A First Rate Tragedy (21 page)

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 messages 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.

Scott again had to rely to a large extent on sponsorship and described with satisfaction how ‘the advertisement to be derived from the supply of stores to an Expedition such as this is thought of very highly in this country, and thanks to this and to a patriotic wish for our success, we are getting goods on extraordinarily favourable terms.’
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Some companies donated their products free while, as Scott noted with something approaching glee, they were even handsomely paid to take a wide range of branded products. Colman’s supplied ‘new ready mixed mustard’, flour and semolina. Scott wrote from his winter quarters in Antarctica to thank the company. He also took Bovril, pemmican and Oxo. The makers of Oxo devised an advertisement showing Polar bears advancing on a jar of Oxo but substituted penguins when they belatedly realized that there were no Polar bears in Antarctica. Other products
included goods from Imperial Tobacco, Abram Lyle’s golden syrup, Henry Tate’s sugar and Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade. Jaeger provided the expedition with special boots, while the brewers Bass donated some cases of the celebrated ‘King’s Ale’, the brewing of which had been inaugurated by King Edward VII during a visit to the brewery in 1902. The directors expressed the hope that Captain Scott would use it to drink to the King’s health at the South Pole.

Scott was also delighted with the generous response from schools across the country which he had invited to raise money to buy dogs, ponies, sledges, sleeping bags and tents. More than one hundred public, secondary and private schools took part. Dogs cost £3.3s each, sledges £5 12s 6d, sleeping bags £2 and ponies £5. Each contribution was carefully recorded in the appendix to Scott’s journals of the final expedition and Scott made a point of writing to every school himself to thank the girls and boys – he wrote to South Hampstead High School for Girls to acknowledge the donation of a pony nicknamed ‘Bones’ and a dog nicknamed ‘Jackass’.

Throughout this period of frantic hard work – Nansen had been right to warn that the hardest part of an expedition was the preparation – Scott had to be careful to cultivate the right public image. There must be no sign of the inner worry and bouts of depression, ‘the black thundercloud’ as Kathleen called his darker moods. There was a revealing report in the
Daily Mail
of January 1910 for which Scott must have projected absolutely the right image of a man of action and determination.

Captain Scott has a personal force which is plain for all men to see. Thick-set, deep-chested, with a thoughtful geniality in his clean-shaven ‘naval-officer’
face, he is much of the bull-dog type, with blue eyes that look out sparklingly from a face hard-bitten with adventure. ‘Suppose you don’t succeed at first?’ he was asked. . . . Captain Scott took his cigarette from his lips and brought his finger down on to the table with slow emphasis. ‘. . . we shall jolly well stop there till the thing is done’.

This display of confidence was at odds with his inner doubts. He later wrote to Kathleen from Antarctica of his worries during the early stages:

And now that I can say these things and feel myself as I do, a competent leader over the team, I must be honest enough to confess a certain amount of surprise at finding everything so satisfactory. I am quite on my feet now, I feel both mentally and physically fit for the work, and I realize that the others know it and have full confidence in me. But it is a certain fact that it was not so in London or indeed until after we reached this spot. The root of the trouble was that I had lost confidence in myself . . .
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The tension was heightened when Shackleton wrote to him announcing that he was preparing an expedition in 1911 to map the western coastline between Cape Adare and Kaiser Wilhelm II land. He explained that he had no plans to go to the Pole, promised that his expedition was purely scientific and offered, should Scott still be in Antarctica, to cooperate with him in exploring this western region. Scott’s response was lukewarm. While he would welcome cooperation to explore this little known area ‘it should
be clearly understood that my own programme for a second season will not be modified by the publication of your plans’.
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On 3 February came another development which excited public interest. The US National Geographical Society announced that it would launch an American expedition to the Pole from the Weddell Sea coast to begin in December 1911 and with the goal of reaching the Pole a year later. Peary had written to Scott to ask whether he had any objections to these plans. He had replied that he welcomed the plan and would be happy to cooperate in scientific work. However, the press now took up the story, presenting it as a challenge to British ambitions. Scott allowed the correspondence between himself and Peary to be published, adding the rider that the rivalry would be of an entirely friendly character, but that each would naturally be keen that his own nationality should be first. At the end of February Peary gave the public what they wanted, promising ‘the most exciting and nerve-wracking race the world has seen’.

The following month Scott was in Norway to consult Fridtjof Nansen, who seems to have been very taken with Kathleen, and to test out a prototype motor sledge at Fefor at the foot of the Jotunheim mountains, north of Oslo. This was built on lines devised by Scott and Reginald Skelton by the Wolsey Tool and Motor Company and its design was a forerunner both of the tank and of the Sno-cats later used by Fuchs and Hillary on the Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1955–8. He was also able to visit the company that was making his conventional sledges and other equipment, including fifty pairs of skis.

