with wailing and lamenting, but rather with a song of thankfulness for that these sons of our common country had died as they had lived, in the spirit which is the noblest heritage of Englishmen … Could Nelson, sleeping in the crypt below, hear those mighty trumps of a nation’s requiem, he would know that though the years roll on, yet, as long as England expects, there are heroes of her blood and race to answer truly to the call.’

The real value of their deaths, The Times insisted, ‘is moral and spiritual, and therefore in the truest sense national. It is a proof that in an age of depressing materialism men can still be found to face known hardship, heavy risk, and even death, in pursuit of an idea, and that the unconquerable will can carry them through, loyal to the last to the charge they have undertaken. That is the temper of men who build empires, and while it lives among us we shall be capable of maintaining the Empire that our fathers builded … So we owe honour and gratitude to Captain Scott and his companions for showing that the solid stuff of national character is still among us, and that men are still willing to be “killed in action” for an idea.’

The news of Scott’s death would have struck a chord at any time, but what is easily ignored in all this is that it came at a moment when Britain was in urgent need of the kind of reassurance it seemed to offer. The horrors of the First World War have cast so seductive a glow over the age that immediately preceded it that it is easy to forget what it was really like, seeing it instead as a last Golden Age, a final swansong of patrician ease and self-confidence before the watershed of the Somme and Jutland destroyed its certainties for ever.

There is something about the iconography of the period, too – something about its ripeness of institutional expression, its imperial gravity, its command of ritual – that no amount of historical deconstruction can shake. This has nothing in any crude sense to do with the mere exercise of power, but from the rent rolls of its statesmen to the flickering cinematographic dumb-show of the old Queen’s Jubilee parade, the age before the Great War still projects an illusion of ceremonial and functional harmony that seems to paralyse dissent.

It was, after all, little more than a decade since a cabinet that boasted a marquess for Prime Minister, another at the War Office, a duke for Lord President, the son of a duke as Secretary of India, an earl, a viscount, three barons and a brace of baronets, seemed to hold out to Englishmen a promise of social and historic permanence. In the United States – the power of the future – and France – the historic enemy of the past – politics and social status had long parted company, but faced with a government that seemed to reconcile privilege and responsibility, heredity and power as effortlessly as Salisbury’s did, it is hard not to succumb to the illusion.

Yet if images of the King presiding at Cowes, of Balfour golfing at North Berwick, or Sir Edward Grey fly-fishing on the Itchen, seem to extend the shelf-life of the ‘Splendid’ in Splendid Isolation long beyond its doctrinal usefulness, it certainly did not seem a Golden Age at the time. The Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin’s, idea of heaven might be to sit in an English garden and receive telegrams alternately announcing British victories by land and sea, but after the humiliations of the Boer War at the hands of a nation no bigger than ‘Flintshire and Denbighshire combined’, it was not just Kipling who could see the writing on the walls of Tyre.

There are certain moments in modern British history that have a psychological impact out of all proportion to their practical consequences, and the war in South Africa is one of these. In the past even such defeats as Majuba Hill could be transmuted into allegories of British heroism, but as Europe howled in moral outrage at British concentration camps, and British troops came invalided home in their thousands, the jubilant vision of Herbert Bismarck, the anglophobe son of the ‘Iron Chancellor’, of a country ‘smothered in its own fat’ seemed something more than Prussian wishful thinking.

It was as if Britain, as it began the long retreat from empire and abandoned its historic isolation for the entanglements of European alliances, had collectively glimpsed the possibility that the whole fabric of its power was nothing but a show. From the moment that naval architects had created the Dreadnought the navy that had reigned supreme at the Queen’s Jubilee was so much scrap. But what if the whole edifice of power was a charade? What if the obsessions with espionage and invasion in the popular fiction of the day were justified? What if the paranoid hatred of decadence and homosexuality and ‘foreign influence’ was no more than a last, dying protest of a stricken empire? What if the very texture of national life, the physical and imaginative landscape of its identity, its historical sense of self, were all equally flawed? What if ‘The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers and their servants in their stations and degrees,’ as Wells wrote, had ‘even now passed away’? ‘The great houses stand in the parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers, the English country-side … persists obstinately in looking what it was. It is like an early day in a fine October. The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for a while, as it were half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing forever. One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience end, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire … ’

In such a climate of doubt and self-questioning, the outpouring of national pride over Scott was no demonstration of imperialist triumphalism but its reverse, its militancy the militancy of weakness, its stridency the stridency of a country desperate for assurance that the moral qualities that once made it great were still intact. ‘Children,’ Arthur Machen – the great mythologiser of ‘The Angel of Mons’ – began the story read to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren across the country as Scott’s memorial service at St Paul’s opened, ‘you are about to hear the true story of five of the bravest and best men who have ever lived on the earth since the world began. You are English boys and girls, and you must often have heard England spoken of as the greatest country in the world, or perhaps you have been told that the British Empire … is the greatest Empire that the world has ever seen … when we say that England is great we are not thinking of the size of the country or of the number of people who live in it. We are thinking of much more important things, and if you listen to the story that is to be read to you, you will find out what greatness really does mean.’

‘Oh! England! oh! England! What men have done for thee,’ responded one eleven-year-old girl, Mary Steel, and her sob of relieved gratitude found an echo across the country. ‘Amundsen says he won the Cup,’ began one extraordinary poem sent to Scott’s bereaved family by an E. Clacy – a poem that in its grotesque fusion of sporting and religious symbolism brings into single focus every outdated fantasy of Arthurian chivalry and gamesplaying, dog-loving, xenophobic English pre-eminence that ever floated an empire.

Amundsen says he won the Cup

Then why do our men guard it?

Two lie prone, but one sits up

Over his hands there hovers a Cup

Amundsen says he won that Cup

Then why does our man hold it?

‘Devil’s Ballroom’ and ‘Devil’s Ravine’

Naming the vastnesses! What does he mean?

‘Shambles’, the dogs explain that name

Where they lie butchered – exhausted and lame

With bringing him up! …

Over the tent and into the tent

Floats the wonderful Cup

Hovers and touches those that lie prone

And then to the Master – who sits alone

Fire – Blood – or Wine?

He sees right into the Thing Divine

For he sits up

Into his hands – the Holy Grail

Into his body – cease of pain

Into his heart – a voice says ‘Hail’

And he knows he has won that Cup.

Amundsen says he won the Cup

Then why does our man hold it?

If ever a man needed saving from the enthusiasm of his admirers, in fact, it was Scott. During the course of his life the impassioned support of Sir Clements Markham would invariably be as much a liability as a help, and in death the jingoistic and imperialist uses to which his name and story were pressed guaranteed that when the reaction came it would be bitter and violent. ‘I found an essentially little man,’ Trevor Griffiths, the dramatist and influential populariser of the hostile modern ‘Scott myth’, wrote in 1985, ‘of deeply ordinary talent: light, conventional, fearful, uncertain, manipulative, ill-tempered, irrational, secretive, driven, at times touching in his misery, trapped inside a particular class-specific Englishness, unequipped, uncharismatic.’

Were the sentiments expressed in E. Clacy’s poem the only ones heard at Scott’s death, the backlash that has seen his reputation plummet over the last years might be understandable; but his tragedy touched the popular imagination in ways that had nothing to do with imperial destiny, ‘class-specifics’ or ‘Englishness’. The race for the Poles in the Heroic Age of Exploration had certainly excited intense national rivalries, but as the telegrams, donations and letters of condolence poured in from Toronto and Lyttelton, and from Tempico and Christiania, all that was forgotten in a sympathy that predicates a shared – and almost proprietorial – pride in his end.

