1: INSTRUCTIONS TO THE COMMANDER
The Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society, with the assistance of His Majesty’s Government, have fitted out an expedition for scientific discovery and exploration in the Antarctic Regions, and have entrusted you with the command.
The objects of the Expedition are (a) to determine, as far as possible, the nature, condition and extent of that portion of the South Polar lands which is included in the scope of your Expedition; and (b) to make a magnetic survey in the southern regions to the south of the 40th parallel and to carry on meteorological, oceanographic, geological, biological and physical investigations and researches. Neither of these objects is to be sacrificed to the other.
There was a genuine value in a set of Instructions of this kind, in as much as it established the notional priorities of the expedition, but it was the clauses that freed Scott and not tied him to London that were so crucial. ‘Owing to our imperfect knowledge of the conditions which prevail in Antarctic seas,’ Markham had written in Paragraph 17, emancipating Scott at a stroke from any prearranged assumptions about the ship’s movements in the south, ‘we cannot pronounce definitely whether it will be necessary for the ship to make her way out of the ice before the winter sets in, or whether she should winter in the Antarctic regions. It is for you to decide on this important question after a careful examination of the local conditions.’
Scott soon had early reminders, too, of how important it was that he should be free to make his own decisions. At the Dundee trials in May Discovery had only been tested under steam, and they had not crossed the Bay of Biscay before it became obvious that it was only in a force 7 or 8 on the Beaufort Scale that they were going to manage anything like the eight knots needed under sail. The problem, as Scott saw it, was the ‘terribly small’ area of sail that Discovery carried, a design deficiency he dressed up rather differently for the benefit of his worried mother. ‘The ship is a magnificent sea boat,’ he wrote to her from Madeira, where Discovery had moored on 15 August, ‘smooth and easy in every movement, a positive cradle on the deep. We only sigh for more sails. Ours are made for temperate seas, so they look rather like pocket handkerchiefs in a light Trade; they are so small that even in a hurricane they couldn’t capsize the ship.’
‘It is quite impossible for me to describe the delight of getting your letter,’ she wrote back from Arromanche in Normandy, where she was still on holiday with Grace. ‘It is so good of you to tell me all the details of the ship and her sailing powers & so sweet of you to tell me of small sails & the safety of these in high winds. I prize every detail and read and reread what you say … ’
Discovery was in fact no more sluggish than might have been expected, and certainly outperformed the German Gauss on the voyage south, but if anything was to be done during the first season in the ice, there was no margin for delay. In his first official ‘Letter of Proceedings’ Scott estimated that the best that could be hoped for was an average speed of 6¾ knots, and even if they missed out Melbourne and headed straight for Lyttelton, that still put their original estimates for arriving well out of reach.
There was soon a more serious problem, with the leak that had been discovered back in the East India Docks on the Thames. Skelton and Royds had been trying to warn Scott about it since London, but it was only when two feet of foul-smelling water was found washing around the forward holds a week out of Madeira that, as an irritable Royds wrote in his diary, ‘the skipper at last woke up to the fact that the ship leaked’. The cause of the problem was almost certainly unseasoned timber, which only added to a growing disillusionment with the work of the Dundee Shipbuilders’ Company. Scott had already sent off a long list of their ‘enormities’ to the ship’s designer, and it is not just his journal from these first weeks that is littered with outbursts against Discovery’s contractors. The ‘ship building firm was in my opinion most dilatory in performing the work’, Skelton had complained the day they sailed; ‘not only were they dilatory but I consider them to have performed their contract in a most scandalous manner’. ‘Those responsible for the leakage out [sic] to be strung up,’ was the twenty-four-year-old seaman Thomas Williamson’s more succinct verdict, and by the time they had finished rescuing, cleaning, disinfecting, restoring or jettisoning slime-covered cases there would have been few dissenters on board.
A week later an exhausted Skelton was complaining that things were still as bad as ever, but one unscheduled benefit of the leak was that the stores had all to be systematically repacked. There had been so little time to complete preparations in London that no one on board really knew where anything was, and with half the stores going separately to Melbourne, and the one man who knew anything about the system going with them, equipment was endlessly being lost or turning up buried ‘in the cutter or some other marvellous stow hold’.
The work had at least given Scott a chance to gauge the men under him, and if he was impressed with Shackleton, he was doubly grateful that he had persuaded Skelton to join him from Majestic. ‘I cannot sufficiently express my admiration for their efforts,’ he reported in his second Letter of Proceedings, after a dead calm and temperatures in the 140s had turned the stokehold into a living hell, ‘and more especially for the unfailing perseverance and skill of Mr Skelton the Chief Engineer and Mr Dellbridge the artifice engineer.’
In spite of these teething problems, however, and the inexperience of the crew in handling a sailing ship or taking soundings, the atmosphere on board was good. ‘It’s a blessed thing we get so much heavy work,’ Edward Wilson wrote contentedly after three weeks at sea, ‘because none of us need ever feel the want of exercise at all. The Captain turns to with all of us and shirks nothing, not even the dirtiest work. Royds works well and had most of the work on the ship itself to do. Shackle and Barne and I are a trio, and one is never dirtier than the other two, and all three as a rule are filthy. We three generally sleep down aft the poop in moonlight as bright as day, except when driven below by rain. Hodgson is always on the go. I think that Shackleton has so far done more hard work than anyone on board.’
Wilson was in no doubt either of the pivotal role Scott played in the well-being of the ship. ‘He is a most capable man in every way,’ he wrote again later in the voyage, when he had had time to take fuller stock of his skipper, ‘and has a really well-balanced head on his shoulders. I admire him immensely, all but his temper. He is quick tempered and very impatient, but he is a really nice fellow, very generous and ready to help us all in every way, and to do everything he can to ensure us the full merit of all we do. He is thoughtful for each individual and does little kindnesses which show it. He is ready to listen to everyone too, and joins heartily in all the humbug that goes on. I have a great admiration for him, and he is in no Service rut but is always anxious to see both sides of every question, and I have never known him to be unfair.’
There were obviously tensions and irritations – the state of the bald, untidy, hopelessly civilian Hodgson’s laboratory, Koettlitz’s idleness, the ever-present threat of having Shackleton spout Swinburne or Browning at you on watch – but Hugh Mill had never been in ‘pleasanter company’. ‘Captain Scott has shown a power that I must own surprised me in mastering the details of the scientific work,’ he reported home, as clear as Wilson as to where the credit lay; ‘he is greatly liked and respected by everyone on board, and has I believe mastered the art – more difficult than any of the scientific work – of preserving the necessary discipline & the equally necessary confidence and friendly feeling between all on board.’
If there was any early difficulty on board, in fact, it was curiously not between navy and civilian, or navy and merchant, or wardroom and mess deck, but between Scott and his First Lieutenant, Charles Royds. By the end of the expedition there was nothing that the two men would not have done for each other, but in these first weeks differences of temperament and habits – and differences at heart, one suspects, between Scott’s style of command and Royds’s amour propre as the First Lieutenant responsible for the running of the ship – spilled out in the stream of grumbles that bubble up time and again in Royds’s journals.
It was invariably Scott’s impatience that