Kitabı oku: «Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South», sayfa 4
There has never been a shortage of men of action who have wanted to be artists – General Wolfe famously declared that he would rather have written Gray’s ‘Elegy’ than take Quebec (which must have been a bit of a ‘facer’ to the men under his command) – but the man who is both is a rarer animal. The conditions of the First World War inevitably threw up a number of poets who were forced into the unfamiliar world of their natural opposites, but in the deeply philistine naval culture within which Scott was brought up – a culture suspicious of the intellectual life in any form – the rarity of such an ambition must have brought an acute sense of loneliness.
And it was not just his inability to express himself that troubled him, but a deeper malaise that hovers somewhere between adolescent mawkishness and the ‘black dog’ from which he never escaped. ‘It is only given to us cold slowly wrought natures to feel this drear deadly tightening at the heart,’ the diary continues after a half-page has been ripped out, ‘this slow sickness that holds one for weeks. How can I bear it. I write of the future; of the hopes of being more worthy; but shall I ever be – can I alone, poor weak wretch that I am, bear up against it all. The daily round, the petty annoyances, the ill-health, the sickness of heart – how can one fight against it all. No one will ever see these words, therefore I may freely write – what does it all mean?’
If it seems impossible now to know what – if anything specific – lay behind this passage, its tone inevitably draws attention to the one period of Scott’s naval life over which there is any uncertainty. A lot has been made of a brief gap in his service record while he was on the Pacific Station, and while there is not a shred of evidence to suggest he had put up any sort of ‘black’ that was later covered up, it does seem likely that Scott was ill on the Station’s depot ship, Liffey, at Coquimbo for a few weeks in the autumn of 1889.*
The only professional risk Scott ever ran, however, was not that he would be a bad naval officer, but that he would turn himself into only too good a one, and whatever lay behind the diary entry never surfaced in his work. He had been lent by Hulton to Caroline and then Daphne shortly after they had arrived at Esquimault in British Columbia, and an independent account of Scott’s journey back from Acapulco in the City of New York to rejoin his ship hardly suggests anything like a physical or mental crisis. ‘In the late winter a quarter of a century ago,’ Sir Courtauld Thomson later wrote in a letter that Barrie wove into his legend of the Young Scott, Scott himself always looked back with particular fondness to his time on the Pacific Station, and he made friends there that he would keep all his life. In professional terms Esquimault was possibly the least interesting of all the navy’s global stations, but if the dress code spelled out in Standing Orders is anything to go by – Helmets to be worn with White Undress; Frock coats to be buttoned close up; Undress Coats with Epaulettes, Gold Laced Trousers and White Waistcoats for Balls; Mess Jackets for Dinner; Dress, White or Blue for Dinner; Undress, Dark Coats and Hats for Sundays ashore – there were all the social compensations of naval life at the apogee of British seapower.
I had to find my way from San Francisco to Alaska. The railway was snowed up and the only available transport at the moment was an ill-found tramp steamer. My fellow passengers were mostly Californians hurrying off to a new mining camp and, with the crew, looked a very unpleasant lot of ruffians. Three singularly unprepossessing Frisco toughs joined me in my cabin, which was none too large for a single person. I was then told that yet another had somehow to be wedged in. While I was wondering if he could be a more ill-favoured or dirtier specimen of humanity than the others the last comer suddenly appeared – the jolliest and breeziest English naval Second Lieutenant. It was Con Scott. I had never seen him before, but we at once became friends and remained so till the end. He was going up to join his ship which, I think, was the Amphion, at Esquimault, B.C.
As soon as we got outside the Golden Gates we ran into a full gale which lasted all the way to Victoria, B.C. The ship was so overcrowded that a large number of women and children were allowed to sleep on the floor of the only saloon there was on condition that they got up early, so that the rest of the passengers could come in for breakfast and the other meals.
I need scarcely say that owing to the heavy weather hardly a woman was able to get up, and the saloon was soon in an indescribable condition. Practically no attempt was made to serve meals, and the few so-called stewards were themselves mostly out of action from drink or sea-sickness.
