Cook, born in 1728, began his life at sea in 1746 when, as an apprentice in the merchant navy, he worked on colliers transporting coal from the Tyne to London, exactly 130 years before the banks of the River Tyne would produce, in addition to coal, one Murray Levick. He volunteered for the Royal Navy in 1755 at the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War between Great Britain and France, when Britain decided that it was not going to let France do to its colonies in North America what it had allowed William the Conqueror to do to it in 1066. By 1760, the French had been expelled from Canada and the British were confirmed as the greatest naval power of their day.
Cook had been master of the HMS Pembroke that took part in the siege of Quebec. He distinguished himself through his talent for surveying and cartography: he mapped much of the Saint Lawrence River in great detail, and this proved crucial in allowing the British to mount a surprise attack at the Plains of Abraham near Quebec City, the decisive battle and turning point in the Seven Years’ War.
James Cook returned to England long enough to get married and then, during five expeditions, he surveyed and mapped the coastline of Newfoundland in what was the first large-scale hydrographic survey to use precise triangulation to establish the outline of land masses. Cook’s maps were so accurate that they would be used by those sailing in Newfoundland’s waters for the next two centuries.
Cook’s achievements as a cartographer were appreciated most particularly by the Admiralty and the Royal Society. They commissioned him to undertake a voyage to the Pacific on His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour, which lasted from 1768 to 1771 and would become known popularly, rightly or wrongly, as his “First Voyage,” because almost always the additional words “in the Pacific” were left unsaid. Ostensibly, he was to make observations on the Transit of Venus, when the planet Venus passes between the Earth and the sun, which it does at rare but predictable intervals. Differences in the paths of Venus when viewed from widely separated locations on Earth would be used to calculate the distance of the Earth from the sun. However, when Cook’s observations of the transit from Tahiti were completed, he opened sealed orders from the Admiralty only to discover that he should head south to search for the mythical continent of Terra Australis.
In doing so, Cook sighted New Zealand on October 6, 1769, and by circumnavigating it, proved that it was not the postulated southern continent. He crossed Abel Tasman’s sea and, while becoming the first person to map the eastern edge of Australia and showing that it was indeed of continental size, he also demonstrated that it was too far north to be the great lump of southern land that fellows of the Royal Society, principally led by the Scottish geographer Alexander Dalrymple, hypothesized was necessary to balance the Earth. Although, to be fair, the notion of Terra Australis Incognita had been proposed first by Aristotle and then by many others ever since.
The inconclusive results of his First Voyage only whetted the appetite of the public, the Admiralty, and the Royal Society for a second. Cook was promoted to commander and in 1772, aboard the HMS Resolution, he set sail on his Second Voyage to prove or disprove the existence of Terra Australis once and for all. This expedition would last until 1775 and it was this expedition that had been joined by Johann Reinhold Forster after Joseph Banks—who had, by then, become a bit of a prima donna and tried to take command of the expedition himself—pulled out.
While the Emperor penguin standing before me looking rather forlorn in the dark and uninspiring exhibit at Tring had not been collected by Forster, it seems likely that Forster was, indeed, the first person to ever see an Emperor penguin. Commander James Cook managed to take the Resolution farther south than any ship had ever been, crossing the Antarctic Circle on January 17, 1773, and continuing to explore southern waters, eventually reaching as far south as 71°10´S a bit over a year later. Cook had come within a piece of pack ice or two of discovering the Antarctic continent but, somehow, he managed to miss it. Nevertheless, the extreme southern latitude of one of Forster’s supposed observations of a King penguin suggests that it was most likely an Antarctic-living Emperor penguin rather than the closely related but sub-Antarctic-living King penguin. An Emperor penguin looks sufficiently like a King penguin that it is completely excusable for even a naturalist of Forster’s ilk that he might mistake it for one—especially from a distance and especially because, at the time, Emperor penguins were not known to exist.
It seemed from Cook’s Second Voyage that Terra Australis did not exist either: he had managed to get seriously south and, apart from a few small islands that he claimed for king and country, the supposed southern continent was nowhere to be seen.
The lure to get farther south did not stop there, however. For the next 140 years, a good many men would endure extreme hardship, take unbelievable risks, and often lose their lives in an attempt to get farther south than any men before them. It was, indeed, a strange preoccupation and one that, a little over a century after Cook returned to England on the Resolution, would be acquired by a boy born on the banks of the River Tyne at the very place where Cook had started his seafaring career.
As I stand there before the faded but otherwise remarkably well-preserved body of a penguin that has been dead for 170 years, I realize that I know more about its life than I do about that of the boy from Newcastle. I know where it lived, when it bred, how it communicated, and what it ate. Yet, if I am to begin to understand Levick, to understand, for example, how and why he should have come to join those endeavors of men to reach ever southward, it seems like I have come to the right place.
Douglas Russell is everything I imagine someone bestowed with the title senior curator of birds’ eggs and nests should be: he is tiny, bespectacled, and as twitchy as a sparrow picking up bread crumbs. He is wearing a waistcoat with jeans, but his beard and glasses make him seem more erudite than rebellious. He is also remarkably open and friendly.
