J. M. Scott
Personal Information
Description
Polar explorer and author. This description is derived from chapter 5 of "The Watkins Boys" by Simon Courtauld, published by Michael Russell of Norwich in 2010, and from British Polar Exploration and Research, by N.R.Poulsom and J.A.L.Myres, published by Savannah Publications in 2000. James Maurice Scott was the son of a lawyer who grew up on the Island of Mull, went to Fettes School and read natural sciences at Clare College Cambridge, where he also obtained a rugby blue and met Gino Watkins. In 1928 the pair went to Labrador to explore and map a wild inland area, travelling on foot, by canoe, and with dog teams. Watkins then organised the British Arctic Air Route Expediton of 1930-31 for which Jamie bought the dogs in West Greenland. Watkins drowned on his second trip to Greenland in August, 1932. Jamie married Gino's sister Pam in 1933 and published a biography of Gino in 1935. During World War Two, Scott was engaged in irregular warfare. Scott published the first of more than twenty books in 1935 and spent nearly thirty years working for the Daily Telegraph. In retirement he was a keen gardener; at the age of seventy-nine he fell from an apple tree and suffered a fatal heart attack.
Books
Desperate journey
Moving to Tehran with her Iranian husband, Caren finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage and desperately tries to escape to the United States with her son Danny.
The white poppy
Investigates the impact of opium seed products on art, crime, and medicine throughout history.
The other half of the orange
Parallel searches in the Alps for a British officer presumed dead in the war and a Frenchman branded a thief and a murderer. A portion appeared in Argosy magazine under title, "The trouble with danger."
Heather Mary
The story of a perilous trip across the Atlantic from England to Bermuda in a sailing yacht.
The land that God gave Cain
This book describes the experiences, primarily, of Gino Watkins and Jamie Scott, on the former’s expedition to Labrador in 1928 and 1929. It was the second expedition which Watkins had organised (the first had been to Edge Island in Spitsbergen in 1927) and its objective was to explore and map the unknown interior of southern Labrador (known colloquially by the book’s title) on foot, by canoe, in motor boats, and with dog sledges. The pair later went to Greenland, respectively as the leader and a member of the British Arctic Air Route Expedition of 1930-31. Watkins, by then a highly respected Arctic explorer, returned to Greenland in 1933 and drowned there when his kayak capsized. Jamie Scott married Gino’s sister Pamela, wrote the biography “Gino Watkins,” and in 1953 also published “Portrait of an ice-cap” about his Greenland experience. On the first part of the Labrador expedition, Watkins and Scott were accompanied by Lionel Leslie – who gave his own account of the experience in the book “Wilderness trails in three continents” (1931). They established their base at the settlement of North West River in July, 1928, and the pair spent nine months in Labrador, travelling about 800 miles by water and 1500 miles by sledge. The book gives a full and vivid account of where they went (there are two detailed maps with twenty black-and-white photographs) and how they travelled, with an account of the earlier exploration and descriptions of the trappers, Indians and Eskimos that they met. It was mostly written while Watkins was still alive, and with his encouragement, but, having been completed after his death, it includes a lot of comments that place on record what an exceptional leader he was. It is a good account also of how the pair learned the techniques of dog sledging in wild, mountainous and wooded terrain, and of the how the experiences and hardships shaped Watkins as a polar expert and expedition leader. In his short life he nurtured and inspired a number of people who laid the foundations for several decades of systematic exploration and mapping of British Antarctic Territory using dog teams initially obtained, via links back to Watkins, in that same part of Labrador.
Icebound
A secret Arctic experiment turns into a frozen nightmare when a team of scientists, stranded on a drifting iceberg with a massive explosive charge, battle the elements for survival, only to discover that one of them is a murderer.