Nearly all the male passengers who were able to be about spent their time drinking and quarrelling. The deck cargo and some of our top hamper were washed away and the cabins got their share of the waves that were washing the deck.
Then it was I first knew that Con Scott was no ordinary human being. Though at that time still only a boy he practically took command of the passengers and was at once accepted by them as their Boss during the rest of the trip. With a small body of volunteers he led an attack on the saloon – dressed the mothers, washed the children, fed the babies, swabbed down the floors and nursed the sick, and performed every imaginable service for all hands. On deck he settled the quarrels and established order either by his personality, or, if necessary, by his fists. Practically by day and night he worked for the common good, never sparing himself, and with his infectious smile gradually made us all feel the whole thing was jolly good fun.
I daresay there are still some of the passengers like myself who, after a quarter of a century, have imprinted on their minds the vision of this fair-haired English sailor boy with the laughing blue eyes, who at that early age knew how to sacrifice himself for the welfare and happiness of others.
Such a life came at a cost, of course, and a lieutenant’s pay of £182.10S a year can only have been just enough to keep up those appearances about which Scott was always morbidly sensitive. In his future years he would have to watch every wardroom drink he bought and pass over every entertainment that had to be paid for, but at Esquimault at least he seems to have been able to hold his own in a society eager to embrace an engaging and attractive young naval officer. He rode, canoed, dined out, and in the handsome Victoria home of Peter O’Reilly, a prominent figure in local life, and his wife, found a welcome that helped ease his homesickness. For many years after Scott kept up a fitful but affectionate correspondence with Mrs O’Reilly and her daughter Kathleen, and in 1899, on the eve of his new life in polar exploration, was still writing of ‘ever fresh memories of good times’ at Esquimault.
There was never a suggestion at the time, however, or in any of the subsequent correspondence, of a warmer friendship with Kathleen, and Scott was just one of any number of officers who washed through the O’Reillys’ hospitable home. ‘Warrender & Scott called,’ Peter O’Reilly noted in his journal for 4 May, six weeks after Scott’s return to Amphion. ‘Warrender & Scott called,’ he wrote again three weeks later; ‘Warrender & Scott arrived in their canoe’; ‘Scott called’; ‘Scott came to supper’; ‘Scott dined with us’; ‘Scott supper’; ‘Scott accompanied the Admiral to church & returned to supper’; ‘Kit: Warrender & Scott on horseback.’ ‘How lovely it must be at Victoria now,’ Scott wrote to Mrs O’Reilly on his return to England and the summer rain of Devon the following year. ‘I can imagine the delightful weather even in the midst of all the rain we are forced to endure here. What jolly times those were for me at Victoria! If anything were needed to recall them to memory – which nothing is – the strawberries and cream on which I chiefly keep my spirits up at present would be a constant reminder … I often feel I shall never have such times again as those days at Victoria which were so very pleasant thanks to your invariable kindness.’
On 19 October 1890 Amphion’s tour of duty came to an end, and she weighed for Honolulu on the first stage of the long journey back to England. The weather on leaving Victoria was foul, Scott wrote to Mrs O’Reilly – ‘as regards physical discomfort some of the worst I have ever endured. We had a gale of wind with a very heavy sea, in our teeth, the motion was awful and the pangs of sea-sickness attacked us all from the captain down to the “warrant officers’ cook’s mate” (usually supposed to be the most humble individual on board). The climax was reached on the night of the Government House Ball when it blew really hard: I had the middle watch, the rain and spray dashing in one’s face made it quite impossible to see ahead, so I turned my back on it and with a sort of grim pleasure tried to imagine what was going on at the ball.’
It is interesting to catch Scott’s own voice again – if for nothing else than to be reminded of just how young he still was – and all the more so as he wrote to Mrs O’Reilly with the same unguarded familiarity with which he treated his own family. ‘The “plant” thrives,’ he went on, clearly referring to a parting gift to him, ‘& to my messmates this is a matter of supreme wonder … it is not for nothing that I have learned the elements of botany … that plant has had a treatment which I venture to suggest, no plant has ever had before; once it grew very yellow, I dosed it with iron and other tonics, gave it nitrate, sulphurite, in carefully measured proportions, to my horror it seemed to grow worse, but I persisted in my treatment and eventually it recovered and has since flourished. In fine weather I take it on deck when I go on watch but I don’t spoil it, it is not allowed too much to drink nor too much fresh air.’
