There was a decency about Royds, a deep sense of loyalty, and a refined civility that would all come out strongly in the south, but as a young man there also was a certain prissiness – ‘girlishness’ his mess-mates called it – that had somehow grafted itself onto the conventional stiffness of the well-connected naval officer. To the rest of the wardroom the state of the ship was a matter for nothing more than the occasional good-humoured comment, but for Royds every speck of coal dust that got on his whites was a personal affront to a soul ideally created for the Mediterranean Squadron and the Grand Harbour at Valetta.
If he was right about one thing, it was Scott’s ‘impatience’, a recurring theme of journal after journal of the men who served under him. When the terrible Jacky Fisher was at the Admiralty he would ‘emblazon’ his papers – and people, he claimed – with the word ‘RUSH’, and as Discovery made its slow way south there were times when Scott’s men must have imagined the same demonic stigmata blistering itself on his brow – “‘Knock off everything”,’ a weary Royds parodied Scott’s style of command, “‘up anchor”, “No steam up”, “clean lower deck”’.
Like Fisher, wandering around with a plaque around his neck saying ‘Give me something to do’, Scott wanted things done and he wanted them done immediately. He could never understand how anyone could waste the opportunities that Discovery had dropped into their laps, and like some reprieved victim, liberated at last from the deadening torpor of naval life, he was determined to press his own, exhausting freshness of vision on everyone around him.
Discovery’s sluggishness under sail also fretted at his patience. ‘A better pace,’ he confided to his journal, ‘produces better spirits,’ and if he added ‘in me at least’, he could not imaginatively grasp any different view of things. How could the scientists not seize every opportunity to perfect their skills, he would wonder in letters home. Why were they not as endlessly eager as he was? ‘These delays are very damping to the spirits,’ he complained in his journal after one altercation over tow-netting. ‘Patience is difficult but the daily tasks proceed. Had to expostulate with Murray on the disgusting state of Hodgson’s laboratory with fruitful results – but I fear there are still pangs to be endured from the latter’s untidiness & want of hygienic perception – Oh for more wind.’
It was not just Royds Scott could annoy; he could just as easily bring the lower deck to a full and historic sense of its grievances. The Discovery had not been three days into her voyage before Williamson was complaining of his workload, but there is an underlying feeling that a lot of this is no more than routine lowerdeck grumbling. Seamen like Williamson – one of the great moaners of Discovery, and one of the first to serve with Scott again on his second expedition – knew that it was an officer’s world. They knew, as any self-respecting able-bodied seaman or army private has always known, that the promotions and the credit would not be coming their way. They knew, with all the force of the biblical injunction to the serpent, that between them and the officer there could be no accommodation. They were not meant to like their captain. Complaint was not just a pleasure and privilege, it was a duty. They might see things partially, but they saw them plain. Read Royds’s journal, and one can almost see the hairs on the back of his neck as Scott reads out the Bishop’s prayer; read Williamson, and it is just the ‘usual amount of church Service’.
It is this persistent note of scepticism that gives Discovery’s lower-deck journals their interest, adding an almost Shakespearean texture to the picture of expedition life. In Markham’s or Scott’s accounts it is inevitably the nobility of the work that is played up, but in the journals of Williamson or James Duncan what we hear is the antidote – the voice of a Dolabella puncturing the glory of a Mark Antony – of the Clown eating away at the narcissistic tragedy of a Cleopatra – of Robert Bolt’s ‘Common man’ casting his jaundiced eye over the vanities and self-delusions of heroism and martyrdom.
With one single exception, however, the other quality that marks all these journals is an utter lack of resentment of ‘things as they are’. Whatever the different politics of the men in Discovery, there seems to have been a vein of almost Salisburyesque conservatism running through the ship, a good old-fashioned John Bull belief that the barbarian was at the gate, and that only the familiar structures of discipline and self-discipline stood between them and the chaos of egotism, megalomania, betrayal, greed, brutality, stupidity, mendacity, murder and cannibalism that the long history of nineteenth-century Arctic exploration suggested as the alternative.
It would be a mistake, in any case, to read any more into these journals than into the occasional spasm of irritation that similarly marks Royds’s or Scott’s diaries. In some ways they bring us as close as we can ever get to Discovery, and yet of their very nature they are dangerous historical tools, safety valves for all the petty and momentary resentments of day-to-day life among thirty-odd men living together in the cramped discomfort of a ship for three years.
And given how claustrophobic this world was, the astonishing thing is not that there were so many rows or discontents in Discovery, but so few. The eleven officers lived and worked in a wardroom no more than thirty feet by twenty, with a long table down the centre, a large stove at the after end, a pianola, and a warren of small cabins leading off on both sides that provided them with their solitary, fragile measure of privacy. It was a world in which there was no escape for Scott, and no escape from him, and the conditions for the men were worse again. In terms of warmth and physical comfort they would certainly be better off than the officers in the ice, but as Discovery steamed slowly through the tropics, with the temperatures in the stokeholds stuck fast in the 140s, it was almost inevitable that the cramped, stifling conditions of a mess deck where a combustible mix of naval and merchant men ate, drank, worked and slung their hammocks in a space scarcely bigger than the wardroom, should spark off the first ugly incident of the voyage.
It occurred at the end of August, just three weeks into their journey, as Discovery crossed the equator, and Neptune and his consort hailed the ship and came aboard. A large seawater bath had been constructed amidships out of a sail, and a scaffold built above it, with a ducking stool secured by a rope for the victims. In the bath below, well primed with ‘a go of grog’, waited four tritons, and high on the platform, Neptune and his court, ‘with the doctor and his greasy soap pill, the barber and his foaming tallow lather and huge razor. After the victim had been interviewed, he was handed over to the tender mercies of the Tritons; and it was generally a gasping, almost breathless creature that emerged from the other end of the bath. Wilson was the first on Neptune’s list, and was the most lucky one, for the chair slipped and before he was even lathered, he was shot into the bath, so he escaped with merely a ducking. Ferrar, the geologist, did not take very kindly to the attentions of the operators, so on the platform he received a double dose, and he struggled a lot in the bath not knowing that under the disguise of wigs and oilskins were hidden the strongest men on the ship. The whole affair went off well, “though the men got a bit rough towards the end”.’
If that had been the finish of it, no one but Ferrar would have had anything to complain about, but by the end of the evening a combination of drink and heat had taken its toll. At the bottom of the trouble was a Brixham seaman taken on in London called John Mardon, and by the time things had been brought under order, one of the Dundee whaler men, Walker, had had his thumb bitten through to the bone and two more of the men had got themselves lined up for reprimands. ‘The party was rather too lavishly regaled with whisky,’ Scott primly wrote on 31 August, ‘and the merchant seamen appear to have saved their rum for the occasion. The result was an orgy in the evening with Mardon and his confreres behaving insubordinately. It gives an excellent opportunity of putting one’s foot down.’
The problem was not of Scott’s making – and there is no need to waste a second’s sympathy on Mardon – but what he lacked was the imagination or will to find anything other than naval solutions