The final advance to the Pole was, according to plan, to have been made by four men. We were organized in four-man units: our rations were made up of four men for a week: our tents held four men: our cookers held four mugs, four pannikins and four spoons.
On the last day of 1911, without explanation, Scott orders that the four men on the other sledge must depot their skis. It is a baffling decision because as he himself notes, thereafter, “We started more than half an hour later on each march and caught the others easy. It’s been a plod for the foot people and pretty easy going for us.”
It seems clear that Scott intends to take only four men onto the pole and they are to be the four pulling his own sledge, which consists of Wilson, Titus Oates, and the seaman Taffy Evans, in addition to himself. However, two days after ordering the others to leave their skis behind, while confirming that three of the men on the other sledge are to go back, Scott adds the remaining man to the team to go onto the pole: Birdie Bowers, the five-foot, four-inch Scotsman who had already proven his mettle with Wilson and Cherry-Garrard on the winter journey to the Emperor penguins at Cape Crozier. In addition to his strength, Scott wants Bowers because of his ability as a navigator: none of the others on his sledge can use a theodolite properly. This, however, creates enormous logistical problems when sledges, tents, cooking, and food have been arranged for groups of four-men. Plus, there is the other glaring issue: Bowers has no skis.
The sensible thing might have been to have swapped Bowers for Oates. Wilson, and Atkinson before him, have warned Scott that Oates is suffering because of his feet. However, Oates is an army man and Scott is determined to have both the army and navy represented when they finally, victoriously, get to the South Pole—as now seems likely, given that they are only about 150 miles away.
It is January 4, 1912. The three-man sledge party bids farewell to the Polar Party and turns back for Cape Evans. At first, they continue to watch the five men, dark dots, four on skis and with Bowers on foot in their center, as they pull their sledge and quickly disappear into the white eternal nothingness that lies before them. The three men have a harrowing journey ahead of them, when death will seem as much a relief as it will seem inevitable, and yet, it is nothing to what lies ahead for the other five.
Scott, though, is largely oblivious to that. His diary entry for the day proclaims, “At present everything seems to be going with extraordinary smoothness.”
It is January 4, 1912. Good fortune, it seems, is also with the Northern Party. Rather than being left alone, they are boarding the Terra Nova to be taken away from the prison that Cape Adare had become for them.
For the preceding week, pairs of the men had been taking turns to camp at the top of Cape Adare near Nicolai Hanson’s grave to keep a lookout for the return of the Terra Nova. Yesterday morning, at 8:30 A.M., Levick had seen the little ship steaming toward them. He hoisted “the flag to signal to the hut.”
Today, the captain of the Terra Nova, Harry Pennell, decides that they must get out of Robertson’s Bay quickly before it gets closed in with pack ice. The men are forced to abandon their loading and get onboard the ship immediately. Levick leaves behind his precious samples of lake water and two leopard seal skins.
Most significantly, however, it is his penguin study that Levick is leaving behind. And this at a time when the colony is once again going through a major change. Just five days earlier, as Campbell wrote in his diary, the chicks had started to form crèches.
The penguin chicks are able to walk now and huddle together in batches.
But the world’s first penguin biologist must board the Terra Nova and leave Cape Adare before he can observe much of that.
Though he has another, much more pressing problem: what to do with his Zoological Notes? The plan is for the ship to transport the Northern Party down the coast to Terra Nova Bay so that they might, at last, carry out some real exploration. Levick will need to leave his Zoological Notes onboard the ship, but what if someone should read them and the atrocities they contain?
I am at Cape Adare and about to leave too, but first, a final look. I wait on the deck of the Shokalskiy for my turn to get into a Zodiac, which has been lowered down the side of the ship by crane. The sea is heaving and it is an awkward step from the runway onto the gray pontoon of the Zodiac. It is late in the evening and already the sky is gloomy: twenty-four hours of daylight, yes, but the sun is below the horizon and the light levels are low. The dark clouds do not help.
We take the Zodiac through the ice-encrusted surface of the sea to Ridley Beach. In places, the underlying black stones of the beach are exposed, but all along the shore there are pieces of ice, either marooned there or being joggled in the swell. Atop most of these pieces of ice there are white-chinned, fledging Adelie penguins, thousands of them, congregating on the shoreline, waiting to take their first swim. Their parents have stopped feeding them. They have been left to their own devices now. Their only hope of survival lies in the surging mass of gray water in front of them. They stare at it, immobile. To a casual observer, it appears as if they are frozen with fear, waiting to build up the courage. And well they might. There is no practice run. They must dive in and then they are on their own in the water for the next two years or so. They will have to learn to hunt for the krill and fish they need by themselves. There are no teachers, no penguin school. And so they wait.
We slow the Zodiac to a crawl, cruising a yard or two from the large blocks of ice that are being bumped up against the shore by the swell. Every now and then one of the fledglings, sometimes followed by a group of its classmates, will throw itself into the water, which is so full of brash ice that it is like jumping into a churning pool of ice cubes. They keep their heads up, as if afraid to put them under water, and they flap their floppy and fairly ineffectual flippers. Perhaps it not the water they are afraid of but what it contains? Not far offshore, we see the dark hump of a leopard seal cruising the shoreline also.
