The son of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott named the Loch Ness monster
Life magazine • September 18, 1964
If you were a Life subscriber in 1964, and you‘d finished reading the September 18 cover story about Sophia Loren’s helmet, you may have flipped to a small story about Peter Scott.
Scott was a man with an unremarkable name and a remarkable father — antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. But it turns out that Peter was pretty badass himself. The news peg for the story was the America’s Cup, and Scott’s position as skipper of the British challenger, Sovereign.
We learn that Scott not only captained the last British yacht to contest an America’s Cup race, but was also Britain’s gliding champion, an Olympic medalist, “a renowned waterfowl painter,” and one of the world’s leading ornithologists.
Not the least of [Scott’s] impressive wildlife feats was his conversion of polo-playing Prince Philip into an enthusiastic bird-watcher.
Scott and his team were crushed by the Cup’s US defender Constellation. But loss was familiar to the Scott family.
Between 1901 and 1904, on Robert Scott’s first trip to Antarctica, the Discovery expedition was a huge scientific success and helped kick off the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration.
Scott’s team discovered the polar plateau, where the South Pole is located, and the only snow-free valleys on the continent. The team also made the first ascent of the Western mountains in Victoria Land.
Robert Scott returned to Antarctica in 1910 to lead the Terra Nova expedition. His goals were to finish the scientific work begun during Discovery and to become the first man to reach the South Pole. When the team finally got to the pole, they found that a Norwegian team had beaten them by 34 days. Scott and his five-man party died on the return trip, 11 miles short of a camp with food and fuel.
Peter Scott was two-and-a-half years old when his father died in 1912. In a final letter to his wife, “a sculptress who was a pupil of Rodin,” according to Life, Robert Scott wrote:
Make the boy interested in natural history. It is better than games … Above all, he must guard against indolence. Make him a strenuous man.
Peter grew up with an interest in birds, and kept an owl in his room at Cambridge. In 1936, he set out, as his father had, on an expedition — to find the rare Red-breasted Goose. He later gave a lecture on the failed effort called “A Wild Goose Chase to the Caspian Sea.”
During World War II Scott led a 50-ton-gunboat squadron against 300-ton German trawlers off the French coast — good agility training for a future yachtsman — and designed a ship camouflage that helped disguise the British fleet’s superstructure.
Scott’s heart was in conservation, though, and in 1973 he was knighted for his work with waterfowl and wetlands. He’s credited with creating the Red Book endangered species list and the Save the Whales campaign.
He also gave Nessie her formal Latin name, Nessiteras rhombopteryx, just in case the monster of Loch Ness was real, and — if ever caught — would need to be protected.
