I am leaving New Zealand on a Russian ship, the Akademik Shokalskiy, bound for the Ross Sea, as I attempt to follow in Levick’s footsteps. I have the potential to get seasick just looking at water and I have purchased about $300 worth of various seasick tablets.
All starts calmly enough, but within a day we are battered by a massive storm. Waves break over the bow of the ship as it plunges from one huge wave to the next. In my bunk, I am thrown with considerable force from one end of the bulkhead to the other with each pitch and roll of the ship. I take several different types of pills to no avail: I am seasick, but, then, so is almost everyone else, including most of the crew and the onboard doctor. After two days, the wind abates and we are left to count the damage. Most of us are badly bruised from being thrown about. One person has a broken collar bone. Another has internal bleeding and needs to be airlifted off the ship in a dramatic long-distance helicopter rescue when we reach the Auckland Islands.
It is November 29, 1910. The Terra Nova has turned south after clearing the heads at Otago Harbor. It is supremely overloaded. Below decks is completely full and they have been forced to store the three motor sleds, forty tons of coal, two thousand gallons of gasoline, and the pony fodder on the upper deck. It is not much bigger than the Fram, yet the Terra Nova has sixty-five men, nineteen ponies, thirty dogs, and three motor sleds on board. By contrast, Fram has just nineteen men aboard her, each with his own small room, and ninety-seven dogs. The overladen Terra Nova is slow and wallows in the sea, causing many of the men to be seasick. Campbell notes that, “We must hope for fine passage,” but that is not to be. Three days out from New Zealand, they are hit by a frightful storm.
The ship is leaking and begins taking in lots of water. Their pumps fail. The men are forced to bail her out with buckets and a hand pump, which as Campbell nonchalantly observes is, “very slow work as the men were constantly being washed off their legs.” Throughout the raging storm, they scramble frantically, trying to clear the pumps while being thrown about and throwing up.
By the time the storm ends and they can assess their damage, two ponies are dead, and a dog and ten sacks of coal have been washed overboard.
It is Christmas Day 1910. The progress of the Terra Nova has been inhibited by dense pack ice. To date, the men’s only real interaction with the wildlife has been to kill it and eat it. Crabeater seals are served as steaks, which according to Levick, “is excellent. More tender than beef steak and quite as good to eat.” They stew Adelie penguins, which Levick finds:
. . . a really first class bird—rather like blackcock to taste, but a good deal better—the flesh is black, like seal meat.
His appreciation of seal and penguin meat is probably just as well, given the diet that awaits him in Antarctica. In fact, the penguin meat is so good that stewed penguin forms part of their first Christmas dinner in the ice.
The day before, on Christmas Eve, Levick noted the men sang, “in a horrible discordant manner,” to Adelie penguins that had gathered about the stationary ship. At the end of the performance, the penguins stood around, “cawing and bowing their appreciation.”
Eventually the pack ice eases and the Terra Nova is able to make its way down to Ross Island. The sea ice has not broken out completely, and they cannot get to Scott’s preferred landing at Hut Point, his old site from the Discovery days. Instead, they decide to set up the hut and base a little farther north at Cape Evans, where they arrive on January 5, 1911. They begin the long and weary process of unloading. They soon learn that this is an environment where the line that separates success and survival from failure and fatality is a very fine one, indeed.
Herbert Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, or “camera artist,” as he prefers to call himself, tries to photograph a pod of six killer whales that are attempting to hunt penguins at the edge of the sea ice. He takes his camera and tripod to the very edge of the sea ice but the whales, seeing him, go under the ice, coming up and breaking it into small floes. Ponting is left rocking on one of the floes when one of the whales rears out of the water, its head over the edge of the floe, trying to grab him. Ponting jumps from floe to floe and is able to get back safely to the fast sea ice and, as Levick admiringly notes, “To his great credit he saved his camera and tripod.”
