RRS Discovery

By 1900 the appetite for a British Antarctic expedition had outrun the government's willingness to run one. The Admiralty and the government stopped short of mounting it themselves but agreed to part-fund a project led by the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society, providing practical help in designing and crewing a purpose-built ship that the RGS would own. Replicating Fridtjof Nansen's Fram was considered and rejected: Fram was made for Arctic pack ice, while the British ship had to cross thousands of miles of open ocean first.

W.E. Smith, a senior Admiralty naval architect, took charge of the design and borrowed heavily from the Bloodhound, a Dundee-built whaler taken into the Royal Navy as HMS Discovery for the Arctic Expedition of 1874; Fleet Engineer Philip Marrack designed the engine, boilers and machinery. Wood was deemed essential, both for strength and ease of repair and to keep a steel hull from interfering with the magnetic work. No steel or iron was permitted within 30 ft of the main compass amidships - wardroom cushions with steel-backed buttons had to be changed, and officers berthed inside that circle slept on horsehair mattresses while those further off got steel springs.

The committee considered building in Norway at Framnæs, the yard that would later build Endurance, but held that British government money should go to a British yard. Only two shipbuilders bid. The order went to the Dundee Shipbuilders Company, which mostly made trawlers, tugs and steam yachts, and which subcontracted the machinery to Gourlay Brothers of the same city. Construction began on 16 March 1900 and Lady Markham launched her into the Firth of Tay on 21 March 1901 - the last traditional wooden three-masted ship built in the United Kingdom. She cost £34,050 to build, £10,322 for engines and machinery and over £6,000 for other fittings.

The hull was built to be frozen in and squeezed. Frames of solid oak up to 11 in thick were set much closer together than normal, and the outer hull was formed of two layers, one 6 in and an outer skin of about 5 in. A third lining inside the frames made a double bottom and skin around almost the whole hull, so that in places it was over 2 ft thick - formidable strength, and excellent insulation. Portholes were impossible, so the crew relied on mushroom vents in the deck for air and light. Seven transverse wooden bulkheads meant ice damage could not flood the whole ship.

Timber was chosen by job: Scots pine for the inner layer, pitch pine, Honduras mahogany or oak for the 6 in skin, English elm and greenheart outside. Oak deck beams 11 in square ran across the hull less than 3 ft apart. The two-blade propeller could be hoisted clear of the ice and the rudder unshipped and stored, with a spare rudder and propeller blades carried; iron-shod bows were severely raked so that in ramming she would ride up onto the ice margin and break it with her own deadweight. At her launch she was widely held to be the strongest wooden ship ever built.

Her 450-horsepower coal-fired triple-expansion engine was never meant to be her main means of moving. At 6 knots she carried coal for only 7,700 nautical miles, and the run to New Zealand was over 12,000. She was rigged as a barque with 12,296 sq ft of sail, carrying split topsails after the practice of the windjammers to cut the number of hands needed, with identical spars and sails on fore and main to simplify spares. When first registered in 1900 she was classified as a sailing ship, and because RGS president Sir Clements Markham belonged to the Royal Harwich Yacht Club she was entered as a private yacht, S.Y. Discovery.

There was barely time for trials. Her speed under steam proved better than designed, averaging 9 knots instead of 8, but neither builder nor Scott could test her under sail. After anchoring at Cowes through August as the RGS yacht - King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra came aboard on 5 August - the British National Antarctic Expedition left on 6 August 1901. Scott thought her slow and unresponsive; she rolled through 94 degrees in the Southern Ocean and griped badly, and Shackleton called her a bad sailer with too much canvas aft. In the Roaring Forties opinions changed: heavy and lightly canvassed for her size, she made good progress in high winds without reefing.

The Antarctic coast was sighted on 8 January 1902. Scott charted coastline for a month, then moored to the ice shelf in McMurdo Sound under the shelter of the Hut Point Peninsula, blowing away part of the shelf with explosives so the ship could be protected on three sides. Pack ice closed round her on 8 February and by the end of March she was frozen in. She would stay there two years. The expedition established that Antarctica is a continent, relocated the South magnetic pole, and put Scott, Shackleton and Edward Wilson at a Furthest South of 82 degrees 18 minutes.

The Morning brought supplies in January 1903 and left in March with the ship still fast in the ice. In January 1904 Colbeck returned with the Morning and the Terra Nova under orders to take off the whole expedition and abandon Discovery if she was not free by 25 February. Work parties sawed and picked at the ice while the relief ships broke a path; on 16 February the ice suddenly began to go, and controlled dynamite charges freed her. Fifty tons of coal came across from Terra Nova and twenty-five more from Morning.

She nearly lost it all at the last. Rounding Hut Point in the teeth of a gale, she grounded on an uncharted shoal and spent nearly ten hours being slammed onto it by wind and sea while the relief captains stood by; Scott called that evening the most dreadful of the expedition. At 3 am on 18 February the wind eased and the tide turned, and she slid astern off the shoal under her own weight, having lost only some greenheart sheathing and taken minor rudder damage. She reached Spithead on 10 September 1904, 1,131 days after leaving.

