Had I been in my generator box, observing Kathleen Scott and Douglas Mawson during their lunch, I might have described them, in penguin terms, as approaching each other cautiously and bowing. That is, in the very preliminary stage of courtship when a female investigates a male performing his ecstatic display. Most often it goes nowhere: she turns and runs away. Most often.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE WORST JOURNEY
Of course, not everything we think we know about penguins turns out to be true.
It is June 22, 1911, and men sitting in three huts dotted around the Ross Sea celebrate Midwinter’s Day. Amundsen and his men are at the Bay of Whales, comfortable in their warm hut with its adjoining network of under-ice rooms carved out of the barrier ice. There is ample food, a library of three thousand books, a piano, a gramophone, and even a sauna. Even given the much more modest comforts of the Cape Adare hut and their normally regimented routine, according to Levick, they manage to celebrate in style with champagne, brandy, cigars, and “an extended sing-song.”
Apsley Cherry-Garrard is at Cape Evans. The young, nearsighted adventurer was employed by Scott as assistant zoologist—despite having no training in that regard—only after he offered to forgo a salary and, instead, pay Scott £1,000 toward the expedition’s costs. He describes the scene that night:
Inside the hut are orgies. We are very merry—and indeed why not? The sun turns to come back to us tonight, and such a day comes only once a year.
I went to Scott’s hut at Cape Evans for the first time in 1985. The last word I would use to describe its long dark interior is “merry.”
Certainly, if anyone has cause for not being merry that Midwinter’s night, it is Cherry-Garrard and two of his companions: the doctor Edward Wilson and Birdie Bowers. They are preparing to leave five days later to march to the Cape Crozier Emperor penguin colony to collect eggs, the embryos of which, Wilson surmises, could prove to be the missing link in explaining the evolution of birds from reptiles.
Wilson had already determined during the Discovery Expedition that Emperor penguins, unlike the summer-breeding Adelie penguins, bred during the Antarctic winter. At the turn of the 20th century, these large flightless birds are thought to be the primitive precursors of flying birds. Wilson reasons that if they could just collect some eggs from the winter-breeding Emperors, the eggs should provide insights into the evolution of all birds. There is a generally held belief among scientists at this time that, “embryology recapitulates phylogeny.” Or rather, in something approaching English: when an animal is developing in the womb or the egg, it goes through developmental stages that correspond with its evolutionary past, becoming ever more complicated as it matures.
In 1911, the only known place where Emperor penguins breed is on the sea ice off Cape Crozier, on the other side of Ross Island from the Cape Evans hut.
It is pitch black when the three men leave, hauling two sleds weighing 759 pounds, in temperatures that rarely go above -50°F. Their journey to Cape Crozier in winter will be immortalized by Cherry-Garrard in The Worst Journey in the World, the book that will establish a longing in me to go to Antarctica, although, in hindsight, its descriptions are so shocking in their brutality that it seems unfathomable to me now that they did not frighten me away.
It took two men to get one man into his harness, and was all they could do, for the canvas was frozen and our clothes were frozen until sometimes not even two men could bend them into the required shape . . . Once outside, I raised my head to look round and found I could not move it back. My clothing had frozen hard as I stood—perhaps fifteen seconds. For four hours I had to pull with my head stuck up, and from that time we all took care to bend down into a pulling position before being frozen in.
It takes them nineteen days to cover the sixty-seven miles of crevasse-filled ice to Cape Crozier.
The horror of the nineteen days it takes us to travel from Cape Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it. The weeks that followed them were comparative bliss, not because later our conditions were better—they were far worse—because we were callous. I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain.
It is not just the terrain with its crevasses or crystallized snow that makes it like pulling their two sledges through sand—meaning that they must take one sledge forward, then go back and get the other, walking three times the distance that they manage to bring themselves closer to the penguins each day, which often means making only a mile or two of progress. It is not just the darkness, which means that they cannot see the pitfalls ahead of them, nor the way back to the other sledge. It is the bitter cold, when all their clothing and sleeping bags are drenched and stiff with frozen sweat, frozen breaths, and frozen snow. “They talk of chattering teeth,” writes Cherry-Garrard, “but when your body chatters you may call yourself cold.” The temperatures get as low as -77.5°F.
Once at Cape Crozier, they build an igloo of rocks and snow on an exposed moraine using a piece of canvas as its roof. They are some eight hundred feet above the sea ice on the slopes of Mount Terror.
It is 1985. I am at Cape Bird studying the penguins when a helicopter arrives to pick up two surveyors and transport them to Cape Crozier. The pilot suggests that there is space in the “helo” for me and one of my assistants, and “why don’t you come along for the jolly?” as such perks are called on the ice. He says he can bring us back later, as he needs to come back to Cape Bird. We do not have permission from the New Zealand operators at Scott Base for such a mission, but this is something being offered by the Americans. “Never wait for the second shuttle,” is something another helicopter pilot has said to me and it resounds in my head. We climb aboard.
