The Romans established a fort and small settlement called Pons Aelius on the north bank of the River Tyne at what was then the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall. Aelius was the clan name of Emperor Hadrian, who had visited Britain in 122 C.E. and ordered the construction of a wall. By the beginning of the 5th century, the Romans had put up the shutters and left, leaving the town—by then called Monkchester—to the mercy of first the Danes, and then the Normans. It was William the Conqueror’s eldest son, Robert Curthose, who would set the enduring tone for the place and give the town its modern name: he built a castle there in 1080 and, thenceforth, it became known as New Castle.
If ever one needed convincing that it is indeed strange that Murray Levick should have felt compelled to disguise a little bit of bad behavior in penguins behind a veil of Greek letters, one need only look to Robert Curthose and his father for perspective. William the Conqueror, who was also known by the equally prophetic title, William the Bastard—apart from being illegitimate, he was also the instigator of the Domesday Book—was the Duke of Normandy in France until he decided to invade England in 1066 and become its first Norman king. His son Robert would go on to sire several illegitimate children of his own, devastate large areas of France, and fight incessantly with his father and two brothers. But not in the way of normal families: they did so with armies. He once even managed to wound his father in battle. When eventually William was killed, at someone else’s hand in yet another battle, Robert succeeded his father as the Duke of Normandy, but it would be his two younger brothers, first William Rufus and then Henry I, who would each become king. A chagrined Robert led several insurrections against his brothers to no avail. After forty some years of raping, pillaging, and warring, Robert, then aged about sixty, was captured by Henry’s men and imprisoned for the last quarter of his life.
Sexual misconduct, sibling rivalry, and the inhumane treatment of others were clearly de rigueur in society in the past, to such an extent that the behavior of penguins would have seemed pretty tame by comparison. Yet the Victorian values of Levick’s upbringing, a consequence of the timing of his birth, left him, it seems, unable to even mention masturbation or homosexuality in penguins, let alone in men.
In the 140 years since Murray Levick was born, the pendulum in Newcastle has certainly shifted back the other way, so that the city today is more something that Robert Curthose would recognize rather than the Victorian Levick.
Evening is falling as I make my way down to the River Tyne. The curvaceous Gateshead Millennium Bridge is lit subtly, while on the other side of the river it seems that all the coal in Newcastle is being burnt to light up the modern and equally curvaceous new arts center: it reflects from the river’s surface like some sort of giant neon painting. There are lots of people out and about, but I notice that most of the foot traffic that negotiates the sweeping arch of the bridge is moving toward me. At a series of bars on my side of the Tyne, men and women congregate like penguins at the start of the breeding season, seemingly as intent on mating as any of the penguins that Levick and I have studied.
I enter the Pitcher & Piano, a contemporary bar that is all square lines, glass, and aluminum. A young man, in jeans and a T-shirt that barely covers his bulging belly, bumps into me, his attention diverted by a woman wearing a pink dress so short that it would scarcely qualify as a T-shirt. At this and three other bars, I push my way through throngs of bulging bellies and minuscule dresses so that, in breaks between the music, I might question these natives of Newcastle. Not one of them, it transpires, has even heard of Murray Levick.
I cannot help but reflect on the contradictions in all of this. Ever since another Victorian gentleman, Charles Darwin, described the phenomenon of sexual selection, it has been assumed that where males and females in a species look alike, they will be monogamous. Where they look different, like here—with beards and breasts, beer bellies and dresses being just the most obvious manifestations of the many sexual differences on display—then it is likely the species will be polygamous, with successful males having several partners. Yet, as patently sexually different as we are as a species, we live in a world where society’s mores, and particularly those emanating from our religious institutions, preach marriage and monogamy for us. Conversely, Levick’s observations, and subsequently those of mine, would seem to indicate that penguins, the cartoonists’ standby for look-alike conformity, are no more wedded to the idea of monogamy than are the inhabitants of Newcastle that surround me.
