When the Northern Party emerges from the snow cave on September 30, 1912, having survived the unimaginable, their lives still look remarkably precarious; the odds of their getting back to Cape Evans and safety, extremely low. For seven months they have existed on a diet rationed strictly by Levick. The only time he really relented was for their Midwinter’s feast on June 22: “One of the memorable days of our lives.”
They have been living in the same clothes for nearly nine months since disembarking from the Terra Nova on January 8. Just before leaving the snow cave, they change into what new clothes Campbell stowed away for just this moment, even though it had seemed at times like it would never come. When Priestley takes off his blubber-soaked trousers, they stand up by themselves. The men load their two sledges with seal meat, blubber, and the supplies of sledging biscuits and other items that Levick had demanded that they retain during the long winter months, even when their empty tummies were saying otherwise.
In many ways, Levick regards it as something of a miracle that they have managed to endure the seven months of an Antarctic winter in a snow cave and all are able to stand at the end of it. Yet Dickason, and especially Browning, are too sick from chronic diarrhea to do much more than stand, let alone pull the sledges.
In the end, the Drygalski Ice Tongue proves to be straightforward—at least as straightforward as it can be for six men drained and strained by a winter’s meager rations of seal meat and almost a continuous month of diarrhea. They discover a gently sloping snow slope to haul their sledges up, and there are mercifully few crevasses in the area. They get across this obstacle, which had loomed so large in the darkness of the igloo, in just three days. At last, it really starts to seem to them that salvation may be possible.
There are still obstacles to face, of course, such as running out of food. Yet, each time they are in danger of that, they discover a seal they can butcher. Eventually, they arrive at Butter Point and the food depot left by Atkinson, gorging themselves on food such as they had never thought they might see again. After that, on November 3, one of their sledges collapses and three days later, close to Hut Point, their remaining sledge gives out. They are able to “borrow” a sledge from Scott’s old hut from the Discovery Expedition, which ever since has functioned more as a sanctuary than a storage facility.
Finally, on November 7, 1912, all six men of the Northern Party arrive at the Cape Evans hut, having rescued themselves. The hut is practically deserted. The cook and the physicist, Frank Debenham, are the only ones there. They are shocked and turn pale. “I believe they thought we were ghosts,” wrote Levick afterward. And in a way, they are. They have come back from an almost certain death.
Everyone else is out looking for the luckless Scott, who they know for certain is dead.
It is November 12, 1912. Led by Atkinson, the search party had set out near the end of October with two dog teams and mules, which had been brought down by the Terra Nova. Apsley Cherry-Garrard is driving one of the dog teams some eleven miles south of One Ton Depot when he sees Charles Wright, who is out in front and acting as navigator, swerve to the right in a spray of snow. Wright has seen a small object and has gone to investigate. It turns out to be the top few inches of Scott’s tent sticking out of a six-foot high drift of snow. Wright motions the rest of the party over and then walks up to Cherry-Garrard, saying simply, “It is the tent.”
They find the entrance to the tent but it is too dark to see inside. It is only when they clear away the snow from the walls of the tent that the grim scene it houses becomes apparent. Birdie Bowers is lying with his feet closest to the entrance. In the middle there is Scott lying on his side with his sleeping bag half undone and an arm flung over Bill Wilson. Their skin is a patchwork of glassy yellow and frostbite. As Cherry-Garrard puts it when describing seeing his two dear friends and Scott—three men he potentially could have saved—in this tent, so close to where he had waited for six days in March without going further south, seems to attest:
That scene can never leave my memory.
Atkinson, as the leader, takes it upon himself to remove the three men’s diaries and letters. There is a loud crack “like a shot being fired” as he moves Scott’s arm to reach his diary. The arm breaks. With Wilson is Cherry-Garrard’s beloved green-bound copy of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which he had lent to Wilson the previous summer when he had said goodbye to the Polar Party at the top of the Beardmore, as they marched on toward the South Pole.
They collapse the tent on the three bodies and build a twelve-foot-high cairn of snow and ice over it. On the top, in a touch of deep irony, the Norwegian skiing expert Tryggve Gran fashions a cross using his own pair of skis. Inasmuch as they mark the fallen, they also tell much of the reason for the fall.
As the search party heads back to Cape Evans, Atkinson, Cherry-Garrard, and the dog-handler, Demitri Gerov, go ahead. On November 25, 1912, they arrive at the Hut Point hut. Cherry-Garrard finds a letter from Campbell tacked to the door by Levick, who had skied across from Cape Evans with it. The news of the safe arrival of the Northern Party is the one bright spot for Cherry-Garrard in what are pretty bleak times:
It is the happiest day for nearly a year—almost the only happy one.
