Shotley proves to be a small town with a big history—one that has often involved fighting of one sort or another. First the Vikings, then William the Conqueror (it is featured in his Domesday Book) and his bloody sons, then the Hundred Years’ War and, finally, two world wars. What is most obvious to me, however, is that as hard as those times might have been, its best days are behind it. The HMS Ganges was used to train boys and men for the navy for much of the 20th century but it was closed down in 1976. The mast of the Ganges, in a state of disrepair, still hovers on the hill above the little harbor.
Nevertheless, Levick’s time in Shotley, developing his interest in physical training, is an important step in moving him closer to Antarctica.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DECEPTION
It is September 2, 1909. Roald Amundsen is preparing his expedition to become the first person to get to the North Pole. His childhood hero and erstwhile mentor, Fridtjof Nansen, has given him the use of the Fram, the ship specially built for polar conditions.
Yet, on this day, Amundsen hears astonishing news from another of his mentors. Frederick Cook, the doctor and his savior from the Belgica Expedition, sends a cable from the Shetland Islands in northern Scotland to say that he has reached the North Pole. He claims to have gotten to the pole on April 21, 1908, but, because the journey back has been so long and hard, it has taken him eighteen months to get to anywhere civilized enough to be able to send a telegram.
Incredibly, within a week, Cook’s own mentor, Robert Peary—with whom Cook had crossed Greenland and from whom he had learned the art of polar travel—claims to have gotten there too. In a separate expedition, Peary says that he arrived at the North Pole on April 6, 1909. Peary, who is endowed with a spectacular mustache that looks like a couple of bull walruses facing off on either side of his lips, now turns his formidable bite on his former protégé. He and his supporters immediately set about discrediting Cook’s character and claim. Particularly damning to Cook’s claim of priority, they say, was his announcement three years earlier that he had been the first to summit Mount McKinley (renamed Denali) in Alaska. This seems highly unlikely, given that the photo—which Cook said was taken from its peak—is demonstrably taken from a nearby mountain.
Fast on the heels of Cook and Peary’s announcements, Robert Falcon Scott makes one of his own. On September 13, 1909, the same day that Kathleen gives birth to their son, Peter, Scott publicly announces his intention to mount another expedition to Antarctica to “reach the South Pole and secure for the British Empire the honor of that achievement.”
Murray Levick, along with eight thousand others, puts his name forward, and undoubtedly his prior acquaintance with Scott helps get him the job as surgeon and part-time zoologist on the expedition. Additionally, Levick has already made a name for himself as a doctor in areas that make him a highly suitable appointment for the expedition: diet, physical fitness, and training.
At this stage, Levick has never seen a penguin, never had any inclination to study them, nor, indeed, to do any zoology. He is signing on because, like me sixty-seven years later, he simply wants to go to Antarctica.
It is hard to say where that desire in Levick has come from but when he joined the Royal Navy and went through his initial naval medical training, one of his classmates was Alister Mackay. Dr. Mackay became the surgeon on Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition. It is easy to imagine that Levick has discussed the trip to Antarctica with his classmate, or at the very least is aware of it, and that he longs for such adventure himself.
Others, however, are interested not so much in the adventure but in securing the achievement of reaching the South Pole for themselves and their own countries. The New York Times reports, three days after Scott’s public announcement, that Robert Peary is now seeking to be the first person to get to the South Pole, thereby securing for the United States the honor of being the first to get to both ends of the Earth. Similar intentions are announced by other would-be explorers: Wilhelm Filchner in Germany, Jean-Baptiste Charcot in France, and Nobu Shirase in Japan. There is, however, no such announcement coming out of Norway: Amundsen maintains that the achievement of his friend Frederick Cook in getting to the North Pole—Amundsen remains loyal to the man he views as saving his life when on the Belgica and continues to support Cook’s claim—does not affect his forthcoming expedition to the North Pole, as, he maintains, its primary focus is “oceanographic investigation” rather than being first to the North Pole.
