1 ER artificer
4 leading stokers
6 petty officers
10 seamen
At the end of May, Scott and Markham were again in Dundee to take possession of the completed ship and steam her down to London. As they were being shown over it, an incident nearly cost Scott his life. ‘Went over Discovery with Scott etc,’ Markham’s diary records. ‘We then, including Royds, all went to see the screw lifted by tackle from the spanker boom, used as a derrick. We were all standing round watching, when the iron hook came in two, the block crashed down, and the screw went down – 2½ tons. Scott was standing exactly under the block, and would have been killed if Mr Smith had not got him to move a little, just a few seconds before. Mr Smith saved Scott’s life.’
Scott was none the worse for the episode, but the screw had jammed in its lifting shaft, and for two days the Discovery was back in dry dock. With time to spare for the first time in months, Scott took out the ship’s dinghy, and the next day drove with his hosts to see Glamis Castle ten miles north of Dundee. On 3 June, though, Discovery was again ready, and in ‘fine weather with a smooth sea’ and Markham ‘very comfortable in the captain’s cabin’, began the first leg of her long journey south.
By the next day Discovery was off Flamborough Head, and passing Yarmouth on the fifth, came into her East India Dock billet on the Thames at 2 p.m. on the sixth, Scott’s thirty-third birthday. Even at this late stage they were still eight men short of a full crew, and with the Admiralty authorising only twenty-three volunteers, Scott was forced to recruit the remainder where he could, taking on four unknown men from the great pool of London’s maritime labour force, and another three from Dundee with experience on northern whalers.
The last thing that Scott had wanted was to mix naval and merchant men in this way, and with the defection of Gregory and the loss of his one outstanding scientist, George Simpson, to the Admiralty’s medical board, there were also still gaps in his civilian staff. It seems astonishing that a National Antarctic Expedition could have brought itself to such a pass, but with little more than a month to go Scott was still without a physicist and a geologist, the two men most crucial to the expedition’s geographical programme and cooperation with the German Gauss.
It was not as though the scientist he already had – Reginald Koettlitz, a former member of the Jackson – Harmsworth expedition, or the ‘exceedingly bald’ Thomas Hodgson, his marine biologist – were national names, but not even Poulton can have envisaged the situation now facing Scott. He was luckier than he might have been in getting another old polar hand in Louis Bernacchi to accept the vacant role of physicist, but with nobody of proven ability to fill Gregory’s shoes, he had no choice but to fall back on a twenty-one-year-old Cambridge oarsman with a Second in the Natural Science Tripos from Cambridge that summer, Hartley Ferrar.
It was little wonder that a scientist like Poulton thought it would have been better that the expedition should be abandoned than sail on these terms, but it was Scott who had to live with the consequences, and no one could have denied him the one piece of real fortune he had with his scientific staff. The previous November he had interviewed a talented ornithologist and water-colourist called Edward Wilson for the post of second doctor, and had been impressed enough to ignore a history of tuberculosis and an infected arm and put him straight onto the books.
A subsequent medical board – at which the scrupulous Wilson had gone back into the room to confess to his tuberculosis – had advised against the appointment, but Scott had no intention of losing a second good man. At such a late stage it would have been almost impossible, anyway, to find a replacement, and so long as Wilson was willing to risk his health and life, Scott was happy to abet him. ‘I think,’ Wilson wrote with that absolute trust in the controlling purpose of a beneficent God that stayed with him to the end, ‘I am intended to go. If I had tried to get it I should have many doubts, but it seems given to me to do. If the climate suits me I shall come back more fit for work than ever, whereas if it doesn’t I think there’s no fear of my coming back at all. I quite realize that it is kill or cure, and have made up my mind that it shall be cure.’
There was one more scare, when their engineer, Skelton, found a leak in Discovery and she went again into dry dock, but with coaling and stowing still to be done, no one could be persuaded to take this with the seriousness it deserved. It must have seemed to Scott, in fact, that a greater threat to the ship came from the visitors, with a chaotic scrum of families, friends, admirals, donors, old ‘Arctics’, ticket-holders and sightseers all pressing to see Discovery before she sailed. The visitors were so numerous, Thomas Williamson, a young naval seaman recruited from HMS Pactolus, complained, ‘you had scarcely breathing’. ‘The relatives were frequently on board,’ Markham recalled with all his old, almost forensic, fascination with the peculiarities of human behaviour, ‘and it was most interesting and rather pathetic to see them finding great consolation in furnishing and arranging the cabins. Scott had his dear old Mother, and his sisters Mrs Macartney, Mrs Campbell, Mrs Brownlow, and Miss Scott. Charlie Royds had his mother and his sisters. Barne had his mother Lady Constance and sister. Shackleton had his fiancée and her two sisters. Dr Koettlitz and Dr Wilson had their wives. Mrs Armitage was near her confinement … ’
With the leak apparently mended, the filthy scramble to coal the ship could at last begin, and 240 tons were loaded into the main bunker, and another sixty into the small bunkers either side of the engine room. On 15 July, another ceremony took place on board that brought home to crew and families the imminence of departure. ‘The bishop came up from below in his robes,’ Markham recalled, ‘preceded by his chaplain with the Crozier.’ Drawn up, waiting for him between the hatching and the main mast, stood the officers and men, and behind them, crowding the ship, their families. ‘The Bishop’s address’ – ‘Behold how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity’ – ‘was excellent and very impressive,’ Markham noted, ‘and the men, led by Royds, sang their hymns well.’ ‘Oh! Almighty God,’ the Bishop finally prayed, ‘Who has appointed all things in heaven and earth in a wonderful order, be pleased to receive into Thy most gracious protection all who sail in this ship. Grant that our labours may show forth Thy praise and increase natural knowledge, preserve us in all dangers of body and soul, nourish us in one spirit of gentle unity, and bring us home O Father in love and safety through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’
It is an image to savour. The Bishop’s blessing, the final prayer of dedication that Scott cherished all his life, the First Lieutenant in his naval uniform leading the lower deck in the hymns, the choice of hymns themselves – ‘Fight the good fight’, ‘Lord Thou hast been our refuge’ and the great sailors’ hymn, ‘Eternal Father’ – no service could have better captured the peculiarly English cultural baggage that the men of the Discovery took with them when they went south. In his account of the first nightmare winter ever spent in Antarctica, Frederick Cook recalled that there was not so much as a bible on board Belgica. In Discovery that would have been inconceivable. For an English and naval expedition, uneasily straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the institutional trappings of late-Victorian religion, along with the sense of order, hierarchy and deference they underpinned, were as real and ever-present as the science, the modernity, agnosticism and spirit of enquiry that drove them.
With only days left before they sailed, there was little time for anything more spiritual than the last, rushed preparations. There were still a hundred things to do, and as many again that would never be done in time. The novelist A.E.W. Mason wanted to see over the ship. Sir Erasmus Ommaney, one of the last frail links with Ross’s expedition, wrote begging Scott to escort him around her. Sir George Nares and Sir Joseph Hooker, old adversaries, had to be accommodated. There were lectures to give, speeches to make, the Worcester training ship to be visited, pay scales to be finalised, wills to be completed, teeth to be stopped, and a last ritual dinner at the Athenaeum with the very men who had spent the last year trying to stop Scott going to be endured. ‘The venerable white President down from his stellar regions … the great physiologist … the equally great physicist … the man responsible for the safe navigation of the world’s waters … the one who had revolutionised