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Here at LSOZI, we take a break every Wednesday to explore the old steam/diesel navies of the 1833-1954 period, profiling a different ship each week. These ships have a life, a tale all their own, which sometimes takes them to the strangest places.- Christopher Eger

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Warship Wednesday 31 December 2025: What a bit of Whale Oil Taxes Gets You

Above we see the unique British polar research ship-turned minesweeper HMS William Scoresby (J 122) approaching Deception Island, in the South Shetland Islands, circa 1944, during Operation Tabarin, the little-known WWII Royal Navy expedition to Antarctica.

A humble 370-tonner that ran 134 feet from bow to stern, Scoresby launched 31 December 1925, a century ago today, and became an icy legend.

Meet Scoresby

Our subject was named for William Scoresby, Jr, a whaling captain and almost accidental Arctic scientist and later ordained Church of England clergyman, who was born in Cropton, near Pickering, Yorkshire, on 5 October 1789.

A veteran of numerous whaling voyages to far off, oft-frozen waters (his first at age 10 with his sea captain father, a man later credited with inventing the crows nest), he penned his An Account of the Arctic Regions in 1820, one of the first clear-eyed examinations of such areas, followed up by Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whale Fishery three years later. These volumes have been called “the beginning of the scientific study of the polar regions.”

In practical terms, the good Rev. Scoresby charted 400 miles of East Greenland’s coast– with most of his place names still in use– and his meticulous ship logs, including weather and current data, provide valuable information for climatologists even today.

Ordered as one of His Majesty’s Royal Research Ships– in the same vein as the legendary RRS Discovery, Scott’s old ship– for the Government of the Falkland Islands from Hull-based trawler maker Cook, Welton & Gemmell in East Riding of Yorkshire (Yard No. 477), the future RRS William Scoresby was launched on New Years Eve 1925, christened by the Lady Harmer.

Built on spec for a thrifty £34,303 to the modified plans of a whale catcher, her intended primary service was to study and mark whales and to conduct research trawls for the South Atlantic fisheries. At the time, it was seen that data on the biological and physical conditions affecting the distribution of the whale stock were of preeminent importance.

Ice-strengthened, she was 134 feet in length, 26 in beam, and could make 12 knots. Her triple-expansion steam engines were built by Amos and Smith of Hull. She had a powerful commercial winch and port side gallows, which would allow her to tow a full-sized otter trawl.

Her only armament at the time were a couple of revolvers for problems that needed revolvers and a few 12-bore (12 gauge) single-shot marker guns, developed by Holland & Holland to fire special 10-inch marker darts on an Eley-Kynoch charge that could be recovered during the harvest and returned (for a £1 reward), allowing the data of the whale’s travel from when and where it was darted to when and where it was harvested to be cataloged.

Between 1934 and 1938, 5,219 whales of six species were marked in the Southern Hemisphere using such guns from Scoresby and Discovery II, yielding significant data on migration patterns for species such as Blue, Fin, and Humpback whales.

Scoresby also possessed a sampling and sounding winch for oceanographic surveys, along with a small onboard laboratory for conducting scientific work on plankton and hydrology. While deployed, in addition to whales and their krill, the humble vessel’s embarked scientific detachment also branched out to study seals, bird life, lichens, mosses, and algae.

The same fund that paid for Scoresby, raised from taxes levied on whaling exports from the Falkland Island Dependencies and on the whaling companies, in the same year established a new £10,000 marine station at the whaling station at Grytviken on South Georgia Island, later of Falklands 1982 fame.

Once launched and floated down the River Hull for fitting out in Hull’s Queen’s Dock, the RRS William Scoresby was completed on 14 June 1926.

Her first Master was George M Mercer (Lieutenant Commander, RNR), and she arrived at Cape Town two months later to join RRS Discovery. Over the next 13 years, her skippers were all officers either on the Royal Navy’s retired or reserve list.

