Indeed, Nansen, life rarely gets so complicated as when you fuck someone else’s wife.
Murray Levick never saw the likes of this in what he regarded as his sexually depraved penguins. It is one thing for a female penguin to mate with a male and then switch partners—as Levick and I had both documented. In those cases, there is a kind of handing off of the baton, like a relay race, a sort of sequential monogamy. The type of infidelity displayed by Kathleen Scott and Fritjof Nansen is entirely different: such as when a female goes off for a bit of sex but has no intention of leaving her partner.
Theoretically, scientists argued, it should not occur in monogamous species like Adelie penguins where the males and females look practically identical. Such monomorphism they say, using five syllables when three or less would do, indicates that there is little sexual selection in this species, little reason to think that some types of males do better at the expense of the rest, which would lead to an exaggeration of the traits sought after by the females. Like the way some male deer have massive antlers, or some men are tall and blond and come with a rakish mustache and a Norwegian accent compared to the rather bland, round-faced ones. No, the fact that Adelie penguins look so similar, suggests that virtually all of them must get to breed and will have only one partner at any one time.
Yet, it is 1990s and Fiona and I are in the center of the Cape Bird penguin colony observing the Sperm Wars, focusing on recording copulations, whole copulations, and nothing but copulations. Just as with my earlier work, we record a fair bit of mate-switching during the courtship period, like a penguin version of musical chairs. But we go on to make a remarkable discovery: 10 percent of females cheat on their male partners, whipping away for a quickie with a neighbor then returning to their partners. It is behavior that scientists never even suspected could occur, let alone would occur, in these monomorphic and supposedly monogamous seabirds.
Why would they do that? For the males, no explanation is necessary. We already know they are lacking in any form of discrimination, and from the male’s perspective what’s there not to like about getting an unexpected copulation? It is a chance to produce offspring yet have another male raise them: a nice bonus, in an evolutionary sense, if you can get it without any cost. But the females are meant to be the discriminating ones: Why risk pissing off your current partner, the one that will rear the offspring, in order to have a bit of sex with another male if there is no intention of switching, no passing of the baton to the new partner?
However, take any group of a dozen male Adelie penguins and it is a fair bet that one of them will be infertile. Hence, from an evolutionary point of view, the advantage to the female penguin of her duplicitous behavior might be to help ensure that at least one of her eggs will be fertilized in the event that her partner happens to be sterile.
That might excuse a penguin, but not a person: Scott had already proven that he was fertile.
Scott and his men soldier on, but Oates is slowing them down, barely able to walk on his left foot, and they are losing precious time waiting for him. Scott hopes that the dogs he asked Atkinson to send will have brought additional supplies to the next depot, the Mount Hooper Depot.
When they get to it on March 9, 1912, it contains less rations than expected. They had been partially used by the other support parties on their return, especially because no allowance had been made for taking the dogs as far as they did. But much, much worse than that: there is very little fuel. The leather seals on the red fuel cans, which had been placed on top of the food depots to aid their visibility from afar, have evidently swelled as they lay exposed to the sun for so many months and the paraffin oil they contained has evaporated. That might have been alright had the dogs come out this far to meet them with extra supplies, but Scott notes fatalistically now, “The dogs which would have been our salvation have evidently failed.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
DOGS
It is March 10, 1912, and the dogs are, in fact, not so far away: they are at One Ton Depot, seventy-seven miles to the north. They have been there for six days and now, at 8:00 A.M., Demitri and Cherry-Garrard are getting the two teams of dogs ready to move again. Except that rather than going south in search of Scott, they are heading back to Hut Point.
The sequence of events that have brought them to this point might well form the basis of a comedy were the consequences not so tragic.
To begin with, the last support party to leave Scott, the one with three men, had a devilishly trying time getting back from the Polar Plateau. Eventually, their leader, Teddy Evans, had collapsed with scurvy, close to death. They erected their tent and, while one stayed with Evans, the other, Tom Crean, walked for thirty-five miles to get to Hut Point to raise the alarm.
At that moment, Atkinson was at Hut Point and about to leave with Demitri and the two dog teams to take food and fuel to the Polar Party, just as Scott had requested of him. Instead, they took the dogs to get Evans and brought him back to Hut Point on one of the sledges. Atkinson, the doctor, needed to stay with Evans if he was to have any chance of surviving at all.
It turned out that there was only one man who could be spared to go with Demitri to meet the Polar Party and that was Cherry-Garrard. This, despite the fact that the nearsighted Cherry is nearly blind without his glasses, and, in his own words, lacked the requisite qualifications:
I confess I had my misgivings. I had never driven one dog, let alone a team of them; I knew nothing of navigation; and One Ton was a hundred and thirty miles away, out in the middle of the Barrier and away from landmarks.
Nevertheless, they had left Hut Point at 2:00 A.M. on February 26 and managed to travel surprising well with their two sledges and dog teams, getting to One Ton Depot on the night of March 3, 1912.
It is what happened next that seems so lamentable, so laughable were it indeed a comedy: nothing.
