It was not primarily that Britain’s military complacency had been severely dented, because for all the gloom and fear of guerrillas at the Cape, the army was at last beginning to bring the situation under control. The early reversals of the war had brutally exposed the amateurishness and incompetence of Britain’s forces, and yet in a sense what was even harder for a nation that prided itself on its moral superiority was the disgust of the international community and its own liberals for the barbarism of a conflict that had left twenty-eight thousand Boer women and children and more than fifty thousand Africans dead in her camps. ‘Now that I know what the duties of a soldier are in war,’ wrote Wilson, whose own brother was in the fighting, ‘I would sooner shoot myself than anyone else by a long, long way … It [the bombardment of Kronje] made me cry like a baby and I threw away the paper in perfect disgust. A nation should be judged on exactly the same ground as an individual. As a nation we have the vilest of sins which everyone extols as the glories of Imperialism.’
This was not the sort of heroism that had been dreamed of when Discovery sailed, and Scott seemed more than usually grateful to get away to the reassuring world of the naval base at Simonstown. ‘Took up my quarters at Admiralty House,’ he wrote in his journal on the fifth, after they had made the rough journey round from Table Bay: ‘found Armitage & Barne already installed there.’
The main object of their stay at the Cape was to prepare for the magnetic programme ahead, and for the ten days Discovery was at Simonstown, Armitage and Barne were installed in an Admiralty tent on the plateau behind the base, comparing their variable sea instruments with absolute values only attainable on land. While this was being done the resources of the naval dockyards were put at Scott’s disposal. Discovery’s rigging was reset, the ship was recaulked to the waterline, and naval divers were sent down to scrape the barnacles off her hull. In spite of the tensions of the war, too, Admiral Moore provided Scott with three more men. In addition to these, another two were recruited, Robert Sinclair, an employee of the Union Castle Line, and an Australian soldier called Horace Buckridge, who would bring to Discovery his own characteristic brand of colonial dissent.
Cocooned once more in a familiar world, however, there were the inevitable dinners to be endured, entertainment to be returned, speeches to be made – ‘As usual didn’t know what to say but stumbled through a few sentences with more than customary credit’ – and the regulation hordes of visitors eager to see the ship. ‘Heard an amusing yarn of lady being asked why she was coming on board this ship,’ Royds noted, ‘replied that in case of any disaster think how interesting it would be to know that she had actually spoken to and seen the officers!! Nice way of looking at things and not very bright for us.’
By 14 October the refitting was complete, Armitage’s and Barne’s magnetic work done, and Discovery ready to leave on the next leg of their journey to New Zealand. As she made her way out between the warships of the fleet, Scott was moved to one of those hymns to the corporate, interdependent life of the navy that sit so touchingly alongside his own private frustrations. ‘As we got under weigh,’ he recorded in his journal, ‘all ships cleared lower decks & cheered – a grand send off – our small company did their best to respond. Thus ends an experience that makes one totally proud of a glorious profession – added to the practical benefits of our visit, one is deeply touched by the real kindness and sympathy shown by all; men and officers have had a glimpse of the real efficiency and meaning of our navy.’
The dismissal of Mardon had done the trick, and with the men ‘working very well’, and ‘little to complain of on the score of wind’, as Scott put it with a nice understatement, the ship was at last coming into her own. In the heavy following seas she was a mite ‘livelier’ than Williamson found comfortable, but while rolls of up to forty-seven degrees each way were commonplace, ‘it was rarely, if ever necessary to shorten’ those ‘handkerchief’ sails that Scott had reassured his mother about. The ‘worse all this gets’, an exhilarated Wilson wrote in the middle of the Roaring Forties, ‘the more we all enjoy it! Our dinner was all over the ward-room this evening,’ he cheerfully recorded, ‘the crockery is fast disappearing in small pieces. It is the funniest sight … everything all round seems to be tumbling about one’s head. The noise is indescribable.’
Wilson’s good humour is wonderfully engaging, and there is something deeply English in a sensibility that could ‘domesticate’ even the southern oceans. ‘The waves we are amongst now,’ he was writing five days later, as if Discovery were in some neo-Georgian landscape that a Brooke or a Housman might have found comfortingly familiar, ‘are, without any exaggeration, comparable in length and height to the rise from our pigeon gates, at the foot of the Crippets [the family home on a low spur of Leckhampton Hill in the Cotswolds], up to the rabbit warren above, and about the same depth.’
The next day the whole of Leckhampton Hill almost came down on them when a ‘monstrous sea’, ‘towering’ to the topsails, hit Discovery side on. Wilson was on the bridge with Barne and Scott when ‘an enormous wave broke right over the ship. We all three hung on to the stanchions and rails and were swept clean off our feet. We were simply deluged, and I burst out laughing at the Skipper who was gasping for breath. He had been nearly a minute under water. The whole of the upper deck was afloat. The water had flooded the magnetic house; laboratories, fo’c’sle and wardroom; galley filled with steam, winter clothes just brought up from the hold for distribution all swamped, and they call this a dry ship!’ ‘Didn’t we just laugh,’ he added, and not even the sight of a corpse from some unknown ship floating past or Williamson’s conviction that his ‘checks were in’ were enough to dispel the sense that this was ‘indeed … living’.
After the torpor of their voyage through the tropics, there was a palpable excitement that they were at last approaching the edge of an unknown world. There are few things still that can feel so excitingly alien as the first sight of ice at sea, and on 16 November, as Scott temporarily altered course and took Discovery southwards to record the changes in the magnetic force and dip* as they approached the Magnetic Pole, they saw it for the first time. ‘Fast ice seen about 10AM,’ Scott noted in his report for the two Societies, ‘and amid much excitement we watched small pieces of decayed drift ice gradually growing in size and number and assuming more fantastic shapes … The intense blue of the small seaswept holes and caverns … was noticed with delight.’ ‘A most marvellous sight,’ an excited Skelton noted in his journal, ‘quite the most wonderful I have ever seen.’ ‘The sky was grey with snow falling,’ Wilson wrote, ‘the breakers were white on a dark grey sea, and the ice only had its whiteness broken with the most exquisitely shaded blues and greens, pure blue, cobalt, and pale emerald, and every mixture in between them. I never saw more perfect colour or toning in nature.’
‘At 4 pm,’ Scott continued, with that meticulous eye for ‘technical’ detail that would characterise everything he looked at in the south, ‘a strong ice blink’ – the reflection of ice in the sky – ‘was observed to the left and right and a line of white ahead, and in half an hour we had run into a loose pack of drift ice, amongst which were occasional small fragments of glacier ice showing blue and heavy in contrast.’ ‘The wind had died away,’ he later more atmospherically wrote, ‘what light remained was reflected in a ghostly glimmer from the white surface of the pack; now and again a white snow petrel flitted through the gloom, the grinding of the floes against the ship’s side was mingled with the more subdued hush of their rise and fall on the long swell, and for the first time we felt something of the solemnity of these great Southern solitudes.’
Six days later they had their next glimpse of what lay ahead, when the long, grim ridge of Macquarie Island, isolated in the southern ocean hundreds of miles