This picture of universal sorrow is not the whole story, of course – even in these first days the doubts and questions were there – but when Dean Inge declared Scott’s triumph over the grave, it was not just an expression of Christian hope but an absolute conviction that Death had no sting to wound a man who had lived and died as Scott. When he was interviewed in New York, Shackleton might publicly wonder how Scott’s party could have succumbed to a mere blizzard, but not in even his most sanguine moments could he have seen what would happen, or anticipate his own posthumous metamorphosis from Edwardian freebooter into middle-management guru while the beau ideal of English chivalry became a byword for bungling incompetence.

There are few things that more poignantly signal the remoteness of Dean Inge’s age from our own, because while nothing is more inevitable or healthier than historical revisionism, what has happened to Scott’s reputation requires some other label. It might seem odd from this distance that neo-Georgian England should find in a Darwin-carrying agnostic of Scott’s cast the type of Christian sacrifice, but the historical process that has shrunk the rich, complex and deeply human set of associations that once clustered round his story into an allegory of arrogance, selfishness and moral stupidity is every bit as extraordinary. How has a life that was once seen as a long struggle of duty been transformed into the embodiment of self-interested calculation? How has the name of the meticulous and ‘cautious explorer’ his men followed become synonymous with reckless waste? How has the son and husband his mother and wife described become the type of English emotional inadequacy? By what process does a tenderness for animal life become a pathological disorder that belongs to the psychology of military incompetence? What is it that stops a whole age hearing in the cadences, the measure and the sentiment of Scott’s last harrowing appeal to the public, the words of the dying Hamlet?

The most tempting answer is suggested by the cultural and political overtones implicit in Trevor Griffiths’ use of the word ‘Englishness’, because if Scott was once celebrated as the incarnation of everything an Englishman should be, he is now damned as the sad embodiment of everything he actually was. It is very hard to imagine that Scott’s reputation would have taken the battering it has if he had been Irish or Australian, but in his real and perceived ‘Englishness’ the hero of St Paul’s has answered the revisionist needs of a post-colonial age as perfectly as General Gordon once did those of Bloomsbury.

But if the historiography of the Heroic Age has always been as political as the expeditions themselves – polar archives bear witness to that – it would be too easy to take this as the full answer. From the early 1960s historians and biographers were constantly exploiting one or other partisan line, yet buried beneath their different cultural or partisan agenda lies a more fundamental lack of sympathy for Scott’s age that has nothing to do with nationality or bias.

In many ways, of course, the simple truth is that we know more about Scott’s weaknesses and the failures of his leadership than did the congregation at St Paul’s, but it is not that we see him differently from the way they did, but that that we see him the same, and instinctively do not like it. As an age we no longer hear what A.C. Bradley called the ‘Othello Music’ of high eloquence, no longer, mercifully, believe it. At the time of Scott’s death men and women clutched at the proof he offered that the qualities that had once made Britain great were not extinct, but with the knowledge of what lay only two years ahead – the hidebound failure of Jutland, the hopeless heroism and obscene waste of the Western Front – the ideals of duty, self-sacrifice, discipline, patriotism and hierarchy associated with his tragedy take on a different and more sinister colouring. This is too seminal and too valid an insight to give up, but somewhere between the Scott of St Paul’s and the Scott of modern myth lies a profoundly more complex and interesting figure. Of all the explorers of the Heroic Age he is the most interesting, and if Scott had never gone to the Pole, and we had never heard of him, his life, with its alternating rhythms of obscurity and fame, of duty and ambition, of success and failure and the corrosive temptations of them both, would still be the stuff of the English novel from George Eliot to George Gissing.

It was Scott’s fate, however, to be plucked from the pages of a domestic novel and placed, quite literally, between the covers of an A.E.W. Mason tale of heroic adventure. It is the moral of Gray’s ‘Elegy’ in reverse: a life destined for Stoke Poges rerouted to St Paul’s. This is its fascination. It would be moving enough in any context, but set it against its Antarctic background, against a world where every hairline crack becomes a fissure, every inadequacy is ruthlessly exposed, every motive publicly interrogated and every resource of moral and physical courage challenged, and one has the unique appeal of Scott’s story.

‘To me, and perhaps to you,’ wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the party who found the frozen bodies of Scott and his companions, ‘the interest in this story is the men, and it is the spirit of the men.’ Of no one is this more true than of Scott himself. It is this that makes a rounded sense of his whole life and personality so crucial to any understanding of the successes and failures of his two great expeditions. History can take one so far; science can answer so many questions. But those ultimate questions that still swirl about Scott’s last tent can be resolved by neither. They belong to a sense of Scott the man and to the imagination in a way that lifts his story out of the esoterica of polar history and places it in the mainstream of human experience.

TWO Childhood and Dartmouth

There was a time, and not so long ago either, when gentle people were so gentle that the males could not with the countenance of their families enter upon any profession other than the Army, the Navy, or the Church.

Gilbert Cannan, The Road to Come (1913)

TWO YEARS BEFORE the outbreak of the First World War, at just about the same time that Scott was refining the concept of gentility for a whole age, a Royal Naval officer confidently told an Admiralty committee, set up to explore the question of commissions from the lower deck, that it took three generations to make a gentleman.

If anyone was searching for a clue to the simultaneous social durability and decline of Britain as a great industrial power, they could do a lot worse than settle on that. For many a European the only surprise about the formula would have been that the process could be so rapid; but it has always been Britain’s genius and curse to dangle the hopes of gentility before an aspirant population, absorbing and anaesthetising the nation’s energies and talents into the comforting and inclusive orbit of respectability encompassed by that word ‘gentleman’.

There is a case, anyway, for arguing that only pedantry, snobbery or family romance could ask for a longer genealogical perspective, and certainly none is needed for Scott’s family. His early biographers liked to detect a likeness to the ‘great Sir Walter’ in his features, but for all the family traditions of Border raiders, Buccleuch connections and Jacobites hanged at York, the only family history that had any relevance to Scott himself begins with his grandfather, Robert.*

The son of a schoolteacher who had come to the West Country from France, where the family had gone after the ’ 45, Robert Scott was born in 1784, and after four years ‘in a subordinate capacity’ was promoted in 1806 to purser in the Royal Navy. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars he was serving – prophetically enough in the light of his grandson’s future career – in HMS Erebus, and within five years had amassed enough from prize money or graft to buy with his brother Edward a brewery in Plymouth for £4, 782. Robert Scott had married in 1816, and in the same year that the two brothers acquired the Hoegate Brewery took the lease from Sir John Aubyn on a house at Stoke Damerel on the outskirts of Devonport. The house was more a Regency cottage than anything grander when Robert bought it, but by the time he had finished adding to it, ‘Outlands’ had become the outward symbol of the Scotts’ ambitions, a country gentleman’s residence in miniature, complete with servants, outbuildings, shrubberies, paddocks, orchard, governesses, nurses, pets, peacock and stream.

In a small way Robert Scott was the nightmare of Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Elliot made flesh, the Napoleonic War carpetbagger come good. It is not clear how close an interest he ever took in his brewery, but while it was certainly enough to lead to quarrels with his brother, he had other ambitions for his children, sending four of his five sons into the army or navy, and leaving only the youngest, John Edward – Robert Falcon Scott’s father – to maintain an increasingly distasteful connection with trade.