The expedition came home acclaimed and broke. In 1905 Discovery was sold to the Hudson's Bay Company for £10,000, a fifth of her build cost, and stripped below the weather deck for cargo - lifting propeller, dredging winches and galley stove removed and sold. She ran annually from London to Charlton Island in Canada from 1905 to 1911, out with food, fuel, building materials and gunpowder and home with the season's furs, until the new icebreaker Nascopie replaced her. Sold in 1913 to Joseph Foster Stackhouse for another Antarctic expedition, she stayed idle: war came, and Stackhouse died in the sinking of the Lusitania.

The HBC put her to war work instead, one of around 300 ships chartered through the Bay Steamship Company. The voyages exposed her age: leaks around the rudder, dry rot, a failed condenser, and no cargo hatch, so loading took far longer than in a purpose-built freighter. She carried 500 tons of French munitions to Arkhangelsk, the only Russian port in European waters outside the German blockade, and brought back 557 barrels of methanol. In 1916 the government borrowed her to rescue Shackleton's party from Elephant Island; too slow to sail alone, she was towed out by the collier Polesley under destroyer escort, and reached Montevideo to learn Shackleton had got his men off himself in the Yelcho.

In 1923 the Colonial Office bought her for £5,000 to investigate Southern Ocean whale stocks. A £114,000 refit at Vosper amounted to a rebuilding: all three hull skins re-planked, parts of the keel replaced with Quebec oak, fore and mainmasts moved forward by 4 and 8 feet as Scott and Shackleton had urged in 1900, sail area increased by a fifth, and a second wheel put on the bridge working a steam steering engine. She gained laboratories, a darkroom, deep-water trawling winches and an early electronic echo sounder. Much of the money came from the Falkland Islands government, so ownership vested in its executive council, her registry moved to Port Stanley, and she became the first Royal Research Ship.

The Discovery Investigations put her to work off South Georgia from February 1926, her scientists studying processed whales alongside the whalers at Grytviken while the ship surveyed the surrounding seas. Bilge keels fitted at Simon's Town and the removal of upper yards and topmasts greatly reduced her roll. She tagged whales in the South Shetlands, surveyed down the Antarctic Peninsula - naming Discovery Sound - and became the first ship to take oceanographic readings in the Drake Passage, including a station a few miles off Cape Horn, supplying the missing data for the first complete picture of the Antarctic currents. Sidney Frederic Harmer called it the most important scientific expedition to leave British shores since the Challenger.

The 1926 Imperial Conference identified parts of Antarctica that Britain might claim by right of first discovery, and when the Norvegia annexed Bouvet Island for Norway the politics moved fast. Discovery was leased free to Australia for the British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition under Douglas Mawson, with John King Davis as captain, and left London on 1 August 1929 carrying a dismantled de Havilland DH.60 Moth that became the first aircraft operated in Antarctica. Her first season charted Mac. Robertson Land, sighted from the air on 1 January 1930, and planted the Union Jack on Proclamation Island; a meeting with the Norvegia fixed 44 degrees 38 minutes east as the boundary between Australian and Norwegian claims.

The second voyage left Hobart on 22 November 1930 under Kenneth MacKenzie, drawing 19 feet against her usual 13. A storm on 31 December drove her onto the ice for eight hours in winds of 70 mph before MacKenzie worked her offshore under engine and sail. At Cape Denison eighteen hours of magnetic readings showed the South Magnetic Pole had moved northwest since 1913, and on 5 January 1931 Mawson claimed George V Land; Princess Elizabeth Land and the Banzare Coast followed. Heading north into another gale she averaged 8.5 knots under two sails in 100-foot seas, and MacKenzie's diary calls her 'my wonderful little ship'.

She reached Hobart on 19 March 1931 having covered 10,557 miles, and London on 1 August, two years to the day after leaving. Her research days were over: newer ships had the work, she was still slow and rolled abominably, and crews with square-rig experience were getting hard to find. Presented to the Boy Scouts Association in 1936 as a static training ship on the Victoria Embankment, she served the Second World War as headquarters for the River Emergency Service, and was commissioned as HMS Discovery in 1954 for the reserves.

In 1960 she became flagship of the Admiral Commanding, Reserves - one of only two sailing ships to fly the White Ensign and an Admiral's flag in the 20th century, with HMS Victory. The Maritime Trust saved her from the breakers in 1979 and the Dundee Heritage Trust took her in 1985. In March 1986 she left London aboard the docklift ship Happy Mariner and reached the Tay on 3 April, back in the city that built her. Since 1992 she has been the centrepiece of Discovery Point and part of the National Historic Fleet. Arthur C. Clarke, who lunched aboard her in London, named the spaceship Discovery One after her; the Space Shuttle Discovery carries the name too.