A First Rate Tragedy

by Diana Preston

  The ship’s company included twenty-six naval petty officers and men. Five of the twelve who were to be in the shore parties were old ‘Discoverys’ as Markham called the men who had sailed with Scott in 1901. They included William Lashly and Edgar Evans with whom Scott had shared a sleeping bag on ‘the terrible plateau’ and Thomas Crean, his coxswain who had been with him on the railway station platform when he heard the news of Shackleton’s failure to reach the Pole. Scott had been particularly determined to take Edgar Evans, writing to him in March 1910 that he had asked for his services and that ‘I expect you will be appointed in about a fortnight’s time, and I shall want you at the ship to help fitting her out.’26 Evans was no less eager to go. Apart from loyalty to Scott, it was an opportunity for him to make something of himself. Since the Discovery expedition Evans had married a local girl from the Gower, become a father and was now a highly competent naval gunnery instructor with a reputation for being a strict disciplinarian who had no time for shirkers but gave credit where it was due.

  Edgar Evans reported as soon as he could to the expedition’s headquarters where his magnificent physique caused a sensation. There was no doubt that he was the dominant personality on the mess-deck. Scott had tried hard to persuade another old Discovery seaman, Frank Wild, who had accompanied Shackleton on his farthest south, to join him but Wild declined.

  Wilson had picked the scientific team with care, looking for first-class expertise. However he also valued enthusiasm and commitment, as in the case of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, like Oates a member of the landed gentry, who had recently graduated from Oxford where he had read Classics and Modern History. He was appointed assistant zoologist, though his claims to any zoological skills were at the least tenuous. He was so short-sighted that people on the other side of the street appeared to him only as ‘vague blobs walking’. Inexperienced but eager, he was to write some of the most evocative and moving accounts of the final expedition. He understood what drove men to take terrible risks, writing that exploration was the physical expression of the intellectual passion. He was to be marked by his own experiences to the end of his days. He also had a wry sense of humour illustrated by his famous observation that ‘Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised’.27

  Cherry-Garrard had been desperate to go since meeting Wilson at a house in Scotland belonging to his cousin Reginald Smith, the publisher who had assisted Scott with The Voyage of the Discovery. Wilson had so inspired him that, like Oates, he had offered £1,000 to the expedition as well as his services. When his application was initially turned down by Scott he asked that his donation should stand. This was exactly the sort of gesture that appealed to Scott who agreed to see the young man again. Wilson wrote revealingly about Scott to his protégé: ‘I have known him now for ten years and I believe in him so firmly that I am often sorry when he lays himself open to misunderstanding. I am sure you will come to know him and believe in him as I do, and none the less because he is sometimes difficult.’28 Scott eventually agreed to accept him.

  There were to be three geologists this time, compared with one on the Discovery expedition. These included the Australians Griffith Taylor – who in true Antipodean style referred to ‘his mates’ and to his satisfaction with his ‘tucker’ in his subsequent accounts – and Frank Debenham. The third, Raymond Priestley, who had been on Shackleton’s expedition and was an Englishman from Tewkesbury, was in fact recruited later and joined the expedition in Australia. The somewhat dry and acerbic but highly competent Dr George Simpson, of the Indian Weather Bureau Simla, was appointed meteorologist. The biologists were Edward Nelson of the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, a rich and rather idle man with ‘a taste for gin and bridge’,29 albeit a professional scientist, and Denis Lillie, an acknowledged expert on marine mammals and in Scott’s view a bit cranky – he believed in reincarnation and thought that he had been a Persian and a Roman in earlier lives. One of his colleagues wrote gleefully that: ‘Much fun can be got from him if handled properly.’30 The young Canadian Charles Wright from Toronto was chosen as physicist.

