In the rich remembrances of the game there is little that is mournful; but one sad moment comes when I read a letter reminding me that golf was once played "farthest south," where man does not abide save briefly for exploration and adventure, where there is eternal ice and snow. Captain Robert Scott, the glorious British hero of the Southern Pole, whose friendship I enjoyed, was a golfer too. One of many letters of a personal kind I had from him, just before he set out on his last magnificent but fatal expedition, was addressed from the Littlestone Golf Club. He asked me to send to the ship a certain piece of golfing literature, believing that "members of the expedition would read it with interest and, I hope, with benefit to their handicaps!" He had taken some clubs and balls up there into the Antarctic on his previous expedition, when farthest south was reached. On one of the last days he spent in London I had some talk with him on different matters, and we joked about ways of playing Antarctic shots. We were in his office in Victoria Street then. "Good-bye!" he said in parting, "And you must come to meet me on my return!" And if none met him coming back, yet we know the game he played.
The fact that there is golf nearly everywhere on earth will make it appear to some minds, reasonably too, that here is a convenient diversion for those travellers who like this sort of thing, something with which they can fill up time when held up for a while in a distant country and being impatient or weary. True, golf is good for that; but the unsophisticated who imagine that this is the full relation between travel and the game, and that this is the function of the courses everywhere, suffer from a poor delusion, which is expensive.
It is a modern necessity to the traveller. In these days we are a people of wanderers; railways offer cheap journeys, steamships carry us over seas at little cost, hotels are good and comfortable; and why should those who like and have the hours not be always roaming and seeing the open world? But travelling sometimes has its inconveniences and its tedious days. Some wanderers unconsciously exert themselves towards loneliness, and they do not love it when they have it. The joy of meeting with a friend when one is half a globe away from home! With all the travelling that is done in these days there has come a great increase of loneliness. Golf has been set to destroy it. There are still people who travel and do not golf, but they are fewer daily, and as each new travel-golfer is established he wonders how he lived and moved and was moderately well contented and satisfied before. His travelling was a plain occupation then; now it makes more emotion and thrill, and, positively, it is more educative. There was a time, when I was very young, when I did not golf as I travelled abroad, partly because there were few courses to play upon and no golfers to play with, for it is only in recent times that the game has been established in every country in the world; and as I look back upon those days it is hard to realise that they were in this present life. They should have belonged to some other existence, which in the course of time and nature was given up, a reincarnation having followed ages after.