Levick is a great admirer of Ponting and desires desperately, given his new duties for the Eastern Party, to learn the craft of photography from Ponting. However, Ponting is less enamored with the persistent Levick, and to Levick’s disappointment, largely ignores him. Levick records in his diary:
I find I can’t get any information out of Ponting—He won’t give anything away as to his methods of exposure, developing, etc, though I should not think he can lose much by teaching me.
A second calamity is potentially more serious as far as the expedition’s aims go. The men have unloaded the third of the three motor sledges from the ship and are pulling it across the sea ice toward the land where the hut is being erected, when half a mile from the ship, the ice suddenly gives way and the heavy motor sledge sinks, immediately pulling two men with it into the water. One of them is Priestley and he is by far the one in the most precarious position: pulled completely under and, at one stage, under an ice floe. It is my childhood inspiration, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who comes to the rescue. He skis over to the men left standing on the broken ice—who have by now hauled Priestley and the other seaman out of the freezing water—with a lifeline that is used to haul each of them to safety. There is no such happy ending for the motor sled, however: it is in 120 fathoms of water and well beyond being hauled to safety.
It is January 16, 1911. Levick, Campbell, and Priestley leave the main party to get their digs sorted out at Cape Evans and ski over to Cape Royds; the first persons to go there since James Murray shut the door on the hut and the opportunity to be the world’s first penguin biologist.
Scott himself has little desire to go there because of it being Shackleton’s base. As he writes in a letter to Kathleen, “Always I have had the feeling that Cape Royds has been permanently vulgarized.” It is the reason why he had initially considered setting up his base at Cape Crozier. “There is no trail of Shackleton there,” he says to her, revealing how deeply he is tormented by the big Irishman—the big knighted Irishman.
Levick and Priestley are first to go to Shackleton’s hut, Priestley’s old home from the Nimrod Expedition. They break away ice around the door and enter the large dark room, as the windows had been covered with shutters. Levick lights a candle that is by the door. His response on seeing it is uncannily like mine a lifetime later:
In the middle of the hut was a long table with the remains of their last meal.
A tray of bread scones stood on a box, and tins of every description of food stood in piles on shelves round the walls, whilst the mens (sic) beds stood at intervals around the sides. All the little personal belongings of the late expedition lay about, as they had left them on their hurried departure.
It really was like they had just stepped out of the hut. No one felt that more than Priestley, who found the experience of going back to the hut where he had lived “very eerie.”
I expect to see people come in through the door after a walk over the surrounding hills.
Levick takes a walk through the penguin colony, observing the adult birds “bringing in food for their little downy youngsters.” Apart from acknowledging the hard work evidenced by these parent birds there is not a scintilla of enthusiasm for the penguins, nor any evidence that he has any wish to study them himself. To the contrary, he writes in his diary that, “Their habits and characteristics have been so well described by Wilson in his ‘Discovery’ reports that it is no good repeating them here . . .”
He is much more focused on killing Weddell seals, which they cache in the snow and ice for later, and pilfering what they can from Shackleton’s hut for their own ends on the Eastern Party. He is more taken with the hoofprints he can see of Shackleton’s ponies that remain in the snowbanks tha
n he is with the penguins.
It is January 26, 1911, and, following a speech from Scott, the Terra Nova leaves Cape Evans with all the Eastern Party onboard, intent on establishing their base to explore King Edward VII Land. While en route to Antarctica, Scott had discussed with Campbell a possible change from the original plans. Rather than going right along the Ross Ice Shelf until they get to King Edward VII Land, Scott proposed that perhaps they should land at the Bay of Whales, or Balloon Bight, as he insists on still calling it, and use that as their base to get to King Edward VII Land. This provides two advantages from Scott’s perspective. It enables the party to check up on Shackleton’s explanation that Balloon Bight and the easy access it afforded to the shelf has disappeared—something that Scott does not quite believe or trust about Shackleton’s explanation for abandoning his original commitment to stay away from the McMurdo Sound region, which Scott regards as his territory. Additionally, it will save precious coal, allowing the Terra Nova to explore the coastline west of Cape Adare on its way back to New Zealand, where it shall spend the winter. Ironically, the hard-done-by Scott is anticipating exploring the very region that Mawson has proclaimed to be his focus, if not his territory.
