Fergus Fleming
THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS FAILURE

Scott of the Antarctic
By David Crane
(HarperCollins 637pp £25)

Journals: Captain Scott’s Last Expedition
Edited by Max Jones
(Oxford University Press 529pp £14.99)

Is there no end to Scott? People have been banging on about him for ages. Was he a great man? Was he a stupid man? Imperial martyr or unimaginative martinet? Victim of freak weather conditions or agent of his own downfall? Back and forth the arguments have gone, hagiographers and revisionists taking their turn at the literary howitzer, to a point where we are almost deafened by the crump of exploding theories. No Antarctic explorer, not even Shackleton (and that’s saying something), has attracted so much attention. One would expect, by now, that a certain amount of battle fatigue might have set in. But no. Back to your dugouts for here comes another bombardment.

David Crane’s Scott of the Antarctic is puffed as the definitive biography of Scott and at more than 600 pages one is inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. This is a hefty tome, exhaustively researched, which covers every aspect not only of Scott’s life but of anything and anybody connected with him. Indeed, it is as much a biography as a study of late Victorian society, the Royal Navy and Britain’s Imperial ethos with a potted history of polar exploration thrown in for good measure. The weight of information is potentially overwhelming, and it is to Crane’s credit that he has distilled it into a vivid and readable account of the world’s most tragically famous failure.

Crane recreates Scott’s childhood and early career to give a portrait of a youth who was, essentially, unexceptional: earnest but a bit of a larrikin, responsible but disorderly, enthusiastic but not a high-achiever. Here was a hearty, middle-of-the-range cadet, educated to prize obedience above initiative, who enjoyed the innocent entertainments that were considered suitable for young naval officers. Of a beard-growing contest on some far-flung foreign station, for example, he wrote to his mother: ‘I was a bad last – a brilliant idea struck me that checking my hair proper would help to “force” the beard, so I had my back cut with one of those patent horse-clipping arrangements: it didn’t seem to do the least good, but it gave me a very weird appearance.’ All good, clean fun. But Scott stood out from his mess mates in that he was mildly depressed – he called his moods ‘the black dog’ – and that from an early age he kept a private journal. It was an intermittent thing but from the start it showed the self-deprecating humour, clarity of assessment and ear for metre that would establish him as one of the century’s most memorable diarists. One early entry can almost be taken as a leitmotif: ‘The naval officer’, he wrote, ‘should be provided by nature with an infinite capacity for patiently accepting disappointments.’

Neither well off nor well connected, Scott faced many disappointments. In an effort to make his way he transferred to the torpedo section of the Royal Navy. Even here he would probably have languished in obscurity were it not for the ghastly Sir Clements Markham, President of the Royal Geographical Society. Crane’s description of Markham as the bitchy, manipulative éminence grise of polar exploration is worth the price of the book alone. Markham was a man whose ambitions managed simultaneously to feed his imagination and starve his common sense. The high point of his naval career had been in the 1850s when he took part in the search for Sir John Franklin, lost in the North West Passage. The vast distances covered by legendary sledge captains such as Leopold McClintock impressed him immensely; as did the romanticism of Franklin’s ‘sacrifice’. He formed a notion that it was Britain’s destiny to capture the poles – and not just to capture them but to do so in Arthurian style. Not for him the use of dogs. No, the poles were to be taken by knights of the ice who would man-haul their sledges to glory, chivalric pennants fluttering in the breeze. His first stab was the 1875–6 Nares North Pole expedition, a disaster so consummate that the British government refused to sponsor any further Arctic expeditions. But if the North was forbidden, the South was still open. For two decades Markham cast a lascivious eye over every midshipman who joined the Navy, recording their triumphs and failures as they rose through the ranks, searching always for officers who were vigorous, manly, willing to obey and, like himself, of traditional bent. On 1 March 1887, for example, he was most taken by a boat race between the crews of the Rover and the Calypso. ‘I never met nicer, better mannered, more warm hearted young fellows,’ he cheered. ‘God bless them!’ The winning boat was commanded by a chap named R F Scott. Twelve years later, partly on the grounds of this success, Markham chose him to lead an expedition to Antarctica.

