Campbell’s insistence upon stowing the best of their clothes and the best of their food in order to allow for spring sledging seems like an extraordinary piece of foresight when their feet and fingers are freezing and their bellies are empty. It is not unlike the equations the penguins must solve for their winter migrations. They must make sure they have new clothes (feathers) and adequate reserves, not just to exist but to propel them through their long journeys.
It is the winter of 1991. The French Argos satellites, orbiting the Earth every one hundred minutes, are picking up signals from the transmitters glued to the backs of the two penguins from Cape Bird. They are able to record the position of the penguins to within a mile or two of accuracy. The birds are following roughly the same path that the Terra Nova took when getting out of Ross Island for the winter. They travel up the Victoria Land coast, passing the Drygalski Ice Tongue, passing Evans Coves, passing Cape Hallett, moving north at an extraordinary average of over thirty miles each day. When they get to Cape Adare at the outer tip of the indentation that forms the Ross Sea, they hang a left and move westward along the part of Antarctica that had proven off limits and unexplorable to Borchgrevink, Campbell’s men, and Mawson. At a certain point, when opposite another massive ice tongue similar to the Drygalski, they turn north, appearing to slow down then and spend the winter fishing in the pack-ice northwest of the Balleny Islands.
All signals are lost from the penguins after five and a half months, most likely because the batteries have become exhausted in the frigid waters, but the data they have furnished are staggering. The penguin that was tracked for the longest traveled over nine hundred miles from Cape Bird to its winter feeding grounds: farther than Amundsen and Scott’s journeys to the South Pole. Except that it did not move in a straight line. The actual distance traveled by the bird was 1,735 miles. Given that the birds must make the return journey to Cape Bird for the start of the new breeding season, that means that their winter migration is likely to mean traveling over three thousand miles. Not bad for a knee-high bird that cannot fly.
I think back to that first penguin I met on that October evening at Cape Bird in 1977. If I had known what I know now, I would not have just bowed, I would have gotten down on my knees to worship this tiny creature that had just returned from navigating its way over three thousand miles through the dark, ice-filled waters of Antarctica in winter. Incredible. No wonder so many do not make it.
It is May 1, 1912. Cherry-Garrard, Demitri, and Atkinson are traveling with the two dog teams from Hut Point to Cape Evans.
Earlier, on April 17, Atkinson had taken three other men with him and left Hut Point on a brave, probably foolhardy, attempt to get to the Northern Party by traveling up the coast like the migrating penguins. The sun had all but disappeared for the winter, it was dark and cold, and the ice conditions were treacherous. After three days’ hard slog, they got only as far as Butter Point on the other side of McMurdo Sound, where they found the sea ice ahead of them was breaking up. They could not go north to meet Campbell’s men any more than the Northern Party could get south to meet them. They depoted supplies at Butter Point and returned to Hut Point. Campbell’s party would have to make do by itself.
It is hard going in the gloom on an ice surface that makes it difficult for the dogs to pull the sledges. One dog, Manuki Noogis, lies down and refuses to go on; they cut him loose hoping that he will find his own way back to the hut at Cape Evans, but he is never seen again. As they near Cape Evans, Atkinson asks Cherry-Garrard if he would go for Campbell or the Polar Party come the spring. Cherry-Garrard does not hesitate, “Campbell,” he replies.
. . . just then it seemed to me unthinkable that we should leave live men to search for those who were dead.
Yet, the responsibility for finding out what has happened to the Polar Party and whether they reached the pole weighs heavily upon Atkinson. On June 14, 1912, a week before Midwinter’s Day, he calls a meeting of all at Cape Evans to discuss their options come the spring.