  Taylor and some of the other scientists decided to demonstrate their fitness. Fuelled by a dozen hard-boiled eggs and some chocolate bars, they walked the fifty miles from Cambridge to London in twenty-four hours. Taylor described the scene on their arrival in the expedition’s London offices: ‘The offices were . . . in Westminster, situated in a district peculiarly devoted to the Empire’s interests . . . In a large room occasionally sat Captain Scott but he was usually busy [elsewhere] with some ingenious food stuffs or patent appliance . . . Adjacent was the secretary’s office, and there [Scott] was seen wading through some of the 8,000 applications from eager souls anxious to get out of the rut by joining the expedition . . . Another room was almost filled with a huge petty officer who was sorting gear for the sledges . . . An old 1902 sledge was lying in the passage . . .’

  Bernard Day, who had been with Shackleton, was put in charge of the motor sledges. He also bought a bicycle, which several of the party used in Antarctica. On one occasion Griffith Taylor went so far across the ice that he got lost and it was only the providential arrival of Wright that saved him. The man appointed to look after the dogs and who had been dispatched to Siberia to arrange the purchase of dogs and ponies was Cecil Meares, an intriguing individual of somewhat wild and unkempt appearance. He was rumoured to have been a secret agent, playing a hand in the ‘great game’ – the intrigues between Britain and Russia in the far north of India – and he could certainly speak Hindustani and Russian. He had been a fur-trader in Kamchatka and Okotz in north-eastern Siberia and claimed to have seen the fall of Peking and to have fought in the Russo-Japanese War and the Boer War. He also told an extraordinary tale of a great journey he had made into Tibet where his companion, an army officer named Brooke, was killed by Lolo tribesmen and he brought the body back to civilization. Wilson, the pacifist, was fascinated by Meares whom he considered a man of action, a most entertaining messmate and full of fun. However, Meares was to find his relationship with Scott difficult. As a freewheeling adventurer he did not respond well to what he regarded as interference and regimentation. Scott did not respond well to what he saw as insubordination and slackness.

  However, that lay in the future. Meares now made an exotic journey by Trans-Siberian railway, horse and sleigh to Nikolievsk in Siberia where he chose his dogs carefully. However, he was much less knowledgeable about ponies and took the advice of a four-foot-ten-inch Moscow jockey, Anton Omelchenko. Meares’s commission from Scott was a bizarre one – to buy only white ponies, because Shackleton had noted that his dark ponies had died before the white ones. This significantly reduced Meares’s scope for choice and according to Anton produced ‘a plenty big smile’ from a no doubt incredulous but extremely cheerful horse dealer at a fair in Mukden.31 Oates was to be horrified by the sight of the broken down old crocks when they eventually came aboard in New Zealand, gloomily cataloguing such deficiencies as ‘Narrow chest. Knock knees . . . Aged. Windsucker . . .’32

  His buying completed, Meares persuaded Anton and a Russian dog-driver, Dimitri Gerov, to help him transport the animals to New Zealand to meet the expedition. It was a difficult task and Kathleen Bruce’s brother Wilfred, ‘broad, beaming, always with a weather eye for the girls’, was sent out to assist this Noah’s Ark.33 They managed to convey their menagerie across the Pacific to Lyttelton without losing a single animal but were no longer on speaking terms. Meares considered Bruce ‘too “kid glovey” for this job’.34

  Finally, there was the experienced and talented Herbert Ponting, who joined as the expedition’s official ‘camera artist’. He was so devoted to his art that he had abandoned his wife and children, claiming they interfered with his photography. His wonderful pictures would capture the compelling beauty of Antarctica and he was also the expedition’s ‘cinematographer’. His poignant footage of Captain Scott and his colleagues departing for the Pole, small dete
rmined figures plodding away across a great white infinity, is as powerful now as it was in 1912. Ponting was writing a book about Japan when Scott approached him. Scott tempted him with word pictures: ‘. . . he talked with such fervour of his forthcoming journey; of the lure of the southernmost seas; of the mystery of the Great Ice Barrier; of the grandeur of Erebus and the Western Mountains, and of the marvels of the animal life around the Pole, that I warmed to his enthusiasm . . .’ Ponting also fell under Scott’s personal spell: ‘The determined face; the clear blue eyes, with their sincere, searching gaze; the simple, direct speech, and earnest manner; the quiet force of the man – all drew me to him irresistibly.’35 Scott reciprocated describing his photographer as ‘a very charming character, generous, highly strung, nervous and artistic’.

