A Polar Affair

by Lloyd Spencer Davis

  It is 1908. Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition includes the biologist James Murray. Given Hanson’s untimely death just as the Adelie penguins were beginning to arrive at Cape Adare during Borchgrevink’s expedition nine years earlier, and given Scott’s decision six years earlier to set up his base at Hut Point, miles from any penguin colony, Murray has the opportunity to become the world’s first penguin biologist gifted to him on a plate. He is living in the hut at Cape Royds, literally yards from the nesting Adelie penguins.

  Murray, however, is monumentally not up to the task. An insight into his perspective may be gathered from his reaction to Cape Royds itself.

  To the biologist, no more uninviting desert is imaginable than Cape Royds seemed when we made our first landing, and for long afterwards.

  He describes, in detail, the rotifers and other invertebrates he finds in the ponds around Cape Royds, but his observations about penguins are as far from scientific as it is possible to be.

  There is endless interest in watching them, the dignified Emperor, dignified notwithstanding his clumsy waddle, going along with his wife (or wives) by his side, the very picture of a successful, self-satisfied, happy, unsuspicious countryman, gravely bowing like a Chinaman before a yelping dog—the little undignified matter-of-fact Adelie, minding his own business in a way worthy of emulation.

  As a consequence, when the Nimrod, with Shackleton and his crew on board, finally leaves Antarctica at the end of the penguins’ breeding season, in February 1909, and heads back to England where Shackleton shall give his lecture at Whitworth Hall, the opportunity to become the world’s first penguin biologist still sits begging.

  Yet, there is one crew member on the Nimrod destined to have a major impact on Murray Levick: it is the young geologist, Raymond Priestley. Born in 1886, a full decade after Murray Levick, Priestley is just twenty-one when he heads to the Antarctic on the Nimrod, having taken a break from his studies of geology at the University of Bristol. Handsome, tall and lean, with tousled hair, Priestley looks more like the child of athletes and actors than the son of the headmaster of Tewkesbury Grammar School.

  That athleticism, if not the good looks, comes in handy when he is in a party of five men that sets out to climb the northern slopes of Mount Erebus. When the men leave the hut at Cape Royds, the weather is fine and so they opt to travel light, carrying but a single three-man tent with them.

  As with so much that goes wrong during polar exploration, it is not so much the conditions themselves but the lack of preparations to deal with them that creates the need for heroic acts that separate survival from death, even if barely so. In this case, an almighty blizzard strikes while the men are high up on a glacier. In their tent, even by squeezing themselves in, there really is only room enough for four. Priestley volunteers to stay outside, hunkering down in his sleeping bag. For three days the wind and snow rage, battering Priestley while he lies helpless and frozen in his sleeping bag, blowing him slowly down the glacier toward precipitous hundred-foot-high ice cliffs. Without anything to drink, he uses his fingernails to scrape tiny fragments of ice from the glacier surface, which he sucks. After nearly two days, one of the men from the tent crawls out to bring him some chocolate. By the time the wind abates enough for the others to leave the tent again to look for him, his feet are frostbitten. They bring him to the tent where he lies upon the others.

  As soon as they are able, the men abandon the climb and head back to the warm and comparatively roomy hut at Cape Royds. These men have failed to accomplish what they set out to do and almost squandered at least one of their lives—all through being unprepared for the challenges that being in the Antarctic can throw at them. On the other hand, it marks out Priestley as being made of special stuff. If in the future Murray Levick should ever need a companion when circumstances turn dire, he could hardly hope for a better person than Raymond Priestley.

  There is another member of the Nimrod Expedition, another geologist, who will prove himself as mentally and physically the equal of either Shackleton or Priestley. On March 10, 1908, a strapping young Australian, Douglas Mawson is one of five men who are the first to reach the summit of Mount Erebus. If Mawson thinks the climb is hard or dangerous in any way, it will prove to be neither—at least in comparison to what he still has waiting for him in Antarctica.

  During the summer of 1908–09, Shackleton’s party splits up into four groups: the Northern Party, consisting of three men including Mawson, head off with the aim of being the first to get to the South Magnetic Pole; the Western Party also contains three men, including Priestley and an Australian, Bertram Armytage; the Southern Party of four is headed by Shackleton, and it sets out with no lesser aim than to be the first to the South Pole. Finally, a party of five men remains at the Cape Royds Hut with biologist James Murray as their nominal leader in the absence of Shackleton.

  Mawson and his two companions do what Scott was unable to do and they become the first humans to make it to the South Magnetic Pole, which is situated on the Polar Plateau in as isolated and unwelcoming a place as it is possible to be. Mawson and the others are taunted by death on so many occasions that it seems inevitable that if it is not this crevasse, it will be the next in which they fall into oblivion. There is also the almost complete physical and mental breakdown of the party’s leader, which requires a reluctant but, as it proves, highly capable Mawson to take over. Somehow, he leads them all to the conclusion of their 1,260-mile journey over some of the worst conditions ever encountered by polar explorers at either end of the Earth. They manage to just make a fortuitous rendezvous with the Nimrod, having failed to reach the coast before the ship sailed by, searching for them. The first officer of the Nimrod, John King Davis, convinces the captain to go back to check an area where some grounded icebergs may have obscured their view at the base of the Drygalski Ice Tongue. There, behind the bergs, they find the newly arrived members of the Northern Party.