Scoresby completed seven voyages to Antarctic waters between 1926 and 1937, operating initially with the old RRS Discovery and after 1929 the new RRS Discovery II, based mainly out of Port Stanley in the Falklands and Grytviken on South Georgia– in the very shadow of Shackleton’s grave.

Coupled with the 13 “Discovery Investigation” voyages made by Discovery I and II in roughly the same period, these missions advanced the understanding of everything in the Antarctic along biological and oceanographic lines.

Between voyages, which were usually six-seven months long, Scoresby typically retired to Portsmouth Dockyard for repairs to damages incurred while among the ice floes and bergs. Dredged seabed rocks and preserved biological specimens were brought back for further study.

If too banged up for the 8,000nm return trip to England, she would call at Montevideo– the closest friendly port to the Falklands, some 1,200 miles west– in a pinch, or at the Royal Dockyard at Simonstown, South Africa (2,000 miles East) instead.

During this period, her crew tagged and tracked something on the order of 3,000 whales alone and “undertook studies on plankton, fish, and hydrological surveys.” These results were published from Cambridge in the Discovery Reports.

The exception to the rule and the longest of these pre-war voyages was the two and a half year 1928-1930 Second Wilkins-Hearst Antarctic Expedition, so called as it was led by Australian explorer (and soon to be knighted) Hubert Wilkins, MC and Bar, and funded by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Among the cargo and specialized gear crammed aboard Scoresby was a Baby Austin car equipped with snow chains.

This voyage included loading up one of the expedition’s two Lockheed Vega floatplanes on her stern via the ship’s jib crane boom at Deception Island and heading South, aiming for the first trans-Antarctic flight.

Scoresby sailed just below the 67th parallel in an attempt to find somewhere suitable to take off for an attempted flight across Antarctica, but in the end was unable to find a suitable place on the ice to take off with sufficient fuel to complete such a long flight.

Nonetheless, the floatplane did make several shorter flights completed over a period of weeks, in December 1929 and January 1930.

RRS Discovery II continued such work with floatplanes in the Antarctic, supporting the Ellsworth “Polar Star” which was a specially modified Northrop Gamma 2B monoplane, and embarking two RAAF Gipsy Moths and seven air/ground crew for her 1935-36 expedition.

At least 41 members of Scoresby’s circa 1926-39 crews were authorized bronze or silver Polar Medals “for good services” in 1941, a rare award that to this day has only been handed out less than 1,000 times, as it requires at least 12 months of arduous service in such a region to qualify to receive. By comparison, the U.S. Antarctica Service Medal, the primary medal for American Antarctic service, can be earned these days with just 10 days spent on orders south of 60°S latitude.

War!

When the war kicked off, RRS Discovery II was turned over to the Admiralty and served with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, mainly in the North Atlantic as a buoy tender and rescue ship out of Scotland, before resuming her Antarctic survey work only after the war ended.

Meanwhile, our subject, at the time laid up at St Katherine’s Dock, London, was taken over by the Admiralty in October 1939 and by January 1940 became HM Minesweeping Trawler Scoresby (J122) armed with a single “rather antique looking” manually trained 12 pounder (3-inch) gun on her bow (likely one of the 3,494 Mk I and II guns 12cwt QF 3″/40s on hand in RN stocks hand left over from the Great War) and some basic mechanical sweep gear (paravanes, etc.). This was augmented by a Lewis gun and a few small arms.

Her first wartime skipper was CDR (Retired) Harry Petit-Dann, RD, RNR, originally minted a lieutenant in 1924 and moved to the retired list in 1926.

On 1 May 1940, Scoresby sailed as an escort for ships in Convoy OG.28F, which was formed at sea and arrived at Gibraltar a week later. It had to be hairy as the convoy had 44 merchant ships and just three escorts, our little research vessel, the old destroyer HMS Versatile (D32), and the sloop HMS Folkestone (L22).

From Gibraltar, Scoresby continued alone down the West African coast on patrol.

By mid-May, she was part of the 93rd Minesweeper Group at Freetown, Sierra Leone, joining five other minesweeping trawlers there briefly before shifting across the South Atlantic to Rio de Janeiro in June.