Douglas leads me to his office through vast rooms containing what I imagine are the more than 300,000 clutches of birds’ eggs and the more than 4,000 nests for which he is responsible, not to mention the nearly 750,000 bird skins the museum now contains (108 of the skins taken by Edwin Rist remain unrecovered). If Douglas were indeed a bird, he would be more bower bird than sparrow it seems: his own nest is overflowing with little treasures.
I ask him first about the unpublished manuscript of Levick’s that he had discovered. It turns out that Douglas had gone to the library in the Rothschild building—for what, he cannot remember—but they did not have whatever it was and, to occupy his time, he began flicking idly through reprints held in filing boxes in the library. He happened to have the box before him with reprints of authors whose surnames start with L and, because he knew of Levick, he decided to look at Levick’s papers. It was then that he spied the three-page manuscript with the words NOT FOR PUBLICATION printed across the top of its front page. Not realizing its significance at that stage, but intrigued by the notion that what it contained should be kept from the public, he decided to have a closer look.
It seems that the contents of the unpublished manuscript that Douglas had found were originally intended for inclusion in Levick’s book Antarctic Penguins: A Study of Their Social Habits—at least, until the heavyweights at the British Museum of Natural History intervened.
Douglas conducted a thorough search through the records of the Natural History Museum and at first could not find any reference to the unpublished manuscript or any other surviving copies. That was, until he came across a note from Sidney Harmer, the quaintly titled keeper of zoology, written to William Ogilvie-Grant, the curator of birds. Harmer made it clear that the contents of Levick’s manuscript about penguin sex should not be included in Levick’s book from the expedition and that, instead, one hundred copies could be printed for internal consumption only.
Douglas looks at me with his habitually earnest stare, speaking in a strong, slow, matter-of-fact voice:
Harmer writes to Ogilvie-Grant and says we’ll have it cut out, we’re not going to include it in
the published version.
I ask Douglas if I can see the actual copy of Levick’s lost manuscript and he, obligingly, retreats to the vaults of the museum and returns with a manila filing box. He removes the thin and, but for a couple of dog-ears along its leading edge, remarkably pristine paper that had caused all the fuss when he finally published it nearly a century after it had been written. In fact, Douglas’s sleuthing eventually did turn up one other surviving copy of Levick’s manuscript: it was tucked into the private papers about the Terra Nova Expedition belonging to none other than Walter Rothschild himself.
In 1977, when I first read Murray Levick’s book about penguins, little did I imagine that Levick had been gagged, that the book had been censored. Or that, nearly forty years later, I would find myself sitting in an office on the other side of the world, holding a manuscript written by Levick describing the sexual behavior of Adelie penguins in such torrid terms, and—as determined from my own research—in such accurate detail.
I put down the manuscript with its edges slightly darkened—perhaps from the oil on Douglas’s fingers, perhaps from that on those of Levick himself—and stare back at Douglas equally hard. Except that I am not really looking at him: I am reflecting that as I set about uncovering the story about this man Murray Levick and penguin sex, it will, inevitably, also involve me.
I ask Douglas if I can see Levick’s original field notes—the notebook where Levick initially recorded all his observations of Adelie penguins—which Douglas had referenced in his commentary published in Polar Biology. He is hesitant. “No,” he says. The field notes are held by an antiquarian book collector who, Douglas explains, wishes to remain anonymous. Yet, as we continue to talk in his office cluttered with bits and pieces of birds, nests, paper, and God knows what else, a kind of mutual respect and trust begins to develop between us. Douglas admits that he would like to have the field notes published. If Douglas can get permission to do so, it will be good to have a penguin expert to interpret Levick’s observations. “Perhaps you might like to do that?” he asks.
I leave Tring with a promise from Douglas that he will contact the owner to see if we can view Levick’s field notes together. He cautions me, however, that he cannot promise his request will be successful.
I am in a book-lined room on the third floor of an elegant apartment in one of the better suburbs of London. On an oval oak table at the center of the room, there is a blue-covered notebook. On its cover, in large awkward letters written with red paint, are the words ZOOLOGICAL NOTES CAPE ADARE VOL.1.
It is the book in which Murray Levick recorded his observations of the penguins at Cape Adare. Only four people, as far as I can discern, have had the opportunity to see these notes in their entirety during the more than one hundred years since they were written: Levick himself, the gentleman who owns this apartment and all the books it contains, my companion Douglas Russell, and me. I gently pull back the cover. The writing in blue-black fountain pen ink is taut, composed of small, neat letters. I randomly open the notebook at another page and stop. Stop everything. Stop talking, stop moving, stop breathing. It is just as Douglas had described: a section of the page has been pasted over with another piece of paper and other text that I cannot decipher. I can see that they are Greek letters but they make no sense to me. It’s a code. For some reason Murray Levick, not just Sidney Harmer, had wanted to keep this part of his writing secret from prying eyes.
But why? These were zoological notes, were they not? Observations of penguins in Antarctica. Why the need for such secrecy; for such caution?