Murray Levick’s father was George Levick, a civil engineer, and his mother was Jeannie Levick. He had two older sisters, Ruby and Lorna. At the time of his birth, the family lived at 12 Whitworth Place. What the family home might have been like in Levick’s day is hard to say: I find that it has been torn down and replaced by a row of adjoining brick look-alike apartments that somehow epitomize the modern Newcastle. It is as if the people of Newcastle, in trying desperately to escape their meaner past, have created a facade that is—with the exception of one bridge—as bland as it is shallow.
Naively, perhaps, I have come to Newcastle expecting it to have some kind of monument to Levick, some traces of his roots. Yet in all of Newcastle I cannot find a single memorial, not a single plaque, with his name. If this were a crime scene, then it is as if all the surfaces have been wiped clean.
I am forced to change direction, to begin anew my quest for Murray Levick. At least there is one place where I know for certain there is evidence that Levick left behind: I must go to find the senior curator of birds’ eggs and nests at the Natural History Museum in Tring.
Another line of inquiry also points me to the museum’s bird collections: if Levick’s own family tree and roots have not proven helpful, perhaps those of the penguins might? Of all the world’s nine thousand species of living birds,† just nineteen of them are penguins. The specimens held in collections like those at Tring are more than just an assembly of dead representatives of the living; they also carry with them a history of their interactions with humans.
Penguins are found only in the Southern Hemisphere, and while they must undoubtedly have been known to natives of South Africa and South America for hundreds if not thousands of years, there are no written records to confirm that. It was not until European explorers ventured far enough south that we have our first confirmed sightings of penguins: in 1497 on Vasco da Gama’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and in 1520 off the coast of Patagonia during Ferdinand Magellan’s famous first circumnavigation of the globe. The African and Magellanic penguins that those early explorers encountered are characterized by having black bands on their white chests and are members of a group of penguins known as the banded penguins. They live at the lowest latitudes of any penguins. Indeed, Galapagos penguins, another member of their group, even live right on the equator. As such, these banded penguins are as far removed as it is possible to be from the Adelie and Emperor penguins encountered by Levick on Captain Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition.
Antarctica, however, has no natives. The first sightings by humans of the Antarctic-living Adelie and Emperor penguins could not occur until men were able to sail that far south. And that did not occur until the 19th century, during the life and reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. In those days, it was common practice to include a naturalist on voyages of exploration, whose job it was to collect specimens of all the new creatures and plants that would inevitably be encountered. These specimens were then preserved, described, categorized, and typically deposited in museums. Museums like the one in Tring.
A Victorian museum for Victorian discoveries established by people with Victorian values: Could there be a better place to look for Antarctic penguins and my man Levick?
* Adelie penguins were discovered by French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville, who named them Adélie penguins after his wife, Adéle. However, in the English-speaking literature, the accent has been used inconsistently. In 1992, at the Second International Penguin Conference, penguin researchers agreed on standardized
common names for the various species of penguins. For Adelie penguins, we settled on Adelie, without the accent.
† DNA techniques suggest that there may be more than twice as many species of birds (i.e., over eighteen thousand) compared to those described using differences in their morphology.
CHAPTER TWO
TERRA AUSTRALIS
Eight years before Murray Levick was born into what were fairly ordinary circumstances in Newcastle, the son of one of Britain’s wealthiest families was born in London: the 2nd Baron Rothschild, Lionel Walter Rothschild. Walter, who like Levick preferred his second name to his first, would prove to be not just one of England’s richest men but, arguably, its most eccentric too.
He was big but not robust, pathologically shy, and suffered from a speech impediment: a combination of conditions that caused his parents to homeschool him. Except that this was no ordinary home, no row house like those in Newcastle. It was Tring Park Mansion, set in over 3,500 acres of grounds some forty miles to the northwest of London.
