Beattie is somewhat pudgy, with longish, lank hair and thick-lensed, oversized glasses. In that sense, he is like hundreds of other academics on the University of Alberta campus that are obsessed with their academic work to an extent that they are not with their personal appearance or exercise. Where he stands out, and the reason he shows up as such a large blip on my radar, is the subject of his research.
Beattie announces an audacious plan to go to King William Island in the Canadian Arctic to look for the bodies of the men who were part of the Franklin Expedition. It seems too weirdly coincidental that I should be there writing a thesis about penguins in Antarctica at a place named after the first lieutenant of the Erebus, while this man down the corridor from one of my supervisors should be searching in the Arctic for people who had sailed on the same ship. Beattie’s plan is to apply forensic techniques to any body parts and artifacts he can find in order to determine how and why the men of the expedition died.
In July 1981, as I am completing my last season of fieldwork on the ground squirrels, Beattie and his team traverse the coastline of King William Island looking for signs of the crews from the Erebus and the Terror. Near Booth Point, less than twenty miles from Gjoahaven, they discover skeletal remains, along with artifacts that they are able to use to ascertain, unequivocally, that the human bone fragments are those of a member of the Franklin Expedition. Forensic analysis reveals cut marks on the bones, which corroborates the oral histories of the local Inuit that say the men who abandoned the icebound Erebus and Terror were reduced to cannibalism in what was, in the end, a futile bid to stave off starvation. Most intriguing of all for Beattie, however, is that his analysis of the bones reveals extraordinarily high levels of lead. Could it be that the men were killed more by lead poisoning than the cold or a lack of food?
The problem for Beattie’s hypothesis is that lead levels in the bones could be a consequence of a lifetime’s exposure to lead rather than something that occurred during the Franklin Expedition itself. What he really needs is soft tissue from the dead crew members to analyze. As it happens, marked graves of three of Franklin’s crew have been found north of King William Island on Beechey Island.
It is 1984. The PhD is behind me, and just as I am contemplating a return expedition to Antarctica to continue my penguin research, Beattie leads an expedition to Beechey Island and exhumes the bodies of John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine. Their soft tissues have been remarkably well preserved in the permafrost of the Canadian Arctic. Beattie and his team are able to identify scurvy and lead poisoning as causes of death. Furthermore, the lead in the bodies matches exactly the lead used to solder and line the empty tins of food from the Franklin Expedition, which Beattie has been able to recover nearby.
A lack of vitamin C, plus food contaminated by lead were, therefore, the reasons why the men of the Franklin Expedition failed to survive in an area where the Inuit not only survived, they thrived.
It is August 13, 1905, and Amundsen, who has been thriving on King William Island for almost two years learning the ways of the Inuit, sails out of Gjoahaven.
The previous year he had set out with sleds and dogs to get to the North Magnetic Pole. Eventually, Amundsen reached the position recorded seventy-four years earlier by James Clark Ross when he became the first person to reach one of the Earth’s magnetic poles, only to discover that the pole had moved to the north. While Amundsen had thereby become the first person to prove that the magnetic poles shifted, it frustrated him greatly that he was not able to get to his goal, the current position of the Magnetic North Pole.
Yet, he learned many valuable lessons in the process of trying, especially from a group of Netsilik Inuit he encountered along the way, about how to apply ice to the runners of sleds to make them glide irrespective of the temperatures or the snow and ice conditions; about how to wear caribou skin clothing loosely so as not to sweat (the enemy for those undertaking polar exploration and wanting to stay warm); about how to manage dogs for hauling sleds efficiently; and about how superior dogs were to what he called the “futile toil” of man-hauling. He learned too that dogs can be sacrificed and fed to their own: they will cannibalize their companions with relish. And, further, that dog meat can make a suitable meal for men:
We ourselves tried some substantial steaks and found the meat excellent.
Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen have proven themselves to be polar opposites in every sense of the words. While encamped at opposite ends of the Earth in order to attempt to get to their respective magnetic poles, they have drawn exactly opposite conclusions about the best way to travel in polar regions. One of them must be wrong.