On the way home Scott and his messmates raced each other in growing beards, with Scott ‘bound to confess’, he wrote, that ‘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 much good, but it gave me a very weird appearance.’
With a long voyage ahead of them, he continued, the ‘Admiral’ (Warrender, a future admiral, so a prophetic nickname for Scott’s friend as it turned out) and Scott ‘hit on a capital method of employing this spare time’ in writing a book – ‘not a novel, but a grave and important technical work’, designed to ‘epitomise’ the various seamanship manuals into one pocket-sized volume. ‘With this great end in view, we set and lay out our places, divide into heads and sub-heads, chapters and paragraphs and generally succeed in building up scaffolding, which would contain books about three times the size of any seamanship manual in existence. At first this was amusing, but after a bit it gets quite irritating. This is of course a state secret, and naval officers must not be told what is in store for them, nor, in case of non-publication, must they know what they have missed.’
It was ten days’ sailing from Victoria to Honolulu, where a week was spent in those social and diplomatic functions dear to Captain Hulton’s heart. ‘At Honolulu we employed our time firing salutes and anathematising mosquitoes,’ Scott wrote. ‘Besides such necessary visitors as the King etc, the Captain in the fullness of his heart must needs invite calls from all the consuls and other dignitaries in the place, their name is legion and they all have to be saluted, so we are everlastingly popping off guns.’
There were other things for Scott to worry about, apart from Hulton or the mosquitoes. He had applied for a place on the Torpedo course at HMS Vernon, and as the Amphion made its slow way back to England via Hong Kong, Aden and Suez, he became increasingly anxious over his prospects. ‘I was very despondent,’ he later confessed to Mrs O’Reilly, in a letter that probably shows as well as anything what anxieties lay behind the tone of his short-lived diary, ‘on account of my small chance of being selected for this Torpedo business; after that my spirits got lower & lower; each mail brought me what I considered to be worse & worse news – I knew there were only five vacancies and every letter from home informed me of an increased number of applicants for them – the number swelled from 20 to 30 and at last to 49 – I was in despair and gave up all hope; but a day or two brought the welcome telegram informing me that I was chosen and on the 20th of June I was on my road to England – I really think if I had not been taken this year I should have gradually lost all interest in the Service – it seems such a dismal look out to go on year after year with that dreary old watch keeping, going abroad for three years and coming home for six weeks and so off again. As it is there is a great deal of interest in the speciality I have adopted and at any rate there are a certain two or perhaps three years in England.’
If Scott had been anxious, he was right to be. Ambition, for a naval or army officer of intelligence, is not an option but a necessity. Cultural traditions might dissemble the fact, but the alternative to promotion is too dire to leave any alternative. Fail to get on the right Torpedo course, fail to get a Staff College nomination, fail to get on the ‘pink list’, fail to be seen doing the right job, fall six months behind your contemporaries – and the endless vista of naval or military life in all its undifferentiated and unimaginative dullness, stagnation and impotent subordination opens up.
For a young officer without interest, ambition was even more vital. It was, alongside his talent, all he had. It was not, in any narrowing sense, a mere matter of self-interest. It was not about power, or self-promotion, or any authoritarian instinct, but about professional fulfilment – about finding the space to think and develop – the mental and physical lebensraum that the naval and military life institutionally denies to failure or mediocrity. And for Scott, as he set foot on English soil again for the first time in two and a half years, and went down to Outlands to see his ‘great stay-at-home’ of a father, it would soon be about more. It would be about survival.
FOUR Crisis
Lives there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said This is mine own, my native land Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned As home his footsteps he hath turned From wandering on a foreign strand.
Sir Walter Scott,
(mis)quoted in Scott’s address book
THE TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD SCOTT his family welcomed home in the summer of 1891 was not the homesick boy who had gone to sea in Amphion. In their memories of these last, unclouded months together as a family, his sisters would recall a more physically and mentally alert Con, stronger, more robust, more incisive, more curious, more navy. ‘He felt that things requiring to be done,’ Grace recollected, ‘must be well arranged, and must not attend on slower wits … matters once well considered and decided upon must not be allowed to be hampered by afterthoughts and questions. Details should be minutely arranged, then off and get it done with.’
