HMS Rover (1874): The Training Ship That Carried a Young Robert Falcon Scott

Built on the Thames, Sheathed Against the Sea

HMS Rover was built by the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company at Leamouth in London, launched in August 1874 and completed the following September at a cost of £169,739.

She was designed in 1872 by Edward Reed, the Royal Navy's Chief Constructor, as an improved version of the Volage-class corvettes, an iron-hulled ship of 3,462 tons whose hull was covered with a three-inch layer of oak and then sheathed in zinc below the waterline, a practical measure against the marine biofouling that plagued iron and wooden hulls alike on long overseas deployments.

Getting her machinery to behave took rather longer. She did not commission for sea service until 14 December 1875 at Chatham, over a year after her launch, under Captain Thomas Barnardiston, and even then her engines kept failing on trials, not running to satisfaction until early 1876, an inauspicious start for a corvette rated at 4,750 indicated horsepower and a complement of around 325 officers and men.

Years on the North America and West Indies Station

Rover's early career took her to the North America and West Indies Station, one of the Royal Navy's key overseas commands, protecting British interests and shipping across a wide swathe of the Atlantic under Captain Barnardiston until 3 May 1879, when she returned home for a refit at Chatham Dockyard, after which she spent a period in reserve.

A Future Polar Explorer Aboard

Rover joined the Training Squadron on its formation in 1885, taking on the role of preparing young sailors for service across the fleet under Captain Gerard Henry Uctred Noel, who commanded her from 21 September 1885 to 6 November 1888. Noel went on to become an Admiral of the Fleet, and had already shown a scholarly streak by publishing a much-discussed essay on naval tactics titled 'The Gun, Ram and Torpedo'. One of his own midshipmen aboard Rover, Sydney Fremantle, who also rose to Admiral, later recalled him rather more candidly than the rank suggests: 'He had, unfortunately, a violent temper, was a stern disciplinarian, and was very difficult to please.'

Among the midshipmen who served under him, appointed to Rover on 1 November 1886, was eighteen-year-old Robert Falcon Scott, who left her the following August with a First Class certificate in Seamanship and a mark of 980 out of a possible 1,000. It was aboard Rover that Scott first crossed paths with Clements Markham, Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, a meeting that counted for little at the time but decided the whole shape of Scott's later career: when Markham came calling again thirteen years later with news of a proposed British Antarctic expedition, Scott applied to command it within two days, and went on to lead the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic, a remarkably notable footnote for a ship whose training role otherwise proved something of a disappointment.

A Cutter Race at St Kitts

That crossing of paths has a date and a place and it is worth having both. On 1 March 1887 the Training Squadron was cruising in the West Indies, and the midshipmen of the four ships raced their cutters across the bay at St Kitts. Rover's boat, with the eighteen-year-old Scott in it, won. Watching from the shore was Clements Markham, Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society and a man with a private and quite deliberate habit: he collected the names of promising young naval officers against the day when somebody would have to be found to lead an expedition to the poles. He wrote Scott's down.

Nothing came of it for twelve years. Then, in 1899, Scott ran into Markham by chance in a London street, learned that a British Antarctic expedition was being got up, and applied to command it within two days. He was given Discovery, and led her south from 1901 to 1904 in the first sustained British Antarctic expedition since the 1840s. He went back in 1910 in the Terra Nova.

What ill-fated stands in for is this. Scott and four companions reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912 and found a tent there with a Norwegian flag over it: Amundsen had beaten them by five weeks. All five died on the way back. Edgar Evans went first, then Lawrence Oates walked out of the tent into a blizzard, and Scott, Wilson and Bowers died in theirs about eleven miles from a supply depot. Scott's last diary entry is dated 29 March 1912. A search party found the tent on 12 November, collapsed it over the three men and built a cairn of snow over it, and it is still out there somewhere, buried in a glacier and moving very slowly towards the sea.

None of which is Rover's doing. But a rowing race in the Caribbean on a March morning in 1887 is where the chain starts, and if a different cutter had won it, or if a corvette that turned out to be no good at her job had not been in the West Indies that season, the whole thing might have gone to somebody else.

Poor Under Sail, Retired Early

For all her sound construction, Rover struggled in her training role, judged unsuitable for the purpose largely because of her poor performance under sail alone, a serious shortcoming for a vessel whose principal job was teaching young sailors the fundamentals of seamanship under canvas.

It is worth being clear about what her failing actually meant, because condemning a fifteen-year-old iron warship for being bad at sailing sounds absurd until you look at the date. In 1889 the Royal Navy still believed, and would go on believing for another twenty years, that a young seaman learned his trade under canvas: the balance, the weather sense, the willingness to go aloft in the dark. The ships that fought the fleet actions no longer had masts to speak of, and the Navy knew that too. HMS Devastation had gone to sea in 1873, a year before Rover was launched, with no sailing rig at all.

So Rover was an iron-hulled steam corvette wearing a full ship rig she was not much good at, built for a Navy that was rapidly ceasing to need the rig and had not yet worked out how to train people without it. Being poor under sail did not make her a poor warship. It made her a poor school, and a school was the only thing left for her to be.

That deficiency led to her decommissioning in 1889, comparatively early for a ship of her type, and she was sold for scrap in 1893.

A Modest Ship With a Notable Footnote

HMS Rover never fought a major action or achieved any particular fame in her own right, and her career as a training ship ended earlier than intended once her limitations under sail became clear.

But her few months with a young officer named Robert Falcon Scott aboard give her a small, permanent place in the wider story of British naval and polar exploration history, a reminder that even a ship remembered mainly for her shortcomings can still have brushed against greatness.

There is one more thing about her that is worth noticing. She cost £169,739, she needed a year and a half to get her engines to run properly, she spent four years on a foreign station and four more in a training squadron, and she was sold for scrap at nineteen years old having never fired a shot at anybody. By any reasonable measure she was a failure. And she carried, for nine months, a boy from Plymouth who would be dead in the ice at forty-three and remembered for as long as anybody remembers anything about the Antarctic. Ships are not always judged by what they were for.