The thirteen men are all that remain at Cape Evans from the Terra Nova Expedition. The hut is hushed. Any frivolities replaced now by the seriousness of the decision confronting them. Atkinson addresses the men. There are simply not enough of them to mount two search parties. Either they go south to try to ascertain what became of Scott and the Polar Party or they go north to try to rescue Campbell and his men, who, potentially at least, might have survived the winter on seals and penguins, however small that chance might be; unlike the Polar Party members, who have no such chance. On the one hand, they might go south and fail to find any trace of the Polar Party, while Campbell’s men “might die for want of help.” Cherry-Garrard reiterates the moral dilemma they face, much as he had expressed it to Atkinson on the journey from Hut Point to Cape Evans six weeks earlier: “Were we to forsake men who might be alive to look for those whom we knew were dead?”
Atkinson points out that even if they could get to Campbell, it is likely they could do so only five to six weeks before the Terra Nova should return and be able to pick them up anyway. He expresses his own conviction that they should go south. The primary purpose of the expedition has been to get to the South Pole. He suggests that they owe it to the men of the Polar Party and their relatives, as well as the expedition as a whole, to ascertain their fate if at all possible. He puts the two options to the vote. All, including Cherry-Garrard, vote with Atkinson. Only Lashly abstains and refuses to vote at all.
Like Manuki Noogis, then, the decision has been made to cut Campbell’s Northern Party loose and leave them to find their own way back to the Cape Evans hut. The dark truth that settles uneasily on them more certainly than the long black night outside, is that none of them know if, like their dog, they will ever see Campbell, Levick, Priestley, Abbott, Browning, and Dickason again.
The night is at its longest and blackest. It is June 22, 1912, Midwinter’s Day. In the snow cave at Evans Coves, Levick describes it as “a great day of feasting.” He and Priestley are the cooks. They prepare “the most magnificent hoosh, with emperor penguins (sic) hearts and livers, and seals (sic) liver, meat, and plenty of blubber.” This is followed by a “brew of Fry’s Malted Cocoa of the actual strength employed in civilisation, and I think we enjoyed this more than anything.” After this comes “four biscuits and four sticks of chocolate each, and 12 lumps of sugar.”
I have not realised how hungry I have been during the last month or so, till I felt the relief of a full stomach and the absence of a worrying appetite.
They also drink their only alcohol, a bottle of British fortified wine called Wincarnis. Priestley says, “none of the famous wines of the world could possibly taste to us as did this,” although, while chopping meat, he knocks over his mug of the precious wine, spilling it over his sleeping bag. He manages to save less than a tablespoonful, although he good-humoredly maintains this enhances his appreciation of the little wine that remains. Yet like Levick, it is the full-strength cocoa that is his pick of the meal:
The hoosh flavoured with seal’s brain and penguins’s liver, was sublime, the Wincarnis tasted strongly of muscatel grape, and the sweet cocoa was the best drink I have had for nine months.
The importance of the Midwinter’s Day feast in maintaining their mental well-being cannot be overstated. It had sustained them for two weeks beforehand, discussing and anticipating what the menu should contain. And the memory of the treat from the next day forward, when they “once more went back to a subnormal allowance” of food, coupled with the knowledge that “everyday now the sun will come nearer and nearer to us,” suggests that life should improve and there is literally going to be sunlight at the end of the tunnel that forms the entrance to their “miserable hole.”
Campbell wants to ensure that his men, like successful penguins, make it through their own winter and migration. He had set aside the spare clothes they would need in spring and divvied up the rest between them for living in the snow cave. They have shelter and a modicum of insulation fr
om their clothing. What they most lack, what is most critical, is food.
It is July 10, 1912. They are running low on meat and already down to half rations. The men cook in pairs, with a pair cooking the two meals for a day, then having two days off. Levick cooks with Priestley and it is their day to cook.
Campbell, meanwhile, goes outside at midday for a walk down to the beach where he spots a seal, the first they have seen for three months. Rushing back to the igloo, he grabs Abbott and Browning and they head back down to the ice edge where they find a fat cow and a large bull Weddell seal. Abbott stabs the cow in the heart with his knife, but the bull seal is a harder proposition as it heads for the water. Abbott bashes it with his ice axe to little effect and, as a last resort, jumps upon its back, whacking it on its nose with his ice axe, which stuns it enough to bring it to a stop. He reaches out to Campbell for his knife but he does not notice that Campbell has handed him Browning’s knife instead. The handle of Abbott’s knife is bound so as to form a stop between the handle and the blade, but Browning’s is not. Abbott thrusts the knife with all his might into the thick blubber of the bull seal to penetrate its heart. The handle of Browning’s knife is greasy and, without the stop, his hand slides unimpeded down the sharp blade, slicing deeply through the base of the three middle fingers on his right hand.
