In 1901, Borchgrevink publishes his book, titled predictably, if not appropriately: First on the Antarctic Continent, in which he sets down his observations, including a chapter devoted to living among the Adelie penguins that were his neighbors on Ridley Beach. However, his observations provide little insight into the penguins that a trained zoologist like Hanson might have brought.
We all watched the life of the penguins with the utmost interest, and I believe and hope that some of us learnt something from their habits and characteristics . . . From the 14th October one continual stream of penguins waddled over the ice towards their summer residence; like so many people, they walked after one another. . . During the time of love-making—when they were studied most attentively by my bachelor staff—it goes without saying that they had many hard fights.
Borchgrevink manages to set the tone for all the observations of penguin behavior to come after his: anthropomorphic in style, with an analogy to humans, albeit the whiff of a notion that penguins are somehow better than us. These black-and-white upright little creatures are portrayed as paragons of a type of virtue that we should seek to emulate and, never more so than when it comes to their lovemaking.
However, Borchgrevink and his men had been much more interested in eating the penguins than in studying them. They rarely met a penguin on the journey south to Cape Adare that they did not kill. Throughout their summer spent at Cape Adare, they ate roasted penguin on many of the days of the week. When the penguins’ eggs were laid, they had eaten those, with relish too. Borchgrevink takes a kind of pride in his book when he notes that by November 15 they had collected four thousand penguin eggs and secured them in salt as reserve rations.
Hanson was evidently not the only casualty of the Southern Cross Expedition. However, Cape Adare and its penguins were destined to have other expeditions inflicted upon them.
It is January 9, 1902. The HMS Discovery, under the command of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, pushes through the pack ice at the head of Robertson Bay and makes landfall for the first time in Antarctica at none other place than Ridley Beach, that tiny spit of shingle beach at Cape Adare that is home to a vast colony of Adelie penguins; the very same place that the first footstep had been placed on the Antarctic continent; the very same place that Borchgrevink had left behind just two years earlier after his party had become the first to overwinter on the frozen continent. In fact, among the crew onboard the Discovery is Louis Bernacchi, the physicist who had been one of those with Borchgrevink during those long dark winter months.
Robert Falcon Scott had been born on June 6, 1868, near the naval base of Devonport on the south coast of England. He is four years younger than Borchgrevink, four years older than Amundsen, and just over eight years older than Murray Levick. Given the military tradition in his family, it was preordained that he should join the Royal Navy. When just thirteen, he began his naval career as a cadet. By the age of fifteen, he was serving on ships in South Africa and, later, was stationed in the West Indies. It was there, that as an eighteen-year-old midshipman, Scott first caught the eye of the Royal Geographical Society’s Clements Markham, who was impressed by Scott’s abilities and attitude. In early June 1899, by then just turned thirty-one, Scott chanced upon Markham in a London street while home on leave. He learned, for the first time, of Markham’s plan to send a ship, the Discovery, on a Royal Geographical Society expedition to the Ross Sea region of Antarctica. A few days later, Scott turned up at Markham’s house to volunteer to lead the expedition to Antarctica.
Scott had been given command of the Discovery Expedition finally to realize Sir Clements Markham’s vision of a British-led expedition to Antarctica. They had set sail from England in August 1901 with instructions to explore the Ross Sea and to get as far south as possible, perhaps even to the South Pole.
On board the Discovery with Scott are two others destined to become household names in the annals of what would become known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration: junior doctor Edward Wilson and Third Officer Ernest Shackleton.
It is a time that marked the beginning of a new age in morality as well. In January 1901, after sixty-four years on the throne, Queen Victoria had died. She has been succeeded by her son, King Edward VII, who is as famous for his litany of affairs with married women as Victoria has been for her prudish ways—to the extent that he is otherwise known as Edward the Caresser. Outwardly, morally, the times are indeed a-changing. When the Discovery left England, it had been seen off by the country’s new, sexually indiscrete king.
