These were only momentary irritations, and as Scott took Discovery slowly southwards, holding close to the coastline, they were soon too busy again, laying down food for the winter, to worry about much else. ‘As so often in the Antarctic’, he wrote, they ‘resolved to turn night into day’, and began the wretched job of stocking their rigging with all the seal they could kill. ‘It seemed a terrible desecration,’ Scott wrote, ‘to come to this quiet spot only to murder its innocent inhabitants and stain the white snow with their blood … Some of us were glad enough to get away on our ski and to climb the steep slopes at the end of the creek.’ Their slaughter, though, had given them a chance for their first successful dredge, and Hodgson and Koettlitz were in their element. ‘Hodgson was awfully pleased & tremendously excited about it,’ Skelton recorded, one hunter delighted for another. ‘Sponge, starfish, seaeggs, worm – 70 different species in all.’
‘Hodgson is glorified,’ wrote an equally happy Scott, but that was nothing compared to Koettlitz’s joy five days later. Throughout the voyage old ‘Cuttlefish’ had been something of a figure of fun in the wardroom, a combination of touchiness and a certain residual ‘foreign-ness’ making him the natural butt in particular for Shackleton’s high spirits. “‘Moss! Moss!!”’ Koettlitz’s tormentor recorded in his diary on the twentieth. “‘I have found moss!!!” I said, “go on, I found it!” He took it quite seriously, and said, “Never mind, it’s moss, I am so glad!” The poor fellow was so overjoyed that there were almost tears in his eyes.’
With the season pressing on, there were other concerns, and for the last few days Scott had been searching with increasing urgency for a suitable wintering place. The natural harbour where Shackleton had found Koettlitz his moss seemed to offer one plausible fallback if nothing else could be found, but on the night of 21 January, as they pushed their way into the loose pack of McMurdo Sound, Scott saw for the first time the landscape that was to provide the backdrop to all his polar hopes. ‘To the right,’ he wrote, vividly conveying a sense of anticipation and uncertainty that had nothing to do with hindsight, ‘is a lofty range of mountains with one very high peak far inland, and to the south a peculiar conical mountain, seemingly ending the coastline in this direction; to the left is Mount Erebus, its foothills, and a glimpse of Mount Terror. The Parry Mountains cannot be seen ahead of us. In the distance there is a small patch like a distant island. Ross could not have seen these patches, and a remnant of hope remains that we are heading for a strait and not a bay.’
In technical terms Scott was right – McMurdo is a sound – but by eight the next morning the contours of the landscape ahead had resolved themselves into what for all practical purposes is a massive bay. As they pressed on southward into it, the apparent smudges of islands broadened out to suggest its southern limits, but if there was clearly no route through for Discovery, there seemed to be the next best thing. Without doubt, Scott added to his first description, McMurdo was a bay. ‘But,’ he went on – a possible gateway to the south, and the ‘great prospect of very good sledging work’ in his sights – ‘it is highly satisfactory to note that there were no mountains in the background and that as far as the eye can see there must be a straight or smooth level plain stretching far away directly south.’
He was again right – it was the northern edge of the Ross Ice Shelf – and with a second likely winter harbour sighted through binoculars on the west side of McMurdo Sound, Scott turned Discovery eastwards. Rounding Cape Bird at the north-west extremity of Ross Island, they steamed eastwards beneath the twin peaks of Erebus and Terror until at eight the next evening they found a gently shelving beach to the west of Cape Crozier with enough protection from grounded bergs to provide a landing.
Lowering an overladen whale boat, complete with sixteen men, magnetic instruments and a tin message cylinder, they pulled through the surf for the shore and launched themselves on the crest of a wave onto the beach. Scott found himself a spot in the middle of the biggest penguin colony they had seen to erect a post, and anchoring it with boulders, left their final message for the outside world. It did not, at the time, seem the most secure of connections. Even at a few hundred yards, for all their efforts to mark the spot, ‘it was almost impossible to distinguish it, and one could not help thinking, should disaster come to the expedition, what a poor reed was this on which alone we could trust to afford our friends a clue to our whereabouts’.
Once the post was up, and Bernacchi and Barne busy at their chilly magnetic observations, Scott, Royds and Wilson began the climb up to the highest of the nearby volcanic cones. With penguins occupying every available inch of land they were reduced to whatever scree was available, but after hard scramble and a still steeper climb up the rock faces above, they were at last above the stench-line, with a view to the south and east across the Great Barrier – Scott’s first sight of his final resting place – that extended indefinitely away in an immense blue-grey plain of ice.
One of the chief objectives of their first season was to discover whether there was land to the east of this ice shelf, and back on the ship Scott ordered Armitage to take Discovery close under the cliff that formed its northernmost edge. With only Ross’s description to go on, the endless variety and mutability of the ice wall came as a surprise to them, and ‘every few hours some new variation showed itself’, Scott wrote, with ‘now a sharp inlet or other irregularity of outline, now a change in appearance showing a difference in the length of time that the ice-face had been exposed’.
As they steamed steadily eastwards, taking meticulous observations as they went, Discovery passed the farthest south of any ship, and on the twenty-ninth reached the point where Ross had reported a strong suggestion of land to the south-east. Scott had already been in the Antarctic long enough to know how deceptive appearances could be, but soundings of only one hundred fathoms and rapid changes in the conformation of the Barrier suggested land must be close, ‘But what a land!’ Scott wrote. ‘On the swelling mounds of snow above us there was not one break, not a feature to give definition to the hazy outline. Instinctively one felt that such a scene as this was most perfectly devised to produce optical illusions in the explorer, and to cause those errors into which we had found even experienced persons to be led. What could be the height of the misty summit? And what the distance of that shadowy undulation? Instruments provide no answer – we could but guess.’
The discolourations of sand and dirt in the grounded bergs meant that it was more than a ‘moral certainty’ that they had discovered land, but as a thick fog descended over everything the clear visual proof they wanted was still missing. Throughout the next day Discovery groped her way slowly along the line of ice, but it was only as the bell sounded for their evening meal, and all but the officer of the watch were going below, that above the summit of an ice island ahead appeared two or three little black patches – ‘Two little points of bare black rock,’ a jubilant Shackleton wrote, ‘but Oh! how glad we were to see them, for it was land, real land, and the end of the great barrier was really found by us, and the theories and ideas can now be settled.’ ‘New Land. All’s well,’ a contented Williamson recorded, and Duncan was prepared to go one better, noting in his usual style that ‘Its local name is being Edwards land.’ ‘It is intensely satisfactory to have seen the land,’ Scott wrote in his journal that night, ‘for although we were morally certain of its existence – In such a stupendous glaciation doubts of all kinds are always on the top of one’s mind.’
This was hardly the extensive exploration of an unknown eastern land that Markham had envisaged, but that same evening, as they continued in a north-easterly direction, a near disaster made up Scott’s mind that it was enough. Discovery had steamed though thick fog into a narrow channel between pack and land before anyone realised they were in trouble, and was soon deep into a cul-de-sac of ice, lost among a shifting chaos of bergs and heavy pack with no way out but the southern end