Campbell sends Abbott back to the igloo while he and the others butcher the two seals. By the time Abbott gets to Levick, “His fur mit (sic) was nearly full of blood which soon froze into a solid block.” Levick faces a difficult choice: his hands are “filthy & soaked with blubber from the stove,” his fingers are “stiff with cold,” and he has only “the guttering light of a blubber lamp held by Priestley.” He opts to dress the wounds in bandages right away rather than risk infection by trying to open the wounds up to see if the tendons have been cut, because even if they have been, Levick doubts that he will be able to find the severed ends and repair them in the dim light with his frozen fingers. Yet he frets about his decision:
I shall feel rotten about it if his tendons are cut, but think it would have been risking serious suppuration if I had attempted enlarging the wounds and picking up the severed ends, even if I had been able to find them in this light, so great was the filth of my hands & whole surroundings.
The next evening, Levick washes and dresses Abbott’s wounds. He observes, “The tendons of three fingers are cut I am sorry to say.”
Two days after finding the two seals, Browning and Dickason find another two and butcher them. Things are looking up on the food front. “We had another double hoosh,” Campbell notes, to celebrate their changing fortunes.
Apart from the physical hardships that living in a hole in a snowbank during an Antarctic winter poses, the psychological hardships are no less of a risk to their chances of surviving the almost impossible. The cold and the perpetual darkness had played havoc with the minds of the crew of the Belgica during the first Antarctic winter endured by men—and that was on a dry ship with plenty of food. Inasmuch as Levick is the Northern Party’s doctor looking after their physical well-being, he also plays a crucial role in attending to their psychological well-being. He recognizes the need to remain cheerful and positive in outlook. Each night, by the flickering light of a blubber lamp, he reads to the men from one of the few books they have with them. First, Boccaccio’s Decameron, followed by the newly published novel Simon the Jester by William John Locke, then Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and afterward, Balfour’s Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Decameron is an unusual choice: the focus of the one hundred stories it contains is often on human sexuality and depravities. Levick, ever one to display his Victorian-bred roots, pronounces it “a most boring production.” However, the parallels with his observations of penguins cannot have escaped him: Boccaccio’s 14th century Italian tales deal with lust, insatiable sexual arousal, deception, and infidelities—all things he had observed in the penguins. And yet, nowhere in the blubber-stained diaries the men keep in their dark cave, in which they discuss food and life in minute detail, is there a single mention of them discussing the behavior of penguins, and certainly nothing in reference to Decameron. Their only references to penguins concern how good they are to eat.
Crucially, Levick becomes Campbell’s confidant. Campbell is a leader in that he makes well-considered decisions, but he is not a leader who inspires, not a person given to emotion, and certainly not one to reach out to the men. Even within the confines of the most wretched living conditions imaginable, he still maintains naval disciplines, including booking Browning for misconduct for turning out late from his sleeping bag to cook the meal.
Levick is able to engage Campbell in a way that the others cannot. He and Campbell spend long hours in the darkness discussing in great detail the various motorbike tours they will undertake when getting back to civilization. This inevitably involves “dining sumptuously at the various inns on the way,” where they discuss ordering the meals in “the most minute particulars, wine and all.”
It is uncommonly cheering to think of the stretches of white dusty road at home at the present time, with green trees and flowers, pretty girls in summer dresses, and all the other things there that make life good, including the motor-bike I’m going to buy when I get back, until one feels inclined to smash down the door of this damned dismal little hole and clear out, only there’s the beastly thin Plateau nosing round outside. It wont (sic) be like this on the Saskatchewan!