The lot of the chicks further inland is far worse. Those that remain on Ridley Beach, which I can see still standing among the scattered stones that are all that remains of their subcolonies, still with down covering parts of their bodies: they have no future. There are few adults around and though they beg from any that come nearby, it is not with any success. Parents feed only their own chicks and most parents have already left the colony to fatten up so they can undergo the rigors of molt, whereby they replace their worn-out feathers by growing new ones. It is like putting on a new change of clothes with better insulation before the ravages of the Antarctic winter set in.
The sea may be a scary proposition for the white-chinned chicks massed along the shore, where their survival will be uncertain, but for those that remain on land it is death that is certain. It is just as Levick had observed when arriving at this very beach.
We take the Zodiac out into the black waters of Robertson Bay. Penguins are clustered on icebergs with curved sides sculpted by the sun and tides, as if Kathleen Scott herself had a hand in the making of each. Occasionally the penguins dive from the sides of the bergs, like a brief black-and-white waterfall, as the birds respond to whatever instinctual urges are telling them to get the hell out of there. The dark brooding clouds and the shortening days speak of further darkness: the coming winter.
Even the white-chinned fledglings, as fearful of the water as they seem to be, nevertheless throw themselves into it: it is their route to getting out of there, their route to not just future success, but to a future at all. The surface of the sea is starting to freeze over, creating a carpet of ice. The fledglings make their way through it, heads up, more like ducks than penguins. Two clamber onto a small piece of pack ice in front of the Zodiac, but their respite is short.
The large bulbous head of a leopard seal glides toward them. Eyes wide with fear, the young penguins dash, helter-skelter, to the other side of the floe. The three-meter long seal propels itself completely out of the water and slides across the surface of the ice toward them. The gray
-olive skin on its head and back contrasts with its white undersides, which are dotted with black spots. At the last moment, it opens its enormous jaw: a line of massive teeth and a huge pink tongue engulf the slowest of the chicks, grabbing it around its midriff.
There are no sounds. No grunts from the seal. No screams from the chicks. This is a silent assassination. The seal slips into the sea, penguin chick in its mouth. The seal dives with the penguin clamped in its jaws, a futile wave of the penguin’s flipper the only visible sign of a struggle it cannot win.
Returning to the surface with the penguin’s body now limp, the seal slaps the penguin on the surface of the sea with vicious slaps, pulverizing its flesh. Eventually, the leopard seal tilts its head backward and, with a big seal bite, gulps down the penguin: its lifetime since fledgling measured in hours, if not minutes.
During their time at Cape Adare, Victor Campbell and Murray Levick studied the leopard seals in the only way that their Victorian backgrounds had prepared them to do: they shot the seals. Levick dissected one and found that, in its stomach, it had the remains of eighteen penguins.
Despite the dangers that leopard seals pose to adult and fledgling penguins alike, they kill so relatively few compared to the death and destruction about to be exacted by the oncoming winter. In the Antarctic, being late is never a good option for bird or man: it leads to running out of adequate food and being battered by the coming storms.
On January 4, 1912, the future had looked so bright for both the Polar and Northern Parties. How wrong that would turn out to be for all of them. And while luck is always a factor for survival in the Antarctic—an inopportune storm here, a leopard seal there—the chief determinant of success, be it for penguins or men, is most often timing. Doing the right things at the right time.
A storm is coming. We pull anchor, and get the hell out of Cape Adare.
PART FOUR
AFTER CAPE ADARE
Rape
Only humans commit murder; only men commit rape. Until recently, pretty much any biologist would have agreed. Nobel laureate Konrad Lorenz argued convincingly in the 1960s that behavioral feedback mechanisms like submissive postures prevent animals from deliberately killing members of their own species. Similarly, sexual perversions are seen as a peculiarly human condition. Sadomasochism is hard to imagine in birds or other beasts. Rape and gang rape are things we see in our newspapers not in the animal kingdom.
Yet over the last four decades, close inspection of creatures from ground squirrels to great apes, from white sharks to black eagles, from timid mice to the king of the beasts, shows that they all commit murder. It turns out that there are times when, biologically, it pays them to kill their own kind. Murder really can be an adaptive strategy. Murder really can be programmed into an animal’s DNA. Who would have thought?
So if animals can be programmed to commit murder, does it take too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that they could also be programmed to coerce other animals into having sex: to rape? Rape is such a heinous crime that nowhere in our society do we allow for the possibility that it may represent a personality trait rather than a personality defect, a biologically determined characteristic like the color of our eyes. We might not forgive rape, but perhaps evolution could? Perhaps conditions could exist whereby behaviors that give an animal an advantage in producing offspring, as part of natural selection’s own competition, might lead to rape?