Nansen listened carefully to Scott’s plans and did his best to advise him. He personally had little confidence in motorized sledges but approved Scott’s decision to take dogs as well as ponies. He also advised him to take an expert skier and introduced him
to a good-looking, lively, confident young man, Tryggve Gran. Gran was wealthy (or at least wealthy for a Norwegian as Wilson observed) and had serious plans of his own to go to the Pole.
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He had had a vessel especially built and his idea, based on advice from Nansen, Shackleton and Borchgrevink, was to ski to the Pole taking dogs. He planned to start out from Norway the following summer and wanted Scott to be aware of his plans. It must have seemed to Scott as if Antarctica was developing into a kind of Piccadilly Circus for explorers with everyone explaining their plans to everyone else to ensure they did not trip over one another or breach understood spheres of interest.

However, one explorer, also Norwegian, was at this time keeping exceptionally quiet about his plans – the thirty-seven-year-old Roald Amundsen. Since serving as second mate on the
Belgica
he had matured as a Polar explorer. He had traversed the North West Passage and been the first to confirm that the North Magnetic Pole was not fixed but migrated. His publicly avowed intent was now to reach the North Pole and explore the Polar basin despite Peary’s successful expedition. Significantly, however, although Scott made several attempts to make contact, Amundsen avoided him. Scott even sent a matched set of instruments so that comparative measurements could be taken of north and south. Amundsen accepted these quietly and, although he felt awkward, had no intention of revealing that for the past six months he had secretly been planning to head for the South Pole. Gran, who had tried to engineer a meeting, was deeply embarrassed. Amundsen wouldn’t take his telephone calls and when Gran took Scott to Amundsen’s house they were told by his brother that, even though he knew Scott might be coming, Amundsen was out. Although they waited an hour, Amundsen didn’t return.

Scott decided that the best way to deal with the ardent Tryggve
Gran was to invite him to join his own expedition. He was impressed with the speed with which Gran had been able to ski to the nearest blacksmith to have a motor sledge axle repaired, and by his skiing technique – using two sticks, rather than one – which was new to Scott. The offer was accepted, Gran interpreting it as a mission ‘to root out that opposition and ill-will towards skiing which had characterized previous English South Polar Expeditions’.
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He had a high opinion of his abilities – an expedition colleague later described how he delighted in ‘speechmaking and in telling tales of his exploits on ski – our strong man – at any rate by his own accounts’.
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The trials themselves went quite well. The motorized sledge performed promisingly, although there were problems with the fuel. The sledge was tried out across level surfaces and up hills. It was found that it could haul 10 hundredweight over deep snow and several times that weight at least over firm ice.

Scott flirted with some other novel ideas. The reign of Edward VII had been a revolutionary period in transport. Electrical propulsion was taking over from steam: man was taking to the air in planes and venturing into the deep in submarines. The British and Colonial Aeroplane Company of Bristol offered him the use of a Zodiac monoplane, but he turned it down because he felt it was too experimental. By 1910 there had in fact been considerable advances in aviation. More powerful and reliable engines had been developed and aircraft design improved so that pilots were undertaking more daring feats. The most outstanding achievement of the year was the crossing of the Alps by Georges Charez. By 1911 aviation had developed from a sport for the adventurous to a serious commercial proposition. While Scott was probably correct not to take a plane in 1910, had he been departing just a couple of years later he might have benefited from doing so.
While he was away Kathleen Scott had great fun visiting airshows and becoming only the second British woman to be airborne. Scott was also interested in being the first explorer to use wireless telegraphy in Antarctica but had to reject it because the equipment was too cumbersome to transport and erect. However, the National Telephone Company supplied equipment that would enable Scott to lay a telephone link between his two huts on McMurdo Sound.

Leaving the sledge to undergo final tests and modifications Scott returned to London to be greeted by news of yet further rivals for the Pole. The Germans had announced an expedition commencing, like the Americans, from the Weddell Sea. Not only that, but having reached the Pole they intended to march on across the plateau to McMurdo Sound and thereby complete the first crossing of Antarctica. This roused the Royal Geographical Society to more than its usual acerbity and it sent a sharp rebuke to Berlin, prompting a promise from the Germans to leave the way clear for the British and the Americans. However, Scott was probably more concerned with Shackleton who now published his plans for exploring the western coastline. There was no intention to compete with Scott, but Scott insisted that his own freedom of action be clearly understood and wrote to the President of the Royal Geographical Society that ‘I want it settled before I leave that I am free to go where I please without the reproach that I am trespassing on his ground’.
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In the event, though, Scott need not have worried. Shackleton abandoned his plans and left the work to the young Australian Mawson whom he had intended to accompany.

The final weeks before departure were spent trying to wring some final donations out of an increasingly reluctant public. Scott now put the expedition’s costs at £50,000 but hoped to raise
£10,000 from Australia and New Zealand. Nevertheless money continued to trickle in and then in April came the news that Peary was postponing his bid for the Pole because of lack of money. The scene looked set for Scott, but in the first week of May the death of King Edward VII cast a blight over everything including making subscriptions. Scott decided that when the
Terra Nova
sailed he must stay behind to raise the final funds and follow on by steamer.