His few surviving letters from this time convey the same impression, though the final phase of his journey home from Esquimault hardly bears it out. He had gone down with fever at Malta and been forced to miss Cannes, where the Amphion was on guard duty for the Queen, and on his recovery made his own way back by land from Brindisi. He had ‘looked forward to a few days in Paris’, he wrote to the O’Reillys, but ‘hating timetables and all those sorts of things’, had ‘attached’ himself to a civil engineer he had met, and woke up in Milan ‘where I didn’t ought to have been’ with no luggage and nothing to do but ‘console’ himself with a day in the cathedral.
He was not united with his luggage again until Calais, and so had to miss Paris, but with the exception of his father all the Scotts that could be rounded up were waiting for him in London. For a family whose idea of excitement was the Plymouth Theatre pantomime the capital must have seemed about as remote as Esquimault, and for the next three days the Scotts gorged themselves on it, cramming in the Handel Festival and Ivanhoe at the English Opera – music a ‘trifle insipid’ – between exhaustive sweeps of the naval exhibition and – that symbol of everything the service still thought it was – Nelson’s Victory moored on the Thames.
Scott had been appointed to Sharpshooter for summer manoeuvres before he joined Vernon, but as she was conveniently anchored at Plymouth there was time first for Outlands. ‘When Con, at the age of nineteen, was wildly in the throes of his first love,’ Grace again recalled, in an elusive glimpse of a side of Scott’s life that has vanished without trace, ‘and longing to rush off to his charmer, who had a very short-tempered husband, Archie alone could speak to him and try to dissuade him from his project; Con at the time was very impressionable, and remained so. The sailor’s life and his romantic nature caused him to idealise women. He had his youthful loves and flirtations. His affections were easily caught though not easily held. He had a capacity for appearing wholly absorbed in the person he was talking to, while all the time he was really quite detached. This was misleading. As far as I know, he had two real loves only; one, a girlhood friend of ours who later married, but was always in the background of his affections, no matter who from time to time interested him for a while, and she remained so, I think, until he met his wife.’
This is a sister talking – and a younger sister, at that, who saw him only rarely – but if there was any other woman of whom Grace never knew, no name survives. Many years later Cherry-Garrard would write of Scott’s astonishing power to charm when he wanted to, and at least one married American woman, a Minnie Chase, a friend’s sister Scott met briefly in San Francisco on his way north to rejoin the Amphion, would happily have signed up to the proposition. ‘The night has a thousand eyes,’ she copied into the front of an address book she probably gave him,
And the day but one,
Yet the light of the bright world dies,
With the dying sun.
The mind has a thousand eyes,
And the heart but one;
Yet the light of a whole life dies,
When love is done.
Conventional enough stuff – the verses are by Charles Bourdillon and were well known at the time – and Scott was in San Francisco only a few days, but those days fixed themselves in Minnie Chase’s memory. ‘Do you remember Mrs Chase 24 years ago,’ Scott’s widow would write to her husband from California in 1913, ignorant that he had already been dead ten months. ‘She fell on my neck because of what a darling you were 24 years ago. She couldn’t believe that you’d remained unmarried so long – the more I think of it the more I wonder with her.’
At twenty-three Scott was slightly below average height, trim and broad-chested, with fair hair, blue, almost violet eyes, an odd, attractively ugly face not unlike Jacky Fisher’s, and a smile that went a long way to explaining the impact of his charm. ‘Well-built, and alert,’ one man who saw him lecturing a few years later described him. ‘Neither tall nor short, he yet conveyed the impression of vigorous quickness. Nine people out of ten, seeing him, would have said, “Naval Officer.”’ It was certainly a role he was well on his way to making his own. ‘Lieutenant Scott is a young officer of good promise,’ his last captain had written in forwarding on his application to Vernon, ‘and has patience and tact in the handling of men. He is quick and intelligent and from all I’ve seen of him I think likely to develop into a useful torpedo officer. I recommend him for the class which commences in October next.’