The expedition did not begin well. They traveled south via New Zealand and, as they bade farewell to the crowd that had gathered around Lyttelton Harbor to see them off, seaman Charles Bonner fell to his death from the top of the mainmast. He was buried two days later in Port Chalmers, when the Discovery made a brief stop in the seaport where I now live.
I had never been to the cemetery in Port Chalmers, and I am surprised by how picturesque it is, situated on a ridge overlooking the harbor out of which the Discovery had sailed, leaving behind the luckless Bonner. His grave is easily discerned. It sits near the top end of a line of flat and simple graves that stretch down toward the sea. Marking his grave, however, there is a large white marble spire that is taller than me. A plaque records that he died on December 21, 1901, aged twenty-three. I am stilled by that and brought to my knees. I was the same age when I boarded a Starlifter bound for Antarctica for the first time. I feel terribly for him. I know exactly the sense of excitement and youthful exuberance he must have been feeling when he climbed the mast to wave goodbye on his way to Antarctica. He deserved more than just a fancy headstone.
Charles Bonner’s grave is an eternal reminder of the pitfalls of those times. So much of the Heroic Age would turn out to be accident, near accident, or accident waiting to happen. The heroic part actually came about in the ways that the men—and they were all men—dug themselves out of holes of their own making.
At Cape Adare, it is the penguins and not the ever-present dangers that seem to most impress Scott. He is fascinated as to why they are not content with just nesting on the flat ground of Ridley Beach. Instead, he observes, many of their number form “their nests on the steep hillsides, even to a height of 1,000 feet.” He is equally impressed with the first human nest, noting that Borchgrevink’s hut “is in very good condition,” though he reveals something of his sentimental makeup when he remarks that:
There is always something sad in contemplating the deserted dwellings of mankind, under whatever conditions the inhabitants may have left.
Certainly, Cape Adare is not appealing to Scott or his men as a prospective home, even though Robertson Bay is where Sir Clements Markham had suggested Scott should set up his winter quarters. Apart from its distance from the pole, there is the presence of the penguins. Edward Wilson, the expedition’s junior doctor and zoologist, describes his reaction to the place in a way that suggests that he, like Hanson, will forgo the opportunities presented to him to become the world’s first penguin biologist:
There were literally millions of them. It simply stunk like hell, and the noise was deafening.
The next day, the Discovery pulls up anchor and heads south.
At first Scott follows in Borchgrevink’s wake. He takes the Discovery ever eastward along the face of the Ross Ice Shelf until they sight new undiscovered land that forms the eastern edge of the shelf. He names this King Edward VII Land in honor of Britain’s new king.
Turning back toward the west, in an area close to the inlet where Borchgrevink discovered that it was possible to land upon the shelf, Scott takes the ship into a small bight. Here the top of the shelf slopes down to the height of the ship. They moor next to the ice edge and are able to simply step off onto the ice.
It is then that Scott demonstrates the two elements that define his curious chemistry, which are capable of producing a reaction that results in either greatness or disaster, with the outcome depending largely upon luck: his brave determination coup
led with a wanton disregard for adequate preparations. It was Joseph Dalton Hooker, the naturalist with James Clark Ross who collected my friend the Emperor penguin that is on display at the Rothschild Museum, who had first suggested that using a balloon in Antarctica would allow a visual assessment of its interior. Scott has brought with him two balloons and a number of hydrogen cylinders. What he has not brought with him, however, is anyone with much experience at ballooning. Furthermore, on February 4, 1902, he takes it upon himself, having never been ballooning before, to make the first flight in Antarctica in the one-man balloon.
Even as Scott himself tells the story, it is not a very smart move:
The honour of being the first aeronaut to make an ascent in the Antarctic regions, perhaps somewhat selfishly, I chose for myself, and I may further confess that in so doing I was contemplating the first ascent I had made in any region, and as I swayed about in what appeared a very inadequate basket and gazed down on the rapidly diminishing figures below, I felt some doubt as to whether I had been wise in my choice.
At one point, Scott throws all the ballast out at once instead of jettisoning it gradually. The balloon shoots up in the air, oscillating wildly. Wilson manages to sum it up best: “The Captain, knowing nothing whatever about the business, insisted on going up first and through no fault of his own came back safely.”
