David Crane - Scott of the Antarctic - A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South

The mature Scott would be only too bitterly aware of the cost of conformity, but it is hard to know whether the young cadet already felt it. There is a vast wealth of correspondence, journals, notes, memoranda and jottings surviving from the second half of his life, but from the summer of 1883 when he first went to sea until he took over Discovery and became a ‘public man’ there are no more than a few dozen letters and a couple of diary fragments to give any sense of an interior life.

The career of a peacetime naval officer leaves so faint a biographical trace that almost everything beyond a skeleton of dates and ships is conjecture. From the time Scott left Britannia to the day he was appointed to command Discovery there is scarcely a day that cannot be accounted for, but apart from the dry details of a ship’s movements or the laconic entries on a service record there is nothing but the occasional ‘RFS’ initialled in a log book to lift him out of the anonymity of a service that spanned and policed the world.

It is curious to know at once so much and so little about a man, and yet, as in Britannia , it is the opacity of surviving records that offers the bleakest clue to Scott’s new life. After a last boyhood summer at home he had sailed out to South Africa in the Euphrates with a fellow cadet from the same term at Dartmouth to join HMS Boadicea , and the ship’s log for 4 October 1883 records with characteristic indifference their arrival: ‘9.am Read articles of war and returns of courts martial, out launch and P boat. Joined Lieut Roope and Messrs Dampier & Scott, mids from HMS Euphrates.’

As a midshipman Scott was still a pupil under instruction, and in many respects life in Boadicea ’s gunroom would only have been a more bruising extension of his Britannia existence. His mornings would at least in theory be spent in navigation lessons, but with watches to keep and sights to take, men to manage and the ship’s boats to run, instruction invariably lost out to the endless demands of ship life.

It was only twelve months before, too, that the fleet at Alexandria had fired its guns for the first time since the Crimea, and as long as Rear Admiral Nowell Salmon, with a face that wouldn’t look out of place on Mount Rushmore, was flying his flag in Boadicea , Scott would need no reminder of what was ultimately expected of a naval officer. In the Crimean War Salmon had served against the Russians in the Baltic, and then as a young lieutenant in the Shannon ’s Naval Brigade during the Indian Mutiny made his name winning one of the four naval Victoria Crosses awarded at the relief of Lucknow.

And even in the depths of peace, the occasional entry in the ship’s log betrays the kind of personalities and frictions that lay behind the orderly façade of naval life. ‘Mr Kirkby gunner was cautioned by Capt and his leave stopped for 1 month for not being fit for duty in the morning supposed from having taken too much liquor the night before,’ records the log for the day after Scott’s arrival. ‘Sublt the Honble Francis Addington,’ runs a second entry, for 2 January 1884, ‘was cautioned by Capt for unofficerlike conduct in using abusive and disgraceful language to one of his shipmates in the gun room on Xmas day.’ ‘British barque Guyana in want of medical assistance arrived,’ the Boadicea ’s log for 29 January notes with a wonderfully mild detachment, ‘Capt having stabbed the 2nd mate and assaulted one of the crew with an iron belaying pin.’ For the most part, though, the life of the ship, with its interminable provisioning, coaling and sailmaking, its mending, scrubbing and drilling, its cutlass exercise, sail and signalling drills, its exchanges of courtesies and diplomatic visits, went on with the unruffled calm of an organisation supremely sure of its role in the world.

There are no surviving letters of Scott’s from his time in Boadicea , but in the ship’s log one can follow him over the next two years, as the wooden-cased iron corvette did its imperial rounds from Simon’s Bay and the Congo to Accra and Lagos and back to repeat the same leisurely sweep all over again. ‘All yesterday was spent at Sierra Leone,’ a future shipmate of Scott’s wrote home of another such cruise with the Duke of Connaught aboard, giving a vivid glimpse of the assumptions, prejudices and cultural remoteness of the world that lay behind all these anonymous entries in the Boadicea ’s log book, ‘and a most amusing time we had of it. We arrived there at 7a.m. and landed at 9 and never, never, in my life, have I seen such enthusiasm as was displayed by all the niggers and seldom have I seen more ludicrous contrasts. Addresses were presented at the Town Hall which were read out by The Town Clerk, a large typical nigger with rolling eyes, who was in a barrister’s wig and gown … In the garden at Government House the Duke received deputations from native chiefs in all sorts of ridiculous garments – some of them with tinsel crowns, and one in a naval cocked hat with military plumes … A deputation from the Coloured Freemasons and from the African Ladies of the Colony. We were all quite intrigued to know who the African Ladies were, when there appeared about a dozen negresses, dressed in the very latest Parisian fashions picture hats, hobble skirts and all the rest of it … one had to rub one’s eyes to be sure one wasn’t dreaming – it was more like a scene from a very extravagant musical comedy than anything else.’

St Helena – where in the 1880s naval visitors would have a woman in her sixties pointed out to them as Napoleon’s daughter – Ascension, River Gambia, Sierra Leone, Monrovia, Accra, Lagos – it was August 1885 before Scott would again be in England, but his time in Boadicea had gone well. There is a sameness about captain’s reports that gives very little away, but if a ‘VG’ for conduct and abilities, and ‘Temperate’ for habits, are no more than the standard comments, Captain Church was sufficiently impressed to take the seventeen-year-old Scott with him when he moved from Boadicea to Monarch .

Before Monarch , though, there was the rest of the summer, and Grace would always remember these last family holidays, when Con came home from sea and Archie, bound for the Artillery, was on leave from Woolwich or his station at Weymouth. There was still their eighteen-foot boat with the big lug sail, and ‘As to horsemanship, Con was a fairly good rider – good enough to win trophies when he was stationed at Lima – but not so good as Archie who was an exceptionally good huntsman, though he never possessed a horse of his own. The two brothers seized all opportunities of being together for a few days’ leave; Archie coming home in his cheery way described days of golfing when he had to find both balls – Con being lost in day-dreams besides a bunker or on a green, maybe enchanted by a view or lost in a problem, anyway quite oblivious of his surroundings.’

By the middle of September, however, Scott was with his new ship, and a part of the Channel Squadron in the armour-plated Monarch . It was the same life and the same routines as in Boadicea , and if his time under Nowell Salmon had brought him face to face with the navy’s past, HMS Monarch , with both Rosslyn Wemyss, a future First Sea Lord, and John Jellicoe lieutenants in the ship, afforded an equally uncompromising vision of its future. It is a moot point whether or not this glimpse would have been reassuring, but it must at least have brought home to a young midshipman with almost nothing in the way of ‘interest’ to call on that promotion would be a long, slow haul. From his earliest days in Britannia Jellicoe had clearly been destined for the top, but if ‘Old Biddy’ – as Rosslyn Wemyss was familiarly known in court circles – was going in the same direction it owed as much to all those social, political and royal connections that Scott lacked as to any transcendent abilities.