Clements Markham was born in 1830, the son and grandson of clergymen, the great-grandson of an admiral, and the great-great-grandson of the formidable William Markham, Archbishop of York. Like so many families of a similar social and financial position the Markham generations had regularly alternated between Church and navy, and after school at Cheam and Westminster the fourteen-year-old Clements duly reported with his fellow applicants aboard the St Vincent at Portsmouth to be examined for a naval cadet. After writing out half the Lord’s Prayer, he was told he had passed, and then ‘a fat old doctor made his appearance, and, punching them violently in the wind, asks “if it hurts?” On their replying in the negative, he reported them medically fit for the service.’
An exquisite drawing of him done about this time by George Richmond shows a ‘ringer’ for the young Thomas de Quincey, but it is a moot point whether it was the faculty of imagination or just temper that most severely disabled Markham for naval life. By the time he had finished his first cruise to South America he had more than had his fill of it, and not even a brief foray ‘in the vanguard of English chivalry’ during the long search for Sir John Franklin in the Arctic was enough to reconcile his ‘volatile, emotional, strong willed and impulsive’ nature to the discipline or brutality that marked the old navy in the last years of sail.
For all his loathing of the harsh punishments of naval life, and his deep resentment of any authority other than his own, Markham never lost his deeply romantic and nostalgic attachment to the service itself. During his first cruise in Collingwood he had fallen under the spell of the son of the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, and in many ways the charismatic and brilliant William Peel – VC, KCB and Byronically dead by the age of thirty-five – is the clue to Markham’s whole character, the ‘Rosebud’ he would eternally mourn, the unattainably glorious, handsome, well-connected ‘beau idéal’ of manliness and gentility that as an old man Markham would scour the gunrooms of the Royal Navy’s ships in a rheumy-eyed search to replace.
There seems little doubt that there was a homosexual strain in this passionate attachment to youth – there would be ‘talk’ of it in Discovery – but what exactly that means is harder to say. There was clearly nothing that Markham liked more than an evening ‘larking’ with some good-looking ‘middie’ in a ship’s gunroom, and to the fastidious taste of the epicure the old man brought an almost Linnaean rigour and method, cataloguing, listing, and ranking his newest favourites in journal entries of ten and twelve pages long that ranged, in his small spidery hand, from pedigree and family coat-of-arms to colouring, shape of lip and tilt of nose. There is not a shred of evidence, however, nothing in fact but the odd snatch of naval gossip, to suggest that his predilection for youth was anything more than that. Throughout his life he had a fierce and dogmatic hatred of exploitation in any form, and if his interest in young midshipmen had an erotic tinge, it was of the sentimentalising, romantic and snobbish kind, homage to the pedigree and birth of a chivalric caste for which physical good looks merely stood surety.
The whole question of Markham’s sexuality would be an utter irrelevance if it were not for its slight bearing on Scott’s reputation, and for the broader concern that it has diverted attention from the achievements of a remarkable man. After leaving the navy in 1851 Markham had entered the civil service, and with the influence he achieved there, and subsequently in the India Office, exploited a position at the heart of the Victorian establishment to push the geographical and historical interests that alongside the navy and its young officers were the ruling passions of his life.
If there was nothing in which Markham was not interested, however, and nothing that a life of travel, exploration, research, archaeology, collecting, writing and power-brokering did not entitle him to an opinion on, it was polar exploration that brought the disparate sides of his personality into sharpest focus. In many ways no one would ever challenge the hold of Sir William Peel on his imagination, but alongside Peel loomed those other titans of his youth, obscure heroes of even more obscure voyages, naval officers like McClintock, Osborn, Mechan, Vesey and Hamilton, who had so heroically retarded the cause of human knowledge and British exploration in the nineteenth-century navy’s long quest for those twin chimeras of a North-West Passage and the North Pole.
The modern history of polar exploration dates back to the years immediately following the end of the Napoleonic War. For centuries before then seamen and speculators had dreamed of a navigable northern route linking the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, but it was only when reports from whalers of changing ice conditions off Greenland coincided with a glut of unemployable naval officers that the Admiralty decided that the Arctic offered a perfect solution to the baleful spectre of peace. ‘To what purpose could a portion of our naval force be … more honourably or more usefully employed,’ demanded John Barrow, the influential Second Secretary to the Admiralty, in 1816, ‘than in completing those details of geographical and hydrographical science of which the grand outlines have been boldly and broadly sketched by Cook, Vancouver and Flinders, and other of our countrymen?’
The Arctic was by no means Barrow’s only goal – he was as happy to commit lives and money to Timbuctoo as to Baffin Bay – but it was in the polar regions that his obsessions bore the bitterest fruit. Within two years of his call a dual expedition under the command of John Ross and David Buchan had been dispatched, the first of a long series of futile and harrowing journeys in search of the Passage or the Pole that reached its tragic climax in 1845 when Sir John Franklin, that ‘knight sans peur et sans reproche’ – or ‘the man who ate his boots’ as he was more familiarly known – disappeared into the ice with the Erebus and Terror and was never seen again, perishing with all his men in a prolonged agony of disease, starvation, cold and cannibalism that gripped and horrified the nation for more than a decade.
The long, rancorous and ruinously expensive search for Franklin ought to have put paid to public and Admiralty enthusiasm for good, but when it came to polar exploration memories were notoriously short, and by 1875 Britain was ready to try again. ‘No one on board our two ships can ever forget the farewell given to the discovery vessels,’ wrote the expedition commander, George ‘Daddy’ Nares, of the scenes at Portsmouth in May of that year when Alert and Discovery sailed for the Arctic. ‘Closely packed multitudes occupied each pier and jetty … troops in garrison paraded on the common, the men-of-war in port manned their rigging, and as we passed greeted us with deafening cheers, whilst the air rang with the shouts of spectators on shore and on board the steamers, yachts and small craft which crowded the water.’
The object of the Nares expedition was the Pole, the motive the old one of national prestige, but for all the excitement and confidence, the result was very much what any dispassionate observer of British Arctic exploration might have predicted.* By the autumn of 1875 Alert had hit an impenetrable wall of ice in 82°27'N, and the next spring, after a brief flirtation with dogs, Nares’s men reverted to doing what naval expeditions traditionally did best in these circumstances, and settled down to the grim business of man-hauling their massive sledges towards the distant Pole.
In the culture that had grown up over the previous half-century, in fact, no other mode of exploration was really acceptable. As early as 1822 Parry had experimented with Eskimo dog-sledging, but long before Nares’s voyage the heroics of men like Leopold McClintock, criss-crossing the ice in the search for Franklin with their heraldic pennants flying above their sledges, had made manhauling with all its attendant miseries the British way.
Nares had warned his officers that ‘the hardest day’s work’ they ‘had ever imagined, let alone had, would not hold a patch’ on the miseries of man-hauling, and he had not been exaggerating. He had put Sir Clements’s gloomily evangelical cousin Albert Markham in command of the northern sledging party, and by the time Markham had hacked, stumbled, dragged and prayed his way through a nightmare ice-scape