  Priestley and his men also have a lucky escape. They enjoy a successful time exploring the region around the Ferrar Glacier but then, in a bid to ease the difficulties of the Nimrod to get to them because of the frozen sea ice around their rendezvous point at Butter Point, they camp on the sea ice. During the night, they awake to discover that the ice has broken out and they are floating on the Ross Sea: in all likelihood, the last bit of sailing any of them will ever do. For a day they are carried away from the shore by the wind, but at one point it turns and blows the ice floe back toward the shore. They calculate that the ice floe they are on might just catch an edge of the sea ice jutting out from the land and, in the briefest few seconds that it does so, they haul themselves and their sledge to the safety of the shore before the ice floe is driven north in what would have been their route to a certain death. Soon afterward the Nimrod arrives to pick them up.

  Of all the parties, though, it is Shackleton’s Southern Party that has it worst. Initially, they proceed south across the Ross Ice Shelf with four ponies—all that remain of the ten that had left Lyttelton on the Nimrod a year earlier. The ponies do not prove as resilient as the men and, one by one, they must be put down, until the very last of them falls to his death down a huge crevasse as they negotiate the Beardmore Glacier. The Beardmore Glacier is a 125-mile glacier that Shackleton has discovered, which acts like a very dangerous road from the barrier ice of the Ross Ice Shelf, through the mountains, to the Antarctic Plateau itself. The going is painful and painfully slow: the men haul their two sleds up strastugi, which are sharp-edged waves of ice formed by the wind. They fall, it seems, as often as they go up: down strastugi, down crevasses, until it seems like they can move no more. Their clothing is woefully inadequate as they walk into fierce winds that freeze their faces including the hairs inside their nostrils. They are getting weaker by the day: the exertion and dysentery from a terrible diet weakening each of them equally. Despite having meat from the horses and even the remaining feed intended for the horses, which they add to their soup—or “hoosh,” as they call it—that th
ey eat each morning and night, they are forced to cut rations to a few biscuits and two small bowls of hoosh each day. The four men are running out of food.

  Finally, when within 112 miles of the Pole, Shackleton is forced to call a halt to their slog. While they still, somehow, have the will and probable strength to make the Pole itself, there is no way they would have enough rations to get back alive. Even at that point, their getting back is not a sure thing. When eventually they arrive at their food depot, the four men can barely walk and are close to death. One of them collapses and can go no further. Shackleton makes the decision to leave two of them there, while he and another make a dash over the last thirty-eight miles to Scott’s old store hut at Hut Point where, according to Shackleton’s written orders before the parties had gone their separate ways, there are supposed to be food supplies and a party waiting. There are neither. Yet after a cold night spent without sleeping bags (they had left theirs behind to travel more quickly), they light a fire to signal the Nimrod, which they hope is still somewhere in McMurdo Sound, and, sure enough, having already picked up the personnel from Cape Royds, the Nimrod is headed to Hut Point.

  After a bath and some food, despite being physically knackered from his harrowing journey of 1,700 miles, walking to a point closer to the Earth’s axis than has been attained at that time at either the North or the South Poles, Shackleton insists that it be he who returns with two others to get the remaining two men from his party.

  Once all are safe and sound onboard the Nimrod, they head north for New Zealand, sailing past the hut at Cape Royds but not setting foot in there again.

  It has stopped snowing for the moment. Yet the dark purple clouds swirling overhead suggest that there is more to come. There is a new sign screwed to the door of Shackleton’s hut that proclaims, This building and its contents are a historic shrine . . .

  It had been biologist James Murray, who having shared the summer of 1908–09 at Cape Royds with the penguins, had been last to go through that doorway. During that summer, while the other three parties were out risking life and a number of limbs in the name of exploration and science, he had nowhere else he needed to be, no other task to perform than to stay where he was, cheek-by-jowl with a colony of Adelie penguins. It seems flabbergasting to me that, as the expedition’s biologist, he did not set about studying the Adelie penguins given the unfettered opportunity afforded to him.

  Yet if nearly five decades as a biologist have taught me anything, it is that there are two types of biologists. One, to which I claim affinity, is attracted by the rawness and excitement of the great outdoors and especially those charismatic megafauna like big cats, wolves, bears, seals, whales, and yes, penguins. Danger and drama are constant companions for such scientists and, truth be told, a big part of the attraction too. The other type of biologist is generally happy indoors, looking down a microscope or prodding their biological subjects with some piece of equipment or another. Mostly, they are fascinated by small creatures where the biggest danger they face is spilling a hot cup of tea over their white lab coats. James Murray was one of the latter. The things that beguiled him most while at Cape Royds were the tiny rotifers he dredged from the bottoms of small lakes. He was fascinated by how hardy they were, conducting experiments to show that they could survive freezing or, conversely, really hot temperatures. All the while, outside the windows of the Cape Royds hut, a colony of knee-high penguins performed the perverse and debauched behaviors that characterize their mating, untroubled by Murray’s eye any more than they had been by those of Hanson, Borchgrevink, or Wilson before him.