At Crozier, we land near the knoll where Cherry-Garrard, Wilson, and Bowers built their igloo of rocks and snow nearby. All that remains is an oblong rectangle of stacked black boulders partially covered in snow, knee-high. It looks like it gives way less shelter than even my generator box. The slope itself stretches away to the ice-covered sea. The patchwork of snow and black volcanic rock leaves no doubt that even if Mount Terror is no longer active, it had certainly been so once. To the right is the great white expanse of the Ross Ice Shelf and, where this giant glacier comes into contact with the sea ice, where the surface of the sea has frozen during winter, the sea ice has been buckled by the pressure coming from the slowly moving shelf and been forced up into a jumble of pressure ridges like miniature mountains. Beyond them, perhaps four miles away, there is a dark patch on the sea ice, which, when I use my binoculars, I can just make out is a congregation of Emperor penguins and their large gray fluffy chicks. The ice is stained from their guano and, I suppose, their dirty guano-covered feet.
Even then, even in the full daylight and comparative warmth of the summer, it would not have been easy to reach the penguins. As we stood there contemplating that, suddenly the wind changes unexpectedly and jumps in velocity to over twenty knots, gusting much higher. The pilot has shut down the helo and has to act quickly to get the rotor blades going and lift off, otherwise we will be forced to take shelter near the knoll, just as Cherry-Garrard and the others had, and our pilot clearly is in no mood to engage in such discomfort.
We lift off with a sudden jerk eastward, propelled by the wind as much as the engines. There is no way that we can beat back into it to return to Cape Bird, so the pilot heads southward, taking what little shelter he can in the lee of Mount Terror, finally dropping my assistant and me at Scott Base, much to the consternation of the commanding officer at the base—I had broken the first rule of Antarctic travel: get permission first.
The storm rages for three days before the wind finally dies down enough to enable us to go back to Cape Bird, tails between our legs.
Wilson, Bowers, and Cherry-Garrard make their first attempt to get down to where they believe the Emperor penguins
are breeding on July 19, 1911, but they become entrapped within the mess of crevasses and pressure ridges, which in the almost total darkness are impossible to negotiate. They can hear the penguins, but are forced to return to their camp. The next day they try again, this time near the middle of the day when the darkness is not so “pitchy black.”
After indescribable effort and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and we were the first and only men who had ever done so . . .
The colony of penguins seems to be in some strife. There are only one hundred birds there compared to two thousand or so when Wilson had been there on the Discovery Expedition, and, of those, only about a quarter or less are incubating an egg. Many eggless birds, so desperate to incubate, so primed by their hormones and instincts, are incubating egg-shaped blocks of ice instead.
The men collect five eggs, kill and skin three penguins, and then make their way gingerly back to the igloo in the cold and the dark.
. . . we on this journey were already beginning to think of death as a friend. As we groped our way back that night, sleepless, icy and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, a crevasse seemed almost a friendly gift.
The eggs are in the insides of their fur-lined over-mittens, which they carry tied about their necks but by the time they get back to the igloo, the two that Cherry-Garrard carries in his mittens have been broken. They pickle the embryos from the remaining three eggs in alcohol.
The next day, the weather takes a turn for the considerable worse. A storm of hurricane proportions rips the canvas roof away from their shelter, the sides cave in, and some of their belongings, including their only tent, is blown away.
. . . it was blowing as though the world was having a fit of hysterics. The earth was torn in pieces: the indescribable fury and roar of it all cannot be imagined.
They lie there for two days in their sleeping bags, covered in snow drift, their voices unable to be heard above the roar of the wind, as certain of death as it is possible to be. Then, after such a long time without hope, there is a sudden lull in the storm; a lull long enough for Bowers to find and retrieve their tent. Somehow—even Cherry-Garrard in his book seems unsure how—the three men and the three eggs make it to the safety of the hut at Hut Point, the one that Scott had built during his first expedition. The worst of the world’s worst journey has come to an end.
I am following the surprisingly quick footsteps of the waistcoat-wearing Douglas Russell as he leads me into the bowels of the Natural History Museum’s storage facilities at Tring. It is a veritable mall of birds’ eggs and nests, as well as being a mortuary for the carcasses of animals collected during a time when it was thought that the most essential item needed to study biology was a gun. It would take hundreds of years before recognition of the irony of inflicting death to learn about life should bring a halt to such practices.
Douglas opens a large gray metal cabinet and hauls out a thick-walled jar the size of a jug of beer. At its bottom, pickled in the yellowish alcohol, lies one of the hard-won embryos from the “winter eggs.” It is pale and remarkably big; about the size of Douglas’s thumb. Most of the head seems taken up by two enormous black eyes. If the embryology of Emperor penguins can tell us anything, I reckon, it is that this nascent creature had been on its way to becoming a bird with damn good eyesight.
Douglas tells me that of the million-plus exhibits held at Tring, more people come to see the “winter eggs” than all the other specimens combined. He fetches a plain, oblong cardboard box and ceremoniously removes its lid revealing the two eggs it contains. The very eggs that Cherry-Garrard had delivered personally to the museum and for which he, Wilson, and Bowers had suffered so hard and for so long. The third egg, Douglas explains, is currently in an exhibit at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.