The original manor had been listed in William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book and, for a while, it was owned by William’s grandson, King Stephen of England and his wife Matilda. In the late 17th century, the then secretary of the treasury, Sir Henry Guy, upon being gifted the house and grounds from King Charles II, had a new manor house built that was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the architect responsible for such iconic buildings as St. Paul’s Cathedral. Albeit afterward, Guy was confined to the far less salubrious Tower of London for misappropriating treasury funds to support his predilection for home improvements. Walter’s grandfather, Baron Lionel de Rothschild bought Tring Park in 1872 and gifted it to Walter’s father, the 1st Baron Rothschild. Hence, from the age of four, Walter lived on an estate the size of a small country, which he populated with weird and wonderful creatures such as kangaroos and exotic birds.
At the age of seven, when Murray Levick was little more than a possibility bouncing around in his mother’s womb, Walter Rothschild announced to his parents that when he grew up he wanted to be the owner of a zoological museum. Indeed, Walter proved to be far better at collecting butterflies than he ever was at managing finances in the family’s banking businesses. Eventually, his parents relented, and as a twenty-first birthday present built him the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum on the grounds of Tring Park. It opened to the public in 1892 and would house over two million butterflies, over three hundred thousand bird skins, and a veritable cornucopia of other animals shot, snared, or pickled in that peculiar way Victorians showed their love for nature: by killing it and labeling it.
The grounds at Tring were filled with ever more exotic living creatures too, including emus and rheas. Walter had a particular fondness for zebras and would often be seen riding a carriage pulled by zebras, which he even rode to Buckingham Palace. His penchant for kangaroos remained, with the Australian imports playing havoc with the gardens at Tring, much to the consternation of the gardeners.
Yet there was no escaping the success of the Rothschild Museum either: it housed the largest privately owned zoological collection ever amassed. It also contained one of the best zoological libraries anywhere; one that drew scholars from around the world. In the end, it would be sex—or rather, the Victorian attitude to sex that was so ingrained in both Walter and Murray Levick—that would be the museum’s undoing. Walter never married but he had a couple of mistresses. One of them, the wife of a wealthy aristocrat, blackmailed Walter, threatening to make their affair public. As Walter had by then been disinherited by his father, who disapproved of his interest in animals rather than money, he was compelled to sell much of the museum’s bird collection to the American Museum of Natural History for $225,000. The message seemingly emanating from Tring and its Victorian-bred occupants was that the public shouldn’t get to know about sex, be it among penguins or Barons.
Walter died in 1937, and two years later his nephew, who had inherited Tring Park and the mansion, offered the museum and its remaining collections to the British Museum.
The public face of the British Museum of Natural History, which since 1992 has been called simply the Natural History Museum, is a magnificent cathedral-like building in South Kensington, London. Like Newcastle, it is more facade than fact: much of the museum’s vast collections are stored elsewhere, including the bird collections, which are located in fortresslike facilities next to the Rothschild Museum in Tring, sitting on the outer side of the M25 motorway that circles London like a modern-day moat.
As I approach the museum on foot, it becomes clear that the 1st Baron Rothschild had spared no expense on his son’s present: the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum is a beautiful building with an Elizabethan air to it. By contrast, the Natural History Museum’s adjoining storage and research facilities look more like bunkers. “Function over form” had presumably been their architect’s brief and rightly so: the buildings house, among many other things, 750,000 bird skins from about 95 percent of the world’s species of birds, and these all have to be kept in carefully controlled conditions if they are not to deteriorate. They also need to be kept secure.
During the night of June 23, 2009, Edwin Rist, a talented American flautist studying at London’s Royal Academy of Music, smashed a window into the museum at Tring and stole 299 bird skins. In addition to music, he had an equal talent tying flies for fishing. He had won silver and bronze medals at the 2006 Irish Open Fly-tying Championships, the equivalent of the Masters at Augusta for those peculiar individuals obsessed with attaching feathers and other bits of glitz to hooks in ways that must seem attractive to themselves, if not to the trout.
