Then, just as perversely, Levick switches back to using his code of Greek letters to say where these incidents observed by Browning have occurred.
It turns out that such necrophilia, as Browning and Levick’s observations might suggest, is not all that uncommon in Adelie penguins. Neither is Levick so far off the mark by implying that such behavior is similar in cause to the homosexual behavior that he, and subsequently I, would see. Our observations of homosexuality and necrophilia—indeed, my research with Fiona that showed male penguins will just as readily get it off with a fluffy toy as a female penguin—stem from the same root cause: males are not very discriminating in what they will fornicate with because the costs of making a mistake are so low. Sperm are cheap.
It all comes down to the relative size of the contribution that males and females make to mating. A male passes on his genetic material by way of sperm: tiny, almost invisible tadpole-like things that he produces in the hundreds of millions with every ejaculate. Sperm are cheap to produce and misplacing or misusing even a few million of them is of no consequence: there’s plenty more where they came from, for the most part.
By contrast, the female Adelie penguin passes on her genetic material in the form of eggs, and she produces just two of them each year. They are large and contain yolk and albumen to nourish a developing embryo. The females have a lot invested in each egg and they need to be cautious about with whom and where they mate: get it wrong and the whole breeding season’s opportunity is lost.
So, simply as a consequence of the differences in the size of their respective investments in eggs or sperm, females and males behave differently when it comes to sex. It pays for females to be extremely choosy about who, when, and where they mate. Males, on the other hand, can afford to throw caution to the wind and sow their wild oats wherever they like in the hopes that some will germinate and bear fruit, so to speak. It’s a condition that affects males of many species, including humans.
Levick more or less hints at this when he notes that “now the season is so far advanced there must be a certain number of both cocks and hens wandering about who have been left out in the race for partners . . .” He thereafter switches to more pasted Greek letters to excuse the behavior of the males on the basis that it is the only option left to them.
Who would have thought that a race to breed could be used as an excuse for necrophilia or sodomy; just as who would have thought that a race to the South Pole could lead to so much bloodshed?
It is December 9, 1911. Scott’s party has finally made it to the base of the Beardmore Glacier, trudging through storm after storm after storm. The five ponies that remain are thin and tired, at times sinking in the snow up to their bellies. Oates walks them away and shoots each in turn. The flesh is hacked from their bones. There is blood and guts everywhere. The men name this blood-stained place Shambles Camp. In that regard, they are not so different from the Norwegians: “shambles” originally designated a butcher’s place for slaughtering animals. Even its more modern connotation as a place of carnage seems appropriate.
The pony meat is frozen in the snow to act as a depot for the returning parties of men. Even at this stage, some of the men are looking almost as gaunt and tired as the ponies. None more so than the four men who had been in charge of the motor sledges: they have man-hauled their sledges through the same awful conditions as the ponies for almost four hundred miles to get this far.
It is a strange contradiction, indeed, that Scott can be so against sacrificing dogs for the purposes of Antarctic travel, yet he is so prepared to sacrifice the ponies, which Cherry-Garrard describes as “a horrid business.” Unlike dogs, which might be fed to their companions and thereby allow at least some of them to make the return journey, from the outset there was never any way to carry enough food to get any of the ponies back to base, even were they capable of walking another foot, let alone another four hundred miles. Scott’s plan had always called for the ponies to be killed.
By now Scott’s party is behind schedule. They have already started to eat into the rations intended for use on the Polar Plateau at the top of the glacier. The dogs should have turned back by now, but Scott makes a last-minute decision that they will go on for a couple more days, even though that means all the men giving up one biscuit per day of what are already inadequate rations for such backbreaking, calorie-sapping work.
Scott’s ponies all slaughtered by Shambles Camp; more than half of Amundsen’s dogs slaughtered by the Butcher’s Shop. However, nothing emphasizes the differences between these two expeditions more so than the locations of these abattoirs. Amundsen was already on the Polar Plateau and only 274 miles from the pole. Scott is still on the barrier, still with 10,000 feet to climb and still more than 430 miles to go to the South Pole. Plus, the dogs had been slaughtered on November 21, eighteen days before the carnage of Shambles Camp.
By any measure, Amundsen is well ahead, and his dogs and his men have proven their worth.
It is December 9, 1911. While Scott and his party are at Shambles Camp with the blood and entrails from their five ponies spread about the snow, Amundsen and his four men stay in bed late, resting in their sleeping bags. The day before they have passed Shackleton’s furthest south record, and they are now within ninety-five miles of their quarry. Amundsen has declared it a rest day “to prepare for the final onslaught.”
They make their final depot, taking care to mark the whereabouts of the cairn containing around two hundred pounds of food and fuel with thirty black planks taken from empty sledging cases in a line three miles long on either side of the depot. The next morning, the party that now consists of the five men, three sledges, and seventeen dogs, heads off south in glorious sunshine. “Sledges and ski glide easily and pleasantly,” according to Amundsen, across what is now a “quite even and flat” surface.
The competition is almost over.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
TIMING
Even when not part of the competition, it is possible to be affected by it.