I am stunned; more by what the eggs represent rather than how they are presented. They are large, oval, whitish, and with unexpectedly large and irregular holes through which Wilson had pried the embryos. They seem so unprepossessing, so lacking in any quality that could make men endure such extreme hardships and flirt so closely with death.
Douglas asks me if I wish to photograph them. It is only when I am perched over them that he enquires as to whether I am sure that my lens is attached securely to my camera. I experience a moment of pure panic. My camera is directly above the eggs, a foot away from them, no more. I don’t even have a wrist strap attaching it to me: one cough or a slip, and I will destroy the most famous, most visited items in the collections of the Natural History Museum. I click the shutter quickly, a couple of times, then jerk my camera to the side.
For all their sentimental value, the eggs proved to have virtually no scientific value. Soon after they were deposited in the museum, science realized that penguins were not the original primordial birds but, instead, were derived from flying birds and, even then, relatively recently. In fact, after some cursory initial attention, it was decades before anyone at the museum even bothered to look at the eggs in any serious way.
Yet, if Cherry-Garrard and the others had risked so much for what science treated as being of so little value, I find some enlightenment in his first-ever descriptions of Emperor penguins breeding, as he puts it, “in the middle of the Antarctic winter with the temperatures anywhere below seventy degrees of frost, and the blizzards blowing, always blowing.” He notes that the birds do not have a nest site but “shuffle along” the ice, carrying the egg on their feet.
Where he gets things wrong is that he assumes that these birds carrying the eggs are the females. Nothing exemplifies why Cherry-Garrard is not destined to be the world’s first penguin biologist more than this observation of the incubating penguins:
In these poor birds the maternal side seems to have necessarily swamped the other functions of life. Such is the struggle for existence that they can only live by a glut of maternity, and it would be interesting to know whether such a life leads to happiness or satisfaction.
I cannot help but think of the irony of the comparison with Levick. Cherry-Garrard was employed as the Terra Nova Expedition’s assistant zoologist but he eschewed the style of the dispassionate scientist for that of the breathtaking writer, a man capable of wringing emotion from words in a way that would inspire a young boy in New Zealand half a century later. Whereas Levick, the surgeon who had swapped his double-barreled shotgun for Wilfred Bruce’s fountain pen as he wished to become a writer, should prove to be so objective and methodical an observer of nature that he would explore the scientific ground later covered by that same boy.
While admittedly no scientist, Cherry-Garrard’s wistful reflections are understandable given his own struggle for existence, and not just that of the penguins, during his journey to see them:
I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven; but candidly I did not care. I could not have wept if I had tried . . . Men do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.
It is one of the most gobsmackingly remarkable features of this bird, which breeds in the dead black of the Antarctic winter, that the male alone should incubate the egg for two long months with “the blizzards blowing, always blowing” against his devoted back until the chick hatches. Setting aside that they were the fathers and not the mothers that Cherry-Garrard thought he was observing, his observation that they shuffled about not attached to any particular nest site explains a lot about the mating of Emperor penguins that it would take the better part of a century for scientists to understand.
Wilson may have been wrong about the scientific importance of the embryos that were the motivation for the winter journey to Cape Crozier, but Cherry-Garrard was not wrong about his observation that they had witnessed “a marvel of the natural world.” The Antarctic is such a hostile place in winter that it seems incredible that any animal should choose to live there at that time, let alone breed. And it is true that all the birds and mammals that make the Antarctic continent their home in summer—when there is twenty-four-hour daylight
and the seas are brimming with krill and the greatest abundance of life found anywhere on the planet—get the hell out of there at the first signs of winter. All, that is, except Emperor penguins.
It is 2005. I go to the theater to see a film about Emperor penguins. The story of their extreme lifestyle has gained international attention with the release of a feature-length documentary, March of the Penguins. It is immensely popular and becomes the highest-grossing documentary ever made, pulling in over $127 million at the box office.
The basic story of the Emperor penguins as told in the film is entirely accurate. They breed in the heart of the Antarctic winter. The pairs form in April. A single egg is laid and carried on the feet of the father for some two months while the mother goes to find food at sea. It is completely dark. Temperatures can be as low as -60°F, and winds of over one hundred mph can take the wind chill factor down to levels that make the penguins’ persistence seem more like lunacy than some marvel of the natural world. The mother returns just as the chick hatches, and then, together, mother and father alternate turns, with one feeding and brooding the chick while the other goes to sea to get food.
This cinematic story of a struggle for survival against the odds may have resulted in little more than fascination with one of the peculiarities of biology were it not for the spin the film puts on it: the producers sell it as a love story. As the posters proclaim, “in the harshest place on Earth love finds a way.” The film makes love the enduring, most highly valued commodity of penguins.
The Christian Right in the United States embraces the story. Conservative Christian groups co-opt Emperor penguins as evidence for “Intelligent Design” and family values. As one of their publications puts it:
A Polar Affair Page 15