If the brewery had ever made very much money, it had ceased to do so by the time of Robert’s death, and Scott’s father was left with the tastes of a gentleman and very little on which to support them. The death of Robert also led to a protracted family challenge over the ownership of Outlands, and in 1862 John played the only card available to a man spoiled for business and useless for much else, and married a Hannah Cuming, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a prominent figure in the Plymouth insurance and maritime world.

John and Hannah Scott had six children who survived infancy – Ettie, Rose, Robert Falcon (always known as ‘Con’), Grace, Archie and Katherine – and it is in their memories that this marriage and Outlands life most vividly survive. ‘Mr Scott girded against the enforced restriction of a business life which was uncongenial to his tastes,’ wrote George Seaver, the last biographical link, through Con’s sister Grace, with that generation of the Scott family, ‘and although he interested himself in local affairs in Devonport where he was magistrate and Chairman of the Conservative Association, these pursuits provided no adequate outlet for a man of his capability … Lack of means, lack of health, and lack of opportunity bred in him a baleful sense of inferiority, the result of inhibitions, which gave rise to the most explosive temper – by no means improved by the periodical visits of his brothers, who stirred his envy by their accounts of thrilling adventures in foreign fields.’

It is hard to know how just this is, or how much it reflects the resentment of a daughter who always had to take second place to her two brothers. The few surviving letters from Con’s early days certainly suggest an affectionate and easy-going relationship between father and son, but a letter written in a tent in Antarctica just before his death conjures up the John Scott of Grace’s memory. ‘The inherited vice from my side of the family is indolence,’ Scott warned his wife about their own son; ‘above all he must guard, and you must guard him against that. I had to force myself into being strenuous as you know – had always an inclination to be idle. My father was idle and it brought much trouble.’

Side by side in photographs, Scott’s parents certainly look an oddly suited pair, John Scott bearded, irresolute, almost characterless, his wife Hannah refined, intelligent, discriminating and kindly formidable. It seems unlikely that the Cuming family ever let John Scott forget that it was their money that had kept Outlands in the family, and it was Hannah who ruled, and her brand of genteel, slightly compromised, mid-Victorian Evangelicalism that set the moral tone of the household. ‘Whatever we have cause to bless ourselves for, comes from you,’ her devoted elder son would later write to her at a moment of family tragedy. ‘If ever children had cause to worship their mother, we feel we have, dear … you can never be a burden, but only the bond that keeps us closer together, – the fine example that will guide us all … What is left for you to do is to be the same sweet kind mother that you have always been, our guide and our friend.’

Not that there was anything gloomily oppressive about her influence – their Plymouth Brethren cousins thought the Outlands Scotts ‘damned’ – and the children grew up to a normal, uncomplicated life. ‘As children we were always very happy and ordinary and simple,’ Grace recalled in a bucolic memoir of their Outlands childhood, ‘and though we had a comfortable house and a nice biggish garden there was no money for travel or even simple excitements. As a matter of fact, we did not want them or think about them, for we were brought up a much quieter generation … Our great yearly treat to look forward to was a visit to the Pantomime at the Plymouth Theatre! Though the house was small for such a crowd – seventeen persons when the boys were at home – thanks to the garden, fields, and outhouses, during the day-time we could disperse. We had entire liberty within these bounds which excluded a blacksmith’s forge just outside the shrubbery gate, and a small general shop – good for boiled sweets. I may say that to get the sweets we had to climb a high gate, which was kept locked to keep us from temptation, and failed.’

Robert Falcon Scott was born into this modest Victorian idyll on 6 June 1868, and first ‘enters history’, as J.M. Barrie, his most influential and unscrupulous mythologiser, put it, ‘aged six, blue eyed, long haired, inexpressibly slight and in velveteen, being held out at arm’s length by a servant and dripping horribly, like a half drowned kitten. This is the earliest recollection of him of a sister, who was too young to join a children’s party on that fatal day. But Con, as he was always called, had intimated to her that from her window she would be able to see him taking a noble lead in the festivities in the garden, and she looked; and that is what she saw. He had been showing his guests how superbly he could jump the leat, and had fallen into it.’

This probably says more about the author of Peter Pan than it does about Scott, but if it is hard to see how a nation could swallow it, it does highlight the problem of everything to do with Scott’s youth. There is no reason to imagine that anyone would invent Barrie’s anecdotes for him, but they belong to the world of medieval apocrypha rather than biography, exemplary tales chosen to illustrate either latent greatness or the triumph of will over the sickly, dreamy, introspective, ‘pigeon-chested’, slovenly ‘Old Mooney’ of Barrie-inspired legend.

There is no evidence that Scott was any weaker-chested than many another child, or any ‘dreamier’, but the anecdotes flow with the same dire mix of saccharin charm and cautionary humour – the stream, the ‘ocean’ that only adults could call a pond, the holly tree, the dangers of the glass conservatory, the much-loved pony, Beppo, who would throw any other rider. ‘His first knife is a great event in the life of a boy,’ wrote Barrie, ‘and he is nearly always given it on condition that he keeps it shut. So it was with Con, and a few minutes after he had sworn not to open it he was begging for permission to use it on a tempting sapling. “Very well,” his father said grimly, “but remember, if you hurt yourself, don’t expect any sympathy from me.” The knife was opened, and to cut himself rather badly proved as easy as falling into the leat. The father, however, had not noticed, and the boy put his bleeding hand into his pocket and walked on unconcernedly. This is a good story of a child of seven who all his life suffered extreme nausea from the sight of blood; even in the Discovery days, to get accustomed to “seeing red” he had to force himself to watch Dr. Wilson skinning his specimens.’

For all of Barrie’s efforts to press it into significance, it is the utter normality of Scott’s childhood that is most striking. In later life he, Archie and his oldest sister Ettie would always form a kind of distinctive triumvirate within family councils, but as children they all mucked in together, left pretty much to their own devices by a father busy pottering about his gardens and a mother nursing her ailing parents. ‘Our tastes for sailing were very much encouraged by my uncle Harry, my mother’s brother,’ Grace remembered. ‘On holidays we, that is four girls and two brothers, had glorious days sailing about Plymouth Harbour in an eighteen foot boat with a big lug sail. We were taught to work the boat and had thrilling days out by the Mewstone (the parental limit seawards), or up one of the rivers, where we had been known to be stranded in the mud for hours on a falling tide. Considering our lives were so very sheltered then, so small and bounded, it seemed wonderful to have our sailing freedom.’

Close as the children would always be, it was not within the circle of his siblings that Scott’s childhood was shaped, but by the dynamics of family ambitions that stretched back to his grandfather, Robert. In any sensible society – or European nation of his own day – a child of Scott’s type would have ended up as an engineer or scientist, but for a boy of his class in Victorian England the future was circumscribed by the deadening monopoly of the old professions, and at the age of eight, home and his sisters’ governess were exchanged for a day school at Damerel, from where, at eleven or twelve, he was packed off by his father to board at Stubbington House in Fareham, a naval crammer that prepared boys for the entrance exams to the training ship Britannia.

If Scott had any say in the choice it has gone unrecorded, but it would be hard to imagine a better berth for a training ship or for a child of any imagination than the River Dart. Sheltered by steep hills on either bank and protected from the sea by a sudden bend in the river, the Britannia lay moored just above the ancient port of Dartmouth, ideally positioned for the rough training ground of the open channel and the quiet waters of the river.