While arguably a crime of passion, this was not a spur of the moment thing, but rather carefully planned and premeditated. In the rarified world of fly-tying, the stolen feathers were worth a fortune: “millions of pounds” according to one source. Indeed, after his capture, Rist was required to pay back £125,150, which was the estimated earnings he had derived from selling some of the skins through eBay and the like. The rest he had intended to keep for himself, presumably with gold medals at the next Irish Open in his sights.
If the value and vulnerability of the collections at Tring needed any further underlining, two years later Darren Bennett from Leicester—about seventy miles north of Tring—broke into the museum, smashed a cabinet containing two rhinos, and sawed their horns off. He intended to sell the horns on the black market, where they would have fetched an estimated £240,000. According to newspapers that reported his crime, the value of the rhino horns stemmed largely from their being prized in Asia for medicinal purposes and as aphrodisiacs. Bennett, however, did not realize that the horns, for which he risked so much, were worthless plaster fakes. They had been substituted for the real ones by museum staff worried after Rist’s break-in. If that were not bad enough for Bennett, he dropped a glove, which a museum staff member found while biking home. Given that Bennett had, on a previous occasion, troubled the police sufficiently that they should take a blood sample from him, the DNA on his glove was able to be used to identify him more easily than a man with a stomach full of rhino keratin can get an erection.
As a consequence of these two robberies, security to get into the Natural History Museum’s buildings at Tring is now extremely tight. When I get to the entrance, I am forced to wait while my credentials are checked and, then, to wait some more while Douglas Russell is fetched. This enforced delay, however, leads to a rather serendipitous discovery as I go to the Rothschild Museum next door to while away my time.
Though the fortified building containing the collections at Tring is not a place for the public—it is more back end than front end for the Natural History Museum—the original Rothschild Museum is open to the public and contains displays of many of the museum’s treasures. At the center of one display, I notice a stuffed Emperor penguin. But this is no ordinary penguin, as Douglas, himself not much taller than the penguin, explains to me after he has been fetched. This Emperor penguin is one of the
first encountered by humans. It had been collected by the naturalist Joseph Dalton Hooker during an expedition to Antarctic waters led by British naval officer James Clark Ross. My interest is piqued immediately. Not just because Ross’s expedition, from 1839 to 1843, was the first to go so far south, but because it did so in the area where I had studied penguins for so many years: on the appropriately named Ross Island.
Emperor penguins were first described scientifically by the head of ornithology at the British Museum, George Robert Gray: perhaps not from the very specimen in front of me, but certainly from one of those few individuals unlucky enough to have been collected by Hooker on Ross’s expedition. Gray gave the species its scientific name of Aptenodytes forsteri in honor of a German naturalist who went by the even more magnificent handle, Johann Reinhold Forster. It was Forster who had, at the last minute, replaced Joseph Banks as naturalist on Captain James Cook’s second voyage to seek a suspected land mass at the bottom of the world known rather vaguely, and somewhat optimistically, as Terra Australis Incognita. This large dollop of southern land had been thought necessary by cartographers to balance the mass of land evident in the Northern Hemisphere.
James Cook and Joseph Banks are very familiar to me, their feats drilled into me during countless lessons at primary and secondary school in New Zealand. It was Cook, a British naval lieutenant, who, in what became known rather unfairly as his First Voyage (he had already been at sea for over twenty years by then) really put New Zealand on the map, so to speak. In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to see New Zealand, but he did little more than put a few squiggles on a map and leave his name attached to the sea that—some would say, thankfully—separates New Zealand from Australia. It was Cook who would rediscover New Zealand in 1769, circumnavigate it, and fastidiously map its coastline, while Banks, his onboard naturalist, would collect and describe many of the unique creatures and plant life that make New Zealand much more Middle Earth than any that Tolkien ever wrote about.
A Polar Affair Page 2
