As well as the expedition work, there were also the social obligations that went with the command. ‘Scott at the RGS evening … Scott to dinner … Scott at paper on Lake Rudolph – Nile journey … Anniversary dinner – Scott there … ’ Exhausting though all this may have been, he was becoming very good at it. There was nothing Armitage admired in Scott more than his deft touch with the difficult men who were his employers, but behind the charm there was real metal. ‘I am of course aware that the latter amount has been definitely ordered,’ he wrote smoothly to the American Compressed Food Company, having first explained that he was halving his original order, ‘but I do not think it would be satisfactory to you that the fact should be known that we were obliged to leave behind a quantity of your pemmican owing to its not being up to our requirements.’
If the burden of things still fell on Scott, at least his staff was beginning to take shape. Albert Armitage had joined from the merchant service in December, and most of the naval and scientific personnel were in place by the spring. A medical doubt still hung over the choice of a second doctor, but by the end of February the list of executive officers was complete with the appointment of Michael Barne – ‘a charming young fellow … and a relative of mine which is also in his favour’, Markham noted – and a twenty-three-year-old merchant officer with the ear of the expedition’s greatest benefactor, Llewellyn Longstaff, and valuable experience in square-rigged ships, Ernest Shackleton.
If there was one thing too that hydrographers, ‘Arctics’, scientists and Clements Markham were united in, it was the recognition that the key to success lay in the right ship and the right men to handle it. In the earliest days of planning Markham had looked for a suitable whaler to do the job, but with the delicacy of the instruments required for their magnetic programme ruling that option out, it was decided to commission a purpose-built ship. The obvious place for this was Norway, and the obvious man to build it Colin Archer, the designer of Nansen’s Fram, but national sensibilities made this a delicate issue. ‘Colin Archer is no doubt a man of great skill and experience,’ Sir William White, the greatest of all British warship designers, warned Markham, ‘but it would be a matter of great regret that a ship to carry a British Antarctic expedition should be built outside these islands. We have only a few wooden-ship builders left, but they are quite capable of doing all you want.’
If public money had been involved at this stage, White might have had a valid point, but it was Longstaff’s donation that had made a new ship possible, and the advice effectively cut the expedition off from both Archer’s expertise and the stocks of seasoned timber at his disposal. The consequences of this would later be felt by those who had to sail her, but no Ship Committee chaired by Sir Leopold McClintock was going to ignore an appeal to patriotism, and in the place of a new design emerged a modified version of the old Discovery that twenty-five years earlier had gone with Nares to the Arctic.
The design of the vessel was put in the hands of the Admiralty’s chief constructor, William Smith, and with the contract awarded to the Dundee Shipbuilders’ Company, the keel was laid on 16 March 1900. The ship that rose on the stocks over the next twelve months was 172 feet long and thirty-four feet at the beam, barque rigged, with a displacement of 1,620 tons, a comfortable speed under steam of something like seven knots, an iron exclusion zone of thirty feet around the magnetic observatory, an overhanging stern to protect the ‘Achilles heel’ of the ship, a massively reinforced and raked stem, and an ‘internal arrangement’ – Scott recalled with a blind affection he never showed for any other home – of a strength that no one who had only travelled in a modern steel ship could conceive. ‘The frames, which were placed very close together,’ he wrote, ‘were eleven inches thick and of solid English oak; inside the frames came the inner lining, a solid planking four inches thick; whilst the outside was covered with two layers of planking, respectively six and five inches thick, so that, in most places, to bore a hole in the side one would have had to get through twenty-six inches of solid wood.
‘The inner lining,’ Scott went on, ‘was of Riga fir, the frames of English oak, the inner skin, according to its position, of pitch pine, Honduras mahogany, or oak, whilst the outer skin in the same way was of English elm or greenheart. The massive side structure was stiffened and strengthened by three tiers of beams running from side to side, and at intervals with stout transverse wooden bulkheads; the beams in the lower tiers were especially solid, being eleven inches by eleven inches in section, and they were placed at intervals of something less than three feet.’
A measure of this strength can be gauged from photographs of her on the stocks, and that must have been how Scott first saw her when he came off the night train for Dundee at the beginning of December 1900. The day-to-day supervision of her progress was left in the capable hands of his engineer, the tirelessly hard-working, inventive and cheerfully irascible old ‘Majestic’ Reginald Skelton, but there were always details that needed Scott’s attention. In ‘1¼ days,’ George Murray wrote to the RGS librarian Hugh Robert Mill two months later, ‘I have settled the deck plan for winches, reels, sounding gear, trawling and dredging gear, special tow netting and thermometer and water bottle gear, and the fittings for the Biological and physico-chemical workshop. Many matters which could have taken weeks of committees (joint and disjointed) Scott and I have settled quietly … Scott is a good chap and a first class organiser. I think he will go all the way and Armitage too.’
It had been only eleven months since the keel had been laid, but just over three weeks later, Scott, along with Armitage and Sir Clements and Lady Markham, was again heading north, via the Waverley Hotel in Edinburgh, for the launch of the ship. At midday on 21 March 1901 Scott showed Markham over her, and after lunch with the President of the Dundee Council of the Scottish Geographical Society, invited forward Markham’s wife Minna to perform the ceremony.
It had been Scott’s decision to ask Lady Markham, a graceful tribute to the man who had almost single-handedly battered the expedition into being. ‘After waiting a short time in the office,’ Markham proudly recorded in his diary, ‘Minna was conducted to the platform before the stern … I followed, and there were also Mrs Peterson, the other directors, Scott, Armitage, Royds and Koettlitz … Keltie, Mill etc. Minna was presented with a pair of gold scissors, and at a signal she cut a ribbon. The bottle of wine was smashed against the bows, there was a pause of two minutes, and then the good ship “Discovery” glided into the sea – a beautiful sight – amidst tremendous cheers.’
The name ‘Discovery’ had only been finally chosen the previous June, but with Markham’s sense of history, it is hard to imagine her being called anything else. With certain modifications and nods in the direction of Colin Archer, she was to all intents and purposes Nares’s old ship, the sixth of a long line of ‘Discoveries’ that linked Scott’s vessel in an unbroken tradition of exploration with the great voyages of Vancouver, Cook and William Baffin.
If Scott was as alive as anyone to the romance of the name, however, he was more concerned with performance, and he would have been pleased with the successful trials in the middle of May. It had been estimated beforehand that she would make seven knots under steam, but in trials both with and against the tide, an average mean of nine knots and the performance of the engine gave them all the encouragement they needed. They might have been less sanguine if they had been able to test her capabilities under sail, but without either the money or the crew to do this, Scott would have to wait until the journey out to South Africa to discover how seriously she under-performed. Her sluggishness under sail would have serious consequences for the costs and timetable of the southward journey, and yet as with everything connected with the expedition, the sheer pressure of time and business meant that no one had the luxury of their German colleagues to think or plan properly ahead.
Back in London, Scott was busier than ever, ordering furs and sledges, negotiating the purchase of dogs, and cadging and wheedling his way to a full crew. From the day that he had taken on the command he had seen the expedition as an essentially naval affair, and he was determined to squeeze as many men out of a reluctant Admiralty as possible. ‘1 senior carpenter’s mate – F.E. Dailey (Ganges),’ an Admiralty