Scott had risen to a height of just under eight hundred feet. He is followed in the balloon by Shackleton, who takes a camera with him and gets even higher. And in that single act, Shackleton, too, demonstrates two facets of his own chemistry: his competitive relationship with Scott and his focus on gathering as much data as he can to support exploration in this unknown region of the world that is ladled with dangers and surprises.
The balloon flights and Shackleton’s photos reveal that the Ross Ice Shelf is a flat plain of ice stretching as far as the eye can see to the south, a veritable highway to the South Pole. Scott names the inlet in the ice shelf Balloon Bight, but really it is part of the same geological phenomenon that formed Borchgrevink’s earlier discovery of the nearby inlet. In this area, instead of floating on a watery base, the Ross Ice Shelf is being shunted over an island, which deforms it and produces these indented sloping edges of the shelf that can provide easy access to the interior.
His first and only ballooning experience behind him, Scott sends the Discovery westward, eventually setting up base in the most southerly reaches of McMurdo Sound. The Discovery is secured to the shore, allowing the men to use the ship as their winter base. They erect a hut for storing supplies next to the ship on what will become known as Hut Point. Given the predilection of Antarctic explorers to find themselves in tough situations, over the years, the hut at Hut Point will function as a refuge for many including Wilson, Shackleton, and Levick. Scott’s decision to moor the ship there, however, comes with consequences: it gets completely frozen in over winter and cannot be freed the following summer.
In 1900, the year before leaving England for Antarctica, Scott had gone to Kristiania to consult with none other than the tall, blond, handsome Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen. Scott was keenly aware of the lack of British expertise when it came to sledging. He tried to pick Nansen’s brains, to glean what he could, but Scott, pressed for time, did not spend long with Nansen. He bought some equipment and provisions from the Norwegians but opted to produce the rest in England.
Although Nansen had recommended the use of dogs for pulling sledges, Scott has brought with him only two men who have any experience with managing dogs and sledges. It is like the ballooning debacle all over again. Neither can the British men of the Discovery Expedition ski. Their first attempts to ski on the sea ice around the ship when it is moored at Hut Point are discouragingly bad, if one is Scott, or ludicrous, if one is Nansen, Borchgrevink, Amundsen, or any other Norwegian.
Despite the inadequacies of their preparation, Scott, Wilson, and Shackleton attempt the improbable: a trek to the South Pole with skis and dogs to pull sledges. Eivind Astrup, had he not shot himself, would no doubt have approved of their method of travel, and he himself may well have triumphed. As it is, while Scott and his men manage to get farther south than anyone before them, poor preparations and scurvy eventually take their toll and almost their lives. They have to retreat when still five hundred miles from the Pole. On the way back, Shackleton collapses and has to be helped by the other two. Once back, Scott orders Shackleton to be invalided home to England aboard the relief ship, the SY Morning, which has brought down more supplies to the men on the Discovery, which is locked in the ice.
Scott’s subsequent account of their southern journey, which covered over nine hundred miles in three months, will anger Shackleton: it being implied that it was Shackleton’s breakdown that led to them faltering when so far from the Pole.
Certainly, the dismal failure of their attempt to reach the South Pole is enough to convince Scott that the best way to travel in the Antarctic is to man-haul sledges without dogs. While he admits that dogs may potentially be faster if one is prepared to kill the dogs to feed those that are left, the experience of doing so on their own journey, when it became necessary to sacrifice all their dogs in order just to survive the return to their ship at Hut Point, leaves Scott averse to ever using dogs again:
. . . it left in each one of our small party an unconquerable aversion to the employment of dogs in this ruthless fashion . . . the introduction of such sordid necessity must and does rob sledge-travelling of much of its glory. In my mind no journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception which is realised when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers, and difficulties with their own unaided efforts, and by days and weeks of hard physical labour succeed in solving some problem of the great unknown. Surely in this case the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won.