Finally, on 23 January 1941, Scoresby pulled into her old haunt at Port Stanley in the Falklands, assuming station at the local shore establishment “stone frigate” there dubbed HMS Pursuivant. The only other armed floating military assets in the Falklands at the time were the minesweeping whaler HMT Roydur and the minesweeping drifter HMT Afterglow.

There, Scoresby remained on quiet duty, patrolling from Port Stanley in West Falkland to old Port Louis, East Falklands, part of the local effort to defend against passing German raiders and U-boats, as well as interloping Argentine naval ships who were planting flags around the British Antarctic Territories. This duty grew more tense after December 1941, when Churchill feared a move by the Japanese to seize the Falklands.

While the cruisers HMS Ajax, Achilles, Exeter, and Cumberland had sheltered at various times in the Falklands during their Graf Spee chase in late 1939, later joined by HMS Dorsetshire and Shropshire the islands were left fairly on their own after even the old heavy cruiser HMS Hawkins was shifted from the South Atlantic to the Indian Ocean in late 1940 as the traffic in German commerce raiders and blockade runners had thinned– or at least they thought.

A red alert went through the Falklands after the German Hilfskreuzer Pinguin (HSK 5) raided into Antarctic waters in January 1941, where it captured the whole of the Norwegian whaling fleet: three factory ships and 11 chasers, capturing a whopping 20,000 tons of precious whale oil in the process. The Admiralty dispatched the armed merchant cruiser HMS Queen of Bermuda to patrol the waters for a few months in response, but even she resumed her regular duties.

A 1,700-man reinforced battalion (11th West Yorks) arrived in the Falklands in 1942 and would remain ashore into early 1944 when they were replaced by a smaller force of Royal Scots. Other than Scoresby and her two fellow armed trawlers, that was it for local defense in the islands, barring passing Allied warships taking the “long way around” Cape Horn.

A small force of several RN armed merchant cruisers protected Simonstown to Freetown convoys up the Southwest coast of Africa, but they generally came nowhere near the Falklands except for a short patrol by HMS Carnarvon Castle in January 1943 to respond to Argentine flag-raising antics on far-away Deception Island.

Meanwhile, CDR Petit-Dann was relieved as Scoresby’s skipper in mid-1942 by one T./Lt Thomas Gentle, RNR– who soon left to command the new Algerine-class minesweeper HMS Welcome (J 386)— and T./Lt. Harold Olaf Olsen, RNR, a Norwegian-born officer who by early 1944 left to command the ASW whaler HMS Thirlmere (FY 206)/ex-Kos XXVI.

This left Scoresby in early 1944 in command of Lt Victor Aloysius John Baptist Marchesi, RN, recently arrived in the islands from England with the mysterious 14 members of Naval Parties 475 and 476, aboard the troop ship HMT Highland Monarch, hitching a ride with the Royal Scots coming to relieve the miserable 11th West Yorks.

The London-born Marchesi was only 30 at the time but was more than qualified, having served some months as an RNR officer in the battlecruiser HMS Hood before joining the Brocklebank Line before the war. As fourth officer in the RRS Discovery II in January 1936, he helped rescue the American airman Lincoln Ellsworth and his Canadian co-pilot, Herbert Hollick-Kenyon, from the Ross ice shelf.

Transferring to the Royal Navy at the outbreak of the war, in addition to commanding Scoresby, Marchesi was also the 2IC of NP 475/476, which had been handpicked by T/LCDR. James William Slessor Marr, RNVR, a 42-year-old Scottish marine biologist and polar explorer who had sailed with Shackleton on the Quest as a lad, took part in the BANZARE expedition, and been a member of both Discovery II and Scoresby’s pre-war crews at one time or another. At the time, Marr already had a mountain named after him in Antarctica, as well as a bay named in his honor in the South Orkney Islands, and had earned both a Polar Medal (with clasp) and a W. S. Bruce Medal.