They had plenty of food and fuel for themselves and for Scott’s party to get them from One Ton Depot back to Hut Point. What they didn’t have was much dog food. With all Scott’s confused changes of orders, it turned out that Meares had not depoted any dog food at One Ton Depot, as they had expected. The situation was also exacerbated the day after they got to the depot because Demitri came to the young and inexperienced Cherry-Garrard, who was in charge, and asked that they increase the rations for the dogs because they were “losing their coats.” This left them with only thirteen days of dog rations and Cherry-Garrard wanted to allow eight for getting back to Hut Point. In the six days they were hanging out at One Ton Depot, at least two were fine for traveling further south, even by Cherry-Garrard’s own admission, and the others were probably doable for experienced dog drivers like a Demitri or a Meares. Furthermore, Atkinson had told Cherry-Garrard before he left Hut Point that if Scott and his men were not yet at One Ton Depot when he got there, Cherry-Garrard himself was to decide what to do.
If he went south, Cherry-Garrard rationalized, because of his poor navigational abilities, he might have missed the party on the two good days; and, because of the wind-driven snow on the other four days, “the chance of seeing another party at any distance was nil.” He had calculated that the available dog rations would allow him to go for only a day’s march anyway, unless he killed some dogs to feed to the others; something he was loath to do, especially as Scott had said he wanted the dogs in good shape for the following spring sledging trips that were planned.
And so Demitri and Cherry-Garrard simply sat at One Ton Depot, waiting for Scott. Until now, March 10, when they are turning for home. Ironically, they make “23 to 24 miles (statute) for the day.” It would have been more than enough had they taken some food and fuel that far south.
What seems so unfathomable is that the men with Scott include the two men with whom Cherry-Garrard had taken the perilous winter journey; the two men to whom he certainly owes his own life. Together, they had crossed the line that separates life from death, yet somehow returned. Surely, he owes those men whatever risks it would take to g
o south on the basis that, perhaps, they are again near that line.
But Cherry-Garrard has managed to convince himself that his friends and his leader are doing fine.
It is March 10, 1912, and the awful stark reality for Scott’s party is that if they move only at the pace Oates can manage, they are all dead men. As Cherry-Garrard and Demitri head back to Hut Point, Scott assesses clinically the risk that Oates poses for the rest of them:
. . . if he went under now, I doubt whether we could get through. With great care we might have a dog’s chance, but no more. The weather conditions are awful, and our gear gets steadily more icy and difficult to manage. At the same time of course poor Titus is the greatest handicap.
The following morning, March 11, 1912, Scott orders Wilson to “hand over the means of ending our troubles.” Reluctantly, the very religious Wilson gives each of them thirty opium tablets, leaving himself with a tube of morphine.
It is March 12, 1912. The Aurora arrives back in Hobart, having dropped Douglas Mawson’s main party at Commonwealth Bay and his Western Party on an ice shelf, which they have named the Shackleton Ice Shelf. As the Aurora motors past the Fram, which is still in the harbor, John Davis and his crew come out on deck and give three cheers for Amundsen.
Later, Amundsen gifts twenty-one of his Greenland dogs to Mawson, including one that he had taken to the South Pole and back, which Davis will take down to Mawson on the Aurora.
The dogs are coming for Mawson, at least.
By now, the scientist has become the predator. With hope of the Terra Nova coming all but gone, Levick and the others set about killing as many seals and penguins as they can get. For those penguins remaining at the little colony Levick had discovered, it is not the impending winter that they need worry about. By March 14, 1912, the men have killed 118 Adelie penguins—all those they can get their hands on—and added them to a food larder. They have also killed nine Weddell seals, of which they have eaten two. Even so, the prospects of getting enough food do not look good: Levick estimates that they shall need twenty seals, and as long as the wind continues to blow relentlessly, the seals choose not to come ashore.
Meanwhile, the men also work at digging out their snow cave using ice axes and whatever else they can use to fashion its sides. All the while, the wind blows. On March 17, 1912, Campbell, Priestley, and Dickason move into the still-unfinished cave. Meanwhile, Levick, Browning, and Abbott remain camped at the place they call Hell’s Gate—the place where they had first landed at Evans Coves—in order to watch for the ship and kill and cut up the seals and the penguins. These men had become the butchers.
For the first time in ten days, Levick writes in his diary:
Abbott, Browning & I have killed & butchered 8 seals, and we have killed about 100 penguins: all the moulting birds that remain. I think we ought to have 20 seals to last us till the spring.
Levick does not look forward to what lies ahead of them: “it is going to be a queer time for us through the dark months.” And, given the conditions right now, God knows what it will be like then.
The wind has blown now from the S.E. for a whole month excepting one day, and we are all exasperated, it is so damned cold and miserable, and frequently prevents our getting about at all when we ought to be getting on with the sealing and work on the cave, and we are losing the sun daily.