As Amundsen takes the Gjoa out into Simpson Strait, they pass Hall Point where there is a grave site of two men from the Franklin Expedition. The failed expedition that had so inspired the young Roald is now tangibly close. To honor the dead members of the Franklin Expedition, Amundsen hoists the Gjoa’s flag and they “went by the grave in solemn silence.”
Thirteen days later, on August 26, 1905, they sight another ship coming toward them. Amundsen has done the unthinkable to all but himself. He has sailed the Northwest Passage.
The North-West Passage had been accomplished—my dream from childhood. This very moment it was fulfilled. I had a peculiar sensation in my throat; I was somewhat overworked and tired, and I suppose it was weakness on my part, but I could feel tears coming to my eyes.
CHAPTER SIX
LOST OPPORTUNITIES
It is October 1984, and, arguably, I have accomplished my boyhood dream too: I am sitting in a Starlifter jet once more, heading to Antarctica for the second time. Admittedly, it has not been as difficult for me to obtain my dream as it was for Amundsen, yet I can now justifiably claim to have also fulfilled its modified aspiration, the one I added seven years earlier on an evening at Cape Bird when I met my first Adelie penguin. I am going back to Antarctica as a fully fledged Antarctic penguin biologist, not someone who views penguins as a substitute for seals or a ticket to the ice. I am now Dr. Davis and I have a masters thesis and a couple of publications about penguins under my belt. I am leading a team of five researchers on a three-month study to examine the breeding behavior of Adelie penguins.
After we land in McMurdo and complete our survival training at New Zealand’s Scott Base, we take a helicopter out to Cape Bird to begin the study with no less of an audacious goal than that of observing a subcolony of Adelie penguins around-the-clock for an entire breeding season. Nothing like it has ever been attempted before with any bird. We are only able to contemplate this because of the unique set of circumstances afforded to us by the Adelie penguins.
They breed from late October to late January, in the Antarctic summer when there is twenty-four-hour daylight. They are relatively large birds that nest close together on open ground, making them easily observable. Further, they are unafraid of us, having been virtually unexposed to humans, allowing us to set up an observation post near to their nests without affecting them going about their normal business.
The only difficulty is that they all look alike, making identification and observation of individuals impossible. I solve this problem by using a technique I had employed when studying the behavior of ground squirrels in Canada for my PhD, a species where all the individuals also look alike. In that instance, I caught the squirrels and painted a large identifying code that consisted of a letter and a number on their backs using Lady Clairol blue-black hair dye. Such hair dye is never going to work on the black backs of the penguins, but the principle of marking them should. At the start of the season, before the penguins even begin to start breeding, we catch all eighty-three penguins in the subcolony. We weigh them, measure them, put an individually numbered metal band around one flipper and, importantly, paint a coded combination of a letter and number on their backs using white enamel paint. Over the course of the penguins’ breeding season, the paint will wash off and fade, eventually disappearing altogether when they molt their fea
thers at the end of the breeding season. In the meantime, it gives us the perfect way to quickly and accurately identify all individuals in the subcolony.
We set up a tent as an observation hide. Not to obscure us from the penguins—because, truly, they couldn’t give a damn about our nearby presence—but to shield us from the worst of the Antarctic weather when observing the penguins through all twenty-four hours of each day. Two blizzards with one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds within the first few days soon put paid to that. The first destroys the tent; the second blows away our other tent. Thereafter, I opt to use the wooden crate that our generator had been transported in. It is too small for an observer to get fully inside, but it breaks the wind from tearing at the upper parts of our bodies and, thereby, provides a modicum of protection. Nevertheless, it can be bloody cold sitting out there for hours at a time, so we always dress in full survival gear and take with us a thermos of hot coffee or hot chocolate and some comfort food.
Our observation post is above the subcolony, and from there we have a perfect view of all the nests. We record the behavior of the eighty-three individual penguins present in the subcolony throughout the breeding season.
