When Con heard these tales, and the stories of his own father and uncles who were captains in England’s navy, he knew it was true that the spirit of a brave man does not die.
Sometimes when he was thinking of these things and wondering about the “something hidden” that the future had in store for him, his father would have to call him three or four times before he could wake him from his dream. “Old Mooney,” his father called him then, and he shook his head.
“Remember, son,” he would say, “an hour of doing is better than a life of dreaming. You must wake up and stir about in this world, and prove that you have it in you to be a man.”
How do you think that the delicate boy, with the narrow chest and the dreamy blue eyes, whom his father called “Old Mooney,” grew into the wide-awake, practical lad who became, a few years later, captain of the naval cadets on the training ship Britannia?
“I must learn to command this idle, dreamy ‘Old Mooney’ before I can ever command a ship,” he said to himself. So he gave himself orders in earnest.
When he wanted to lie in bed an extra half hour, it was, “Up, sir! ‘Up and doing,’ is the word!” And out he would jump with a laugh and a cheer for the new day.
When he felt like hugging the fire with a book on his knees he would say, “Out, sir! Get out in the open air and show what you’re made of!” Then he would race for an hour or two with his dog, a big Dane, over the downs, to come back in a glow ready for anything. And so the man who was to command others became master of himself. There came a time when a strong, brave man was needed to take command of the ship Discovery, that was to sail over unexplored seas to the South Pole. And Robert Falcon Scott, then a lieutenant in the royal navy, who had long dreamed of going forth where ships and men had never been and find the “something hidden” in strange far-off lands, found his dream had come true. He was put in command of that ship.
Three years were spent in that terrible land where
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around;
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled—
in the fierce winds that swept over those great death-white wastes.