Sir Clements Markham, of honourable memory, died in London, one hundred years ago on 29 January 2016. Not long before, towards the end of a very full life, he had been walking his godson, little Peter Scott, in the garden.
He travelled in Peru, the Arctic, India and Abyssinia/Ethiopia, publishing many translations from the Spanish for the Hakluyt Society. He was President and Honorary Secretary of the Hakluyt Society as well as of the Royal Geographical Society over much of his life. His books and writings are legion. He is perhaps best remembered as having launched Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton, on their polar careers during the National Antarctic Expedition in Discovery, 1901–1904. The first long-distance journeys into the interior of Antarctica were made on that expedition. At the furthest south of the Pole party, Scott named a mountain, ‘a monster of unsurpassed eminence and dignity’, after Markham. Minna Bluff was called after Markham's wife, who had earlier accompanied him to Peru.
The portrait of Sir Clements Markham on the front cover of this issue (Fig. 1), hangs in the house of the Royal Geographical Society. It was painted in 1913 by George Henry, ARA. On the wall beside him is pictured a cinchona plant, many of which he collected in Peru in the 1860’s, to be transplanted in India for the relief of malaria. The silver sledge model also pictured was presented to him by the officers of Discovery and Morning after their return from the Antarctic in 1904. The portrait is reproduced by courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers. His History of Peru (1892) and other works were acknowledged by ‘the Peruvian nation’ in 1921, when a bust was presented to the Royal Geographical Society ‘in gratitude for his services as Historian of their country’. It stands outside Lowther Lodge on the Kensington Gore side of the society's headquarters.
Portrait of Sir Clements Markham by George Henry, 1913.
His cousin, Admiral Sir Albert Hastings Markham (1841–1918) wrote The life of Sir Clements R. Markham, K.C.B., F.R.S., published in 1917 by John Murray (Markham A.H. Reference Markham1917). The present writer has spent many years researching Markham. She contributed the biographical essay in the 150th anniversary volume of the Hakluyt Society Compassing the vaste globe of the Earth, edited by R.C. Bridges and P.E.H. Hair, and published by the society in 1996 (Savours Reference Savours, Bridges and Hair1996: 164–188). An amusing sketch from his Franklin Search journal, illustrates this note (Fig. 2). See also Savours Reference Savours2001.
‘Winter quarters. Despatches leaving H.M.S. Assistance by balloon and fox’ during the search for Sir John Franklin. Original drawing by Markham in his Arctic journal, 1850–1851. By permission of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers.
