A week later on 31 July, Scott and Discovery were at last ready to make their escape. At twelve o’clock Markham and his wife Minna, along with Scott’s mother and his sister Grace, went on board at the dock gate. There, also, were Sir George Goldie, Markham’s staunchest ally in the last battle against the RS, Cyril Longhurst, the expedition secretary, relatives and a watching crowd of hundreds. ‘At 1 sharp,’ Scott noted in the first entry of his Expedition Journal, ‘left E.I. Docks … Ship’s company not so disorganised as I had expected. Naval people splendid – three merchant seamen intoxicated.’
As Discovery moved slowly down river on the tide, ‘all the steamers on the Thames’, the expedition’s new geologist, Hartley Ferrar, wrote in his diary, ‘blew their horns’, and the boys of the Worcester, manning the rigging of the training ship, ‘sang Auld Lang Syne’. At Greenhithe most of the visitors were put ashore, and by next evening Discovery had crossed Spithead and was anchored off the pier at Stokes Bay. On 3 August George Murray arrived with Dr Hugh Mill, the RGS librarian, who was accompanying the ship as far as Madeira, and two days later the last of the men returned from leave, including among them Wilson, back from a brief honeymoon, having been married less than three weeks before.
At nine that morning Discovery, with Sir Clements Markham and his cousin Albert, McClintock and Scott’s mother aboard, steamed across to Cowes and made fast to a buoy near the Royal Yacht Osborne. Scott had come a long way since he had been turned down for a berth on the Yacht, and at twelve the new King and Queen came alongside, with Princess Victoria. ‘As His Majesty came over the side,’ Markham noted with a wonderful bit of courtier’s mummery, ‘he called me, and I knelt and kissed hands, being the first time I had seen him since the accession, also the Queen.’ Markham then introduced Scott to the King and Queen, and Scott presented his officers. The men, drawn up on the port side, were inspected, and then Scott’s mother presented. ‘The King and Queen then went round the upper-deck, and the living deck,’ Markham continued, ‘taking the greatest interest in everything. On returning to the upper deck the King came and talked to me, speaking in high terms of Scott and his crew. The men were drawn up on the starboard side. After mentioning his grief and anxiety over his sister who was dying [Victoria, the Dowager Empress of Germany and the Kaiser’s mother, died that same day, one more small incident in the deteriorating relations between Britain and Germany], he spoke to Albert and McClintock. Then he made an excellent speech to the men, and turning to Scott, His Majesty decorated him with the Victorian Order (MVO).’
If the biologist Thomas Hodgson is to be believed, the only thing that really excited the Queen was Scott’s terrier, Scamp, but as Hodgson had not even recognised the Queen – ‘Very young … lame and deaf’ – he is possibly not the best witness. ‘We have had millions of visitors while we have been here,’ Hodgson wrote to his mother, as if numbers might somehow explain his failure of identification, ‘mostly aristocratic yet very mixed. We went in a mob to sign the King’s book on board the Osborne and as we came back a boat fouled us at the gangway and a fool went and jumped overboard and we had to haul him in like a drowned rat.’ The ‘fool’ had actually dived in to rescue one of the Queen’s Pekingeses, but even an anxious Skelton, ‘in spite of being much troubled with numerous ladies’, thought it ‘on the whole rather a good show’.
For Scott himself, it was a mixed occasion. He always hated fuss of any kind, especially anything that singled him out. In his journal entry for the day he forgot even to mention his MVO, only pencilling it later in the margin as an afterthought. For his mother, though, he was pleased. ‘My Dear little Phoebe & Esther,’ he wrote in big writing to his sister Ettie’s children, ‘This letter is to tell you that the King has made dear Uncle Con a Member of the Victorian Order, that is to say he has been given a very pretty medal which dear Granny Scott pinned to his coat.’ He was grateful, too, to his old captain for his thoughtfulness in arranging things. ‘It was entirely due to Egerton,’ he explained to the girls’ father, ‘that mother remained on board, and nothing as you say could have been more gratifying to her at such a time.’
It was a kindness that was not wasted on her. On holiday with Grace in France, where Scott had sent them to take her mind off his leaving, she wrote to him with a disarming pride of meeting the King and Queen. ‘People here like hearing about them. I never begin the subject, but of course if I’m asked I am only too pleased to tell them and recall my time of triumph in my son, for, after all, it is only the very few who actually shake hands with Royalty. Apart from that I like to think of the sweet sympathetic face that looked at me and smiled such interest in all she was looking at. And now, dear, one word of thanks for the holiday you are giving us both, and then good bye. God bless, keep and preserve you, my best of sons.’ Royalty was not enough, however, to take her mind long off her sadness at losing him. ‘I am not going to say one word about our feelings,’ she wrote three days later, ‘as your beautiful ship grew less & less till we lost her altogether: I shall rather tell you of the great kindness everyone showed us.’
Even the landscape of the coast brought back memories: ‘It was so lovely sitting on the shore,’ she wrote to him again a week later, ‘but this sort of life is too much like the old life at Devonport & brings it much to the front … Monsie [Grace] went to the stores about your V.O. ribbon and was directed to Spink & Sons and I hear from them that they have sent it.’ By the time she wrote that, Discovery was already off Madeira. After one last hectic day, she had sailed on the sixth. Scott and Murray had gone ashore for a final breakfast with Markham, and then retuned to the ship, ‘sad to see the last of this Grand old man and his companion Longhurst’.
Just before twelve o’clock Discovery finally slipped from her buoy, the house flag of the RGS and Blue Ensign and burgee of the Harwich Yacht Club – the Admiralty had forbidden them use of the Royal Navy’s White Ensign – fluttering at the mast. Slowly she made her way through the bobbing mass of boats and yachts crowding the Solent for Cowes Week and westward towards the Needles Channel. Off the small town of Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight the last of the families were put ashore – ‘a sad time indeed’, Scott scrawled in his journal, ‘but the womenfolk are always brave’. ‘How willingly one would dispense with these farewells,’ he later wrote in a passage that might have come straight out of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, ‘and how truly one feels that the greater burden of sadness is on those who are left behind! Before us lay new scenes, new interests, expanding horizons; but who at such times must not think sorely of the wives and mothers condemned to think of the past, and hope in silent patience for the future, through years of suspense and anxiety?’
Early the next morning the Start was still in sight, ‘but gradually it shaded from green to blue, till towards noon it vanished in the distance, and with it our last view of the Old Country’.
This is an awful ship for keeping our whites clean.
Charles Royds, diary, 22 August 1901
The same routine, all day at work & keeping watch & watch at night, a little bit rough I think.
Thomas Williamson, journal, 9 August 1901
FOR ALL HIS ANXIETIES over his mother, Scott would have been an odd creature if he had not been relieved to see England finally dip out of sight. With the forgettable exception of Torpedo Boat 87 almost a decade earlier, this was his first command, and if he had been in control of Discovery for over a year, it had been only the most notional authority, beset by the hydrographers and professors on the one side and the benign but autocratic presence of Sir Clements Markham on the other.
But now it was his ship, and if the Instructions he carried with him ran to twenty-seven