There was reason Scoresby had such a man in charge.

Tabarin

The expedition was named Operation Tabarin after Bal Tabarin, a famed and chaotic Paris cabaret and nightclub second only to the Moulin Rouge, as a sort of tongue-in-cheek stab at the chaotic nature of the endeavor. Ironically, at the time, the real Bal Tabarin on Rue Victor-Massé just off the Seine was favored by both the German officer corps in Paris and the movers and shakers of the Resistance.

Their mission: establish year-round British bases in the far south, at Deception Island at a minimum, to deny its use in sheltering German, Japanese, or Argentine vessels and strengthen Britannia’s assertions of sovereignty over its claimed Falkland Islands Dependencies

Scoresby took the place of NP 475/476s former mothership, the condemned Norwegian sealing vessel Veslekari. Taken up in Iceland in 1943 and renamed HMS Bransfield, the old sealer proved unsuited for the task and was abandoned, the party left to ship to the Falklands via HMT Highland Monarch while their equipment was transshipped as cargo to Montevideo on other vessels.

Scoresby was assigned as escort to the slightly larger but very familiar coaster Fitzroy (ex-Lafonia), a 165-foot/853-ton steamer which had built by Henry Robb in 1931 for the Falkland Islands Company to serve as the inter-islands mail ship. The islands’ only dedicated lifeline to the world, the needs of the Crown took priority, and she was used first to retrieve the expedition’s equipment from Montevideo before the two vessels set out, bound for Deception Island.

On 29 January 1944, they left Port Stanley, headed south. 

The first installation, established on 3 February 1944, was Base B, at Whaler’s Bay, on Deception Island, where Carnarvon Castle had called the year prior. Importantly, they had a radio to report any enemy vessels or interactions and were in regular communication with Port Stanley.

Marchesi later said in a postwar interview that, until inside the harbor, he could not see whether it was occupied by an Argentine warship or a German U-boat. “Just as well,” he said, “because my one handgun and William Scoresby’s puny bow-mounted gun would hardly have put the fear of death into anyone.”

The second, larger, post would be Base A, at Port Lockroy, on nearby Goudier Island in the Gerlache Strait, established on 11 February. The base was to have been at Hope Bay on the Antarctic mainland, but Fitzroy was not ice-strengthened and could not risk the sea ice in the bay.

It was sparse to say the least.

As described by the British Antarctic Survey:

The base at Port Lockroy was built on Goudier Island in February 1944. It housed a nine-man wintering team. The hut was erected from prefabricated sections, and some timber used in the construction was salvaged from an abandoned whaling station on Deception Island. The building contained a mess room where the men ate, relaxed, and slept, a work room, a kitchen, a store room, and a generator room. There was even a bathroom. However, because water was rationed, only the person whose turn it was to gather and melt the ice or snow was allowed to bathe. This meant up to nine days between baths!

The secrecy bubble popped, and in April 1944, the existence of both bases was shared globally via a BBC announcement, news that reached the polar outposts– men alone on a continent of some 5 million square miles– and left them amused.

All 14 members of the expedition wintered over the 1944 season, and a third base was set up on the mainland at Hope Bay (Base D) on 13 February 1945, where the Union Jack was unfurled on a 20-foot pole that had been found near the remains of the hut from Otto Nordenskjold’s circa 1901 Swedish Antarctic Expedition.

On the way back to Port Stanley in 1945, Scoresby stopped at Scotia Bay on Laurie Island to “show the flag” to a group of frostbitten Argentinean meteorologists who had been stuck at their Orcadas Station for 14 months. A little tit-for-tat in the ice.

Scoresby, Fitzroy, and two chartered vessels, SS Eagle and MV Trepassey, would return to the region from the Falklands in early 1946 to resupply the posts and swap out personnel.

Tabarin was extensively documented, with some 1,800 images preserved from the operation today.

For a deeper dive on the operation, check out Operation Tabarin: Britain’s secret wartime expedition to Antarctica, 1944-46 by Stephen Haddelsey.