There can be few more beautiful ports anywhere, and if a boy from Plymouth needed no lesson in England’s maritime past, Dartmouth’s history was just as rich. The natural harbour had become too small to retain its old importance by Scott’s day, but even after its historic role in the old triangular trade of cod, salt and wine had been usurped by Liverpool, the town still preserved links with the New World and English naval life that stretched back through the Dutch and Civil Wars to Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Elizabeth’s reign.

The Britannia was a product of the mid-Victorian navy’s determination to control and standardise its officer intake. In the first half of the nineteenth century a boy’s education was dependent on the goodwill and interest of the individual ship’s captain, but in 1857 an Admiralty circular announced a new regime of training and examinations for all future officers that would include a period of time on a stationary ship before they were allowed to go to sea. The initial training ship had been established at Portsmouth, but Britannia had first been towed to her mooring on the Dart in September 1863, and in the following year, as numbers grew, was joined by a second vessel, the Hindostan. In 1869 the Britannia herself was replaced by a bigger ship, and it was this Britannia – the eighth of her name – that Scott knew, an old sailing vessel of over six thousand tons, with a draught of thirty-one feet and a length of 251 feet, a gangway linking her to the Hindostan and a fully rigged foremast to test the seamanship, agility and courage of her cadets.

And it was in this Britannia, too, for the next thirty years, until she was replaced by a shore-based college, that the navy trained its future leaders. At the time of the First World War there was scarcely a senior officer who had not passed through Dartmouth, not a man above the rank of lieutenant-commander who had not been moulded by the same ethos and training that produced the men who fought at Jutland or went south with Scott. ‘That training,’ the biographer of Earl Beatty – the navy’s most flamboyantly glamorous admiral since Nelson – wrote of Britannia in the mid-1880s, the years immediately after Scott was there, ‘was based on forcing cadets into a pre-conceived and rigid mould by the application of harsh, even inhuman discipline. Obedience to orders was the hallowed principle of the system, and woe betide any boy who was deemed to have transgressed that tenet. Any signs of originality or independence were seriously frowned on – if not actively suppressed; while intellectual accomplishments always came a bad second to athletics.’

In many ways, this makes it little different from any Victorian public school in its aspirations. From the days of Thomas Arnold the ambition of every public school was to produce a ‘brave, helpful, truth-telling’ English Christian gentleman, but whereas the Arnoldian ideal was to mould the men who would run the Empire or clear out slums, the aim of Britannia was to take the sons of these gentlemen and refine – or brutalise – them into the more specialist incarnation of the British naval officer.

This might have mattered less if the navy still recruited from a more inclusive social base, or if the curriculum in Scott’s day had been any wider, or had more strenuously faced up to the realities of the age of steam. When Britannia was first established twenty years before, the range of subjects was more or less typical of the wider educational world, but by 1883 this had shrunk back to a far more vocational training – Arithmetic and Algebra (to read across Scott’s Final Examination Results), Geometry, Trigonometry, Plain and Spherical, Practical Navigation, Theoretical Navigation, Charts, Instruments and Observations, French, Essay, Physics and Drawing.

In practice little attention was ever given to ‘Extra Subjects’, or, in fact, to study at all – in Scott’s term, or intake, only three cadets got so much as ‘Fair’ for ‘Attention paid to Study’ – and with no engineering workshop, no gunnery officer, no instruction in command and a heavy emphasis on seamanship, a Britannia training put a cadet firmly in the camp of the dinosaur. ‘I call the whole system of our naval education utterly faulty,’ the young Jellicoe – future First Sea Lord and Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet at Jutland – writing under the nom de plume of ‘A Naval Nobody’, protested in Macmillan’s Magazine: ‘I say that we, the Navy’s youth, are in some professional matters most deplorably ignorant, and the day will come when we, England, will wake up to the fact with a start. It sounds impossible, inconceivable, that it is only a privileged few who are allowed to make a study of gunnery … only a privileged few who are initiated into the mysteries of torpedos; only a privileged few who are taught … surveying and navigation; not even a privileged few who are taught the science of steam; and yet all this is so!’

It was an education for an age of sail, designed for a profession that envisaged no scope for individual responsibility, and enforced with all the rigour of nineteenth-century naval discipline. From the moment that Scott woke, his day was regulated to the sound of bugle calls or drum rolls, to the barking of orders and the running of feet, as the cadets were marched from bath house to inspection deck, from inspection to Euclid, from Euclid to breakfast, and from their breakfast across the gangway to Hindostan and back to Britannia’s poop for another inspection, prayers – and all that before the day proper had even started. Even their swimming was controlled by bugle call, even the casual brutality of the discipline institutionalised by a system of numbers. For severe offences there was the cane and the captain, but for everything else, the Commander’s Punishments ranged from 1 to 7, with ‘No. 4’ – Scott’s most common penalty – including ‘an hour early in the morning, an hour out on the deck after evening prayers, extra drill and stopped pocket money’. ‘19 Oct, ’81,’ Scott’s charge sheet typically reads:

Entering an orchard whilst on Half holiday … March 11th 1882, Skylarking at Morning Study, [punishment] 1 days 3; Sept 18th Late for Muster, 1 days 4; Oct 3rd Not being into his place in the ranks when 2nd bugle sounded, 1 days 3; Oct 6th Talking in his Hammock after hours, 1 days 3; Oct 11th Being into Hindostan Contrary to regulations, 1 days 4; Oct 13th Going on the Middle deck in his night shirt, 1 days 4; Oct 15th; Creating a disturbance on sleeping deck, 1 days 4; Oct 16th Making a noise in his Hamk after hours, 1 days 3; Nov 5th Talking in his Hamk after hours, 1 days 3; Nov 9th Improperly dressed at Muster, 1 days 2; Nov 22nd Delaying to come out of the bath, 1 days 3 …

There were other infringements – most memorably, ‘Did as Cadet Captain allow some of the Cadets to humbug Mr Poynter Chief Capt. in the Sanctuary, and did also take part in annoying him’ – but there is not much here to alarm anyone who has ever been to a boarding school, and still less to suggest the delicate child of Barrie legend. From time to time the Britannia regime or some bullying scandal would make the national newspapers, but if it always tottered on the edge of bullying, it was probably no different from any other school in Victorian life or fiction.

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.

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.

He was not united with his luggage again until Calais, and so had to miss Paris, but with the exception of his father all the Scotts that could be rounded up were waiting for him in London. For a family whose idea of excitement was the Plymouth Theatre pantomime the capital must have seemed about as remote as Esquimault, and for the next three days the Scotts gorged themselves on it, cramming in the Handel Festival and Ivanhoe at the English Opera – music a ‘trifle insipid’ – between exhaustive sweeps of the naval exhibition and – that symbol of everything the service still thought it was – Nelson’s Victory moored on the Thames.

Scott had been appointed to Sharpshooter for summer manoeuvres before he joined Vernon, but as she was conveniently anchored at Plymouth there was time first for Outlands. ‘When Con, at the age of nineteen, was wildly in the throes of his first love,’ Grace again recalled, in an elusive glimpse of a side of Scott’s life that has vanished without trace, ‘and longing to rush off to his charmer, who had a very short-tempered husband, Archie alone could speak to him and try to dissuade him from his project; Con at the time was very impressionable, and remained so. The sailor’s life and his romantic nature caused him to idealise women. He had his youthful loves and flirtations. His affections were easily caught though not easily held. He had a capacity for appearing wholly absorbed in the person he was talking to, while all the time he was really quite detached. This was misleading. As far as I know, he had two real loves only; one, a girlhood friend of ours who later married, but was always in the background of his affections, no matter who from time to time interested him for a while, and she remained so, I think, until he met his wife.’