  Ponting completed the team that was to go south. However, there is a story, later told by Kathleen Scott to Nancy Mitford, that the birth control pioneer Marie Stopes had wanted to go on the expedition and that ‘Scott had to use all his willpower to stop her!’36

  There was also the all-important question of a ship. Scott tried to get hold of the Discovery, to which he had a strong sentimental attachment, but she was now owned by the Hudson Bay Company which refused to give her up. Instead he negotiated for the Terra Nova, the relief ship whose appearance in McMurdo Sound had so startled him and Wilson. She was old with an extravagant consumption of coal, but, as Teddy Evans described, she had a worthy pedigree: ‘She was the largest and strongest of the old Scotch whalers, had proved herself in the Antarctic pack-ice and acquitted herself magnificently in the Northern ice-fields in whaling and sealing voyages extending over a period of twenty years. In spite of her age she had considerable power . . .’ Her hull was constructed of massive oak beams 14 inches thick while her bow was a solid bulkhead of timber, 9 feet thick and clad in iron plating. Scott secured her for a down payment of £5,000 which he had great difficulty in finding, leaving the balance of £7,500 to be paid later. She was handed over in November 1909.

  While the Terra Nova was indeed a suitable vessel, she was also filthy. Teddy Evans was responsible for her transformation into a floating laboratory and fell in love with her: ‘I loved her from the day I saw her because she was my first command. Poor little ship, she looked so dirty and uncared for . . .’ Her noisome blubber tanks had to be removed and the whole ship scrubbed down and disinfected. Living quarters had to be constructed for officers and men as well as laboratories, instrument and chronometer rooms and store rooms. As the work progressed down in the West India Docks she attracted plenty of visitors but poor Teddy Evans ‘often blushed when admirals came down to see our ship, she was so very dirty’. He was operating on a very limited budget but there was much to be bought or scrounged: ‘There were boatswain’s stores to be purchased, wire hawsers, canvas for sail-making, fireworks for signalling, whale boats and whaling gear, flags, logs, paint, tar, carpenter’s stores, and a multitude of necessities to be thought of, selected, and not paid for if we could help it.’ He observed wryly that the verb ‘to wangle’ had not then appeared in the English language, so they just ‘obtained’. Much of the work was done by petty officers and men from the RNVR in their spare time. Ironically, moored immediately opposite the Terra Nova was the Discovery, which was being loaded for a voyage to North America – the Birmingham Post noted that Scott’s former pride and joy looked ‘very unkempt and forlorn’. There was little time to get the Terra Nova into shape. Scott had decided to bring the date of sailing forward by two months to 1 June. By arriving earlier in Antarctica he hoped to gain extra time for the depot-laying journey he planned before the onset of the Antarctic winter.

  Of course Scott was once again caught in the toils of fundraising, this time with no official sponsors. He estimated the costs at some £40,000, compared to the cost of the Discovery expedition, which at over £90,000 had included the construction of the Discovery herself, and the press argued that he should have it without quibbling. The Pall Mall Gazette announced in a lordly way that the sum required was ‘a mere bagatelle’ and ‘that it should not be forthcoming is unthinkable’. The Times threw in its penn’orth suggesting that it would be ‘deeply regrettable if, for want either of men or of money, the brilliant recent record of British exploration were at this point to be checked’ and, somewhat prophetically, that it would be a shocking thing if the door were left open for a foreigner. The most obvious danger seemed to be from the Americans. In November 1909 Commander Robert Peary, who in April had hobbled toeless towards the North Pole to claim it for his country (it was his sixth attempt and he had lost his toes through frostbite after his fourth attempt), had announced that the Americans would try for the South Pole within the next five years.

