Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South. David Crane
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Scott was soon noting with characteristic impatience, ‘and their kennels are ranged over the hillside below the huts. They complain bitterly, but they are a good riddance from the deck, which is again assuming some appearance of cleanliness … It is surprising what a number of things have to be done, and what an unconscionable time it takes to do them … Much work is before us when the huts are up: we must land a store of provisions and a boat for emergencies; then there are the instruments to be seen to, more seals to be killed for the winter, arrangements made for fresh-water ice, sledges and tents to be prepared, and a hundred and-one details to be attended to.’
At the heart of this growing shantytown was the ironically dubbed ‘Villa Gregory’, a thirty-six-foot-square ‘settler’s bungalow’ with overhanging eves and veranda that had been constructed in Australia and shipped down with their other stores. It had been designed originally with an independent shore party in mind, but one look at it on the quay at Lyttelton had been enough to leave Scott’s men knowing there was nothing they would sooner avoid. ‘There was … the uncertainty of the long Antarctic night,’ Bernacchi wrote with the nightmare memory of Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross expedition to sharpen his relief, ‘which I had experienced at Cape Adare, in a tiny hut, fifteen feet square, lashed down by cables to the rocky shore. The night there had been shorter than we would now experience, as we had been farther north, but officers and men, living together in so restricted a space, ten of us in all, had found tempers wearing thin long before it passed. To those who had not yet experienced the polar darkness, anticipating was probably worse than realisation, and some feared the results of nervous irritation before the winter passed. That was an experience, however, from which Discovery saved us. A winter in “Gregory’s Lodge” might have been little better than a repetition of the boredom and irritation engendered at Cape Adare. With Discovery our home, each officer had his own sanctum, and the men in their quarters could enjoy their leisure in their own way. The friction of conflicting tastes was eliminated from the beginning.’
With every available day of light precious, there was little chance of boredom for officer or man in these first weeks ashore. In addition to the Villa Gregory there were two asbestos-covered huts for magnetic observations, the larger of the two for differential instruments and the smaller for absolute instruments against which daily observations could periodically be checked. ‘They and all that pertained to them were Mr. Bernacchi’s special business,’ Scott wrote of the arcane mysteries of these huts, ‘and many times a day this officer could be seen journeying to and fro in attendance on his precious charge. Within the larger of the huts, mounted on a solidly bedded oak plant, could be seen three small instruments, set at different angles, but each containing a delicately suspended magnetic needle … [recording] on rolls of sensitised photographic paper … the declination, horizontal force, and vertical force … of the earth’s magnetic pull.’
It was a tyrannous routine at the best of times – still more so in winter, on the ‘international term days’, when comparative readings in Discovery and the German ship Gauss had to be taken every two hours – but for sheer despotic misery it probably took second place to Royds’s. As Scott’s First Lieutenant he was responsible anyway for the day-to-day running of the ship, and on top of his normal duties he was also the expedition’s meteorologist, condemned summer and winter, fair or blizzard, to an icy two-hourly circle of the expedition’s barometer, thermometers and anemometer.
With each of the officers doing a night shift in turn, and their own separate disciplines to look after, there was no one in the wardroom who was idle. There was such a disparate range of tasks to cover that they tended only to meet at meal times, dispersing in between to their specimens and microscopes, their rocks and ice-holes and dredging equipment or, in the case of Michael Barne – utterly indifferent to cold or hardship – to his lonely treks across the ice in a thankless search for variations in sea temperatures.
For the men, too, there were seals to kill, penguins to hunt, snow ramps to build, ship sides to bank, water to collect and Discovery’s winter awning to be prepared. ‘Routine while the light lasts,’ Williamson recorded in his journal:
AM
5.45 – call hands, coffee
6.15 – hands fall in for work, ice ship generally
7.00 – one hand from each mess to clean out mess deck
8.00 – breakfast
9.00 – hands turn to work as necessary
PM
12.00 – dinner
1.30 – hands turn to, work as necessary
5.00 – supper, finish for day, if all goes well.
From the first, however, Scott had made it clear that he was not interested in making work for its own sake, and for a man who obsessively filled his own time he was surprisingly tolerant of what the men did with theirs. On the nineteenth-century naval expeditions in the Arctic officers had traditionally taught their men to read and write, but in a different world and a different navy Scott recognised that there were no courses that would not either patronise or bewilder a crew who filled in their spare hours with anything from Darwin’s Origin of Species to interminable games of shove ha’penny.
But for all that he allowed a fairly relaxed regime, he could be tough when he needed to be, and their first days in McMurdo provided him with an unwanted opportunity to put down his marker. ‘The cook Mr Brett getting troublesome,’ the Dundee shipwright James Duncan noted with a nice understatement in his journal for 10 February, ‘had to be taked two [sic] by the Captain.’ ‘Had trouble with the cook this morning,’ Scott recorded more explicitly. ‘He had been insolent to Shackleton on Saturday & when brought up was insolent to me – I put him in irons, being much reviled during the process. 8 hours brought him to his senses and a condition of whining humility – He is a wretched specimen of humanity.’
This might not sound very attractive, but if journals are anything to go by, there was not a soul on the ship who would have raised a finger to save Charles Brett from a lot worse. Brett had been taken on at the last minute in New Zealand to replace the original cook who had been dismissed, and even before they had reached McMurdo his blend of idleness, dirtiness and empty brag had made anything that Scott could do to him seem no less than his due.
Considering the mix of men on board, in fact, and the restrictions and strains they had to live under, there was astonishingly little need for Scott to use a heavy hand at any time in the south. ‘There was one [William Hubert] who found himself in serious trouble for his epicurean tastes,’ Bernacchi recalled of one of the rare exceptions to this general harmony,
a merchant seaman who must have signed on in a moment of mental aberration. He was not made for Polar exploration. He did not like the Antarctic or anything to do with it, and had been heard, during one of the very cold autumn sledging journeys, to sit up in his sleeping-bag and with chattering teeth apostrophise the night – ‘Fancy me from bloody Poplar, on the bloody Ice Barrier, in a bloody sleeping-bag, gorblimey!’
No doubt on the mess deck he applied the same adjective to the cake which caused the trouble, though when the ship’s company was paraded in strict naval style, so that he might make his complaint with due ceremony, he only demanded mildly of the captain, as he fished an offensive lump of something from his pocket – ‘Do you call this caike?’ Scott had no sense of humour when discipline was infringed upon, and discipline demanded surely that a man who approached his commanding officer in such a way be ordered to instant execution.*
With the routines of wardroom and mess-deck life firmly established, the scientific work under way and the shore settlement taking shape, Scott’s next priority was to come to grips with Discovery’s immediate environment. ‘Names have been given to the various landmarks in our vicinity,’ he wrote in the middle of February of their first, touching steps at appropriating the alien landscape of Ross Island. ‘The end of our peninsula is to be called “Cape Armitage” after our excellent navigator. The sharp hill above it is to be “Observation Hill”; it is 750' high, and should make an excellent look-out