December 11, 1911. Douglas Mawson, aboard his ship the SY Aurora, arrives at Macquarie Island, a large subantarctic island 960 miles south of Hobart. His Australasian Antarctic Expedition had finally got underway from the Tasmanian capital nine days earlier. Unable to go to Cape Adare as planned, because Scott has installed Campbell’s party there, Mawson is forced to head south into the unknown and unexplored parts of the big white continent directly below Australia. First, he is stopping at Macquarie Island to erect radio towers and leave a party there in the hopes that they may be able to relay radio signals between his base in Antarctica and Australia. He had left Paquita in Adelaide six weeks earlier, and though their parting had been more sweet than sorrowful, radio contact with Australia would be a bonus for his fiancée, not to mention all the other benefits it promised.
Macquarie Island is surprisingly steep and rugged, like a piece of land that in another life had been a shark’s tooth: a high craggy ridgeline extends down the entire backbone of the island, making access to its heights difficult. At its northern end, however, there is a small 350-foot-high headland where they will build their wireless communication station.
The black shingle beach is dotted with elephant seals, some alive, some dead. And among the four types of penguins to be found on the island, there are large congregations of the beautiful orange-cheeked King penguins, the very ones that Johann Reinhold Forster, in a case of mistaken identity, had ascribed to the first Emperor penguin seen in Antarctic waters. Despite their numbers, jammed onto the shore between the sea and the steep hillside, there are far fewer penguins than there should have been. For in their midst are large steam digesters that had been set up by a New Zealander, Joseph Hatch, a dozen years earlier. These are used to render down the penguins so as to extract oil from them. Other pots are used to boil up the blubber of seals to also extract oil, the unwanted parts of their bodies left to rot upon the beach.
Mawson is appalled. Yet Hatch’s ship, the Clyde, which had
been preparing to take the penguin and seal oil off the island, had broken its moorings in a gale and been wrecked. Mawson has another ship, the Toroa, coming to Macquarie Island to bring supplies. He offers to take Hatch’s stranded men back to Australia on the Toroa, but only on the condition that it also takes back the penguin and seal oil that can be salvaged and that money derived from selling the oil goes to his expedition.
Mawson is happy to leave all the death and destruction on Macquarie behind as the Aurora finally heads south, but he will not forget the travesty he has witnessed. In the years that Hatch’s men operate the penguin digesters on Macquarie Island, they kill and boil around three million penguins, almost all of them King penguins.
It is December 14, 1911. This is the twenty-first day in a row that Murray Levick has not made an entry in his personal diary. It is as if he does not want to make a public record of what he is seeing. While there are no penguin digesters to appall him, he is repulsed by the behavior of what he calls the “hooligan cocks.”
In his Zoological Notes, Levick had recorded that the first chicks hatched on December 7, although, as one nest had two chicks and within a brood they usually hatch at least a day apart, the first was probably hatched on December 6. He also noted that, “owing to the wind the old birds are sitting very closely and there are probably many hatched already.” Given that the first eggs were seen in the colony by Campbell on November 3, this would be consistent with an incubation period of about thirty-three days, which is pretty normal for Adelie penguins.
Levick correctly deduces the limitations on the parents now that their chicks have hatched:
Whilst the chicks are small the two parents manage to keep them fed without much difficulty; but as one of them has always to remain at the nest to keep the chicks warm, guard them from skuas and hooligan cocks, and prevent them from straying, only one is free to go for food.
In a sign once more of his scientific approach to his study, Levick weighs chicks at different ages and finds that they grow remarkably quickly on their diet of krill, which is brought to them by their parents and then vomited into their gaping and begging mouths. The largesse of the Southern Ocean during this brief period of the summer means that there is food aplenty, and the chicks are quickly transformed from slim gray dots of fluff into chicks with bulging bellies that would be the envy of any male in Newcastle upon Tyne. They amuse Levick.
To see an Adélie chick of a fortnight’s growth trying to get itself covered by its mother is a most ludicrous sight.
From the penguins’ perspective, it is no laughing matter. The secret to their success depends upon timing. The very worst a penguin can be is late. To be successful, the parents are in a race to bring enough food to the chicks to ensure that they become large enough to fledge—large enough to be independent and survive on their own. And even then, simply fledging a chick is not enough: low-weight fledgling chicks are unlikely even to survive long enough to return to the colony to breed someday. They are destined, instead, to become Darwin’s dead meat: the non-survival of the unfittest.
It is December 14, 1911, 3:00 P.M. The sky is blue and clear, the sun is bright and high overhead. Roald Amundsen is on skis, out in front of the line of three sledges and their dog teams, leading the way across a flat, white, nondescript tableau that stretches in every direction as far as he can see. No one place looks any different from the other. But, then, his men driving the dogs, who have been watching their sledge meters to measure the distance traveled with all the intensity of skuas eyeing an exposed penguin egg, shout in unison, “Halt!” They are there. This is the South Pole. And, what is as clear as the day: they are the first humans to ever be here. There is no sign of the Englishmen.