  To the contrary, among the limited notes Murray wrote about the penguins, he opined:

  . . . the Adelie appears to be entirely moral in his domestic arrangements.

  The inside of the hut is suffused with a soft dull light from a couple of small windows, desaturating further the room’s already sepia-colored contents: a stove, some beds, items of clothing and boots, and stacks of various cans and goodies that brought such humor to the room over one hundred years earlier. The sign is right: it still feels more church or shrine than it does the refuge of men who could walk to within 112 miles of the South Pole or lie outside in a blizzard for three days and survive. I speak in whispers, if I speak at all. So completely have the room and its contents been preserved in the dry cold of Antarctica, and so artfully have they been protected by conservators, that to pass through that door is to travel back in time. Shackleton, Priestley, Mawson, and the others might have just stepped outside.

  I stand alone in the hut. Something keeps me there, immersed in a childhood dream that is so tangible I can smell the blackened air that comes from cooking seal blubber on the stove; I can touch Priestley’s sock as it hangs to dry, having done its best to protect his foot from frostbite as he hunkered down in the blizzard; I can feel the inside of Shackleton’s sleeping bag with molecules of him left there still to shake my hand. If the spirit of Antarctica resides anywhere, it is here. I stand there waiting, absorbing everything the men have left behind. I know they will not be stepping inside again, but honestly, I would not be surprised to see them, lost as I am in an eerie world somewhere between trance and truth.

  With a sigh, I take a final glance at the photo on the wall of King Edward VII and walk out the door, closing it behind me. Shackleton had done something similar before he had left on his attempt to march to the South Pole. In fact, the evening before he left, the sun had come through the window and spotlighted the photo of the king in profile—all whiskers and sternness—in a way that it had never done so before. Shackleton, a spiritual if not a religious man, took that to be a splendid omen for good luck when, on October 29, 1908, he went out the door of the Cape Royds hut and headed into the white nothingness that lay before him in order to seek glory for king and country, and, it has to be said, not a little for himself.

  Four months later it would be biologist James Murray who, after a summer spent with the penguins would shut the door of the hut for the very last time, leaving the penguins still unstudied, before he boarded the Nimrod and departed to pick up the exhausted, near dead members of the Southern Party.

  Neither James Murray nor Ernest Shackleton could have imagined that the next person to go through that door would be Murray Levick.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  COURTSHIP

  Murray Levick still had a number of steps to take before he could walk through the door of Shackleton’s hut, and I have come to St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London to try and connect the dots.

  St Bartholomew’s Hospital, or Barts as it is affectionately known, is Britain’s oldest hospital. It was founded in 1123 by one of the courtiers of Henry I, William the Conqueror’s son and the brother of Robert Curthose. If King Henry I is remembered for his fighting, it is another King Henry, known much more as a lover than a fighter, who has left his mark on Barts. I walk out of the stone archway that is the King Henry VIII Gate of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, with a statue of the king himself standing atop the arch, a potent symbol for sexual libido. That seems especially appropriate considering that this is where Murray Levick, discoverer of the sexual excesses of penguins, had been tutored.

  The buildings are all white ornate stone work and, save for a red telephone box and red double-decker buses, I imagine that little has changed from the time that Levick walked down that same street passing the same buildings with the beautifully rounded dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral at its end. Despite the grandeur of the buildings and the cathedral designed by Christopher Wren, the architect of the Rothschild mansion in Tring, I am left feeling short-changed by my visit.

  I am struggling to find any evidence of what took Levick from a hospital to the Royal Navy to the door of Shackleton’s Hut at Cape Royds in Antarctica. The one significant telltale sign seems to be his dedication to sport. He was fond of rugby, gymnastics, and rowing, all driven by his relentless pursuit of physical fitness.

  It is in 1908, just as Shackleton is preparing to leave his hut to wal
k to the South Pole and six years after Levick walked out the King Henry VIII gate of Barts for the last time, that fate deals Murray Levick an especially auspicious hand: he is appointed surgeon aboard the battleship HMS Essex. It is commanded by none other than Robert Falcon Scott, who had been given command of the ship in January, eight months ahead of his marriage to Kathleen Bruce.

  If I could, I would have set up my empty generator box from which to observe Levick and the other polar explorers, much as I did with the penguins. No doubt, I would have been similarly taken with their courtship patterns. As I am starting to appreciate, an understanding of what motivates the behavior of these males can be gained from observing their relationships with females. Just like the penguins.

  It is September 2, 1908. Robert Falcon Scott is marrying Kathleen Bruce at the Royal Chapel in Hampton Court.

  Scott is closer to being bland than he is beautiful. Yet his thick dark eyebrows emphasize his brooding eyes, taking attention away from his somewhat pointy ears and thinning hair. He holds himself upright and his stoic demeanor belies the troubled soul hidden behind those eyes. He is attractive enough that some, including his own family, regard him as something of a ladies’ man.