William Speirs Bruce
William Speirs Bruce was a British naturalist, polar scientist and oceanographer who organised and led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition to the South Orkney Islands and the Weddell Sea. Among other achievements, the expedition established the first permanent weather station in Antarctica. Bruce later founded the Scottish Oceanographical Laboratory in Edinburgh, but his plans for a transcontinental Antarctic march via the South Pole were abandoned because of lack of public and financial support.
In 1892 Bruce gave up his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh and joined the Dundee Whaling Expedition to Antarctica as a scientific assistant. This was followed by Arctic voyages to Novaya Zemlya, Spitsbergen and Franz Josef Land. In 1899 Bruce, by then Britain's most experienced polar scientist, applied for a post on Robert Falcon Scott's Discovery Expedition, but delays over this appointment and clashes with Royal Geographical Society president Sir Clements Markham led him instead to organise his own expedition, and earned him the permanent enmity of the geographical establishment in London. Although Bruce received various awards for his polar work, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, neither he nor any of his SNAE colleagues were recommended by the RGS for the prestigious Polar Medal.
Between 1907 and 1920 Bruce made many journeys to the Arctic regions, both for scientific and for commercial purposes. His failure to mount any major exploration ventures after the SNAE is usually attributed to his lack of public relations skills, powerful enemies, and his Scottish nationalism. By 1919 his health was failing, and he experienced several spells in the hospital before his death in 1921, after which he was almost totally forgotten. In recent years, following the centenary of the Scottish Expedition, efforts have been made to give fuller recognition to his role in the history of scientific polar exploration.
Early life
Home and school
William Speirs Bruce was born at 43 Kensington Gardens Square in London, the fourth child of Samuel Noble Bruce, a Scottish physician, and his Welsh wife Mary, née Lloyd. His middle name came from another branch of the family; its unusual spelling, as distinct from the more common "Spiers", tended to cause problems for reporters, reviewers and biographers. William passed his early childhood in the family's London home at 18 Royal Crescent, Holland Park, under the tutelage of his grandfather, the Revd William Bruce. There were regular visits to nearby Kensington Gardens, and sometimes to the Natural History Museum; according to Samuel Bruce these outings first ignited young William's interest in life and nature.In 1879, at the age of 12, William was sent to a progressive boarding school, Norfolk County School in the village of North Elmham, Norfolk. He remained there until 1885, and then spent two further years at University College School, Hampstead, preparing for the matriculation examination that would admit him to the medical school at University College London. He succeeded at his third attempt, and was ready to start his medical studies in the autumn of 1887.
Edinburgh
During mid-1887, Bruce travelled north to Edinburgh to attend a pair of vacation courses in natural sciences. The six-week courses, at the recently established Scottish Marine Station at Granton on the Firth of Forth, were under the direction of Patrick Geddes and John Arthur Thomson, and included sections on botany and practical zoology. The experience of Granton, and the contact with some of the foremost contemporary natural scientists, convinced Bruce to stay in Scotland. He abandoned his place at UCL, and enrolled instead in the medical school at the University of Edinburgh. This enabled him to maintain contact with mentors such as Geddes and Thomson, and also gave him the opportunity to work during his free time in the Edinburgh laboratories where specimens brought back from the Challenger expedition were being examined and classified. Here he worked under Dr John Murray and his assistant John Young Buchanan, and gained a deeper understanding of oceanography and invaluable experience in the principles of scientific investigation.First voyages
Dundee Whaling Expedition
The Dundee Whaling Expedition, 1892–1893, was an attempt to investigate the commercial possibilities of whaling in Antarctic waters by locating a source of right whales in the region. Scientific observations and oceanographic research would also be carried out in the four whaling ships: Balaena, Active, Diana and Polar Star. Bruce was recommended to the expedition by Hugh Robert Mill, an acquaintance from Granton who was now librarian to the Royal Geographical Society in London. Although it would finally curtail his medical studies, Bruce did not hesitate; with William Gordon Burn Murdoch as an assistant he took up his duties on Balaena under Capt. Alexander Fairweather. The four ships sailed from Dundee on 6 September 1892.The relatively short expedition—Bruce was back in Scotland in May 1893—failed in its main purpose, and gave only limited opportunities for scientific work. No right whales were found, and to cut the expedition's losses a mass slaughter of seals was ordered, to secure skins, oil and blubber. Bruce found this distasteful, especially as he was expected to share in the killing. The scientific output from the voyage was, in Bruce's words "a miserable show". In a letter to the Royal Geographical Society he wrote: "The general bearing of the master was far from being favourable to scientific work". Bruce was denied access to charts, so was unable to establish the accurate location of phenomena. He was required to work "in the boats" when he should have been making meteorological and other observations, and no facilities were allowed him for the preparation of specimens, many of which were lost through careless handling by the crew. Nevertheless, his letter to the RGS ends: "I have to thank the Society for assisting me in what has been, despite all drawbacks, an instructive and delightful experience." In a further letter to Mill he outlined his wishes to go South again, adding: "the taste I have had has made me ravenous".