The five men, who have accomplished so much, quietly shake each other’s hands. There is no cheering or back slapping, no hugging or wild exultation. In a measure of Amundsen’s leadership, at his insistence, all five men grip the post with their “weather-beaten, frostbitten fists” and plant the Norwegian flag to mark the geographic South Pole, with Amundsen naming this expanse of nothingness King Haakon VII Plateau.
Amundsen, highly sensitive to the criticism directed at both Cook and Peary, then sets out to make sure there could be no doubt that they have, indeed, attained the South Pole. The next day, in bright sunny conditions, Amundsen and one of the men use their sextant to take accurate readings of the path of the sun throughout the day. To make sure that they have boxed in the area containing the exact position of the pole, he sends the other three men out skiing for ten miles at 90° intervals from the direction where they have come. Each carries a twelve-foot-long spare sledge runner, which at the designated distance (determined by their time of travel), they plant in the snow. Atop the sledge runner is a black flag and a small bag containing a note for Scott.
Amundsen’s measurements and calculations show that they had stopped five and a half miles from the exact position of the pole. On December 17, they move camp to a new position and all four navigators in the party participate in taking readings over the next twenty-four hours to be doubly sure of their position, countersigning each other’s navigation books, in contrast to the lackadaisical records of Peary. In a suggestion that Amundsen does not quite believe either Cook or Peary’s claims of having gotten to the North Pole, he writes:
It is quite interesting, to see the sun wander round the heavens at so to speak the same altitude day and night. I think somehow we are the first to see this curious sight.
In fact, Amundsen’s subdued reaction upon reaching the South Pole betrays that his real ambition had been the North Pole instead.
I have never known any man to be placed in such a diametrically opposite position to the goal of his desires as I was at that moment. The regions around the North Pole—well, yes, the North Pole itself—had attracted me from childhood, and here I was at the South Pole. Can anything more topsy-turvy be imagined?
Their measurements show that they are camped now within 2,500 yards of the actual position of the Pole. Amundsen sends his men out with pennants to mark the area a few miles in each direction to make triply sure they could not be denied their priority of getting to the South Pole, whether that is the prize he had originally yearned for or not.
It is December 18, 1911, when Amundsen and his men erect their reserve tent to which they attach a bamboo pole with the Norwegian flag. Poleheim. Inside they leave some equipment they no longer need and a letter to King Haakon VII with a covering letter addressed to Scott. Outside they leave one of their sledges. Upon their arrival at the pole three days earlier, they had killed one of the dogs and fed it to its companions. Now they return northward, bound for Framheim in the Bay of Whales; five men on their skis, sixteen dogs, and two sledges.
All has gone to plan. Has there been luck? Certainly. For the most part, though, they have made their own luck through Amundsen’s meticulous planning and their adherence to traveling by Eivind Astrup’s method of using skis and dogs. They are all as comfortable on skis as they are experts at driving the dogs and sledges. They have never been in any danger of not having enough food or fuel. Amundsen has depoted and carried three times as much food per man as has Scott. Amundsen’s margins for error, like those of a penguin with a fat belly, are much greater than Scott’s. Scott must depend upon good luck and good weather. Amundsen does not.
It is December 14, 1911, the day that, unbeknownst to Scott and his men, Amundsen has arrived at the South Pole. They are more than four hundred miles behind. The twelve men are hauling three sledges carrying two hundred pounds of weight per man up the 120-mile-long Beardmore Glacier, climbing ten thousand feet to the Polar Plateau. The ponies had been put down five days earlier. The dogs, along with their drivers, Meares and Demitri, had turned back to Cape Evans two days after that.
The snow is deep. None of the men are proficient enough on skis to use them as profitably as the Norwegians might have done, even without their dogs. Scott writes, with some exasperation, in his diary the day the do
gs leave:
Ski are the thing, and here are my tiresome fellow-countrymen too prejudiced to have prepared themselves for the event.
Though rather than blame the men, Scott should shoulder some of it himself. He had taken the young Norwegian skiing expert Tryggve Gran with them to Antarctica at Nansen’s suggestion, but then had not put a priority on using him to get the men up to speed with skiing, despite their many months of living in the snow and ice of Antarctica. Now they are on the Beardmore Glacier, when skiing is their best option for making progress. They ski when they can and trudge when they cannot, often sinking in snow up to their knees, or even thighs. Slipping and falling, they inch their way up the glacier with their heavy loads, draining valuable energy from their already stressed bodies. And, if it is not the snow that is a bother, it is, according to Bowers, “the perfect mass of crevasses into which we all continually fall; mostly one foot, but often two, and occasionally we went down altogether.”
It is December 21, 1911, when they finally reach the upper glacier near the start of the Polar Plateau. It has been no four-day transition from the barrier to the plateau for them: it has taken them three times as long as Amundsen. At this stage, Scott sends back the first of the supporting parties: one of the sledges and four men, including Dr. Edward Atkinson and Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Before they leave, Cherry-Garrard notes that Scott tells Atkinson “to bring the dog-teams out to meet the Polar Party” upon their return from the pole.
The next day, the remaining two four-man sledges continue on toward the pole. One is to be the advance party that will go onto the pole, the other is the supporting party needed to take food and gear as far as possible for a final depot. As Cherry-Garrard writes:
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