As Cherry-Garrard, Wilson, and Bowers found out the hard way, Emperor penguins are able to live and breed during the Antarctic winter. However, they are only able to do so because of some unique physical and behavioral adaptations. To begin with, they are big—huge, by penguin standards, with one Emperor weighing more than seven Adelies stacked together—reducing their surface area to volume ratio and thereby helping to minimize heat loss. When it gets really cold, they huddle together, shifting around so that the individuals on the outside get to take their turn on the inside where they benefit from the huddle’s collective warmth and protection from the wind. They can only do this because they do not have a nest site. Instead, they carry their eggs on their feet. This means having a clutch of only one egg, and a big egg at that. They breed on the sea ice in the lee of ice cliffs, but it must be sea ice that will remain secure throughout the winter. Food is likely to be far away, requiring them to walk many miles, perhaps ninety or more, across the frozen sea ice to open water. They manage this constraint only because they are so darn big, with the males being able to go for three months in the cold Antarctic winter without food in order to get through the courtship period, as well as incubating the eggs on their feet for the entire two months it takes to incubate the eggs. This gives the females time to walk to the open sea, fatten up, and then walk back to the colony with food for the newly hatched chicks. The males even have an incredible insurance policy should their partners be a bit late getting back with food for their chicks: incredibly, the males can break down their own body tissues to manufacture a form of food. Daddy’s milk.
Even if humans like Levick or the small Adelie penguins could somehow withstand the Antarctic winter’s cold, there is no way that either could go without food for long. For the Adelies, this means that when winter arrives they must get away from the icebound Antarctic continent and go to areas where there is open water and access to the food they need.
But where might that be? Ever since Scott’s Discovery Expedition, we had known that Adelie penguins inhabit the continent only during the summer months, but we had no idea how far they went or where. In the dark Antarctic winter, in an environment sheathed in ice and icebergs and subject to vicious storms, following the penguins would seem to be an impossible task. Except, potentially, it could be accomplished by satellites. The big breakthrough came in the 1990s with the miniaturization of electronics and improvements in battery technology needed to power a transmitter that could send a signal to satellites passing overhead more than five hundred miles above the Earth.
It is 1991. I am at Cape Bird as late in the season as it is possible to be. Each summer season, there comes a day in mid-February when the American and New Zealand Antarctic programs must shut down their helicopter operations. I am scheduled to be pulled out of Cape Bird on the last day scheduled for flights.
It is a weird place at that time of year. Instead of bustling activity and noise as during the heart of the penguins’ breeding season, it is quiet and almost deserted. The subcolonies have all lost their structure, the stones that lined their nests now scattered thither and yon. There is a smattering of penguin chicks left. Most are “de-downed,” as Levick would have described them, having grown their survival suits of feathers that will enable them to endure being immersed in the cold Antarctic waters for long periods. Their backs are blue-black, the same shade as the ink in Levick’s Zoological Notes. Their chins are white. Some still sport a few tufts of down on the tops of their heads, but otherwise they are slim versions of an adult penguin, ready to prove themselves in the watery world beyond.
Thick snowflakes have started to fall from skies black with winter’s clouds. The odd down-covered chicks, pathetic runts, stand immobile, their backs plastered with snowflakes, as they wait for death.
The beach has changed too. Gone is the barrier of push ice, that ten-foot-high jumble of huge ice blocks thrown up by winter’s storms, which normally separates sea from land. The exposed beach is black shingle, although there are clusters of small rounded pieces of ice bobbing in the waves and being tossed onto the beach like pieces of flotsam.
The adult penguins that remain at Cape Bird, like the chicks, are largely immobile too: they are molting. Mostly they hang out in little valleys at the base of the cliffs, their loosened feathers carpeting the snow around where they stand, unmoving, conserving all the energy they can. Producing a new set of feathers is energetically very expensive and, while they shed their old feathers and wait for the new lot to grow, their insulation is much reduced. Bereft of effective insulation, the molting penguins are unable to go to sea to feed. Instead, they try to stand close to the cliffs, out
of the wind.
Most of the sixty thousand adult birds that breed at Cape Bird do not, in fact, molt there: they leave the colony at the end of the breeding season, fatten themselves up at sea, and then molt elsewhere. That might be on pack ice, icebergs, or ashore at other colonies. When Borchgrevink became the first person to stand on Franklin Island, he discovered massive numbers of molting Adelie penguins there, suggesting that it is a popular molting location for at least some birds in the Ross Sea area. Nevertheless, at Cape Bird, a few adults remain to molt in the colony and, it is possible, some may have come from elsewhere.
I find two adults that have completed their molt and, with help from my colleagues, I attach transmitters to the new feathers on their lower backs using a combination of an epoxy resin and a special tape. It is snowing lightly and it is cold work. I press the transmitter in place with my bare fingers: the five-minute epoxy glue takes more like fifteen minutes to cure in the freezing conditions.
Each transmitter has cost nearly as much as my car. It is unlikely we will ever retrieve them. Nobody has ever done this before. It is unknown if the glue and tape can hold the transmitters to the feathers for the whole winter, and even if they do, the batteries are not strong enough for them to function that long, hence, we will have no way of finding the birds again, except visually. Even assuming these birds return to Cape Bird, with over sixty thousand birds in the colony, finding them will be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
No. As I walk away from the birds, which are now standing unfazed with a streamlined bump on their lower backs, I know that I am consigning the equivalent of two cars to spend their future in the same graveyard that holds Framheim: the bottom of the Ross Sea. Such can be the price of science.
A Polar Affair Page 23