This is a sister talking – and a younger sister, at that, who saw him only rarely – but if there was any other woman of whom Grace never knew, no name survives. Many years later Cherry-Garrard would write of Scott’s astonishing power to charm when he wanted to, and at least one married American woman, a Minnie Chase, a friend’s sister Scott met briefly in San Francisco on his way north to rejoin the Amphion, would happily have signed up to the proposition. ‘The night has a thousand eyes,’ she copied into the front of an address book she probably gave him,

And the day but one,

Yet the light of the bright world dies,

With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,

And the heart but one;

Yet the light of a whole life dies,

When love is done.

Conventional enough stuff – the verses are by Charles Bourdillon and were well known at the time – and Scott was in San Francisco only a few days, but those days fixed themselves in Minnie Chase’s memory. ‘Do you remember Mrs Chase 24 years ago,’ Scott’s widow would write to her husband from California in 1913, ignorant that he had already been dead ten months. ‘She fell on my neck because of what a darling you were 24 years ago. She couldn’t believe that you’d remained unmarried so long – the more I think of it the more I wonder with her.’

At twenty-three Scott was slightly below average height, trim and broad-chested, with fair hair, blue, almost violet eyes, an odd, attractively ugly face not unlike Jacky Fisher’s, and a smile that went a long way to explaining the impact of his charm. ‘Well-built, and alert,’ one man who saw him lecturing a few years later described him. ‘Neither tall nor short, he yet conveyed the impression of vigorous quickness. Nine people out of ten, seeing him, would have said, “Naval Officer.”’ It was certainly a role he was well on his way to making his own. ‘Lieutenant Scott is a young officer of good promise,’ his last captain had written in forwarding on his application to Vernon, ‘and has patience and tact in the handling of men. He is quick and intelligent and from all I’ve seen of him I think likely to develop into a useful torpedo officer. I recommend him for the class which commences in October next.’

After his holiday at Outlands and nearly six weeks of manoeuvres in Sharpshooter, Scott took up his place in HMS Vernon, the navy’s Torpedo School Ship at Portsmouth. He would only have had to see a Lieutenant Philip Colomb – another great name in the Victorian navy – on the same list as himself to know what he was still up against, but if there was anywhere that might have symbolised a different navy, it was Vernon, an elegant and streamlined relic of the age of sail that had been laid up, dismasted and brutalised into shape to serve the service’s newest technical arm.

The Vernon had begun its new life as a tender to HMS Excellent, the naval gunnery school, but as the importance of the new weapon became obvious, Vernon broke away from Excellent to become an independent command in her own right. She was lucky enough to have Jacky Fisher for her first captain, and when he was followed in turn by another formidable naval legend and future First Sea Lord, ‘old ’ard ’art’ Wilson, who had hacked and brawled his way to a VC at the Battle of El Teb in 1884, the future of the school was assured.

By Wilson’s and Scott’s time, Vernon had grown in size and importance, with a motley collection of hulks, workshops and a flat iron gunboat with a horizontal funnel jutting out of her stern added to the original establishment. In some ways the unsanitary, rat-infested warren of vessels must have conjured up memories of Britannia and Hindostan for Scott, but the filth and bustle of nineteenth-century Portsmouth was about as far a cry from the quiet beauty of the Dart as Vernon was from anything in the navy Scott had known before.

It was an exciting time to be there, with the torpedo undergoing constant improvements since the first above-water-launched model had been slid into the sea off a mess table. The year before Scott arrived had seen the introduction and testing of a new eighteen-inch weapon with a greater range, speed and accuracy than anything tried before, and for the first time in his life he had the chance to develop – or discover in himself – the technical and scientific aptitude that would so strongly mark his future work.

Even in Vernon, however, the most modern and innovative of establishments, Scott found himself in a culture that paradoxically reinforced those centralising, controlling, anti-initiative tendencies that were the hallmarks of the nineteenth-century service. In his brilliant study of Britain’s pre-First World War navy, Andrew Gordon identified four key institutions – Vernon, the Royal Geographical Society, Royalty and Freemasonry – as comprising a kind of ‘checklist’ of naval ‘authoritarianism’, and what he says of Vernon holds a special resonance for anyone interested in Scott’s later record as an explorer in the unpredictable world of Antarctica. ‘The work of the Torpedo School took place on the frontiers of practical physics,’ he wrote, ‘the staff formed (at least in their own opinion) a naval science vanguard, and their leadership of their profession away from art and into science may have inclined them towards a highly regulated “Newton’s clock” view of the universe, in which the unpredictabilities concomitant with devolved authority had no place.’

If there was one other aspect of Vernon life that was regressive in its tendencies, it was a Raglanesque assumption that any future enemy must be French. During the summer of 1890 exercises around Portland and Plymouth had showed how dangerous boats issuing from creeks on the French coast could be, and over his two summers in Vernon, Scott was involved in similar manoeuvres to counter the threat.

It was the first time that he had commanded anything bigger than a ship’s boat, and he could not have made a more disastrous start. On 12 August 1893 he headed for Falmouth as part of the torpedo flotilla, but the next day somehow succeeded in running Torpedo Boat 87 aground, suffering the humiliation of having himself towed back into dry dock at Keyham with ‘severe injury to propeller’.

It was an acute embarrassment for a young officer – ‘due care and attention does not appear to have been exercised’, Scott’s service record reads – but it was no more than that. In the official report on the incident he was ‘cautioned to be more attentive in future’, but Vernon’s commander, George Egerton, would always remain one of Scott’s greatest admirers, and a First Class in his theory examination, and a First Class Certificate in his practical, certainly suggest that the incident led to no lasting damage to his prospects.*

It is just possible, though, that it cast a shadow over his first appointment as a qualified Torpedo Officer to the unglamorous Depot ship Vulcan. The appointment was not ‘considered good in the Vernon’, but in the dogged way that would become typical of Scott, he was determined to make the best of his opportunities. His reasons for remaining with the ship, he wrote to his anxious father from Vulcan,

are firstly that I look upon her as a latent success, as a splendid but undeveloped and misused experiment dependent on her present handling to establish her utility, a utility which in war time would be apparent and patent to all. For this reason I take a very great interest in her welfare and do as much as lays in my power to forward it. Secondly, and in consequence of my first reason, I have hopes of establishing a reputation for myself.

Thirdly, I am losing nothing; in fact gaining a very great deal in general service experience – In general service work, of which we do as much as most other ships, I have a stake and take a position far above that which I should have in other ships – In addition I keep watch at sea with the fleet, and as they generally put us in the fighting line, am precisely in the same position to gain experience as if on board a battleship …

To fall back on the torpedo work again at which I have worked exceedingly hard, I look upon this ship as the best practical experience that could possibly befall an officer; in fact I look upon myself now as an authority on the only modern way of working a minefield and such like exercises – but what is better, the Captain and Currey do likewise.