One thing we know for sure is that for the Victorian-bred Levick, such thoughts would never have crossed his mind until he went to Antarctica and was more or less forced to observe its penguins.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HOOLIGANS
In my cabin on the Shokalskiy, with the penguins and the shattered remains of the hut where Murray Levick wrote his Zoological Notes behind me, I am left to contemplate, once more, his strange behavior. When Douglas Russell had found and then published Levick’s 1915 manuscript about the sexual habits of the Adelie penguin, it was not just the censorship of his science that caught my attention, it was Levick’s own apparent complicity in keeping the information from the public or, indeed, anyone else. Levick’s attempt to hide some of the more salacious elements of his original observations by pasting over them using a code of Greek letters spoke of someone embarrassed or unsure about the repercussions of what he had observed and written down. The assumption seemed to be that Levick had done this in retrospect, perhaps when back in England, but I now think not.
All the evidence points to Levick doing this while still in the Antarctic, while still at Cape Adare. The ink in the covered-up pieces is the same as the rest of the notebook’s entries and the fountain pen used to make the additions leaves the same telltale markings, especially when writing the letter k.
What is certain is that Levick was worried not about the propriety of his data per se, as everything else was left in English but the sensitivity of some of the subject matter. Or perhaps his sensitivity to the subject matter. His Victorian values. His prudish nature.
Despite all that, he reverted to English after his first censored piece, but left little doubt that it was about the sexual behavior of the penguins:
The cock did not seize the hen with his beak, by the feathers on the back of her head as chickens do. I was lucky enough to get a photograph of this.
Tellingly, the word “chickens” had been added in pencil, crossing out was written there already, as if he had gone back to edit it sometime later. There are also four pencil crosses, like large kisses near the bottom of the page, as if he had marked this page for special attention. There is also an added note, written in a different light blue ink that says, “More notes on this later.” All this suggests that such editing occurred sometime later, whereas the original cover-up occurred when he still had the fountain pen with the blue-black ink. That is, at Cape Adare itself.
The strongest evidence for this, however, comes from the entry in Levick’s Zoological Notes for December 5, 1911. This entry is notable because he wrote in Greek letters but he did so directly onto the page. This was no afterthought following the initial writing, this was a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the content at the time he was recording it, and hence it had to have been done in situ, in the hut at Cape Adare.
At first he wrote in English, “I saw a couple of penguins at an empty nest today, in the midst of a group of occupied nests.” Then he switched to using his code of Greek letters: “the hen was sitting on the nest and the cock copulating with her.” Then he switched back to English: “I mention this as it is so late in the season and the chicks expected out any day, The fact that the nest was empty being remarkable,” which was followed by more Greek letters suggesting, “the copulating is still to be seen occasionally all over the rookery”
The following day, December 6, 1911, he again started to write in his coded Greek letters directly onto the page. But, having written six such words, he crossed them out and continued to write in English instead.
I saw another astonishing sight of depravity today. A hen which had been in some way badly injured in the hindquarters, was crawling painfully along on her belly. I was just wondering whether I ought to kill her or not, when a cock noticed her in passing, and went up to her. After a short inspection he deliberately raped her, she being quite unable to resist him. After this, he had hardly left her before another cock came up, and without the slightest hesitation, tried to mount her. He fell off at first, and desisting, stole two stones from neighbouring nests, and dropped them into a deserted nest just in front of her, after which he mounted and copulated with her. After he had gone, the poor hen struggled about 20 yards, when another cock ran up to her and was just starting in the same way as the other, when a fourth ran up and fought the third cock, driving him away, and afterwards raped her as the others had done. After this, the hen who was much more lively now, struggled on, and had got about ten yards further when no less than three more cocks gave chase, each trying to climb onto her, but this ended in a short fight, afte
r which they went their several ways. The hen lay down, and as the poor thing evidently knew her way, making as she was, in a straight line, I left her, deciding that she might recover if she reached her own nest.
Rape, indeed, gang rape at that, was clearly the nadir, as far as Levick’s opinion of the sexual behavior of the penguins went. As he put it so succinctly, “There seems to be no crime too low for these penguins.”
Curiously, this was one incident—arguably the most depraved of the sexual behaviors of the Adelie penguins that Levick observed—that he left uncovered, undressed in his Greek letters, although it was clearly his intention to do so when starting the entry. Why change his mind? And, more so: Why not paste over them like he did the other entries he had written in English? Was this because he had so clearly passed moral judgement on it and, therefore, it could not reflect on his own moral stance?
He certainly cannot have been covering up his observations to keep them secret from the other men. In fact, Levick noted that he had deliberately called Campbell over so that he might witness the rape with Levick. Strangely, however, Campbell made absolutely no mention of this in his diary. Perhaps Campbell was too disgusted to record such observations, or perhaps he felt it was Levick’s job as the expedition’s assigned zoologist? Although, interestingly, Campbell often made zoological-type observations in his diary on other occasions, such as when he had helped Levick kill the leopard seals. I suspect that rape was not a subject he wanted recorded in his diary.
What seems most likely to me as I sit reviewing the evidence in my cabin, is that faced with being picked up from Cape Adare by the Terra Nova and transported down the coast to go exploring, Levick’s Zoological Notes and photographic plates would need to remain onboard the ship. Perhaps he was most worried about what others might think? In particular, what Wilfred Bruce, the original owner of the fountain pen for which Levick had traded his gun, and the second in command on the Terra Nova, might have thought of what Levick had been up to with that pen?
A Polar Affair Page 20
