If Scamp was reluctant to mix it with Macquarie’s inhabitants, Shackleton and the rest of the crew were not so easily discouraged. ‘We saw great flocks of Penwings’ – and a sea elephant that they shot – the difficult but touchingly curious Dundee whaling man James Duncan wrote, with his inimitable spelling, ‘some hands started to skin him & this being their first attempt there was some sport in the finish they were blood from head to foot … we continued on our way Doctor spoting every little plant or moss & bagin it’.
It was not just the men’s first introduction to a penguin colony, but to penguin meat, and Scott was surprised to find ‘no prejudice more difficult to conquer than my own’. He knew well enough from Cook’s account of the Belgica the consequences of any squeamishness over diet, and was glad of the chance to introduce the crew to a regime ‘which it will so often be essential to enforce’. ‘Had penguin for dinner & penguin eggs for breakfast,’ he wrote in his journal on the twenty-fourth, ‘must own to a weak stomach in these matters but am rejoiced to see the excellent spirit shown by the crew – they all ate and most pronounced favourably where I rather expected a kicking against the pricks in a matter where they are usually so pig headed & obstinate.’
With Macquarie Island behind them, they were now less than six hundred miles south-west of New Zealand, and Scott could sit down to his 3rd Letter of Proceedings with a real sense that men and ship had come well through their ‘baptism of fire’. The experience of the voyage, he reported, ‘has been of excellent service to officers and men in learning to handle the ship and the sails, it has given confidence in the ship & in themselves which cannot be overvalued and I am pleased to say that the charge of inexperience which might reasonably have attached to the whole crew, in view of the small amounts of time they had spent in sailing ships, can now no longer be applied’.
Scott also felt that he had got to know his officers. To his mother he confessed – ‘entre nous’ – that of all the wardroom, he had most warmed to Barne, Skelton and Wilson. Wilson, in particular, impressed him. ‘He is indeed a treasure [one of Scott’s favourite terms] in our small company,’ he wrote in his journal just before they reached Lyttelton, ‘whose quick eye for every detail of colour & form, every action and every attitude of his studies can I think have rarely been equalled.’
‘There is one thing your husband will not have told you,’ he took the trouble to write to Wilson’s wife Ory, ‘and that is what a fine fellow we all think him. His intellect and ability will one day win him a great name; of this I feel sure. We admire such qualities … but his kindness, loyalty, good-temper and fine feelings are possessions which go beyond the word admiration and can simply be said to have endeared him to us all. How truly grateful I am to have such a man with me … ’
His officers had also had the chance to get to know Scott. ‘I like Captain Scott better than ever,’ Armitage, his second-in-command, wrote home. More to the point, as Discovery dropped anchor that night at Lyttelton, and the last stage of their journey came into focus, was Wilson’s judgement. ‘One of the best points about him too is that he is very definite about everything,’ he wrote home; ‘nothing is left vague or indeterminate. In every argument he goes straight for the main point, and always knows exactly what he is driving at. There will be no fear of our wandering about aimlessly in the Southern regions.’
New Year’s morning … Memories of Old turning my thoughts to My Dear Loved ones at Home. We being about 14,000 miles from them & in latitude whare thare has not been any ship for a century & I may say cut off from the Civilised World our return as yet being doutfull. Hooping for the Best.
James Duncan, journal, 1 January 1902
IF SCOTT THOUGHT that his troubles were at an end when he got rid of Mardon, Lyttelton proved a rude awakening. From the first day in port his crew seemed determined to relapse into ‘shore’ mode, and with the whole of New Zealand desperate to show its hospitality, there was no shortage of opportunities to make up for lost time.
They were young men in their early twenties who had been at sea for almost four months, and Scott was neither prudish nor unrealistic in his expectations of them. ‘Mayor Rhodes who appears the Croesus of the neighbourhood called with his wife, a pretty woman,’ he wrote the day after their arrival. ‘Fear I rather seemed to throw cold water on entertainment of men but what can one say to a tea social for such thirsty gentry.’
The tolerance did not last long. ‘It is awful,’ Royds complained two days later, ‘and the men are asking to leave the ship and in fact are all very unsettled. How I wish they could keep away from the drink, as they are excellent while at sea, but when in harbour, they absolutely forget themselves, and go wrong.’ ‘We have dismissed … servant and cook,’ Skelton wrote the same day, grateful at least for one mercy – though he would have been less pleased about it if he had known the cook they were getting in his place; ‘they were very poor men & I believe scoundrels … men behaving very badly … good deal of fighting & drunkenness’.
This was a problem that was so endemic to naval life that it is hard to see what Scott could have done to prevent it, but now that trouble had broken out, it was a test of discipline that he had to pass. To a certain extent he was tied by the fact that Discovery had sailed under the Merchant Shipping Act, but if he ever hoped to cope in the ice without the draconian measures of the Navy Act to prop up his authority, he was going to have to assert himself now. The ‘men very fat-headed’, he wrote angrily that night; ‘heard of great disturbance on night before … spoke to men in evening, little to be said, they disgust me – but I’m going to have it out of them somehow – there are really only few black sheep but they lend their colour to the flock’.
If there were going to be problems, it was as well they should happen in Lyttelton and not in the south, while Scott still had the chance to weed out the troublemakers. The Australian warship Ringarooma had already been helping with their refit, and now the navy came to his rescue again, taking his worst offenders into custody, and releasing in their place two volunteers, a ‘big AB named Jesse Handsley’ whom Scott ‘liked the look of’, and another ‘very fine strapping AB’ destined to play a major role in Antarctic history, the twenty-four-year-old Kerryman Tom Crean.
It was not just the crew that was a worry. After Discovery’s brief exposure to ice, the old problem was compounded by a fresh leak in the bow compartments. Back in England her immense strength had seemed a triumph of design, but now that the leaks had to be found, the very thickness and complexity of her linings became a serious drawback, making it virtually impossible, even after two sessions in dry dock, for men unfamiliar with her construction to trace the trouble to its source.
For all the difficulties, however, it would be perverse for these weeks in New Zealand to be remembered for them, because in many ways there was no happier period in Discovery’s history. From the day she arrived there had been far more enthusiasm for the expedition than had ever been shown in England, and with all the hospitality ashore and endless crushes of visitors on board, Scott’s only ‘puzzle’ was ‘How we get along with our work.’
With the curious exception of Wilson, in fact, who did not like the naval officers they met, did not think much of Maori women, and thought the Haka a bogus piece of Sunday-school flummery, a strong note of gratitude runs through all the journals and letters from the time. ‘We had a visit from the Maorie ladies,’ a more appreciative Duncan recorded. ‘They are all original Natives of New Zealand, some of them were rigged up in their own style of dress & they looked splendid.’ ‘I for one will never forget this,’ wrote Williamson of all the kindness they had been shown, and Scott was every bit as thankful. After the initial