It is February 1904 and Robert Falcon Scott’s ship is on a shoal off the coast of Antarctica. “We were in the worst possible position, dead to windward of the bank, with wind, sea and current all tending to set us faster ashore,” he writes in The Voyage of the Discovery (1905).
“The hours that followed were truly the most dreadful I have ever spent. Each moment the ship came down with a sickening thud which shook her from stem to stern, and each thud seemed to show more plainly that, strong as was her build, she could not long survive such awful blows.”
He took soundings and calculated the bank as a small one “and asked myself, would it be possible to force her clean over it? I determined to try, and ordered sail to be made. The wind had steadily increased in force, and it was now blowing like a howling gale …”
It took him about two minutes to realise he was making matters worse. “The seas were breaking heavily over the stern and sending clouds of spray high up the masts, the breakers on the shore flung the backwash over our forecastle, the water was washing to and fro over our flooded decks.”
The ship survived, he lived to tell the tale, and die on his second expedition.