Raising money for polar expeditions—which requires ship support, supplies, and men to be paid for several years—is no easy matter, even for people with the reputations of Amundsen, Peary, Scott, and Shackleton; even with the backing of august bodies like the Royal Geographical Society. The men count on moneys received from public talks as a way to help balance their books. It is why Scott gave his lecture at Whitworth Hall, where he drew a penguin on the blackboard, and it is why Shackleton is looking to follow suit.
Shackleton’s finances are particularly strained. Men like Mawson have remained unpaid for their two years of service, even months after the expedition is over. Accompanied by Emily, Shackleton embarks on an extensive public lecture tour that takes him to the United States and various parts of Europe. During a stop in Oslo in October 1909, Shackleton talks to a hall full of attentive members of the Norwegian public. In the audience there is one man who is more attentive than the rest: he is tall, quiet, and has a large nose, but it is his eyes that most captivate Emily. When her husband speaks, she notes of the attentive audience member, “a mystic look softened his eyes, the look of a man who saw a vision.”
Roald Amundsen absorbs every word from Shackleton. How the access to the Ross Ice Shelf—discovered initially by his childhood friend Carsten Borchgrevink and visited by Scott and Shackleton in 1902, at the nearby Balloon Bight—has been altered by the calving Ross Ice Shelf and become a large bay, the Bay of Whales. How the view and photographs from Scott and Shackleton’s near-disastrous ballooning attempt had provided a view of a flat ice shelf extending as far as the eye could see, a wide, white highway stretching, it seemed, almost to the South Pole.
Although Amundsen does not admit it to anyone but himself, by the time he hears Shackleton talk, he has already concluded that he should head south and not north. That is where the remaining honors lie, the one remaining prize.
It is December 14, 1909, and Shackleton is at Buckingham Palace to collect the ultimate honor for just getting close to the South Pole. Wearing tails and a sword, Shackleton is knighted by King Edward VII, the man whose photo graces the wall of the hut at Cape Royds. The king touches a kneeling Shackleton on the shoulder with his own sword, making a connection between the two charmers—the two philandering charmers. Sir Ernest Shackleton. A knighthood still alludes Scott, and when simply saying the words “Sir Ernest,” they must have caught in his throat no less than if Shackleton and the king had both shoved their swords down his throat at the same time.
Meanwhile, the controversy over the competing claims of Cook and Peary has continued to rage. A week after the ceremonies at Buckingham Palace, when in addition to Shackleton being knighted, all members of the Nimrod Expedition had been awarded the Polar Medal by the king, a commission at the University of Copenhagen declares that there is insufficient evidence to support Frederick Cook’s assertion of having gotten to the North Pole. The detailed navigational records that might have substantiated Cook’s claim had been left in Greenland with a hunter, Harry Whitney, who was supposed to take them back to America for Cook. Ironically, Whitney ended up returning to the States on Peary’s ship, and it had been Peary himself who had refused to transport Cook’s diaries and records on his ship. Left behind in Greenland, the records were never seen again. Curiously, however, Peary does not allow his own records to be scrutinized. These are held by the National Geographic Society and, in accordance with the wishes of the Society and Peary’s family, remain locked away from all who might want to see them.
Irrespect
ive of the bickering about Cook, to whom Amundsen remains loyal and, at least outwardly, professes to believe, he is forced to accept that even if Cook did not get to the North Pole, then surely Peary did. That prize has been won.
Secretly, he sets about planning to go to the South Pole instead.
It is August 22, 1988, and the New York Times, which had worldwide exclusive rights to Peary’s story at the time he claimed to have gotten to the North Pole, as good as publishes a retraction. National Geographic, which celebrated its centenary that year, finally opens up the Peary archives and publishes a review of Peary’s data by none other than Sir Wally Herbert, who, in the same year that Neil Armstrong was stepping onto the moon, became the first undisputed person to travel to the North Pole by dogsled. Peary’s records prove sketchy. The pages of his diary where he should have recorded his positions are blank on the days that he was supposed to be at the Pole. Instead, a loose page has been inserted merely saying, “The Pole at last!!!” His claims about the distances he traveled per day—over seventy miles—seem highly improbable, and also, when he did calculate his position elsewhere in the diary, he did not correct for the effect of currents and the movement of the ice over which they were traveling: all of which are important to accurately determine one’s location in the Arctic. Herbert concludes that Peary was likely thirty to sixty miles away from the North Pole when he claimed to have been there.
