RRS Discovery

RRS Discovery was built in Dundee for one purpose: to survive the Antarctic ice. Launched on 21 March 1901 by the Dundee Shipbuilders Company, she was the last traditional three-masted wooden ship built in Britain, a barque with an auxiliary steam engine and a hull more than two feet thick in places, reinforced with closely spaced oak frames so that pack ice would squeeze her upwards rather than crush her.

Under Robert Falcon Scott, with Ernest Shackleton among the officers, Discovery sailed south in August 1901. The expedition wintered at Hut Point in McMurdo Sound, and the ship stayed locked in the ice for two years before she was freed in February 1904. From that base the expedition set a new record for the farthest south yet reached and relocated the South Magnetic Pole. Discovery came home in September 1904 after more than three years away.

Her later life was almost as varied. She carried cargo for the Hudson's Bay Company, ran supplies during the First World War, and in the 1920s became the first Royal Research Ship, studying whale populations in the Southern Ocean; she then sailed on the British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition led by Douglas Mawson. After decades as a training ship moored in London she returned to Dundee in 1986. Today she sits in a dry dock at Discovery Point, run by Dundee Heritage Trust, presented largely as she was in the 1920s: you can walk the decks, look into the cramped wardroom and cabins, and go below to feel how much timber stood between her crew and the ice.

Getting there

Discovery Point is on the riverside in the centre of Dundee, next to the V&A Dundee and just across the road from Dundee railway station, a walk of two or three minutes. Dundee Airport (DND) is about 4 km away.