In a single, exhilarating leap Scott attained higher plateaus of disappointment. His 1901–04 voyage aboard the Discovery involved heroic, ground-breaking treks into the interior but was marred by inexperience, disease, a leaky ship and squabbles between the personnel. From Crane’s analysis of the crew’s diaries it appears that considerable resentment was directed at one Ernest Shackleton, a blustering merchant officer whose eagerness to return from a sledge trip when suffering from scurvy very nearly branded him a quitter. The expedition was woefully amateur: nobody had any experience of ice or snow, they did not have the faintest idea of how to cope with Antarctic weather conditions, nor, really, did they know what on earth they were doing. It was a tribute to Scott’s leadership that by the second year he had transformed this backbiting bunch of new boys into a cohesive and purposeful band of polar travellers. By then, however, the Discovery was stuck in the ice and the expedition’s return was overdue. In 1904 a pair of rescue vessels materialised with a set of cold instructions from the Admiralty: Scott was to stop messing about, evacuate his men and abandon ship. By dint of luck and copious amounts of explosive Scott managed to extricate the Discovery and bring her home. Fearing disgrace, he found himself instead – thanks to Markham’s machinations – a national hero. In 1910 he sailed aboard the Terra Nova for a second stab at Antarctica.

Markham aside, four figures feature prominently in Scott’s career. The first is Shackleton, the ‘Edwardian freebooter’ who forestalled him in 1909 with an attempt that came within 100 miles of the Pole. The second is Edward Wilson, the tubercular Cheltenham doctor whose eerie saintliness gave religious spine to Scott’s every endeavour. The third is his playwright friend J M Barrie, creator of Peter Pan and arch-espouser of ‘Englishness’. Then there is Kathleen Bruce, the robust sculptress of Scottish/Greek descent whose desire to have children coincided in 1908 with Scott’s decision that it was time he got married. This Gang of Four march through Scott’s final journal. He seems keener to beat Shackleton than he does Amundsen. He marvels at Wilson’s powers of reassurance. He writes almost as if addressing daily letters to his wife. (In one powerful episode Crane alternates Scott’s diary entries with those of Kathleen.) And, at the moment of ultimate disappointment, he sends a deathbed message to Barrie, progenitor of the eternal English childhood.

Death, for Scott, was indeed a very big adventure. In Crane’s view it was also a process of redemption. He had deteriorated since his Discovery days, becoming irritable, impatient, ungenerous and peevish. (Titus ‘I-may-be-some-time’ Oates found him all these things and worse.) Yet he still commanded an extraordinary degree of loyalty (not least from ‘Birdie’ Bowers, whose jingoistic diary is a perfect wonder), and, says Crane, if in small matters he had been found wanting, in the largest of all he was not. His ‘Message to the Public’ was an exemplar of national grit. ‘Had we lived,’ he wrote, ‘I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’ He kept it up until the famous last line: ‘It seems a pity but I do not think I can write any more.’ Interestingly, when Scott wrote these words he cannot have been clamped in a blizzard – no katabatic wind lasts more than four days – and conditions would have been fine. (As proved by the expedition’s own metereological reports.) The suggestion here is that even had Scott’s last companions, Wilson and Bowers, been able to take advantage of the improved weather they would not have, because loyalty to their crippled leader outweighed their instinct for survival. Take this as you will. But in the context of Crane’s biography it makes the perfect end to a seamless tragedy.

The whole script can be found in the latest edition of Scott’s diary published by OUP, Journals: Captain Scott’s Last Expedition. Ably introduced and edited by Max Jones, this is the full, unexpurgated thing. Scott, it seems, made a lot of rude comments about his companions that were suppressed when the diary was first published in 1913. At the same time, editors augmented his suffering by the rather transparent ploy of changing plus temperatures to minus. Jones has rectified these omissions/amendments while adding a summary of Scott’s life and an even-handed critique of his literary reputation. When stripped of posthumous baggage Scott emerges neither as fool nor superhero but as a very human character, at times confident and at others deeply anxious, continually concerned for the health of his men and the success of their enterprise. His eloquence cannot be doubted (at least, not on the page: his Midwinter speech, reproduced here for the first time, is a model of dullness), and one can only marvel at the physical and mental standards he set himself. Whatever judgements one cares to make about the ideals of pre-war, officer-class Britain, there is no denying that Scott clung to them unto death – Jones notes that his rescuers had to break his arm to prise the diary from his grasp. In terms not only of Antarctic but British history Scott’s journal has attained mythological status. It’s a damn good read to boot.