I glance out the window at clouds swollen with rain and I am transported back nearly two decades to another day with gray clouds. To the day when I saw two male penguins fucking each other.
A gust of wind rattles the window pane and I look down again at the blue notebook before me. I am reminded of that moment on January 16, 1912, when Captain Robert Falcon Scott saw Roald Amundsen’s black flag and realized that he was not going to be the first to get to the South Pole. This notebook is indisputable proof that Murray Levick discovered the sexually depraved side of penguins long before I did. But—and this is the most curious thing of all—as this page with its pasted piece of paper and indecipherable Greek letters would seem to attest, he wanted to keep such sexual shenanigans largely to himself.
Why? That is what makes me hold my breath more than the physical evidence of Levick’s observations or, even, his deception. It doesn’t really matter who was the first to see a bit of male-on-male action in penguins any more than it probably matters who was first to stand on an arbitrary piece of ice and drive a flagpole into it. What could compel a man like Scott to sacrifice everything for the chance of doing so, however, is surely more interesting. And, it strikes me in that stilled moment, in that room with hundreds of antiquarian books but seemingly no oxygen, that uncovering why Murray Levick would discover the dirty side of penguins and then try to cover it up is surely more compelling than a bit of sodomy between consenting birds.
I turn the pages of the notebook over, photographing each one like it truly is evidence at a crime scene; like the detective I have now become.
I close the cover of the notebook. Outside, two men with billowing coats run one after the other but, from my third-story perch, I cannot make out if they are running to shelter from the impending rain or whether the second is chasing the first, intent on catching him and, at the very least, giving him a good hiding. I put my camera down beside the notebook. I feel a strange connection to the mysterious man who wrote it. If I were Scott, then Murray Levick would surely be my Amundsen. Yet we are no longer racing toward the same goal. Murray Levick is now my goal. I am chasing him. Not the South Pole. Not the murky behavior of penguins. Murray Levick.
CHAPTER THREE
THE THREE NORWEGIANS
Chasing Murray Levick is not as easy as simply running after him. I cannot see him ahead of me, and he has left so little in his wake. Even his destination is not clear. Levick may well have become the world’s first penguin biologist, but, even at first glance, it is apparent that he never set out to study penguins. We share that in common. It was Antarctica, not penguins, that lured me, and I suspect Levick too.
When I was a small boy—pre-acne, pre-adolescence, pre-ambition—I became obsessed with Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s book, The Worst Journey in the World. Cherry-Garrard, like Levick, had been a member of Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition. His account of the expedition, a story of Antarctic heroism and adventure, gave me the ambition I had been lacking up till then: it established within me an absolute conviction that what I most wanted to do in life was go to Antarctica. It triggered a yearning for my own adventures and a desire to set foot on the Great White Continent that grew in me, year after year, like a benign but relentless cancer.
It is September 1, 1977, the first day of spring. I am a long-haired student at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand’s gateway to Antarctica. The New Zealand Antarctic Research Program operates out of Christchurch and I have joined the university as a PhD student intent upon studying Weddell seals in Antarctica. While I have long had an interest in seal biology, it is Antarctica that really seduces me. I could have studied seals virtually anywhere but I have chosen to come to the University of Canterbury solely because research on the Antarctic-living Weddell seals is my ticket to Antarctica.
Christchurch is flat and staid to my twentysomething eyes. Yet, even the wet spring weather, which has replaced the fog and chill of winter, cannot dampen my spirits as my scheduled departure date approaches. In my dingy bedroom of the St Albans house that I call home, the world has never looked brighter. I pack, unpack, and repack. I can barely sleep; barely contain my excitement.
Then disaster. Followed soon after by utter devastation. Just six weeks out from my departure, I am told that the research project I have planned is no longer viable. What to do? I want to go to Antarctica so desperately that, if seals cannot be my means to get there, what can? That is
when, for the first time in my life, a thought about studying penguins waddles into my brain.
It is October 18, 1977, and I am on a U.S. Navy Starlifter jet, dressed in yellow, puffy, down-filled survival clothes, surrounded by bearded and much older men. I am heading to McMurdo Station in Antarctica and, from there, I will take a helicopter to the Adelie penguin colony at Cape Bird on Ross Island.
After six hours flying, I stare out the small round window and I am awed by the rugged land below, which is covered completely by a sheet of white ice through which peeks a chain of mountains. Even from thirty thousand feet I can make out crevices in their glaciers. One enormous glacier, the Drygalski Ice Tongue, sticks far out into the blue waters of the Ross Sea, which is dotted with millions of brilliant white ice floes, looking for all the world like God’s very own jigsaw puzzle as seen from the heavens. My pulse quickens with the anticipation of taking my first footsteps on the frozen continent below me, yet I know I am by no means the first to experience the lure of Antarctica.
Given the vastness of Antarctica and the notion of Terra Australis existing for over two thousand years, it seems astonishing to me that the continent remained hidden and unseen until about two hundred years ago. The Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen is credited with the first sighting of the Antarctic continent on January 28, 1820, with additional sightings by English and American sailors later in the same year.
A Polar Affair Page 3
