A First Rate Tragedy (22 page)

On the eve of the
Terra Nova
’s departure Scott made a revealing visit to Thomas Marlowe, editor of the
Daily Mail
, whom he had known since the
Discovery
expedition. He was already looking ahead to what he could do on his return and asked Marlowe when he believed war with Germany would break out. Marlowe replied with extraordinary prescience, ‘I can only tell you that there is a well-informed belief that Germany will be ready to strike in the summer of 1914 and it is thought that she may do so.’ Scott mulled this over then replied, ‘By that time I shall be entitled to command a battle cruiser of the Invincible class. The summer of 1914 will suit me very well.’
⁴⁶
The irony is that if Scott had not died in the Antarctic, he could well have perished at the Battle of Jutland in 1915.

10

‘Am Going South, Amundsen’

The
Terra Nova
slid out of the London Docks as planned on 1 June 1910. Just before arriving at Cardiff to take on the Welsh coal so generously donated to her, Scott called all hands aft and made an earnest appeal that every man should make a will. He even offered to give advice. However, the warm reception they received banished sombre thoughts for a while.

Cardiff held a special place in the expedition’s heart as the city that had given them the most fervent support. The Lord Mayor now produced a further £1,000 for the fund. In recognition, Scott promised to make Cardiff the
Terra Nova
’s first port of call on his return. The Cardiff Chamber of Commerce gave a farewell banquet for the officers in the wood-panelled rooms of the Royal Hotel. The crew were feted in the nearby Barry’s hotel, but Scott invited them to join him for a smoking concert. Edgar Evans, as a native of south Wales, was given pride of place between Scott and the Mayor of Cardiff. Described by the
Cambrian
as ‘one of the biggest and burliest members of the crew’, he made a memorable impromptu speech in which he paid an emotional tribute to Scott declaring that: ‘No one else would have induced me to go
there again, but if there is a man in the world who will bring this to a successful issue, Captain Scott is the man.’ Despite putting up such a magnificent performance Evans had had so much to drink that it took six men to help him re-embark that night. He appears to have fallen out with Teddy Evans at around this time by drawing Scott’s attention to the loading of the wrong sort of skis – Teddy Evans’s fault. New skis were ordered and Chief Petty Officer Edgar Evans put in charge of them – a slight which rankled with Lieutenant Evans.

On 15 June Edgar Evans’s family gathered on the Gower cliffs at Rhosili to watch the
Terra Nova
’s departure for Cape Town after a tremendous send-off from the crowds amid the din of steam sirens and hooters. Her escort of little flag-draped vessels turned back and she was alone. Scott also watched her, proud that she was flying the White Ensign rather than the flag of the Merchant Navy. He had been elected a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, entitling him to the Ensign – an honour that had cost him £100. However, he would not see her again until South Africa. His time must now be spent arranging newspaper contracts and squeezing out any last subscriptions because the expedition was still underfunded even at this late stage. There was no guarantee that he could even pay his men their modest salaries beyond the outward voyage.

If Scott regretted that he could not be with his men, Kathleen also had regrets. She was determined to accompany her husband as far as she was able but it meant leaving behind her beloved Peter. She described the pain of it: ‘I can think of nothing that hurt more hideously than unlocking the sturdy fingers that clung round mine as I left the laughing, tawny-haired baby Hercules for four months . . .’ Gritting her teeth she set sail with Scott on the tramp steamer
Saxon
. Shackleton was among those who
came to see them off from Waterloo, and they had as travelling companions Oriana Wilson and Teddy Evans’s wife Hilda.

Meanwhile the deeply laden
Terra Nova
lumbered on her way. Oates said gloomily that she appeared to have only two speeds – slow and slower. Dropping anchor at South Trinidad, a small volcanic island in the South Atlantic, some of the men found themselves cut off from the ship by the thunderous surf and were forced to spend the night on the shore observed by leery giant land crabs. The arachnophobic Birdie Bowers wrote home, ‘it must have been horrible’.
¹
Such experiences helped the men to bond and Cherry-Garrard gave much of the credit for this to Teddy Evans who managed to beat down the natural suspicion between the scientist and sailor, ‘doing much to cement together the rough material into a nucleus which was capable of standing without any friction the strains of nearly three years’.
²
However, credit was also due to Scott who, according to Griffith Taylor made a point of selecting men who liked one another. Deep friendships began to form – Bowers decided Wilson was the finest man he had ever met; Wilson in turn thought Bowers tremendously hard-working and unselfish.