The ship stops briefly at Cape Royds where this time Levick’s only interest in the penguins is to collect twenty of them for food, along with picking up the frozen seal meat they had cached there. Once they leave behind Ross Island, they travel eastward along the Ross Ice Shelf, keeping close to its sheer face.
I am on the Shokalskiy doing the same, sailing within yards of the hundred-foot-high sheer cliffs of ice. It is daunting: an impenetrable, perfectly flat-topped block of ice stretching as far as I can see. The occasional crash of falling ice and the scattered icebergs that have calved off its face are the only hints that this giant sheet of ice is alive and moving. The sea is deep, an inky black, yet where its swell undercuts the edge of the wall of ice, the light reflects as a bright turquoise even though the day is dull and cloudy. The walls are impossibly steep and chiseled, like a giant sculptor—a giant Rodin or Kathleen Scott—has hacked at the edge of the shelf with a giant chisel and mallet. A pair of minke whales swim in the narrow space between us and the wall of ice. Quite fitting really, because at the only place where the wall could be breached, Shackleton had found such an abundance of whales that he named it the Bay of Whales.
At first, the Terra Nova, captained by Harry Pennell with assistance from Wilfred Bruce and Victor Campbell, takes a course directly to King Edward VII Land, but like Shackleton three years before, they meet a barrier of dense, impenetrable pack ice. Turning back, they head for Scott’s Balloon Bight, arriving there in a gale, late on the evening of February 4, to find that, indeed, it and the nearby bight discovered by Borchgrevink have gone, replaced by a large bay and now the edge of the shelf is considerably farther to the south. It is the Bay of Whales, just as Shackleton had said and Priestley already knew. At least Priestley is glad to have “set the matter at rest finally.”
It is just after midnight on February 4, 1911, as the Terra Nova edges its way deep into the bay and, yes, there are whales blowing around them. Bruce is on the bridge when he sees the most unexpected of sights. They are at the extreme end of the great Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. It is a place that Bruce has already described in a letter to his sister as being the most desolate place in the world. And yet, here, tied up to the ice, is another ship.
As Levick records after he is woken and rushes on deck with the rest, “None of us needed to be told that it was the ‘Fram’.”
They moor the Terra Nova nearby and Campbell, Levick, and Priestley ski over to what they think is the Norwegians’ hut, only to realize it is a store. Going over to the Fram, Campbell goes aboard and from the lone watchman learns that their hut is actually two miles away from the edge of the ice and that Amundsen is expected at the ship at 6:00 A.M.
It is February 4, 1911, 6:30 A.M. Amundsen is driving a dog team and an empty sledge to his ship to pick up supplies. He sees the men driving the two teams ahead of him stop and then wave their arms wildly. When he gets to them, he involuntarily starts gesticulating too: all of them now waving their arms like “incurable lunatics.”
We had talked of the possibility of meeting the Terra Nova . . . but it was a great surprise all the same.
Amundsen heads down to the Terra Nova to meet Campbell. He looks older than Campbell expected, a “fine looking man” with “hair nearly white.” From Priestley’s perspective, however, what impresses him most is the perfect control and ease with which Amundsen works his dog team.
I think that no incident was so suggestive of the possibilities latent in these teams as the arrival of Amundsen at the side of the Terra Nova. His dogs were running well and he did not check them until he was right alongside the ship. He then gave a whistle, and the whole team stopped as one dog.
The inescapable conclusion is clear to everyone on the Terra Nova that morning, not Priestly alone. In what is now, beyond any doubt, an out-and-out race for the Pole, “The principal trump-card of the Norwegians was undoubtedly their splendid dogs.”