And there, in his own words, Scott unwittingly sets out the reasons for his later failures. Furthermore, it is the same Victorian moral code that gives English gentlemen of his ilk an aversion to killing dogs, even when their own survival is at stake, that also prevents their talking about sex.
CHAPTER FIVE
BOYHOOD DREAMS
Murray Levick is a long way from even seeing penguins have sex, let alone being able to talk about it, but, unbeknownst to him, he is taking the first steps toward that end.
It is 1902. Levick graduates from London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital then immediately applies to join the Royal Navy. His first significant posting is to the Mediterranean where he becomes interested in the means of transmission of the bacterial disease brucellosis, which causes fever-like symptoms and is sometimes called Mediterranean Fever because of its prevalence in the area, where it is typically transferred to humans from goats and sheep.
It is here that he gives a glimpse of his character, both as a risk taker and someone who is actually cut from the same cloth as Amundsen; someone not inclined to shy away from hardship. Levick demonstrates that brucellosis is not transmitted in the urine of infected patients by drinking the urine himself. He also allows himself to be bitten by a mosquito after it has gorged itself on the blood of a very sick patient with a temperature that hovers around 103°F. Although he had earlier contracted malaria from mosquitos when in Sardinia, neither he nor his coconspirators contract brucellosis via the mosquitos. Levick and a colleague publish the results of their interesting, if ill-conceived, experiments in the British Medical Journal of 1905.
Yet in his observationally driven, experimental approach to disease transmission, there are the hallmarks necessary to conduct the first systematic study of penguins.
It is October 23, 1977, and I am about to begin my own systematic study of penguins. The Iroquois helicopter swivels around on its approach to Cape Bird and I imagine I can see the beach at Cape Tennyson where Borchgrevink and Jensen were nearly drowned by a calving glacier. We swing over the large glacier that runs into the sea from the Mount Bird Ice Cap like a giant white tongue, ending in sheer 150-foot-high cliffs of
ice. Suddenly, dramatically, a bare half circle of land lies before us, cradled by the ice cap. In a landscape of endless white, this expanse of brown comes as a shock; its barren, guano-stained soil a testimony to the importance of this ice-free area for the sixty thousand Adelie penguins that come here each summer to breed. As far as I can tell from the helicopter, the Cape Bird penguin colony is deserted of penguins.
The absence of penguins means that we can land the helicopter beside a green hut, which sits atop a ridge at the western end of the colony. Any later in the season and, in order to avoid disturbing the penguins, we would have had to land down on the beach and carry our supplies and fuel several hundred yards up the steep path to the hut.
The small hut that will form my home for three-and-half months is uninspiring. At its back there is a door to a tiny room without windows that functions as both a refrigerator for storing our food and an airlock to retain heat in the hut proper. The main room of the hut is too small to swing a penguin, let alone a cat. Six bunk beds make up two sides of the cabin. There is a tiny table with seats for two. A little alcove forms a tiny kitchen, with a bench just large enough to take a Primus stove and room for little else. There is a tiny window, but it is really just a piece of clear plexiglass screwed to the walls of the hut. Unlike Borchgrevink’s hut at Cape Adare, which was built in 1899 and even then contained a double skin of wood with papier-mâché for insulation, this hut was built by the University of Canterbury in the 1960s as a temporary shelter and was made simply of three-quarter-inch plywood without a skerrick of insulation. Ice can be seen climbing up the inside walls of the hut and, even with the heater on, it will retreat but not fully disappear. The heater itself is housed in a small adjacent room that makes the main room seem huge by comparison. This space, about six feet wide and a dozen long, will act as our laboratory, laundry, and bathroom for washing ourselves. Using the toilet necessitates a trip outside to a small lean-to at the back of the hut, barely big enough to house a forty-four-gallon drum that has been sawn in half and has a toilet seat plonked on top. Strictly for number twos. Down a path, in a gulley fifteen yards from the hut, there is an orange plastic cone sitting in a pipe that goes into the snow: it forms a crude urinal that transports our urine under the snow and, presumably, down to the beach, out of sight and out of mind.
A Polar Affair Page 6