Indeed, the Saskatchewan. One journey, in particular, exercises Levick’s imagination. He decides that he will become a writer, “and one of my hottest ideas at present is a canoe trip from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic, right through Canada, down the Saskatchewan, and writing about it, with plenty of good photographs.” Campbell, who knows Canada well, helps him by sketching out a map of the journey.
Campbell & I spend hours over planning my trip down the Saskatchewan. He knows the country round Winnipeg and Edmonton, and has shown me the route on a rough map.
It will make the subject for a good book with fine photographs and should not take more than four months, so that six months half pay would easily see me through it.
I write now, to read later, that if I dont (sic) do this trip I ought to be led out and shot.
Led out and shot? At that moment, there are a heap of other things likely to kill him first, not least being the two hundred miles of crevasses and chasms lying between him and safety.
CHAPTER TWENTY
RETURN JOURNEY
As the men lie in the cave, the thought that most terrifies them about getting out of the snow cave and their march to safety is the Drygalski Ice Tongue, which they know from Mawson’s arduous trip to the Magnetic South Pole on Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition is a minefield of crevasses just waiting to suck them down at any time. They do not feel in a condition to cope and it seems like it would be such a cruel shame to survive the winter but not the perilous march to Cape Evans. Originally, they had hoped to be able to sledge to Cape Evans over the sea ice, as they expected the surface of the sea to freeze over during the long cold winter. But their forays out from the cave reveal that the winds and storms have produced mostly open water. Even if some freezes, it will be too unstable and too risky to cross. Their only option is to go across the Drygalski, which Levick confesses makes him apprehensive:
Personally I am looking forward to the sledge journey before us with mixed feelings, and I think this applies to all of us: relief at getting away from this dismal squalid life, and a little reluctance at the idea of the bad time we are probably in for, crossing the Drygalski Barrier.
The other big decision they face is when to leave. Campbell is desperate to get away as early as possible, but Levick and Priestley much prefer to wait until the temperatures are more conducive to spring sledging.
Campbell says he means to start on or about the 22nd Sept. Priestley and I are both against starting till the end of the first week in October, seeing no reason for start
ing earlier, and the temperatures will have risen by then.
As it turns out, there is no need for the Antarctic to teach the same lesson to Campbell as it had to Amundsen: in the end, it is severe diarrhea, which affects them all throughout September, that renders them unfit for walking anywhere save for crawling to the roundhouse at frequent and irregular intervals.
The epidemic of diarrhoea continues in spite of precautions. Tonight the hoosh, which had liver in it, was distinctly “gamy” in flavour. All have joined the ranks, Priestley and I holding out longest of all.
Levick starts to keep a scoreboard of poos: “Campbell 2. Levick 2. Priestley 4. Abbott 3. Browning 3. Dickason 2.”
On September 5, 1912, Levick needs to rush to the roundhouse, only to have Priestley come shuffling down the shaft “in the last extremity.” So they alternate turns at voiding their bowels until Priestley returns to his bag. But Levick is there for forty minutes, according to Campbell, and becomes very cold.
It is September 6, 1912. Levick writes: “Our small stack of literature is disappearing fast.” Presumably it is what they use to clean themselves. The image of Levick, hunched over in their tiny toilet area scooped out of the snow, wiping his bum with pages of the Decameron, strikes me as a metaphor for the contradictions and tensions apparent in his penguin study: wild sex, perverted even, for which Levick cannot hide his contempt, and disgust.
At a certain point in the Antarctic winter, when the nights are still long, even as far north as latitude 67°S northwest of the Balleny Islands where the Adelie penguins have congregated, the penguins receive hormonal signals from their pituitary glands that it is time to head home, time to head back to the breeding grounds. By now they are fat from gorging themselves on krill and fish when they are not resting on pack ice. Even so, the journey they face is a daunting one: for those that breed on Ross Island, it is at least a thousand-mile swim. But such is the biological imperative to breed, such is the power of their hormonal instructions, that they do not stop to think about it once, let alone twice.
A Polar Affair Page 25
