That same evening Scott dined with Nansen and his wife and daughter, and after hearing Markham lecture at the university on Peru, left for Gothenburg and Copenhagen. On his first day in Copenhagen he had dinner with Maurice Baring from the embassy, and after an evening at the music hall was ‘trotted off’ to the zoo the next day to see a musk-ox by a ‘dear simple minded old gentleman with equal simple minded wife’. But even with the occasional musk-ox, music hall, concert recital – ‘horrible looking person with magnificent voice,’ he noted of the Marquis de Souza – to leaven his journey, the coming expedition was never far from his thoughts. ‘What was principally brought to my attention notice and serious consideration,’ he anxiously scrawled in Copenhagen, ‘is … that the crew is ridiculously large in the eyes of all foreigners – this point is again & again driven home – the crew must be largely reduced.’
It was not all one-way traffic, however, and if Scott’s sense of national pride had taken a denting in Norway, it was wonderfully restored by reading the American Frederick Cook’s account of his Antarctic experience on the train journey on to Berlin. Cook had been a member of de Gerlache’s Belgica expedition that had been trapped for a year in the ice of the Bellinghausen Sea, and his maudlin narrative of emotional breakdown and moral disintegration among a foreign crew was just the tonic Scott’s patriotism needed. ‘Read Cook,’ he noted on the twentieth; ‘they must be a poor lot except Lecointe whom alone appears to have had some guts – the food seems to have been very bad.’
If this seems a sweeping judgement on a crew that also included the young Roald Amundsen, Scott was soon brought back to a less insular view of international exploration by the forwardness of German preparations. ‘Two personal points of great interest transpired,’ he wrote on the twenty-first, his own unresolved relations with Gregory clearly in his mind after a meeting with the Gauss’s expedition leader, Erich von Drygalski: ‘He has emancipated himself from all control. He has refused to be subject to any orders.’
The following day Scott was in Potsdam with Drygalski, looking at instruments and discussing magnetism and the chemistry of seawater. After paying a final visit to Baron Richthofen, Markham’s opposite number in Berlin, he left for Hamburg on the twenty-third and the next day caught the train for England, ‘fully impressed with our backwardness’ and determined to ‘put things in order’. ‘The German expedition was to sail from Europe at the same time as our own,’ he later wrote, ‘but its preparations were far more advanced. In Berlin I found the work of equipment in full swing; provisions and stores had already been ordered; clothing had been tried, special instruments were being prepared, the staff of the expedition had been appointed and were already at work, and the “Gauss” was well on towards completion. I was forced to realise that this was all in marked contrast with the state of things in England, and I hastened home in considerable alarm. I found, as I had expected, that all the arrangements which were being so busily pushed forward in Germany were practically at a standstill in England; many of them, in fact, had not yet been considered.’
At the root of the problem, and in marked contrast to the freedom Drygalski enjoyed, were the various committees that controlled every aspect of expedition planning. It was hard to imagine that anywhere but England a national venture of such a scale should have to wait on the social movements of men who were as likely to be on the grouse moors as anywhere else, but until Scott could extract himself from the financial shackles of committee control, there could be no real hope of narrowing the gap with the Germans.
Another month – and another bad-tempered rearguard from Wharton – was wasted before Scott was allowed a measure of financial independence, but he still had nothing like the support that Drygalski enjoyed in Germany. At the end of June Markham had appointed the young Cyril Longhurst to the post of Expedition Secretary, but with the First Lieutenant and engineer busy with the ship’s preparations in Scotland, the third naval officer on the China Station, his biologist working out his notice at Plymouth Museum, his senior doctor just back from Brazil, his navigator still unconfirmed in the job, and half the scientific staff as yet unappointed, the vast bulk of the administrative work inevitably fell on Scott himself.
His energy, though, seemed inexhaustible. He was now living with his mother and sisters again, above a shop in the upper half of a house at 80 Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea. ‘The horror of slackness,’ Barrie wrote, ‘was turned into a very passion for keeping himself “fit” … Even when he was getting the Discovery ready and doing daily the work of several men, he might have been seen running through the streets of London from Savile Row [the old RGS building] or the Admiralty to his home, not because there was no time … but because he must be fit, fit, fit.’
The difficulties only increased when at the beginning of December Gregory arrived back from Melbourne to oversee the scientific preparations for the expedition. At their first meeting he had given Scott a copy of the original plan that Markham had so inexplicably endorsed, and a dinner on the tenth to thrash out their differences only showed how far apart they were. ‘I may as well say,’ Gregory wrote to Poulton, irritated at what he saw as Scott’s trespassing on his territory,
I do not think Scott at all a good man for the post.
His forte is that he is very prepossessing.
It is his first command & for a man who talks so much about discipline I think it is a pity for his first command to be so unusual.
I think he is a poor organizer, his departments are in arrears & he is so casual in all his plans. He appears to trust to luck things which ought to be a matter of precise calculation.
He has no experience of expedition equipment.
Instead of looking after his own work, he has apparently devoted most of his time to making himself acquainted with mine … On questions of furs food sledges ski ie things which are in his department his ignorance is appalling.
He is a mechanical engineer not a sailor or surveyor. And he does not seem at all conscious of these facts or inclined to get experience necessary.
Personally I like Scott but I am sorry he does not stick to his own work, instead of devoting so much of his energies to jumping mine.
This was rich coming from a man who had just swanned in from Australia, but he had no more intention of giving in to Scott, than Scott had of playing ferry master to Gregory. ‘Before perusing your article,’ Scott wrote to the RGS librarian, John Scott Keltie, some time in January, in a letter marked and triple-underlined ‘Strictly Private’, ‘I am writing to tell in strict privacy that the situation between Gregory & myself is in the nature of a deadlock. It is a great matter of regret to me but I still hope he may take a view more consistent with mine.’
If Scott really still had hopes that he could ‘manage’ him, they did not last long, and on 22 January – the same day that the old Queen died – Gregory sent a memorandum to Markham reiterating his demands. ‘A preposterous draft of instruction for himself arrived from Gregory,’ Markham noted in his diary that evening – ‘quite inadmissible’ as he later wrote. ‘He wanted a position equal to Scott’s, to have a deciding voice as to the route, to be consulted in everything, to have charge of observations and sole command on land, but he conceded that Scott might be in charge during times of stress and danger at sea … I sent the draft back, telling him it was out of the question.’
Behind Scott stood Markham, behind Gregory the Royal Society, but for both sides the issue – scientific or civilian command? – was the same, and for both sides the one tactic was to produce a definition of the commander’s role that would force the other into resignation. ‘Dear Gregory,’ Markham wrote on 30 January, conveniently forgetting his own earlier endorsement, ‘I am exceedingly