After his holiday at Outlands and nearly six weeks of manoeuvres in Sharpshooter, Scott took up his place in HMS Vernon, the navy’s Torpedo School Ship at Portsmouth. He would only have had to see a Lieutenant Philip Colomb – another great name in the Victorian navy – on the same list as himself to know what he was still up against, but if there was anywhere that might have symbolised a different navy, it was Vernon, an elegant and streamlined relic of the age of sail that had been laid up, dismasted and brutalised into shape to serve the service’s newest technical arm.
The Vernon had begun its new life as a tender to HMS Excellent, the naval gunnery school, but as the importance of the new weapon became obvious, Vernon broke away from Excellent to become an independent command in her own right. She was lucky enough to have Jacky Fisher for her first captain, and when he was followed in turn by another formidable naval legend and future First Sea Lord, ‘old ’ard ’art’ Wilson, who had hacked and brawled his way to a VC at the Battle of El Teb in 1884, the future of the school was assured.
By Wilson’s and Scott’s time, Vernon had grown in size and importance, with a motley collection of hulks, workshops and a flat iron gunboat with a horizontal funnel jutting out of her stern added to the original establishment. In some ways the unsanitary, rat-infested warren of vessels must have conjured up memories of Britannia and Hindostan for Scott, but the filth and bustle of nineteenth-century Portsmouth was about as far a cry from the quiet beauty of the Dart as Vernon was from anything in the navy Scott had known before.
It was an exciting time to be there, with the torpedo undergoing constant improvements since the first above-water-launched model had been slid into the sea off a mess table. The year before Scott arrived had seen the introduction and testing of a new eighteen-inch weapon with a greater range, speed and accuracy than anything tried before, and for the first time in his life he had the chance to develop – or discover in himself – the technical and scientific aptitude that would so strongly mark his future work.
Even in Vernon, however, the most modern and innovative of establishments, Scott found himself in a culture that paradoxically reinforced those centralising, controlling, anti-initiative tendencies that were the hallmarks of the nineteenth-century service. In his brilliant study of Britain’s pre-First World War navy, Andrew Gordon identified four key institutions – Vernon, the Royal Geographical Society, Royalty and Freemasonry – as comprising a kind of ‘checklist’ of naval ‘authoritarianism’, and what he says of Vernon holds a special resonance for anyone interested in Scott’s later record as an explorer in the unpredictable world of Antarctica. ‘The work of the Torpedo School took place on the frontiers of practical physics,’ he wrote, ‘the staff formed (at least in their own opinion) a naval science vanguard, and their leadership of their profession away from art and into science may have inclined them towards a highly regulated “Newton’s clock” view of the universe, in which the unpredictabilities concomitant with devolved authority had no place.’
If there was one other aspect of Vernon life that was regressive in its tendencies, it was a Raglanesque assumption that any future enemy must be French. During the summer of 1890 exercises around Portland and Plymouth had showed how dangerous boats issuing from creeks on the French coast could be, and over his two summers in Vernon, Scott was involved in similar manoeuvres to counter the threat.
It was the first time that he had commanded anything bigger than a ship’s boat, and he could not have made a more disastrous start. On 12 August 1893 he headed for Falmouth as part of the torpedo flotilla, but the next day somehow succeeded in running Torpedo Boat 87 aground, suffering the humiliation of having himself towed back into dry dock at Keyham with ‘severe injury to propeller’.
It was an acute embarrassment for a young officer – ‘due care and attention does not appear to have been exercised’, Scott’s service record reads – but it was no more than that. In the official report on the incident he was ‘cautioned to be more attentive in future’, but Vernon’s commander, George Egerton, would always remain one of Scott’s greatest admirers, and a First Class in his theory examination, and a First Class Certificate in his practical, certainly suggest that the incident led to no lasting damage to his prospects.*
It is just possible, though, that it cast a shadow over his first appointment as a qualified Torpedo Officer to the unglamorous Depot ship Vulcan. The appointment was not ‘considered good in the Vernon’, but in the dogged way that would become typical of Scott, he was determined to make the best of his opportunities. His reasons for remaining with the ship, he wrote to his anxious father from Vulcan,
are firstly that I look upon her as a latent success, as a splendid but undeveloped and misused experiment dependent on her present handling to establish her utility, a utility which in war time would be apparent and patent to all. For this reason I take a very great interest in her welfare and do as much as lays in my power to forward it. Secondly, and in consequence of my first reason, I have hopes of establishing a reputation for myself.