Even if I fail, the practical knowledge and experience will be invaluable. I am conscious that by self-advertisement I might make myself heard now, but the position is a delicate one, and I should be sorry to advocate anything in which I did not believe. Meanwhile things constantly annoy and irritate one – but as you see, I work for a larger than ordinary stake, and with this I will conclude adding, that the welfare of body if not of career remains good.

It would be another decade before Scott would be able to tick off the other three boxes on Gordon’s ‘authoritarian checklist’ – the RGS, Freemasonry, and Royal connections – but the inevitable process of institutionalisation had begun. ‘We are getting very well known in the fleet,’ he told his father in the same letter, sounding alarmingly like some embryo ‘Pompo’ Heneage; ‘no function takes place but that we come pretty well out of it, the athletic sports, the rifle meetings, the regattas, events which though very far from you are very near to us out here; fate has kept us before the public in all. But best of all we had a most triumphant inspection, the Admiral said publicly that he should report us as the most creditable to all concerned, and privately that we were the cleanest ship he’d inspected, an opinion fully endorsed by Levison and others who accompany him on these occasions, they adding that no ship could “touch us”.’

This was no momentary aberration either. ‘The ship is still very dirty,’ he complained to his mother of his new ship, the Empress of India, ‘but I think improving – a great improvement has been commented upon in my small share of the cleaning part and I feel if only we could get the commander to smarten up a bit we should get the ship all straight – but he is unfortunately lamentably slack.’ Just over a week later, virtue was rewarded when a ‘somewhat disastrous’ admiral’s inspection confirmed ‘that the only clean parts of the ship were the torpedo department – and also that at drills etc the torpedo department shone by a mere absence of doing wrong … Altogether I was pleased with my own show. I have some sixty men numbered whom I fell in at the beginning and told them things must be altered altogether.’

This thickening of the professional arteries, the slow but inexorable process of assimilation, might well have been inevitable, but by the time that Scott wrote this last letter, ‘choice’ had largely been removed. There had always been an assumption within the family that John Scott had been living off interest since his retirement, but in the autumn of 1894, while his son was still in Vulcan, it emerged that for the last twelve years he had been running down his capital and that they were virtually bankrupt. ‘On the 23rd October,’ Hannah Scott recorded with an almost preternatural calm, ‘a crushing blow came of heavy losses. At once we decided to let our house and hope that some occupation will come that will please my dear husband and bring him comfort in the loss of his old house. On November 12th our dear Rose commenced work at Nottingham Hospital, under three weeks after the loss. The others all anxious to be up and doing are only restrained by the occupation at home in getting things in order for letting the furnished house. From Con comes a fine manly reliable letter offering help … Truly sorrow has many compensations and with God’s help we shall yet if He wills it return to our old home.’

They only returned, in fact, to let Outlands permanently, and all it meant in terms of respectability, security and position was gone. It would be impossible to guess from the tone here what this must have meant to Hannah Scott, but for a woman of her age and gentle snobberies, it was as if she had gone to sleep in the cosy, familiar world of some West Country Cranford, and woke within the harsh landscape of a Gissing novel, staring at the prospects of rented rooms, poverty, ostracism, trade and working daughters.

But if there seemed nothing for Hannah Scott except humiliation, for the girls – poised on the brink of a new century with new expectations, aspirations, possibilities – there was at least the chance of a different and more expansive world. Within weeks Rose had begun a career in nursing that would take her to the Gold Coast, and the others soon followed her from home, the ebullient Ettie to a theatre school at Margate and briefly onto the stage with Irene Vanbrugh’s touring company, and Grace and, eventually, Kate into the dingier dressmaking business.

Of all the children it was probably Archie who suffered most, being forced to abandon the Royal Artillery for a post in Nigeria as secretary to the governor, but from the start it was Con who carried the emotional burden of the disaster. For a few months in 1895 the family rented a Devonshire farmhouse, and it was there, in Barrie’s account, that the metamorphosis from ‘Old Mooney’ to ‘head of the family’ was completed. ‘He never seems to have shown a gayer front than when the troubles fell,’ Barrie wrote in his inimitable mix of family lore and hagiography. ‘Not only must there be no “Old Mooney” in him, but it must be driven out of everyone. His concerts, in which he took a leading part, became celebrated in the district; deputations called at the farm to beg for another, and once in these words, “Wull ’ee gie we a concert over our way when the comic young gentleman be here along?”’

If there is again as much Barrie as Scott in this, the family collapse does provide the first real insight into the qualities that distinguished the mature man. In his later years he could talk about ‘duty’ and ‘patriotism’ with the best of them, but whether it was to ship, colleagues, service or country, Scott’s sense of loyalty and duty was always rooted in real obligations, affections, ties and responsibilities. And at the heart of this nexus of relations was his family, and above all his mother. There is a species of family feeling that is little more than an enlarged and clannish selfishness, but as with his ambition there was nothing narrow or ‘laager-like’ in Scott’s devotion, only a generous and unpossessive openness to their sorrows, happiness and opportunities.

In her memoir of her brother Con, Grace described his facility for appearing to be absorbed in the person he was talking to, but his letters to his family reveal a much profounder and more genuine empathy than that remark suggests. It is one of those aspects of personality that is always going to elude definition, but there seems to have always been something almost Keatsian in Scott’s capacity for submerging his own identity and ‘absorbing’ himself – Grace’s word – in the fragile, anxious interior lives of a mother, brother or sister.

As his subsequent career in the Antarctic – and in particular his response to human or animal suffering – would underline, the barriers between ‘self’ and ‘other’ would never be very firmly established for Scott, and never was this more true than when his family needed him. There was nothing he actually ‘did’ for them during their troubles that Archie or Ettie did not match, but in terms of understanding and explaining, and interpreting one to another, he was central to their recovery.

With his mother, in particular, he needed all his tact and sympathy to nudge and cajole her into accepting the different world the Scotts found themselves in with financial failure. Some time towards the end of 1895 or 1896 John Scott secured a job as manager of a Somerset brewery, and while it brought a house and some financial stability, the descent back into trade left Hannah Scott more rawly exposed than ever to the indignities of her position. There can have been no escaping it, either, because even the transition from the rich Devon landscape to the mean, straggling village of Holcombe offered a Hardyesque mirror to their fortunes. Under the fields around the old perpendicular church of St Andrew’s lay buried the ancient pre-plague village, but it was the great mass of the Holcombe Brewery that dominated the new village, with its miserably ugly church, its Wesleyan chapel, its vestiges of the old coal industry and its brewery employees, defining the physical and social perimeters of the Scott family’s decline.

There had been nothing in the bourgeois, provincial, Godfearing, servant-padded world in which Hannah Scott had lived the first sixty years of her life to prepare her for this, and nothing her son would not do to protect her from it. In his memoir of Scott, Barrie spoke feelingly of his hardships at this time, but whatever the humiliations of tarnished braid or a threadbare uniform for a naval officer of Scott’s stamp, he felt the family’s poverty more keenly for his mother than himself. ‘I hate to think that you did not go and see her before she left,’ he wrote to her at Holcombe after Ettie had left for the stage. ‘I hate to think I had not the forethought of writing to urge you to go – that you should have studied economy in such a matter makes me feel very bitter – Promise you won’t do it again – but you really shan’t, for when she comes back I am determined you shall go and see her act and shall yourself see the life and some of your many unknown admirers (who have seen your picture only). I can’t forgive my own want of forethought in not writing about it … I have another great fear about you dear, which is that you don’t get any society. – I do hope people will come & call – you don’t speak of any as yet. I rather feel that people round you are not inclined that way and that you are having rather a slow time – But I suppose time only can correct this and the gradual appreciation of how nice you really are.’

