In spite of Scott’s fears, the work was getting done, and by 21 December Discovery was ready to leave. A service of blessing was held on board by the Bishop of Christchurch, and to the cheers of the huge crowds and the sound of bands, Discovery cast off her warps and steamed slowly out of the great, drowned amphitheatre of Lyttelton harbour, her Plimsoll line sunk beneath the weight of coal, stores, huts, dogs and sheep that now crammed every inch of her upper deck. ‘Cheers followed cheers,’ Scott wrote, ‘until, as we entered the open sea, with a last burst of cheering and a final flutter of handkerchiefs, our kind friends turned away, and slowly we steamed out between the war-ships that seemed to stand as sentinels to the bay.’
With his troublemakers safely out of the way, and the distractions of the shore receding behind them, Scott must have been counting his blessings when disaster struck from nowhere. One of the young naval seamen called Charles Bonner had climbed up earlier to the crow’s nest on the main mast to return the cheers, and was scrambling up higher to stand on the wind vane when the spindle snapped, a cry was heard below, followed by the hideous ‘thud of a fall’ as ‘the poor fellow hit the corner of the winch house with his head, completely smashing his skull & scattering his brains’. ‘He appears to have been sober when he went up,’ a shaken Scott wrote that night on a scrap of paper inserted in his journal, ‘but it afterwards transpired that a bottle of whisky was handed to him by another seaman named Robert Sinclair, whilst he was at the main mast head … his remains were placed on the poop … a dreadful example of the effects of our revelry.’
The death cast a pall across the whole ship. ‘Very dull day, on board, not a word spoken scarcely,’ Williamson wrote in his journal the next day, ‘every man going about his work as silently & quietly as possible, afraid that the least sound would disturb the dead. In the evening myself and another of his messmates washed poor Charlie put a union jack over him and laid him quietly to rest on the poop all ready for the internment [sic] tomorrow on our arrival at Port Chalmers.’
The captain of Ringarooma had steamed on to Port Chalmers to arrange the funeral, and at the inquest Scott made sure there was no word of the whisky. That same evening, at six o’clock on 23 December, the twenty-three-year-old Able Seaman Bonner was buried with naval honours in the graveyard high above the harbour, looking out to open sea and the flanks of hills that might have been Scott’s Devon. ‘We gave full naval honours of course,’ Scott would later write of another funeral to his mother, ‘you know how solemn & impressive such a ceremony is – but after such a funeral as you know the band plays a quickstep & the signs of mourning are discarded – This I think, is in the spirit as well as in the act and it is right and proper.’
Bonner had been hugely popular on the mess deck, but even in the small, tight-knit community of Discovery, life left ‘little time for sad thought’. ‘The cheers of the accompanying ships did not seem to stir so much,’ Williamson wrote on the next day, ‘for we still had sad memories of the last few days, when we passed HMS Ringarooma they gave us three hearty British cheers & a few more besides, & of course as Englishmen & brothers in arms as most of us are, we could not hold it any longer, so we bucked up spirits & gave them something of a return, the best we could under our circumstances.’
For Scott there was the aftermath of Bonner’s death to deal with, his few possessions to be sent home, and the man who had passed him whisky to be considered. On the day of the funeral, Sinclair had stolen a pair of trousers belonging to the cook’s mate and deserted, ‘much depressed’ at his role in Bonner’s fall, and doubting if he could ever live it down in the ship: ‘On the whole,’ Scott added in his journal, ‘I am inclined to doubt it also and think he took the wisest course and the best for all concerned.’
In the circumstances Scott decided to postpone their Christmas celebrations, but they headed south with his mind relieved of at least one worry. He still could not know at this stage whether Discovery would winter in the ice or return to Lyttelton, but the news from London that had reached them in New Zealand, that Markham had raised the funds for a relief ship at least meant that if things turned bad their ‘line of retreat’ was ‘practically assured’.
On board, minds hovered between what lay ahead and what they had left behind. At dinner on Christmas Day, the toasts were ‘The King’ and ‘Absent Friends’. Even Scamp now was gone, left behind at Christchurch, where he had ‘continued to distinguish himself on all sides’. ‘My dear girl,’ Scott had scribbled to his sister Ettie in a sudden spasm of affection, ‘Give the chicks my love & a kiss for yourself … You know what you have been to & what you will always be to your loving brother Con.’
‘At home they are just going to bed,’ wrote Shackleton, in an improbable maudlin blend of sentimentality and faux highmindedness, ‘and all the little ones were hanging their stockings up for the wonderful Father Christmas, who never fails to think of the children who believe in him so. We, but children in the greater world, pray that our request may be granted to do high good work, not just for ourselves, but for the name of England [Celts note], and for all those who have trusted us with the great adventure that we are setting out upon.’
‘Rather erotic lines,’ he wrote more convincingly the next day about a volume of Swinburne’s poetry given him by one of the officers in Ringarooma, and the lightening of spirits was general. Even the unpoetical Skelton was more than usually prepared to indulge Shackleton’s cultural evangelicalism. Reading Stephen Phillips’s ‘Paolo and Francesca’ to Skelton, Shackleton recorded optimistically, ‘though as a rule he thinks poetry of any description rubbish, thinking it, perhaps, not in keeping with the idea of an up-to-date engineer; he rather likes these’.
The West Siberian dogs that had joined them at Lyttelton were also playing their less cultured part, carrying on where Scamp had left off. Scott had deputed the arrangements for them to Armitage back in London, and a Whitstable seaman, Isaac Weller, had been signed on to ship them over to New Zealand and look after them in the ice. Each dog now, though, was assigned to the special care of a seaman, and the move was soon paying some unexpected and ambiguous dividends. ‘Had to make an example of Page & Hubert,’ Scott noted a week into their voyage, after there had been complaints over the food, ‘later very annoyed to find that half a joint of meat being given to the dogs – when will these people wake up to the fact that they are not on a picnic.’ ‘I myself call mine Clarence,’ Williamson engagingly recorded, ‘after a young boyfriend of mine in Lyttelton NZ.’
They were also making good progress southward, and with the wind fair and all ‘handkerchiefs’ spread, they were in a latitude of 61°S by the last day of the year. That evening Bernacchi felt sure enough to bet a bottle of champagne and port that they would see ice before dinner, but if there were bergs out there, Armitage’s hot punch was enough to guarantee that no one in the wardroom saw them that night. On the stroke of midnight, Ferrar, as the youngest member of the wardroom, struck the bell sixteen times, ‘which is the custom on this occasion’, and grog was served to the men. ‘Midnight,’ Skelton’s journal recorded, ‘… several glasses – joined hands & sang “Auld Lang Syne”. Everybody very merry – walking the bridge & joking until nearly 2.00am.’ ‘What indeed may or may not the next two months see?’ Scott asked himself. ‘All one can say is we are prepared – the rest is in the hands of an all seeing Providence, we can only hope for good fortune.’
In the months to come he would look back on an entry like that, and wonder how they could ever have been so innocent. Over the last eighteen months he had done all that any single man could do to ‘prepare’ himself for his command, but though he could not yet know it, his whole professional life had been a kind of anti-preparation for the job, an indoctrination