Thirdly, I am losing nothing; in fact gaining a very great deal in general service experience – In general service work, of which we do as much as most other ships, I have a stake and take a position far above that which I should have in other ships – In addition I keep watch at sea with the fleet, and as they generally put us in the fighting line, am precisely in the same position to gain experience as if on board a battleship …
To fall back on the torpedo work again at which I have worked exceedingly hard, I look upon this ship as the best practical experience that could possibly befall an officer; in fact I look upon myself now as an authority on the only modern way of working a minefield and such like exercises – but what is better, the Captain and Currey do likewise.
Even if I fail, the practical knowledge and experience will be invaluable. I am conscious that by self-advertisement I might make myself heard now, but the position is a delicate one, and I should be sorry to advocate anything in which I did not believe. Meanwhile things constantly annoy and irritate one – but as you see, I work for a larger than ordinary stake, and with this I will conclude adding, that the welfare of body if not of career remains good.
It would be another decade before Scott would be able to tick off the other three boxes on Gordon’s ‘authoritarian checklist’ – the RGS, Freemasonry, and Royal connections – but the inevitable process of institutionalisation had begun. ‘We are getting very well known in the fleet,’ he told his father in the same letter, sounding alarmingly like some embryo ‘Pompo’ Heneage; ‘no function takes place but that we come pretty well out of it, the athletic sports, the rifle meetings, the regattas, events which though very far from you are very near to us out here; fate has kept us before the public in all. But best of all we had a most triumphant inspection, the Admiral said publicly that he should report us as the most creditable to all concerned, and privately that we were the cleanest ship he’d inspected, an opinion fully endorsed by Levison and others who accompany him on these occasions, they adding that no ship could “touch us”.’
This was no momentary aberration either. ‘The ship is still very dirty,’ he complained to his mother of his new ship, the Empress of India, ‘but I think improving – a great improvement has been commented upon in my small share of the cleaning part and I feel if only we could get the commander to smarten up a bit we should get the ship all straight – but he is unfortunately lamentably slack.’ Just over a week later, virtue was rewarded when a ‘somewhat disastrous’ admiral’s inspection confirmed ‘that the only clean parts of the ship were the torpedo department – and also that at drills etc the torpedo department shone by a mere absence of doing wrong … Altogether I was pleased with my own show. I have some sixty men numbered whom I fell in at the beginning and told them things must be altered altogether.’
This thickening of the professional arteries, the slow but inexorable process of assimilation, might well have been inevitable, but by the time that Scott wrote this last letter, ‘choice’ had largely been removed. There had always been an assumption within the family that John Scott had been living off interest since his retirement, but in the autumn of 1894, while his son was still in Vulcan, it emerged that for the last twelve years he had been running down his capital and that they were virtually bankrupt. ‘On the 23rd October,’ Hannah Scott recorded with an almost preternatural calm, ‘a crushing blow came of heavy losses. At once we decided to let our house and hope that some occupation will come that will please my dear husband and bring him comfort in the loss of his old house. On November 12th our dear Rose commenced work at Nottingham Hospital, under three weeks after the loss. The others all anxious to be up and doing are only restrained by the occupation at home in getting things in order for letting the furnished house. From Con comes a fine manly reliable letter offering help … Truly sorrow has many compensations and with God’s help we shall yet if He wills it return to our old home.’
They only returned, in fact, to let Outlands permanently, and all it meant in terms of respectability, security and position was gone. It would be impossible to guess from the tone here what this must have meant to Hannah Scott, but for a woman of her age and gentle snobberies, it was as if she had gone to sleep in the cosy, familiar world of some West Country Cranford, and woke within the harsh landscape of a Gissing novel, staring at the prospects of rented rooms, poverty, ostracism, trade and working daughters.
