Scott of the Antarctic (eBook)

ONE

THE CADET CAPTAIN

Robert Falcon Scott was born on 6 June 1868, in the parish of Stoke Damerel at Devonport, a southern suburb of Plymouth and a thoroughly appropriate birthplace for a boy virtually destined from the cradle for a career in the Navy. The sights and smells of Plymouth Sound would have made some of the earliest impressions on his consciousness, and by an extraordinary chance, a retired Royal Naval assistant paymaster who accompanied Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole as a meteorologist was actually named Francis Drake.

Robert was always known by his family as Con, an abbreviation of his second name, which in itself seems to have been something of a flight of fancy, although no more of a romantic notion than the family’s insistence upon a distant relationship to the novelist Sir Walter Scott. If this connection did exist it was distant in every respect, for there were no literary leanings among Con’s immediate forebears. His paternal grandfather, Robert Scott, had been a naval purser, and on retirement he had become a partner with his brother in a brewery in Plymouth, Scott & Co., purchased for £4,782 out of prize money received during the Napoleonic wars. The brewery was eventually inherited by Con’s father, John Edward Scott, the youngest of a family of eight, most of whom sought their fortunes overseas. One of Con’s paternal uncles became a surgeon in the Royal Navy, while three others joined that invaluable nineteenth-century standby, the Indian Army.

John Scott inherited not only his father’s brewery but a house called Outlands, where he lived in modest comfort with his wife Hannah, the daughter of William Bennett Cuming, a Lloyds surveyor; they married in 1861. Hannah’s was a Plymouth family too, with plenty of sea in their veins; one of Con’s maternal uncles, Harry, even became an admiral.1 John and Hannah produced in quick succession a respectable Victorian brood of six children. By the time Con was born in 1868 there were already two girls, Ettie and Rose. Another girl, Grace, followed Con, and when Con was only two years old he was presented with a brother, Archie. There was a fourth girl, Katherine.2

In the early years of Con’s life profits from the brewery were quite adequate to enable John Scott to support a wife and six children, a commodious house, a carriage and pair, servants and a 2 acre garden with a paddock and outhouses. It was only to be expected that John would sit on the local bench as a Justice of the Peace, serve as a churchwarden and take an active interest in local politics. But it is said he had to decline an invitation to stand for parliament as a Conservative because he could not afford the expense. The truth is, he was bored by business and fancied himself as a full-time country gentleman, so, most unfortunately as it turned out, he sold the brewery, believing he could indulge his love of gardening on the reinvested proceeds.

While it was customary for middle-class Victorian girls to be educated at home it was rare for a boy not to be sent to boarding school, but Con, allegedly delicate when young, lingered at home too, under the tutelage of a governess. However, when he was eight Con was at last sent as a day-boy to a local school called Exmouth House, making the short journey each day on horseback. Under the influence of his nautical relatives, he began to evince a serious interest in the Navy, and after a few years he was removed to Stubbington House School at Fareham in Hampshire, a preparatory school where it was hoped he would improve academically enough to pass the Royal Navy’s cadetship exams.3 This he succeeded in doing in 1881, at the age of thirteen, and on 15 July that year he joined HMS Britannia.

Until he was thirteen, Con’s life had been spent largely in female company. His maternal grandparents and a great-aunt had been given a home at Outlands; he had four sisters and only one brother; and he had been taught by a woman, no doubt cheaper than a male tutor. Of his parents, his mother was undoubtedly the dominant character. Now Con was thrust into exactly the kind of male-orientated society he would have inhabited at a public school, but without even the softening influence of a matron or a housemaster’s wife. There is no evidence that Scott formed any serious commitment to a woman other than his mother before his marriage, at the relatively late age of forty; his family and educational environments were in fact exactly tailored to suit the repressed conditions necessary to sustain long celibate tours of duty at sea, and eventually years of deprivation as an explorer, always in the sole company of men.