As masochistic as it might seem to sit outside in the Antarctic for three continuous months, the results are worth it. The first thing we observe is that these birds, which have been presumed to be largely monogamous, are anything but. They turn out to be what I call “serially monogamous,” in that they seem to have only one partner at a time, but switch partners whenever a better opportunity affords itself. During the courtship period, about one-third of all the birds copulate with two partners, and some even do so with three.
Throughout that summer, as I sit in the generator box overlooking the colony, flanked on one side by the glacier that is the Mount Bird Ice Cap and on the other by the Royal Society Mountain Range, sitting across the ice-encrusted waters of McMurdo Sound, I contemplate why that should be. It is not like these are one-night stands or a bit of sex on the side. These start out as the penguin equivalent of marriage. Why commit to one bird then a few days later turn your back and commit to another? Biologically, let alone morally, where was the literal fucking sense in that?
I stare out at the rounded shape of Beaufort Island sitting some fifteen miles off Cape Bird, which in the super-clean Antarctic air looks so much closer. I stare out at the Ross Sea with its shifting cover of pack ice and icebergs that is constantly changing from one glance to the next. Sometimes its waters heave with minke whales, sei whales, and most exhilarating of all for me, killer whales. And though I never quite land a satisfactory answer to these questions about the apparent immorality of the penguins, I get a sense that the answer must somehow lie there in the blue waters of the Ross Sea before me; that somehow the requirements for a penguin to breed and feed so far south creates the circumstances where all the perceived wisdom about monomorphic seabirds being monogamous can be thrown out the window or, in my case, tossed out of the generator box.
It is January 22, 1985, near the end of the breeding season and instead of taking our helicopter directly back to Scott Base, we go via Cape Royds in order to census and measure the breeding success of a small colony of Adelie penguins that nest even a little closer to the South Pole than do those at Cape Bird. In fact, they nest closer to the Pole than any other birds. Even so, we discover they have managed to rear 3,457 chicks to fledging age this season.
Cape Royds also has another claim to fame: it is where Ernest Shackleton built a hut from which he made his own attempt to get to the South Pole.
In 1907, Ernest Shackleton is determined to prove himself “a better man than Scott.” He launches his own expedition to get to the South Pole. Rober Falcon Scott is livid. Scott demands that Shackleton promise to steer clear of McMurdo Sound and the Ross Island area of Antarctica, which he regards as his “own field,” as he puts it.
Initially, Shackleton tries to be true to the public undertaking he has given to Scott, albeit reluctantly, to stay away from McMurdo Sound. He heads, instead, for the inlet Borchgrevink had discovered in the Ross Ice Shelf and the nearby Balloon Bight, which, in a sign of the pique that has now infected his relationship with Scott, he refuses to call by Scott’s name, instead calling it Barrier Inlet. However, when he gets there on January 24, 1908, he discovers that the Ross Ice Shelf, which is really an enormous moving glacier, has calved off a huge section of ice that has taken away both Borchgrevink’s bight and Scott’s nearby one, thereby destroying the easy access to the ice shelf and the virtual highway to the South Pole that he had glimpsed from the balloon six years before. In their place, a large bay, or indentation, has formed in the edge of the ice shelf where whales abound. Shackleton renames the area the Bay of Whales, but he is not about to set up camp in such an unstable area nor one without such easy access as it had enjoyed before. He makes a tentative push eastward in a bid to get to King Edward VII Land, but the path of his ship, the Nimrod, is immediately blocked by a dense concentration of pack ice. Shackleton, just as quickly, decides to turn the Nimrod around and head westward.
Whether intentionally or by dint of conditions that Shackleton said left him no choice, Shackleton ignores his public undertaking to Scott and sets up his base at Cape Royds on Ross Island.
I am standing in front of the door to Shackleton’s hut three decades after my first visit. On that occasion, the experience of going inside Shackleton’s dimly lit hut had proven as close to a religious experience as I had ever had. It had seemed to me more of a shrine to an extraordinary man than it was a receptacle for the very ordinary things it contained: cans of meat, old boots, a broken sled, a broken promise, and the echoes of hearty comradeship. This time, however, I have come not seeking Shackleton but the ghost of Murray Levick.
