Nobody could have been less ‘prepared’ than Scott as they entered into this world, but for the time being ‘Providence’ was doing its best to keep them alive. By the morning of 3 January 1902 they had crossed the Antarctic Circle, and were through the scattered ‘outriders of the pack’ and battering a path through the real thing, their eyes trained in a constant vigil on the sky for those telltale darker patches that meant open water. ‘The position of the officer of the watch’ in these conditions, Scott recalled, ‘was no sinecure: he had to be constantly on the watch in the pack to avoid contact with the heavier floes and to pick out the easiest path for the ship. When the pack was open his best position was in the “crow’s nest”, where he could first see the open patches of water and the heavier streams of ice, but in thicker pack he could often handle the ship better by “conning” from the bridge, and at such times he had to be constantly giving fresh directions for the movement of the helm.’
With this new world they had entered, wrapped in a heavy pall of leaden skies, came new rhythms, new wildlife, and a new diet. At the edge of the ice the albatross, their constant companion in the southern seas, had fallen away, leaving them to their own gruesome business. The slaughter of the sheep had started, and to their frozen carcasses, hung from the rigging as in some grisly Ottoman man-of-war, were now added the first seals. ‘My seal started off at a tremendous rate around the floe,’ a jubilant Skelton wrote on the fifth, celebrating their delayed Christmas Day with his own joyous slaughter of the innocents; ‘with Michael heading it off and sticking it with his knife – it was a most amusing sight; they chased it into the middle, & then the Skipper gave it a shot through the head with his pea rifle, which stopped it – we then hauled them both on board, mine still alive so it was killed with a knife – must have been very game; they were both small young bulls, very good skins, no scars – We had seal liver for breakfast, neither of them very nice. Church in forenoon with Christmas hymns.’ Scott might not have shared his engineer’s bloodlust – ‘he hates the sight of our butcher’s shop’, Wilson wrote – but he was again determined to make sure that Belgica’s errors were not repeated. Whenever a sheep had to be killed Scott would move himself to the other side of the bridge until it was over, but that did not stop him drilling into his Dundee whaling men the need to conquer their historic aversion to the taste and stench of blubber. We ‘are now eating seal flesh regularly’, he wrote with satisfaction, throwing in for good measure their newest and most recherché term of culinary comparison, ‘and most of us like it. I must own to some squeamishness myself but even I [thought] the steaks & joints good though the kidneys & liver come amiss … the meat is certainly greatly superior to penguins.’
Two days later, with their luck still holding, and Discovery’s massive overhung bow doing its job, they emerged from the pack into a world of clear seas and blue skies. ‘Our pleasure in once more reaching open water may be imagined,’ Scott wrote, and the pleasure was increased when at 10.30 that night their champagne celebrations were suddenly broken ‘by the shout of “Land in sight”. It made us almost feel like explorers,’ Scott wrote in his journal that night, and ‘All who were not on deck quickly gathered there, to take their first look at the Antarctic Continent; the sun, now near the southern horizon, still shone in a cloudless sky, giving us full daylight. Far away to the south-west could be seen the blue outline of the high mountain peaks of Victoria Land, and we were astonished to find that even at this great distance of more than 100 geographical miles we could easily distinguish the peaks of the Admiralty Range.’
With the worst of the pack behind them, a course was set for Robertson Bay, an inlet formed by the long peninsula of Cape Adare where Bernacchi had spent the winter of 1896 with Borch-grevink’s Southern Cross expedition. After a tortuous path through another stream of pack forty miles from the coast, they forced their way through a last heavy band of ice guarding the entrance to the bay and, the next afternoon at 4 p.m., dropped anchor in the shelter of a low, triangular spit of land. With Royds left in charge of the ship, a boat was lowered and Scott and the rest of the wardroom made their way through the fringe of grounded floe and onto the desolate plateau of pebbled basalt that stretched back three-quarters of a mile to the foot of cliffs.
In the centre of this beach, an incongruous relic among the great colonies of Adélie penguins to whom the world seemed to belong, stood Borchgrevink’s hut. Around it were scattered provisions and, inside, a letter addressed ‘to the Captain of the next Expedition’. Scott read it out aloud to his men. It was ‘rather ridiculous’, wrote Skelton, another John Bull convert to the anti-Borchgrevink movement, ‘& one only wonders how such a man could have ever impressed anybody with his fitness to command an expedition – full of bad spelling & punctuation, there wasn’t a word of use to anybody’.
Meteorology, geology, biology, climatology – in every discipline, in fact, except the geographical exploration that was all Markham really cared about – Borchgrevink had bequeathed a legacy Discovery’s men might have envied, but if the sight of the first grave on Antarctica was not enough to dent English complacency, the ice soon exacted its revenge.* After leaving a canister with details of their progress for the relief ship Markham had obtained, they stood out to sea and almost immediately found themselves caught in a stream of pack that carried them helplessly towards a chain of grounded bergs.
It was the first time they had seen what the pack could do, and become aware of what Scott at his most Markhamesque called ‘its mighty powers’. With Armitage aloft in the crow’s nest, they twisted and turned Discovery in an effort to avoid the heaviest floes, struggling desperately against the tide that was forcing them consistently towards the shore. It was one of those hours, Scott recalled, ‘which impress themselves on the memory for ever’. Above them, the sun shone out of a cloudless sky, its rays reflected in myriad gleams among the pack. Behind them were the snow-covered mountains and the glassy water of the bay. The air, Scott remembered, was ‘almost breathlessly still; crisp, clear and sun-lit, it seemed an atmosphere in which all Nature should rejoice; the silence was broken only by the deep panting of our engines and the low measured hush of the grinding floes; yet, beneath all ran this mighty, relentless tide, bearing us on to possible destruction’.
It was the bewildering contrast of appearance and reality that baffled Scott’s imagination, the co-existence of beauty and danger in so extreme a form. At such an early hour of the day, too, only the few men who were on the bridge were aware of their predicament, and the knowledge that down below the rest of the crew lay asleep in their hammocks, unconscious of any danger, seemed to heighten further the incongruity of the scene. Slowly, though – so slowly that no one recognised the moment of release – the tide began to slacken, the tight-packed floes loosened, and by 8.20, five hours after they had weighed anchor, Discovery ‘won through’ to open sea and safety. ‘For me,’ Scott wrote, ‘the lesson had been a sharp and, I have no doubt, a salutary one; we were here to fight the elements with their icy weapons, and once and for all this taught me not to undervalue the enemy.’
If this sounds ominously like the language of naval chivalry, Scott’s men soon had to accustom themselves to another ‘naval’ aspect of his leadership. ‘The Captain is strangely reticent about letting a soul on the ship know what even his immediate plans are,’ Wilson complained after a sudden decision of Scott’s to land on Coulman Island, another in the chain of possible ‘post-boxes’ chosen in London for Discovery, ‘so we are all taken more or less by surprise whenever a landing is made. I think perhaps he is