High spirits sometimes spilled over. Teddy Evans’s ‘taste for rowdyism and skylarking’ set the tone.
³
Wilfred Bruce viewed him as a kind of Peter Pan and Simpson described how:

Sometimes, especially at dinner, our spirits run so high that we should be taken for a party of school boys rather than a party of men engaged on work which has the attention of the whole of England. The usual form of our madness is the singing of songs & choruses at the top of our voices followed by cheering and other meaningless noises.
⁴

Sometimes there would be mock fights and even Oates, fast acquiring a reputation for ‘amused taciturnity’,
⁵
would join in, writing:

We shout and yell at meals just as we like and we have a game which consists in tearing off each others shirts. I wonder what some of the people at home would think if they saw the whole of the afterguard with the exception of the officer of the watch struggling yelling and tearing off each others’ clothes, the ship rolling and the whole place a regular pandemonium.
⁶

He doesn’t say what he thought about the verse composed by Teddy Evans to the tune of Cock Robin:

Who doesn’t like women?

I, said Captain Oates,

I prefer goats.

However, Evans was actually deeply impressed with Oates, particularly his appetite for hard work and his ability to get on with the seamen, and wrote that he was more popular with them than any other officer.

A close camaraderie developed between this somewhat odd assortment of individuals. It was not long before most had nicknames. Scott was the ‘Owner’ and Teddy Evans the ‘Skipper’ – properly respectful names. Campbell, an eccentric but gifted Etonian who frightened the living daylights out of Cherry-Garrard, was nicknamed ‘the wicked mate’. Then imagination ran riot. Pennell was ‘Penelope’ or ‘Pennylope’, Bowers was of course ‘Birdie’, Oates and Atkinson, by now inseparable, were
called ‘Max and Climax’, Wilson was again ‘Uncle Bill’, Wright was ‘Jules Verne’ and the quiet George Simpson ‘Sunny Jim’.

The
Terra Nova
arrived at Simonstown, the Cape Town naval base, on 15 August 1910. Oates recorded their reception with his usual sardonic humour – ‘Hurrah parties, nibs, nobs, and snobs off to welcome us, but they forgot to bring our letters or any bottled beer.’
⁷
Cherry-Garrard and Bowers took the opportunity to whisk two pretty girls for a spin in a hired car but it broke down ‘in the middle of the wild’.
⁸
Scott had already arrived and was in Pretoria wooing the likes of Botha and Smuts. He had to raise £8,000 from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to make good his deficit. He managed to secure an official South African grant of £500 and an equivalent sum from private donors, but it was hard work and the necessary socializing was not always congenial as Wilson described:

. . . for our sins we were entertained by the Cape Town ‘Owl Club’, a sort of colonial Savage Club and one of the worst we have ever had the ill fortune to attend. We were all seated at small tables and apparently two members were told off to look after two guests. My two hosts first of all made offensive remarks about teetotallers when I said I didn’t drink, and then quarrelled about the payment for a bottle of soda water which I was given and half a glass of sherry which had accidentally been poured into my glass by the waiter while I wasn’t looking. The quarrel was not who should pay for it, but who should
not
pay for it, and eventually as both refused to pay for the sherry, and as the old waiter said if
they
didn’t he would have to, they said he might! . . . The evening was truly one of the most
awful penalties of being a member of such a public expedition. There was no redeeming feature about the whole thing.

Wilson was equally intolerant of ‘white derelicts wallowing in the idleness and dirt of . . . degenerate Kaffirs on equal terms’. Though gifted with great humanity Wilson was also a man of his time.