To the detective in me, it is becoming clear that I need to reconstruct the sequence of events that took Levick to Antarctica in order to understand how he should become the world’s first penguin biologist. I have a hunch that there are important clues to be found by examining Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition of 1907–09 and this hut in particular.
Snow is falling lightly and the clouds are dark and bruised. The piles of wooden expedition boxes and bales of hay outside the hut have been tidied up somewhat and there is a new skin of some light-gray, rubbery-looking material that has been applied to the roof by conservators, but otherwise the hut looks the same as it did three decades earlier, or, indeed, when it was built more than a century ago.
Ostensibly, it was Robert Falcon Scott—even more so than Borchgrevink, Amundsen, Nansen, or anyone else—who was responsible for Murray Levick coming to Antarctica and ending up at Cape Adare with nothing to do. However, I believe that the influences that led Levick to study Adelie penguins and, especially, their sexuality, are too many to place solely at Scott’s door. As I stand there brushing the snow and volcanic grit from my boots in preparation for going inside, it is apparent that some of the responsibility for turning Murray Levick into the world’s first penguin biologist can be laid at this door: the door of Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds.
I think back to Christmas 2007. In the days leading up to Christmas, a report emerged that two chalk sketches of penguins on blackboards had been found in a basement at the University of Cambridge. Given the ephemeral nature of chalk on blackboard, it seemed amazing that they should have survived at all because they were dated from 1904 and 1909, making them 103 and 98 years old. Even more amazing were the identities of the artists. The first was signed by Robert Falcon Scott and came from a public lecture he gave at Whitworth Hall in Manchester on December 1, 1904, less than three months after getting back to England from the Discovery Expedition. The second was signed by Ernest Shackleton, from a public lecture about his Nimrod Expedition, given at the same hall five years later.
Aside from the novelty value of the sketches, the media commentary focused on cheap asides along the lines of both men being better explorers than they were artists. For me, that was not the striking thing
at all about the drawings. In fact, to be fair to both men, they are actually pretty good representations of Antarctic penguins to have been drawn quickly on a blackboard while giving a lecture to an audience that cannot have ever seen such animals.
No, for me, the striking thing is that Scott chose to draw an Emperor penguin, while Shackleton drew an Adelie penguin. That single act spoke volumes about where each’s affinities lay concerning penguins.
Scott’s zoologist and friend, Edward Wilson, had expressed disgust about the prospect of living at Cape Adare among the smell of all the Adelie penguins. While Scott had been out on the Antarctic Plateau man-hauling sleds toward the South Magnetic Pole, Wilson had been at Cape Crozier admiring the audacity of the Emperor penguins to breed there during the Antarctic winter. Scott chose to moor the Discovery at Hut Point and used that as his base. Devoid of nearby penguin breeding colonies, most penguins whose wanderings took them to the ice edge around Hut Point were likely to be Emperor penguins. The Emperor penguin is pompous and grand, a perfect reflection of its name. It is large, beautifully colored, and it carries itself with a slow, stately kind of grace. It is easy to imagine that Scott would have been most smitten with Emperor penguins. They mirrored his own values; those of a man who prized the conquest of Antarctica when it was “more nobly and splendidly won.”
By contrast, Shackleton chose to base his expedition beside a colony of the stubby, raucous, black-and-white Adelie penguins. While it was not the primary consideration at all in where he decided to build his hut—ice conditions prevented Shackleton from getting as far south as Hut Point in 1908—he nevertheless chose, to me at least, the most scenically attractive place in all of the Ross Sea area. His hut is backed by the active volcano, Mount Erebus, which rises over twelve thousand feet above sea level with an ever-present plume of smoke emanating from its crown. Across the ice-covered waters of McMurdo Sound, the view is of the magnificent Royal Society Range. The hut itself is nestled beside a small lake and about three thousand pairs of Adelies make the surrounding buttresses of volcanic rocks their homes during the summer. The Adelie penguins were not just Shackleton’s neighbors, in a sense, they were his companions too.
A Polar Affair Page 8
