It was the first time he had to exercise any discipline, but it would not be the last, because the navy had treated its own seamen like children for so long that it was little wonder that they behaved like them whenever they had the chance. The root of the problem this time might have been the merchant recruits, but in these early days Scott’s own seamen were scarcely any better, only ever needing to sniff land or drink for ship standards to dissolve into the drunken indiscipline, irresponsibility and desertions that were endemic to any port the Royal Navy visited. ‘Some of the naval people thought they were in for a sort of picnic from which as they had signed articles they could not be excluded,’ an irritated Scott wrote back to George Egerton, his old Majestic skipper. ‘Nothing much happened but there was a bad feeling creeping in which I couldn’t lay hold of until it came to the surface on a little drink following the function of crossing the line … so having my opportunity I just walked into them properly – I pointed out that I could stop half their pay, all their grog and reduce them to starvation diet without even taking trouble to report the fact further, that I could discharge either naval or merchant seaman and make it pretty hot for them afterwards.’*
It was not just on the lower deck that the voyage was beginning to take its toll. As a south-easterly trade wind pushed Discovery helplessly westward towards the South American coast, a sense of drift seems to have filled the ship. The southern night sky, with its Southern Cross – that great symbol of loneliness and despair in A.E.W. Mason’s The Four Feathers – brought home to everyone just how far they were from home. In the privacy of his cabin Wilson could take ‘spiritual communion’ and imagine himself in St Philips with his wife Ory, but there were days when the mere talk of England could make ‘old Shackles very homesick … and myself nearly as bad’. ‘Moderate wind and sea!’ Shackleton himself wrote in his journal. ‘Just think of it! Moderate wind and sea – instead of golden grain and harvest fields, and gentle winds that waft the warm scent from the hay ricks. We are nearly 6,000 miles from home.’
They were six days behind schedule, and Scott had already abandoned the idea of stopping in Melbourne, but these faltering spirits were enough to prompt him to break their journey at the ‘weird, blighted island’ of South Trinidad. The island was sighted on the morning of 13 September, and dropping anchor on its western side, Scott took two small boats and a landing party in on the heavy, shark-infested breakers that smashed up against its rocky shore. It was a dangerous operation, and if it is typical of Scott that he should have first checked that everyone could swim, it was even more so that he should have pushed on even when he found out that they couldn’t.
It says something too for the monotony of ship life that a place like South Trinidad could seem an attractive diversion, but after five weeks at sea ‘the shore looked too enticing … to be abandoned without an effort’. ‘There is not a single beast on four legs on it,’ Wilson, always the most visually acute of Scott’s men, wrote of it, with ‘thousands of white bleached tree trunks everywhere, and not one living tree of the kind to be seen’. The island was alive, he went on, ‘with birds that knew no fear, and with myriads of quick scrabbling shore-crabs that were the prey of fish; and land-crabs, large fat bloated anaemic-looking beasts with strange black eyes, sat in every hole and corner of the whole island and just slowly look at one. We fed them on potted meat and cheese and chocolate, and they ate it slowly and deliberately without ever taking their eyes off us. There was something horribly uncanny about these slow things; one didn’t know a bit how old they were; they might have been there since the island came up.’
A new specimen of petrel – Aestralat wilsoni – seemed reward enough for a six-hour delay, and that same night Discovery was again under steam and searching for the westerlies that would help preserve their depleted stocks of coal. With the winds as fitful as ever Scott soon had to accept that they could never make South Africa on time, but as so often with him acceptance brought with it no easing of spirit. Ross, he impatiently noted in his journal, ‘had crossed the line on December 3 1839 … with the aid of steam we beat him by a day. So much for ½ a century & more or what has happened to the trade wind’.
‘These twists of fortune are truly exasperating,’ he complained again on 24 September, eleven days on from South Trinidad, ‘& when the luck is adverse one feels inclined to profanity’. Only Scamp seemed completely indifferent to conditions. ‘Best of the sport on board was our mischievous little dog Scamp,’ Williamson wrote the next day; ‘every time we ran along the deck Scamp would sure enough run in between our legs and capsize you, therefore causing much merriment & laughter … all’s well.’
He was equally disrespectful of Divine Service, which his agnostic master would no more have missed than he would a wind or temperature reading. ‘Morning service as usual with interruptions,’ Wilson noted one Sunday. ‘Scamp, the dog tried to enter church when Koettlitz, who was sitting nearest the door seized him by the tail and swung him out again. Scamp gave tongue in a high-pitched voice and in three minutes pelted in again, having got past Koettlitz, and was silently applauded by the blue jackets who beamed upon him. Scamp is an Aberdeen terrier with all the cunning of a Scotchman and a blue jacket rolled in one, and an appetite which bears no mathematical relationship to his full stomach.’
Six days after South Trinidad, Discovery at last picked up the westerlies, and though they were again weaker than expected, progress was ‘slow but sure’. With the Cape less than a week away, Scott took a last opportunity to catch up on his letters home. ‘It is always woe betide me when I take a rest – as regards letter writing,’ he told his sister Ettie. ‘I did so for a whole month after leaving England regarding my desk full of letters with a most complacent and devil-may-care attitude result is when I once come to tackle the matter I find myself once more in a rush to get things off before our arrival at the Cape. There are so many and such different tasks to be floored in this time and I never could drive my pen at a respectable speed so this is only going to be a very short letter to be followed by a more flowery epistle for the general perusal of the family & which of course must first go to headquarters. It’s nice of you to write all those pretty things about “Cowes”. Whatever natural expansion my chest assumes under the small piece of ribbon, it is speedily deflated when I think of the very small deserving of it.’
On the afternoon of 3 October, after nearly two months at sea and with reserves running low, Discovery rounded Green Point and entered Table Bay. The next day Skelton began the hated business of coaling the ship, feeding 230 tons of coal down canvas chutes that passed through hatches in the wardroom ceiling and floor to the coal hold below. ‘Coaling is filthy,’ Royds characteristically complained (a complaint, it should be said, that Scott would have echoed – he never missed a chance as captain to get in a round of golf when there was coaling to be done), ‘and the ship is simply crowded with visitors, black, white and indifferent. Soldiers in uniform, some in plain clothes, Generals, Colonels, Captains, etc, all come to see the ship and gaze on the heroes to be!!! I say Rats to them all.’
It was not just the ship that was in a filthy state and ‘inundated with sightseers’; the crew were no better. ‘I had great trouble with some of my men,’ Skelton was writing within hours of Discovery docking, ‘in fact throughout the ship, the men were unsatisfactory – chiefly owing to the fact that their friends from the shore [were] bringing them drink.’ ‘From tonight my behaviour to the men will be a trifle different,’ an equally irascible Royds threatened. ‘If they won’t behave themselves for kindness, we will see what the other thing does, as things are now too much of a good thing, and can’t go on.’
Scott had not been at the Cape since his days in Boadicea, but with a troublesome crew and the town under martial law, he cannot have been sad to see the back of it the moment coaling was finished. In his brilliant study of the role of ‘ice’ in the English imagination, Francis Spufford makes the point that a naval officer could sail from London to the Antarctic and back without ever really leaving England, happily travelling down a ‘corridor of Britishness’ without touching a land where he could not find familiar faces or a familiar tongue, where he could not