For all Scott’s chivalry, there was nothing emasculating in his devotion to his mother, and while she always remained at the centre of his loyalties, that never stopped him fighting his sisters’ corners when they needed him. ‘Dear Mother,’ he wrote in the same letter to Holcombe, ‘I am afraid that you must be grieving over Ettie’s absence very much, but think dear what it means to her. What prospects of independence and the pleasure of really living, working & doing.’

‘My Own Dearest Mother,’ he wrote in the same vein, this time of Kate and Grace’s new lives as working women, ‘You cannot think how delightful it was to find you all in such good health and spirits. The prospect for the future seems brighter than it has been for years and above all things I rejoice to see that you are beginning to appreciate that by this honest hard work the girls are anything but sufferers. The difference in them since they have been about, meeting all manner of people and relying on themselves, is so very plain to me. Just the same sort of difference that Ettie felt and valued so much. They have gained in a hundred points, not to mention appearance and smartness. I honestly think we shall some day be grateful to fortune for lifting us out of the “sleepy hollow” of the old Plymouth life. Personally, I cannot express the difference I see in the girls since their London experiences.’

For a few brief months in the mid-1890s it must have seemed that he was right, and home on leave at Christmas 1896, the two brothers took up where they had left off in their rented farm. A ‘mixed entertainment and fine farce called Chiselling’ was put on for the brewery’s workers and customers, the local paper reported. ‘Lt A Scott RA. Lt R Scott RN and the Misses K and M. Scott of Holcombe House [were] extremely funny … continuous roars of laughter.’

It was no more than a last, poignant codicil to the family’s collapse, though, and within twelve months both John Scott and his younger son, ‘Arch’, were dead. It seems somehow appropriate that the last public glimpse of John Scott is of him being pushed in a wheelchair to his daughter Ettie’s wedding, but while his death from heart disease cannot have been a complete shock, or even blow, to his family, nothing had prepared them for Arch’s.

‘I am longing to see old Arch,’ Scott had written in the summer of 1897, ‘and tell him how hopeful I think it all,’ and the following year he got his wish. Arch, home on leave from Lagos, joined him, with the use of the admiral’s spare cabin, for a cruise off the Irish coast in Scott’s ship to thrash out the details of the family’s finances. ‘My dearest girl,’ he wrote to his sister Ettie, ‘Arch has been staying with me for the last few days, he is in great form & looking very well – we have of course talked matters out & I think arrived at a clear understanding as regards the situation.’ ‘Isn’t Arch just splendid,’ he wrote to his mother on 15 October. ‘He is so absolutely full of life and enjoyment and at the same time so keen on his job. I expect he has told you about his hope of becoming a commissioner. He seems to have done most excellent work and shown tact and energy in an extraordinary degree. Dear old chap, he deserves to be a success – Commissioner, Consul, and Governor is the future for him I feel sure.’

Within a month, Arch was dead. He had gone to Hythe to play golf, and went down with typhoid. Just what the news meant to Scott can be felt in his letter to Ettie. ‘My dearest Girl, It is good to hear there was no pain and it is easy to understand that he died like a man. All his life, wherever he went, people felt the better for his coming. I don’t think he ever did an unkind thing and no form of meanness was in him. It is a strange chance that has taken him who perhaps of us all found the keenest pleasure in life, who was always content and never grumbled. Of course, now we know he never ought to have gone to West Africa. After watching him carefully, I saw that despite his health he was not strong and I meant to have a long talk with you on the subject. Too late – doesn’t it always seem the ending of our wretched little mortal plans? Good God, it is past all understanding. He and you and I were very close together, weren’t we? I know what your loss is, knowing my own.’

To his mother, however, none of the bewilderment or anger was ever allowed to surface. ‘My Own Dearest Mother,’ he wrote to her from Gibraltar,

I got your letter this morning. Don’t blame yourself for what has happened, dear. Whatever we have cause to bless ourselves for, comes from you. He died like the true-hearted gentleman he was, but to you we owe the first lessons and example that made us gentlemen. This thing is most terrible to us all but it is no penalty for any act of yours …

In another matter I think I can afford a key other than your construction. Arch and I discussed his commissionership in all lights … and it was in regard to that, that his remark about leaving the artillery fell from him. Of this I am sure: he never regretted leaving Weymouth. Often and often when we were about there he said, ‘Well, old chap, this is all very narrow. I am awfully glad to have got away and seen the world a bit.’

Of course he loved his corps, but he never thought of it as a thing left behind and never was anything but glad to have left the dull routine of garrison duty.

I’m glad you got that nice letter from the Governor. Oh, my dear, it is something to know that everyone thought him a fine chap. His popularity was marvellous – he was such a fine gentleman. God bless you … Don’t be bitter, dear.

Your loving son

Con.

Hannah Scott had joined her daughters in Paris for six months, where they had gone to learn the dressmaking business, but with his father and Archie both dead, the financial burden for the family now fell on Scott, generously helped by Ettie’s new husband, the old Etonian, Unionist MP for Antrim and Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, Willy Ellison-Macartney. ‘It seems to me to boil down to this,’ Scott had written to Ettie only weeks before Arch’s death:

that you & Willy are proposing to act in a most generous manner in the matter of the insurance; mother and the girls (especially the former) have been given new life by the proposal, (which if the business succeeds only moderately well will prove satisfactory all round … )

The saving of Mother’s money has an enormous effect on her peace of mind, as of course was to be expected. Therefore the future arrangements seem to be

You are insured for £1500 & pay something like £45 per annum

Arch pays to the ménage £120 & I some £70

The above £190 plus £30 from Outlands & £30 interest on Mother’s capital – £250 forms the home income

But of above is paid £40 as interest on loan £1000 leaving a net income of over £200

All expenses in connection with the business to come out of the £1000

Expenses of the Paris scheme [the dressmaking] to be debited on the £1000 advance.

It was a bathetic world for an ambitious young naval officer to find himself in, but Scott did not flinch. He had been prepared to sacrifice his career prospects in the immediate aftermath of the financial crash so that he could be at Devonport near his family, but with Archie dead and another £120 to be found, the only thing that concerned him now was promotion.

He might still sometimes wonder ‘whether the game is worth a candle’, but that was just idle talk. In letter after letter he comes back to the subject, and the endless speculation, manoeuvring and jobbing that the whole business of joining ‘the ranks of the advancers’ entailed: ‘if this can be worked I shall have little to grumble at’; ‘in with all the Flagship now’; ‘the Flag Captain is rather a friend of mine thanks to Ettie’; ‘Fraser would of course be only too delighted for me to succeed him’; ‘I can only hope to become known to their successors’; ‘I trust he will not forget me’.

Even before his father’s death he had been aiming high, applying for a berth in the senior Royal Yacht, Victoria & Albert, that would have put him at the heart of that unrivalled nexus of connections and patronage that effectively ran the service. ‘I want you to tell father the following about the Yacht of my year,’ he wrote home with that clear thinking and lack of resentment that always characterised his attitude to what he called the navy’s ‘much gilded’ youth: ‘I fear it will disappoint him – next to my name in the Navy List he will find Stanley – Michael Colme-Seymour & Goodenough – Stanley is a godson of the Queen, son of the Earl of Derby, a nice chap, popular and has war service (though only Egyptian) – Michael Seymour is of course the son of the Admiral which is saying a great deal as by the time of selection, his father will be at Portsmouth in command … Goodenough is very well connected, has been in the Yacht and in the Mediterranean Yacht, has many personal friends in high places, war service and altogether an excellent chance. Mike Seymour tells me all three people will try for the billet – so you see I fear there’s a very poor chance for me.’

