At a time when the situation in South Africa made Britain’s isolation seem chillier than ever, it was more than even Lord Salisbury’s government could resist, and a meeting with the First Lord of the Treasury Arthur Balfour on 2 June 1899 produced a promise of £45,000 on the condition that the Societies could match the sum from private funds. The grant still left the Societies three thousand short of the £90,000 they required, but with Markham’s again the crucial voice, the RGS voted to raise the money through the sale of investments, and Markham had won.
The danger for Markham was that at the moment of victory he was going to have to pay the price for having brought the scientific establishment, in the form of the Royal Society, into partnership to get his way. He was realist enough to know that he could never have won over the government without its support, but now that the British National Expedition – as it was somewhat euphemistically called – was a reality, differences over where it should go, why it should go and who should lead it could no longer be fudged.
At the heart of all Markham’s problems was the lumbering Joint Committee, set up in June 1899 and comprising members of both Societies, appointed to oversee every aspect of the planning of the expedition. With its greater prestige and authority there had always been a danger that the RS would dominate this, and with little but his own willpower and the record of the RGS in raising funds to help him, Markham faced an endless struggle to control ‘the rag, tag and bobtail professors’ and the endless sub-committees they spawned. ‘We initiate the whole thing,’ he bitterly complained in August 1900, only two months after Balfour had given the go-ahead to the expedition, ‘raise all the funds, for geographical exploration, and then these mudlarkers [the biological sub-committee] coolly ask us to turn our expedition into a cruise for their purposes.’
‘Murray talking rubbish,’ he scrawled in one typical complaint. ‘Murray very troublesome and wasting our time.’ ‘I think Murray is trying to wreck the expedition.’ ‘He is an ill conditioned bully.’ ‘Murray’s conduct looks as if he was trying to do all the harm he can … This committee will strangle the Expedition with red tape if not checked … Futile chatter.’ ‘Greely pompous and egotistical … all progress all work impossible’. ‘Professors know nothing and only care about their own hobby’. ‘The important questions must be left to one man’ – from June 1899 till the sailing of the expedition, Markham’s diaries and letters are peppered with expressions of his frustration at sharing power and at the sheer dilatoriness of committee life.
At the core of these battles were real principles – the nature of the expedition, the integrity of British science, the quality of international cooperation – and the one battle that mattered more than any was over the appointment of the expedition’s leader. There was room in even Markham’s universe for give and take over the location or duration of the expedition, but if there was one thing over which he would rather have seen the whole project collapse than give in, it was his vision of a National Antarctic Expedition sailing with a naval officer and not a scientist at its head. There was probably no subject to which Markham had devoted more time either, and none on which he felt himself so uniquely qualified to judge. From the middle of the 1880s the search for the right man had been his personal quest, and over the fifteen years since there could hardly have been a suitable midshipman Markham did not get to know, and whose name, appearance and background did not find their way into his journals.
He knew what he wanted, which historical models to copy and which to avoid, and with his customary obsessiveness had made charts, drawn up lists, cross-referenced expeditions and compared performances in page after page of meticulous notes. Parry, he noted, was twenty-nine when he did his best work, Franklin thirty-three, McClintock twenty-nine, Osborn twenty-eight to thirty-two, Mecham twenty-two to twenty-six, Vesey twenty-one to twenty-five, Ross less successful at forty-three than he had been when younger. At fifty, Crozier was a quarter of a century too old. In the search for Franklin all the real work was done by the young. Nares was fine in Challenger, but no good for ‘really severe work’ in the north. The young men on that expedition had been excellent then, but were now past it. ‘He should be a naval officer,’ Markham summed up the evidence; ‘he should be in the regular line and not in the surveying branch, and he should be young, not more than 35; but preferably some years younger than that. All previous good work in the Polar region has been done by young officers in the regular line: those in the surveying branch who have been employed on Polar service have been failures. Old officers, all past 40, have failed and have been unable to take the lead in expeditions they nominally command.’ There were various reasons for this, he went on, because while surveying called for ‘close attention, diligence and endurance, it does not bring out those other qualities which are needed in the leader of an expedition into unknown regions. Nor is the discipline and order of a surveying vessel, the sort of system … essential for the well being of an exploring expedition.’
The other objection to the surveying branch, in Markham’s eyes, was that it had never been a path to promotion or distinction, and did not attract the kind of officer ‘conscious of ability, or who are ambitious, the class of man we want’. ‘Such are the young men to be found in the regular line,’ he triumphantly concluded, prejudice and snobbery gloriously vindicated by precedent, ‘generally as gunnery or torpedo lieutenants, because they see that to excel in those lines is the quickest way to promotion. Among them are many young officers ambitious for distinction, enthusiastic, anxious for opportunities to win a name; at the same time able, resourceful, lovers of order and discipline, and accustomed to the management of men. It is among these that the best leader of an expedition is to be found.’
If Markham had got his expedition ten years earlier, his choice of leader would have been Scott’s new captain in Majestic, but at forty-six Egerton – ‘the beau ideal [a favourite phrase] of a Polar commander’ – was too old. Over the years other possibles on the list had also fallen away for one reason or another, but on 11 June 1899, less than a fortnight before the crucial meeting with Balfour, the officer whom he had already identified as ‘the best man next to Egerton for the job’ appeared at Markham’s Ecclestone Square home. ‘(Sun) to church with Minna,’ Markham’s diary for 11 June bathetically recorded the historic occasion. ‘Mrs & Miss Nuttall came to bid us farewell, then young Robert F. Scott wanting to command the Antarctic Expedition.’
The two men had in fact met in the street a few days earlier, when Scott first learned of the expedition, but it would have been more than Markham could have borne to leave the decisive moment of his life to a chance meeting or an afterthought to Mrs and Miss Nuttall. ‘On June 5th, 1899’ – not the eleventh of the diary – ‘here was a remarkable coincidence,’ he later wrote with a more suitable eye for the workings of destiny, ‘a remarkable coincidence. I was just sitting down to write to my old friend Captain Egerton about [Scott], when he was announced. He came to volunteer to command the Expedition. I believed him to be the best man for so great a trust.’
And Markham had had his eye on Scott for so long too, had seen the potential in him so early, that there must have come a time when he forgot that Scott had once been no more than sixth on his list of possible leaders for the Antarctic. The two men had first come across each other twelve years earlier when Scott was a midshipman in the Training Squadron, and Markham’s diary recorded the occasion. ‘In the forenoon there was a service race for cutters,’ the entry for 1 March 1887 reads. ‘The Rover’s boat won (mid-Scott) but the Calypso (Hyde Parker) held the lead for a long time.’
That race made enough of an