Within months he was making proposals for a scientific expedition to South Georgia, but the RGS would not support his plans. In early 1896 he considered collaboration with the Norwegians Henryk Bull and Carsten Borchgrevink in an attempt to reach the South Magnetic Pole. This, too, failed to materialise.
Jackson–Harmsworth Expedition
From September 1895 to June 1896 Bruce worked at the Ben Nevis summit meteorological station, where he gained further experience in scientific procedures and with meteorological instruments. In June 1896, again on the recommendation of Mill, he left this post to join the Jackson–Harmsworth Expedition, then in its third year in the Arctic on Franz Josef Land. This expedition, led by Frederick George Jackson and financed by newspaper magnate Alfred Harmsworth, had left London in 1894. It was engaged in a detailed survey of the Franz Josef archipelago, which had been discovered, though not properly mapped, during an Austrian expedition 20 years earlier. Jackson's party was based at Cape Flora on Northbrook Island, the southernmost island of the archipelago. It was supplied through regular visits from its expedition ship Windward, on which Bruce sailed from London on 9 June 1896.Windward arrived at Cape Flora on 25 July where Bruce found that Jackson's expedition party had been joined by Fridtjof Nansen and his companion Hjalmar Johansen. The two Norwegians had been living on the ice for more than a year since leaving their ship Fram for a dash to the North Pole, and it was pure chance that had brought them to the one inhabited spot among thousands of square miles of Arctic wastes. Bruce mentions meeting Nansen in a letter to Mill, and his acquaintance with the celebrated Norwegian would be a future source of much advice and encouragement.
During his year at Cape Flora Bruce collected around 700 zoological specimens, in often very disagreeable conditions. According to Jackson: "It is no pleasant job to dabble in icy-cold water, with the thermometer some degrees below zero, or to plod in the summer through snow, slush and mud many miles in search of animal life, as I have known Mr Bruce frequently to do". Jackson named Cape Bruce after him, on the northern edge of Northbrook Island, at 80°55′N. Jackson was less pleased with Bruce's proprietorial attitude to his personal specimens, which he refused to entrust to the British Museum with the expedition's other finds. This "tendency towards scientific conceit", and lack of tact in interpersonal dealings, were early demonstrations of character flaws that in later life would be held against him.
Arctic voyages
On his return from Franz Josef Land in 1897, Bruce worked in Edinburgh as an assistant to his former mentor John Arthur Thomson, and resumed his duties at the Ben Nevis observatory. In March 1898 he received an offer to join Major Andrew Coats on a hunting voyage to the Arctic waters around Novaya Zemlya and Spitsbergen, in the private yacht Blencathra. This offer had originally been made to Mill, who was unable to obtain leave from the Royal Geographical Society, and once again suggested Bruce as a replacement. Andrew Coats was a member of the prosperous Coats family of thread manufacturers, who had founded the Coats Observatory at Paisley.Bruce joined Blencathra at Tromsø, Norway in May 1898, for a cruise which explored the Barents Sea, the dual islands of Novaya Zemlya, and the island of Kolguyev, before a retreat to Vardø in northeastern Norway to reprovision for the voyage to Spitsbergen. In a letter to Mill, Bruce reported: "This is a pure yachting cruise and life is luxurious". But his scientific work was unabated: "I have been taking 4-hourly observations in meteorology and temperature of the sea surface have tested salinity with Buchanan's hydrometer; my tow-nets have been going almost constantly."
Blencathra sailed for Spitsbergen, but was stopped by ice, so she returned to Tromsø. Here she encountered the research ship Princesse Alice, purpose-built for Prince Albert I of Monaco, a leading oceanographer. Bruce was delighted when the Prince invited him to join Princesse Alice on a hydrographic survey around Spitsbergen. The ship sailed up the west coast of the main island of the Spitsbergen group, and visited Adventfjorden and Smeerenburg in the north. During the latter stages of the voyage Bruce was placed in charge of the voyage's scientific observations.
The following year Bruce was invited to join Prince Albert on another oceanographic cruise to Spitsbergen. At Red Bay, latitude 80°N, Bruce ascended the highest peak in the area, which the prince named "Ben Nevis" in his honour. When Princesse Alice ran aground on a submerged rock and appeared stranded, Prince Albert instructed Bruce to begin preparations for a winter camp, in the belief that it might be impossible for the ship to escape. Fortunately she floated free, and was able to return to Tromsø for repairs.