RRS Discovery

RRS Discovery is the wooden three-masted barque that carried Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton on the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901–1904 — the first British expedition to overwinter in Antarctica. The ship was built in Dundee in 1901, the city then being the world centre of whaling shipwrights' know-how, and returned to her birthplace in 1986 after careers as a Royal Navy training ship and Sea Scout vessel.

The visit starts with a substantial museum about polar exploration and Dundee's role in it, then leads onto the ship herself. You can walk the deck, climb down into the cramped officers' wardroom, see the laboratory, and stand at the wheel where Scott steered her south. The whole experience takes about two hours and works very well for families. A combined ticket with the Verdant Works jute museum is the best value.

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A story
Discovery is the first ship in the world to have been built specifically for scientific research. Her hull was made of overlapping layers of oak, elm and greenheart up to 26 inches thick at the bow — engineered to withstand being squeezed by pack ice rather than crushed by it. When the ship returned to Britain in 1904 the ice had failed to dent her, but the Royal Geographical Society could not afford to keep her, and she spent thirty years as a cargo carrier in the Hudson's Bay Company fleet before the city of Dundee bought her back.

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