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.
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