I am struck by the deep irony of all this.
In 1909, the competing claims by Cook and Peary that they have reached the North Pole really do affect Roald Amundsen, despite his public protestations to the contrary. They transform him into an otherwise unwitting competitor with Scott, in what will now become an out-and-out race to get to the South Pole. And that, as much as anything, will be responsible for Murray Levick becoming a penguin biologist.
Douglas Mawson also longs to go south to the Antarctic. But not for any glory attached to getting to any poles, magnetic or otherwise: he wants to go for the science, for the geology, for what the big white continent can tell us about the history of the world, and in particular the relationship between the Antarctic continent and Australia.
Mawson was one of the few men from the Nimrod Expedition who did not attend the ceremony at Buckingham Palace when Shackleton kneeled before the king as Ernest and rose again as Sir Ernest. At the same ceremony, King Edward VII had presented all the other members of the Nimrod Expedition with the Polar Medal, giving Mawson’s in absentia.
Mawson does, however, arrive in London a month later, where he arranges a meeting with Scott in mid-January 1910. Scott offers to take him as part of his new expedition to Antarctica, the Terra Nova Expedition. Mawson is insistent that he will go only if he can be dropped at Cape Adare with a party of three other men so that they may explore the coastline west of Cape Adare, which he believes will reveal evidence of it having been once attached to Australia. Scott is reluctant to add another base to his expedition when he has already committed to setting up his main base in McMurdo Sound and a secondary base on Edward VII Land. Mawson says that, in that case, he will mount his own expedition to Cape Adare. A second meeting takes place between the two men, with Bill Wilson sitting in, but again, makes no headway.
It is January 26, 1910. Scott invites Mawson for dinner to continue their discussions. There Mawson meets Kathleen and is immediately drawn into an orbit around her, along with a whole solar system of admirers of her celestial body that include George Bernard Shaw, James Barrie, and Auguste Rodin.
Unable to persuade Scott, Mawson turns down a place on the Terra Nova Expedition and looks for ways to organize his own expedition to Cape Adare. Sir Ernest Shackleton is continuing his speaking tour in Europe. When Mawson meets Shackleton upon his return, the new knight agrees to help, but on the condition that it becomes his next expedition to Antarctica with Mawson as the chief scientist.
Shackleton, anxious not to be seen as treading on Scott’s toes or territory in any way again, writes to Scott:
I am preparing a purely Scientific Expedition to operate along the coast of Antarctica commencing in 1911. The Easterly base is Cape Adare. . .
Scott, meanwhile, continues to assemble his expedition members and the equipment they will need if they are to have a chance of making it to the South Pole. One of the innovations that Scott is banking on is the use of motor sledges, which are, in effect, newly invented motor cars with tracks. In early March, he travels with Kathleen to Norway to see tests of the motor sledge, which promptly, and disconcertingly, breaks an axle.
While in Norway, they call upon Fridtjof Nansen, who though he doesn’t particularly like Scott, he, like Mawson and so many others, is drawn to Kathleen. Nansen is appalled to learn that Scott intends to rely chiefly on unproven gasoline-powered motor sledges and ponies rather than Eivind Astrup’s proven means of polar travel: dogsleds and skis.
Not everyone, however, is oblivious to the example set by Astrup. At about that moment, on the other side of the world, Bertram Armytage, who had been part of Shackleton’s Western Party with Raymond Priestley, checks into a room at Melbourne’s exclusive Melbourne Club. He puts on a tuxedo and the silver Polar Medal he had received from King Edward VII at Buckingham Palace just three months earlier. He places a towel on the floor. Then he lies upon the towel, places a pistol to his head, and shoots himself.