The exchanges between the men are very cordial. Amundsen invites Lieutenant Pennell, commander of the Terra Nova, Campbell, and Levick to come to their hut and base, called Framheim, to have breakfast. It is Levick’s turn to be impressed.
We found them all men of the of the very best type, and got on very well.
Amundsen offers that the English can set up their base next to his, and the Norwegian-speaking Campbell is tempted. They can certainly reach King Edward VII Land from here and carry out their ambitious plan for exploring the untouched land. But Bruce and others argue against it on the grounds that, “the feelings between the two expeditions must be strained.”
There is nothing more for it. After reciprocating, by hosting Amundsen and some of his men for lunch on board the Terra Nova, they cast off at 2:00 P.M., turning their backs on their mission.
And so it is that the three Norwegians have conspired to alter the course that Levick’s life takes that day: Borchgrevink had discovered that in this area the barrier (perhaps by virtue of being bent and broken by an underwater island over which it passed) was accessible, then Nansen had given his ship Fram to this other Norwegian, this “fine looking man” as Campbell described him, who had sailed it here and set up camp on the only avenue available to the British to carry out their intended exploration.
The Terra Nova will now head first to Cape Evans to deliver the news and drop off the two ponies that they have with them, as Scott will need all the help he can get if he is to beat the Norwegians and their dogs. Then, they will head north to Cape Adare.
If Levick is perturbed by the events of February 4, 1911, such a pivotal day in his life, he does not let on. In summing it up in his diary, he writes, “This has been a wonderful day.”
PART THREE
CAPE ADARE
Infidelity
The notion that penguins might behave like lotharios, sequentially seducing a bevy of partners, runs counter to the popular image of these famously monogamous and endearing creatures. Moreover, to even suggest that some of them might actually cheat on their partners—have an affair, in our parlance—seems to stretch the bounds of belief, to tar the penguins with our own sins. The view that penguins are more upright than us, morally, if not also in their stance, is as prevalent in science as much as it is in society.
There are several factors that make divorce in Antarctic penguins from one season to the next seem, if not morally admirable, then at least understandable. Their imperative is to breed. Their chances of success are slight. Not only is there high mortality of eggs and chicks, but the great majority of chicks that fledge do not survive to reproduce. In a Darwinian sense, most breeding attempts are dead ends. Storms, predation, the amount of ice cover, the location, and amount of food are all factors that influence breeding success but are variable and largely outside the control of the birds. The one factor that the penguins can c
ontrol is when they breed. The best predictor of whether a chick will survive to reach reproductive age is how big it is when it fledges. In other words, to have any reasonable chance of being successful, parents need to get cracking with breeding as soon as the conditions are favorable to do so. It would be Darwinian suicide to wait for a previous partner and delay breeding, even if that tardy partner is alive.
On the other hand, once penguins have paired for the season, surely they should stick with it. They don’t need to mate together for the rest of their lives, but surely they can and, in their best biological interests, should be faithful for a year? Is that too much to expect?
CHAPTER TEN
THE NORTHERN PARTY
If the Earth were a body, then Cape Adare in Antarctica would be its genitals, the place where you would be most likely to get screwed. It is windswept, bleak, and dangerous. Hurricane force winds sweep down from the Polar Plateau and sandblast it—rock blast it, really—into submission. Today, it is one of the most out-of-the-way, least visited spots in Antarctica. And for good reason: it is beyond helicopter range of the bases in Antarctica and the sea ice conditions often make it difficult for ships to get into it. Ironically, it is here that Carsten Borchgrevink and his men chose to overwinter on the snowy continent a dozen years before the Northern Party found itself facing the same prospect.
It is February 18, 1911. The Terra Nova is once more in Robertson Bay, approaching Cape Adare in the early morning. There is a good deal of pack ice being pushed about by the current and up and down by the swell. The shore itself is encrusted with newly frozen pancake ice, making a landing difficult.
A Polar Affair Page 13