Scott was right – Colme-Seymour got the post – but if he failed with the Yacht, he was more successful in his next ambition, joining the flagship of the Channel Fleet under the command of Prince Louis of Battenberg in July 1897. Among all the ships Scott served in, the Majestic and ‘Majestics’ would always hold a special place, and over the next three years he forged many of those key loyalties and friendships – Skelton, Barne, Evans, Egerton, Campbell – that would last his life. It was in Majestic, too, that Scott established himself beyond any question in his profession. He was not sure whether Prince Louis ‘liked’ him or not, ‘but at any rate’, he told his mother, ‘he thinks me able for my work which is the main thing’. ‘I think I said I would tell you about our doings at Palma Bay,’ he reported home in the same letter.

Well, they were most successful. We had a great time at our various exercises and everything went swimmingly; they left everything in my hands and I was a great man bossing the whole show. On the second day the Admiral came ashore and I showed him around the different arrangements – of course he knew very little about it, but by judiciously working his fads in, I think we made the whole thing popular … I am quite pleased with myself because it is the first time anything of the sort has been done in the Channel. On the last day we had a night attack of which I drew out the whole scheme; altogether I feel the torpedo department has asserted itself to some purpose. Now that Hickley leaves they are about to give me his work as well as my own – having no one else they can entrust it to. It suits me on the whole as having now established myself as a competent torpedo man, my policy is to show myself able to do the general duties … and I think there is no doubt I shall be able to manage the ‘Vernon’ next year, if I want it; it is satisfactory to think that promotion is more or less certain within something like a limited time and one joins the ranks of the advancers. Meanwhile I know you will like to hear that everything flourishes with my work here.

For all the cheery triumphalism of this letter – Scott was always wonderfully good in that way with his mother, endlessly ready to indulge maternal pride at the expense of his own innate hatred of ‘show’ – it touches on the one aspect of his career prospects that worried him. ‘Everything went well,’ he wrote home from Port Mahon again the following week, ‘and the Admiral was exceedingly nice about it so that I think my character as a torpedo man is established … But I have my eye also on another thing which is I fear a bit out of my reach. When Campbell [his future best man] is promoted I should like to be thought of as first lieutenant. They may not think me sufficiently good as a general service officer however, which worries me a bit, and since it would have to be done against the gunnery people I fear they won’t see it in the same light. However I shall wait my opportunity – and as Hickey’s work has come down on me as well, it may come that way.’

The danger of finding himself typecast as a technical specialist was no idle fear, but in the June of 1899 a change of captain and ship’s personnel in Majestic gave him the opportunity he wanted. ‘Egerton joined today,’ Scott wrote to his mother from Portsmouth on the twenty-eighth; ‘things have occurred as I expected and I am commander until de Chair arrives in England. He will be telegraphed for when Bradford is promoted but as he is at Zanzibar the journey will occupy some time, so here I am till the end of August or thereabouts – of course it is a wonderful opportunity but means work unending as my own torpedo work has to go on somehow.’

If Scott had found in Prince Louis a captain who thought of him first and foremost as a ‘first rate’ torpedo man, in George Egerton, his old commander in Vernon, he had secured himself a powerful patron and friend. In the Dixonian dichotomy of ‘autocrat’ and ‘authoritarian’ Egerton’s credentials would almost certainly put him on the ‘wrong’ side of the fence, but that did not stop him being in many ways the beau idéal of a Victorian naval officer, spirited, brave, charming well-connected and – best of all in a culture that raised chivalric effort over mere efficiency – an old ‘Arctic’ from the disastrous but heroic Nares expedition of 1875.

Scott was not the sort of young officer who would naturally impose himself, but as the man in Majestic who knew the ship better than anyone, he was well placed to make a mark with his new captain. By the middle of September de Chair had taken up his post as commander, but while he was still ‘green’ in the job he, too, inevitably depended ‘pretty much’ on Scott’s advice and knowledge. It was, as Scott said, hard work but a comfortable situation. ‘The new Captain is very pleased with the ship,’ he reported home the following month, ‘as I am the only link with the past, so to speak, and knowing the game from experience … my position is a very strong one.’

Strong as his position was, it is another remark of Scott’s, a chance comment from a diary fragment – ‘The naval officer should be provided by nature with an infinite capacity for patiently accepting disappointments’ – that probably more accurately reflects his mood at this time. ‘In 1899,’ Grace recalled, ‘coming home in H.M.S. Majestic he said he must look out for something to take him out of the general rut of the Navy, a service he was devoted to, but he wanted freedom to develop more widely. All this time he had been realizing that he had really something to say, in some form or other as yet unknown. How could he express himself fully?’

It was the old angst of the Amphion diary fragment, only maturity had sharpened a vague adolescent dissatisfaction into a more intelligent need for growth. The 14,900-ton, first-class, twin-screw, armoured Majestic was hardly a ‘sleepy hollow’, but in its own way it was every bit as restricting and stultifying. Including Dartmouth, Vernon and that ‘farce’ of an institution, as Jellicoe labelled the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, where Scott had gone in preparation for his lieutenant’s examination, he had been doing more or less the same thing for nineteen years, and again the Majestic’s ship’s log is the best guide to just what that meant: Weighed for Vigo. Anchored Vigo. Weighed for Gibraltar. Anchored Gibraltar. Weighed for Aranci. Anchored Aranci. Governor visited ship. French Admiral visited ship. Italian Royal Yacht Savoia with King and Queen of Italy passed through the lines. Royal salute. King and Queen arrived on board. Royal Salute. Weighed for Cagliari. Anchored Cagliari … Ship dressed in honour of King and Queen of Portugal. Royal Salute. Annual pulling regatta. Sailing regatta. Vice Admiral’s Cup.

At the end of March 1900 Majestic was at anchor at Berehaven, in attendance on the old Queen on her historic visit to Ireland. ‘We leave here on Saturday, arriving at Kingstown on Monday,’ Scott wrote home with a barely restrained irony, as if the whole purpose of the navy was to amuse some Imperial reincarnation of Miss Havisham. ‘The Queen comes on Tuesday, when we man ship and cheer and fire guns and generally display our loyalty.’

Grace was right. Scott needed something different. Her memoir, like those of all Scott’s early biographers, shows the same desire to give shape and meaning to his early years, to see them in quasibiblical terms as a kind of preparation for the ministry of sacrifice that was his polar career. Nevertheless, Grace’s portrait of frustration rings true. Again, brother and sister, speaking from their very different worlds, the one from the dressmakers’ shop, the other from one of the most formidable battleships of the pre-Dreadnought age, could see things in the same light. ‘What he wanted,’ she went on, were ‘great interests and expansion of life with new experiences … in contact with men of the big world [with] all sorts of experiences and interests.’

In the same year Scott, at least, found what he was looking for. In his letter home from Berehaven, he had announced with mock pomposity that June should ‘bring me to greater dignity’. That ‘dignity’ – commander’s rank – duly arrived on 30 June 1900. And with it came the command that was to transform his life.