Nansen regards Scott’s own plans as, if not suicidal, then stupid. He recommends strongly that Scott at least take a young Norwegian skiing expert with him, Tryggve Gran, so that he might teach Scott’s men how to ski properly.
Gran has met Amundsen before, and given that Amundsen has announced plans to go to the North Pole, Gran offers to help arrange a meeting between Scott and Amundsen so that they may consider coordinating the scientific measurements they shall be taking at opposite ends of the Earth. Gran sets up the meeting through Amundsen’s brother Gustav. However, when Scott and Gran arrive at Amundsen’s home on the banks of Bunnefjorden, they are met by only Gustav. They wait for an hour, but Amundsen, although aware of the meeting, curiously does not show up. This is understandable perhaps, if not forgivable, given what he is really up to.
Outwardly undeterred by the Cook and Peary claims, Amundsen has been, to all intents and purposes, proceeding with preparations for his expedition to the North Pole. Secretly, however, aided by another brother, Leon, Amundsen is making plans to go, instead, to the South Pole. He keeps this all a secret from the crew he is assembling for fear of losing the backing of Nansen and the new king of Norway, King Haakon VII, who are supporting the expedition on the basis that it will increase Norway’s prestige in the Arctic regions. The Norwegian government, with Nansen’s blessing, has offered Amundsen Nansen’s ship the Fram for the expedition. Nansen, however, does not want Amundsen to take just his ship: he presses Amundsen to take with him Hjalmar Johansen, the man with whom he had tried, gallantly, if vainly, to reach the North Pole. Johansen is vastly experienced, an undeniable expert in polar travel, but also a drunkard whom Amundsen foresees is likely to cause trouble. Amundsen is extremely reluctant but he relents because he does not want to jeopardize, in any way, the support from Nansen or the expedition’s sponsors.
Amundsen’s house and property, which he calls Uranienborg, is sited a few yards from the shore of the Bunnefjorden, south of Kristiania. It is pretty much as far from the water as this man of the sea is prepared to be. Yet there is just enough room between the front steps and the pier to build the hut he plans to take to the Antarctic and set up on the ice shelf discovered by James Clark Ross at a place first visited by his childhood playmate Carsten Borchgrevink and now called the Bay of Whales by Sir Ernest Shackleton. He is highly secretive: to test the hut, he lives in it, but no one else is allowed near it. No one, that is, except for Sigrid Castberg. There they make love on the beds of the hut among the reindeer skins. These are the happiest moments of Amundsen’s life.
It might be supposed that this recluse, who has, until now, barely known the touch of
a woman and certainly not the gut-wrenching euphoria that love can bring, deliberately chose a married woman to be his partner in that it lessens the complications, making it easier to move on when the ice calls loudest. That is at least as far from the truth as Peary had been from the North Pole. Amundsen implores Sigrid, his first true love, to leave her husband and marry him. She refuses.
It is only then that he acts like the coldhearted explorer that he is; the man who is capable, with dispassionate ease, of weighing risks and the value of lives; the man who can kill and then eat with relish the dogs who have served him so well. He cuts her off completely.
It is May 6, 1910. The monarchy and its approach to sexuality is about to change again to more puritanical ways, that is, if you can turn a blind eye to a little bit of incest. Edward VII (the Caresser) is able to caress no more. As heavy a consumer of cigarettes and cigars as he is of women, he has a heart attack and dies after a period of illness that is no doubt not helped by his smoking, if not his whoring too. Remarkably, Alice Keppel, his last great mistress, is permitted by Queen Alexandra see him on his deathbed. He is succeeded as king by his second son, King George V.
It is true that, prior to becoming king, George V had tried to marry his cousin, and after that was quashed by his mother and aunt, he married another, albeit somewhat more distant, cousin, Princess Victoria Mary (known as May), who had earlier been engaged to his older brother. It had been the death of his brother from pneumonia that had left George next in line to the throne.
A Polar Affair Page 11