  However, Scott put such thoughts out of his mind as, helped by Teddy Evans, he fought against time to find the necessary money. It was not until the spring of 1910 that the first £10,000 was raised. Evans described the distasteful business of hustling from one end of the country to the other. While he had gone to South Wales and the west country ‘beating up funds’ as he called it, ‘Scott, himself, when he could be spared from the Admiralty, worked Newcastle, Liverpool, and the North, whilst both of us did what we could in London . . . It was an anxious time for Scott . . .’ Evans had a hearty easy way of prodding a prospective donor and saying: ‘I want a nice cheque from you!’ Scott conversely found it hard, uncongenial, depressing work and his letters to Kathleen are full of gloom but also of his love for her: ‘My dear, my heart is very full of you in spite of the hard crust which you find it so difficult to get through.’ There are also occasional insights into the practical difficulties of travelling around the country. In February 1910 he sent her an urgent request for socks.37

  In some quarters there was actual hostility to the idea of funding an expedition. The Sussex News of 19 February 1910 carried an angry letter: ‘I call it scientific cheek to come along when there are so many thousands of unemployed and ask £50,000 for such a purpose.’ There was something of Captain Cook’s view in all this that exploration to the south was a futile activity from which the world would derive no benefit. It was also the result of economic pressures – wages were failing to rise with the cost of living and the years between the death of Edward VII and the Great War would see a series of crippling strikes. In November 1910, 30,000 Welsh miners would down tools. In 1911 dockers would strike for eight pence an hour for a ten-hour shift. The rich were also feeling the squeeze with Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 which aimed to raise £15 million by new taxation. Unearned or investment income was taxed at 1s 2d in the pound and land was to be valued so tax could be levied from the rising value of real estate. It seems tame stuff today, but it was described by a critic as ‘the beginning of the end of all rights of property’ and it made rich men less likely to dip into their pockets.38

  The expedition’s prospects became suddenly much rosier with a government grant of £20,000. Its previous parsimony can perhaps be explained by having to stump up £20,000 for Shackleton, who was in financial trouble. In contrast to the cautious Scott he had raised much of the money he needed in the form of loans to be repaid out of fees and royalties from writing books and lecturing. Always the optimist, he had found himself with an embarrassing shortfall. By this time Scott had managed to secure some £12,000 either in donations or promises so that he now only had some £8,000 to find. However, as the expedition was due to sail in June time was short and he set off on a lecture tour of the north.

  Scott had a difficult path to tread in explaining the objectives of the expedition. Was it about science or was it about being first at the Pole? It was certainly more than a Pole hunt as far as Scott himself was concerned. He had too much intellectual curiosity to be unmoved by the potential for serious scientific achievement. Yet at the same time he could not be immune to the fame and prestige that would fall to the man who conquered the Pole for Britain. He was seduced by both objectives but astute enough to know that he must tailor his mes
sages to his audience. In an address to the Royal Geographical Society he confirmed that, while the idea of reaching a spot on the globe as yet untrodden by human feet was a matter of national pride ‘and an outward visible sign that we are still a nation able and willing to undertake difficult enterprises . . .’, the true aim was ‘to achieve the greatest possible scientific harvest which the circumstances permit’. However, he divined correctly that whatever he might say in elegant addresses to the Royal Geographical Society, it was the idea of planting the Union Jack on the Pole which would grip the public’s imagination and attract the funds and so the published objective of the expedition was to reach the South Pole.

  Scott wrote to everyone he could think of for money – from the great and the good to learned institutions and companies. He won some powerful friends. The financier Sir Edgar Speyer, who had been wooed by Kathleen, subscribed £1,000 and agreed to become the expedition’s treasurer. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made a rousing speech at the Mansion House to the effect that that there was one Pole left, it should be a British Pole and that Captain Scott was the man to conquer it.