Post-war service

HMS Scoresby (J122) saw her military service under the Admiralty cease in September 1946.

Landing her gun, she was sent for a major  £11,900 refit and, in November 1949, was released to the Admiralty outright to continue her service under the RFA. She spent the first 10 months of 1950 conducting research into whales off the west coast of Australia– sailing to Fremantle and back to England via the South Atlantic.

On 26 February 1951, the Admiralty transferred Scoresby to the newly formed National Institute of Oceanography, and she would continue serving with that organization in the Southern Ocean for the next two years.

Paid off, ex-Scoresby was on the January 1953 Disposal List, offered for sale for £2,500. She lingered on the list for 17 months until a bid of £1,900 from BISCO (British Iron and Steel Corporation) for demolition was accepted, with her salvaged radio equipment fetching a further £600.

And that was that.

Epilogue

Human habitation of Antarctica has been continuous since the establishment of the first two Tabarin bases by Scoresby and Fitzroy in February 1944.

The scientific observations and surveys initiated during Tabarin continued after the War, and the work was put on a long-term footing under the Colonial Office as the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS). FIDS was re-named the British Antarctic Survey in 1962 and continues today.

Port Lockroy was occupied until 1962, Hope Bay until 1964, and Deception Island until 1967, replaced by newer, less militaristic installations inside the British Antarctic Territory, which formed in 1962 after the Antarctic Treaty came into force. They have been replaced by the year-round Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island and four smaller stations (Signy, Fossil Bluff, Sky Blu, and Halley VI) that don’t overwinter.

Of note, Base A (Port Lockroy) is now the famous “Penguin Post Office.”

The BAS’s current dedicated research and logistic support ship these days is the hulking 15,000-ton RRS Sir David Attenborough (aka “Boaty McBoatface”), which entered service in 2021, backed up by the armed RN icebreaker HMS Protector.

The archives of the Discovery Investigations are held by the National Oceanographic Library.

The British Antarctic Oral History Project includes interviews with members of the ship’s company, which provides insight into the daily life onboard ship.

A bay on the coast of Antarctica’s Kemp Land, discovered by Scoresby’s crew in 1936, was named after her.

As for Scoresby’s former pals, Fitzroy continued to sail between the Falklands to Montevideo, South Georgia, and Graham Land (Antarctica) until 1957, when she was scrapped. RRS Discovery II’s final Antarctic voyage wrapped in 1951, but she continued to work as an oceanographic ship in the North Atlantic until she was scrapped in 1962. She was replaced by a third RRS Discovery in 1962, which, at 4,378 DWT, was the largest general-purpose oceanographic research vessel in use by the Brits until 2006. The current fourth RRS Discovery joined the fleet in 2013.

When it comes to Scoresby’s Operation Tabarin skipper, LT Marchesi remained in the Royal Navy post-war, served two years aboard the carrier HMS Unicorn during Korea, lectured at public schools about naval careers, and was the senior RNR officer in Northern Ireland. In retirement, he worked for Bass, was a port relief officer for Cunard, and land-locked captain of the famed clipper Cutty Sark at Greenwich.

In 2005, Marchesi recounted the story of Operation Tabarin for the BBC, and his exploits were commemorated in a series of stamps issued by the Falkland Islands in the same year (and reissued for the 80th anniversary recently).

He passed in December 2006, aged a ripe 92.

His obituary notes:

At sea, Marchesi recalled keeping watch for hours on the exposed bridge of Scoresby during icy gales and, when off watch, feeling pain in his hands and feet as his circulation returned. In the winter months, Marchesi serviced the remote islands of the Falklands and, for three months each year, refitted his ship in the bright lights of unrationed Montevideo. There he met a talented, multi-lingual secretary in the embassy who contrived a passage to Port Stanley; she was waiting for him when he returned from his third southern voyage, and they were married within the hour.

Meminisse est ad Vivificandum – To Remember is to Keep Alive

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