Con’s father now had to find annual fees of £100 to support him through his four terms of cadet training, a sum considerably in excess of boarding fees at most public schools before the turn of the century. But despite occasional lapses in good behaviour, and two references to inattentiveness in his conduct sheet, he repaid his father’s sacrifice, for in the spring of 1883 he was chosen as Cadet Captain. While on half-holiday on 19 October 1881 Con committed a common schoolboy offence; he trespassed in an orchard. More seriously, on 1 December 1882 he is recorded as having damaged a library book. In April the following year he strayed out of bounds, and on 19 April, ‘as Cadet Captain’, he allowed some of the other cadets ‘to humbug’ one of the officers.

It seems as though, in view of his appointment as Cadet Captain, Con exhibited early signs of leadership, not uncommon among rather solitary, even dreamy, boys. The comment ‘Inattentive in the Lecture Room while at Study’, made on 17 March 1883, was followed seven weeks later by ‘Very inattentive in Study’.4 Yet for two of his four terms Con’s study was rated ‘satisfactory’, for the other two, ‘very satisfactory’. Despite his youthful pranks and occasional misdemeanours his general conduct was consistently rated ‘very good’. As for his appearance, at thirteen, dressed in a jaunty uniform sparkling with brass buttons, clasping a sword and wearing a fetching naval cap, Robert Scott looked a most engaging lad. He was not especially good-looking or particularly tall but he was sturdy, with an absolutely honest face.

The Britannia, a three-decker sailing ship, was moored off Dartmouth. Training was strenuous but humane, and the cadets were permitted adequate leave. They were, after all, only children, and for Con it was easy to get home to Outlands and show off his uniform. It cannot be said that the educational curriculum was wide-ranging. Seamanship was naturally considered vital. Sufficient mathematics were instilled to ensure safe navigation, along with elementary physics, astronomy, geometry and trigonometry. It was no schooling for a boy with artistic interests. Rudimentary French, at which Con was only rated ‘fair’, was taught, in case the boys landed up in a foreign port where the natives failed to comprehend English. Otherwise, it was assumed that as the boys were aspiring officers and gentlemen they would be most unlikely to want to read for pleasure; rather than study the classics it was thought more important they learn how to toast the queen. Despite an apparent desire to fool around, Con managed to justify his rank as Cadet Captain by coming a respectable seventh in a class of twenty-six, gaining first-class certificates in mathematics and seamanship and a second-class certificate in French. Hence on 24 July 1883, at the age of fifteen, he was posted to the Cape Squadron’s flagship, HMS Boadicea, becoming a midshipman three weeks later.

The status of a midshipman was a precarious one at the best of times, for although a midshipman was the equivalent of a second lieutenant in the Army, no Army officer would have been commissioned under the age of eighteen, and no fifteen-year-old midshipman could bank on the automatic respect of hardened and experienced able seamen. Boadicea was an armoured corvette with a ship’s company of nearly 450, so there was no shortage of companionship; quite the reverse. The cramped accommodation would have served as a useful experience for future Antarctic exploration. As a midshipman, Scott continued to receive schooling while training, drilling and taking his turn at keeping watch. As Scott’s pay was about £30 a year it was hardly surprising, as his captain noted, that he served ‘with sobriety’. A brief spell in a brig, the Liberty, caused his second captain to report that Scott was ‘a zealous and painstaking young officer’. On 19 September 1885 Scott again transferred, this time to HMS Monarch, a third-class battleship attached to the Channel Squadron. On 1 November 1886 he moved on yet again and joined HMS Rover, a training ship in which he was to broaden his horizons in more ways than one.

In the first instance, Rover transported Scott to the West Indies, where he gained valuable experience racing the three other ships of the training squadron under sail. The second bonus attached to this particular posting was that a guest aboard the squadron’s flagship, HMS Active, was the man destined to exercise the decisive influence on Scott’s life, a man so restlessly active himself that he could not have been enjoying himself aboard a more appropriately named vessel. His name was Clements Markham.

Born in 1830, Markham had gone to sea at fourteen, at a time when sailors were still flogged for drunkenness or disobedience, and according to one of Scott’s biographers,...