‘A strange thing happened during the night,’ an amused Wilson recorded, ‘The three watch-keepers spent the whole night in wandering round the big bay.’ Scott, though, was shaken. A kind of unspoken Masonry among the executive officers kept the extent of the danger to themselves, but they knew exactly how close they had come to sharing the Belgica’s fate. ‘The courses were logged and could have been eventually worked out,’ Scott wrote – the first entry in the new volume of his Antarctic Journals, and within a whisker of being the entry that marked the end of the expedition – ‘but the fact of one officer relieving the other and the similarity of the bergs and ice edge was most bewildering … the situation was very typical of the ease with which a ship could lose herself in the ice.’
And if tempers had frayed, it is not surprising, as Scott cannot have been the only officer who had had virtually no sleep. For several days the search for land had kept most of them up on deck around the clock, and Scott for one had been on the bridge for the whole of the night of the thirtieth/thirty-first, before taking his first brief rest after twenty-three hours of constant vigil. These were rhythms of life an executive officer was used to, but they were not conditions that any of them were familiar with, and after one more, half-hearted, attempt to find a passage north, Scott decided to turn back before new ice could threaten their McMurdo harbour.
There was time, however, for one detour, and on 3 February Scott took Discovery into a deep bight in the Barrier wall, and pushing on down a narrow creek, secured her with their anchors to the ice walls. While Armitage took a small party out onto the Barrier for their first incompetent experience of sledge work, the balloon equipment was set up, and the next day Scott made the first precarious ascent above Antarctica.
Quite why Scott should have gone up first is hard to say, but if the charitable explanation would have him leading boldly from the front, a rare case of ‘rank pulling’ seems more likely. ‘The Captain said he would like to go up first,’ Shackleton wrote in his diary, equally pleased at his skipper’s indignity and his own satisfaction at outdoing him, ‘so I got out, though I thought it a rather risky thing for he knew nothing about it, and we had to give him a number of directions just before he started.’ Once up, Scott jettisoned first a couple of handfuls of ballast and then a whole bag. ‘We shouted out that he must not throw the ballast out like that,’ Shackleton continued, ‘and then a thin piping voice came back “but I was coming down so fast!” After a short time he had had enough of it, and we hauled him down to earth, and I then went up and realised a height of 650.’ ‘If nobody is killed,’ Wilson added tetchily, ‘it will only be because God has pity on the foolish.’
With a torn fabric and a faulty valve developing, it was not just a ‘first’, but a ‘last’, and the first game of football played on the Barrier seems in retrospect the more significant precedent. But if the balloon they had had such hopes for had failed, and the first sledging party had been a chapter of amateurish errors, there was clearly nothing wrong with spirits on board that a mild embarrassment for the captain could not put right ‘The good spirits and willingness shown by all hands is beyond praise,’ Scott wrote gratefully that night. ‘If an individual can be selected, it is the boatswain – the work, hard manual labour he gets through in the course of the day is little short of wonderful.’
The next day – as if to underline what kind of thanks a man might expect for such heroics in the navy – the boatswain had his cat killed by one of the dogs. In spite of that, as Williamson philosophically concluded his one-line obituary, all was ‘well’ in Discovery. Two days later they had rounded Cape Bird, and by ten o’clock in the evening of 8 February they were deep into McMurdo Sound again, with Discovery’s bows grinding gently on a bank only yards from the shore. Backing away, they found deep water along the northern side of a projecting ice foot, and secured the ship. ‘We have now to consider the possibility of making this part of the bay our winter quarters,’ Scott wrote, and from the point of view of future sledging operations, it seemed that nowhere could be better. To the south-south-east a smooth, even surface stretched away into infinity, with every probability that the Great Barrier continued in that direction. Across the strait, the main coastline and all the geological opportunities it offered, was in easy range, while the proximity of Cape Crozier and their ‘post office’ hopefully kept open their connections with the outside world.
The following day they set out to explore the immediate surroundings, and found on the southern side of their ice foot ‘an excellent little bay’. Alongside it was a sheltered space that would do for their huts, and water shallow enough to preserve them from the threat of floating bergs. There was still sea ice on it, but it was cracked, and it seemed only a matter of days before it broke away. Crucially, too, there was no evidence of pressure from any direction.
Scott had now all but made up his mind to winter here, and Discovery was brought around the ice tongue into the bay. With the ice anchors well bedded and the small kedge buried in the snow for good measure, he took off across the sea-ice on a long exploratory walk with Skelton. After a momentary anxiety with some dangerously thin ice, they worked themselves into a position from which they could take fuller stock of where they were. It was only now that they could see for certain that they were on an island. From their vantage point a smooth, clean snow plain stretched to the furthest ridge of Terror, close to Cape Crozier, where the great ice-wall of the Barrier edge met land. To their right, through an angle of 120 degrees, was nothing but the vast, white expanse of the Barrier, and the way to the south. Safety and opportunity stood hand in hand. Mill’s suggestion of McMurdo, made on the way down to Madeira, had borne fruit. They had found their winter harbour. And if Markham’s vision of eastern exploration had been quietly shelved, what else could he have expected of a naval officer on his first independent command?
All experience must be purchased, and if an officer inexperienced in these matters be appointed, the price will be paid in time and material, neither of which can be afforded in an Antarctic expedition.
Captain Mostyn Field
IT WOULD BE HARD to exaggerate how little Scott and his men knew of the world they had chosen for themselves. Armitage and Koettlitz had the dubious pleasure of an Arctic winter together during the Jackson – Harmsworth expedition to call on, but when it came to interpreting their immediate environment that was of no more real use than Bernacchi’s experience with Borchgrevink some three hundred miles to the north of McMurdo Sound.
‘The whole place had a weird and uncanny look and reminded me of the desert in “Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came”,’ Shackleton decided, but in practical terms that was of only limited help. They were deep in a ‘bay’ formed on the east side by Ross Island, on the west by mainland Antarctica, and on the south by the Great Barrier. Were the conditions that they had met with typical of McMurdo for this time of the year? When did the ice in the harbour they had chosen go out? When would they be able to find a secure anchorage for Discovery? How big were the tides?
With the end of the summer season only a matter of weeks away, the clear priority was to ready themselves for winter. A convenient spot had been found on a bare, flattish