Wilson longed for the simplicity of life aboard the
Terra Nova
, the mugs of cocoa shared with a companion as the sun rose, the closeness to nature as he sat sketching on the deck and the ‘happy family’. He was therefore disappointed when Scott dispatched him ahead to Melbourne by mail steamer to recruit the expedition’s geologist, Raymond Priestley, and to persuade the Federal Government to stump up funds. As Scott was going to sail with the
Terra Nova
, Wilson was also given the job of looking after Kathleen Scott – a preposterously difficult task given their diametrically opposed outlooks on life, but luckily she was a bad sailor (or said she was) and they saw little of each other. Hilda Evans and Oriana also sailed with him. Kathleen found the other women trying. Why, she wondered, could the world not be peopled by men and babies? But she recognized that ‘my hatred of women is becoming a monomania and must be curbed’. Kathleen was a woman of strong opinions. (She once wrote of Winston Churchill that he might be a genius but, if so, he disguised it well.) Now she seems to have found the saintly Wilson just a little dull and a bit of a prig. She certainly bullied him to take her out to the
Terra Nova
in heavy seas by mail launch as the vessel approached Melbourne so she could be reunited with Scott. She wrote that although Wilson had been furious with her, ‘The relief at getting back to sane folk who understood me was more than
can be written about.’ Wilson’s verdict was that ‘. . . in future I hope it will never fall to my lot to have more than one wife at a time to look after, at any rate in a motor launch, in a running sea at night-time.’

Teddy Evans was very disappointed at having to yield command of the
Terra Nova
to Scott on the voyage to Melbourne, interpreting this as a criticism of himself. However, Scott wanted the opportunity for him and his men to get to know one another. He was also planning to choose the Antarctic shore parties during the voyage. While there was a less exuberant atmosphere than under Teddy Evans, Scott regarded the high spirits of his young team benignly. The physicist Charles Wright described how: ‘The Owner has a thirst for scientific knowledge that cannot be quenched. He takes no part in the skylarking – but always looks on with a grin.’
⁹
Gran also left an interesting pen portrait: ‘In Norway I had learned to know Scott as a cheerful and easy man, and this first impression was strengthened when I again came close to him. He was short-tempered and not to be trifled with when angry, but if he had judged someone unfairly and discovered his mistake, he was quick to make amends.’ He was to feel something of Scott’s impatience himself – Scott was beginning to consider the confident Norwegian a lazy, posing fellow and a shirker.

Scott soon had something else to think about, however. On berthing at Melbourne on 12 October he received Amundsen’s famously laconic telegram from Madeira: ‘Am going South, Amundsen.’ This volte-face was a complete surprise to Scott, Norway and the wider world. Amundsen had been loaned Nansen’s
Fram
(by now Norwegian State property), and had put together an expedition on the understanding that his goal was the exploration of the North Polar Basin. However, as Amundsen admitted subsequently, Peary’s conquest of the North Pole
changed everything. ‘Just as rapidly as the message had travelled over the cables I decided on my change of front – to turn to the right-about, and face to the South.’
¹⁰
Amundsen told neither his backers, including Nansen, nor most of his fellow explorers until they were already at sea and it was rather too late for a change of mind. In fact, he had only made six people, on board or ashore, aware of his true intentions before sailing. He later tried to justify his secrecy, arguing, perhaps correctly, that if he had made his plans public they would have been stifled at birth.

He wrote in self-defence that: ‘I knew I should be able to inform Captain Scott of the extension of my plans before he left civilization, and therefore a few months sooner or later could be of no great importance.’ He also maintained that the main object of Scott’s journey was scientific research and that the Pole was ‘only a side-issue’. Furthermore, he argued, a man with Scott’s ‘great knowledge of Antarctic exploration’ would hardly have been likely to alter his plans.
¹¹
Yet the truth was that Amundsen was a ruthlessly ambitious man. He was also a ‘professional’ explorer in a way which Scott, with his troupe of gifted amateurs, so thoroughly in the British tradition, was not. Amundsen had chosen exploration as a career, beginning with the Gerlache expedition and studying such scientific subjects as magnetism because he thought they might be useful in attracting sponsors, rather than through any academic interest. However distasteful such an attitude may have appeared to Scott and his men, Amundsen’s focused professionalism would show to his advantage later.