The long-awaited reunion of the Northern Party with their fellow members of the Terra Nova Expedition is muted by the details of the demise of the Polar Party. According to Priestley, when the Northern Party arrived at Cape Evans, “We were entirely free from fat, and, indeed, were so lean that our legs and arms were corrugated.” During the weeks since their return to the hut, Levick and the others who had eked out the barest of livings in the snow cave, have eaten expansively. Everyone is amazed at what good condition they seem to be in. Levick, especially, has put on so much weight he is likened to be the spitting image of King Henry VIII: it seems that when he went through that gate at St Bartholomew’s he hadn’t quite left it all behind after all.
It is November 12, 1912. Commonwealth Bay. Five days after one heroic journey ends and on the same day there is confirmation of the tragic end to another, a different journey is just beginning. After a breakfast of penguin omelets, Douglas Mawson and his two companions, Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis, are setting out from their base at Cape Denison to get as far east as they can, to try to explore the land he had originally planned to explore from Cape Adare.
It is a difficult journey that takes them high up toward the plateau, across crevasse-laden glaciers. By December 14, they have managed to cover 315 miles, but some of the dogs are struggling. They have divided the dogs so that the six strongest are pulling Ninnis’s sledge, which contains their tent, the dogs’ food, and most of their food. The six weakest dogs are with Mawson’s sledge, which contains some spare food, equipment, and cooking fuel. Mertz, an expert skier, is out front scouting their route across what appears to be a benign surface compared to the nightmarish conditions that they have struggled through so far. At a certain point, Mertz signals to Mawson, who is coming up behind him. When Mawson reaches the spot, at first he does not see anything untoward, so he proceeds, but spying the faint telltale marks of a crevasse lip filled with snow, he turns to signal Ninnis, who is coming up the rear. Mawson then carries on following in Mertz’s path.
As Mawson describes it:
There was no sound from behind except a faint, plaintive whine from one of the dogs . . .
He imagines that Ninnis is whipping one of the dogs, but, when he turns again, there is no sign of Ninnis, the sledge, or the dogs. Mawson and Mertz rush back to discover “a gaping hole in the surface about eleven feet wide.” Mawson leans over the edge and shouts into the dark depths below.
No sound came back but the moaning of a dog, caught on a shelf just visible one hundred and fifty feet below.
After some hours “stricken dumb” and calling forlornly down the crevasse, the true awfulness of their own situation hits them like an avalanche. They have only one-and-a-half week’s rations for themselves and nothing at all for the dog
s. They have no tent. They are over three hundred miles from their base, from which it has taken them just over a month to get here, with full rations and fresh dogs.
With so little food, the prospects that they will die of starvation, if the crevasses do not get them first, seems much more than a probability. It is a dead certainty. Perhaps one of them alone might stand, as Scott would have put it, “a dog’s chance,” but there is no way there is enough food for both of them to get back to the hut.
Their situation is not unlike that faced almost every season by Adelie penguins in the race to fledge their chicks. Is there enough food to feed two chicks? And, if not, how should it be distributed when there is a brood of two chicks?
It is January 15, 2005. My son Daniel and I, together with an assistant, fly into Cape Bird. The massive bergs B-15A and C-16 are still stuck fast on the northeast side of Ross Island. From the helicopter, B-15A looks like another ice shelf, not just a piece of one: it goes for as far as my eye can see, a white, flat-topped wall sitting on the horizon. There is little open water in front of the colony. The pack ice is jammed up against itself. A pod of killer whales moves from one small open lead of water to the next as it passes by, but most of the penguins, both approaching and leaving the colony, are walking in lines across the white expanse of pack ice.
The colony itself looks like a war zone—a killing field. Everywhere there are the carcasses of chicks. Chicks that have died of starvation this year; chicks that died of starvation the previous year; and chicks from the years before that. Since 2000, when the giant icebergs came to a crunching stop in front of the penguin colonies on Ross Island, blocking their normally easy access to open water and food, breeding success for these colonies has varied from “bugger all” to “bugger this.” In the cold, dry Antarctic air, the emaciated bodies of the dead chicks have been freeze-dried, flattening them further, like dry bits of cardboard. They are too many and too unattractive for even the skuas to bother with them.
I notice that there are far fewer chicks than normal in the colony for this time in the season, and way more adult birds. Many parents had deserted their eggs before they could even produce chicks, resulting in many more failed breeders showing up during the Reoccupation Period.
If the parent birds have just a single chick left to look after at this stage when the chicks start crèching, their game plan is pretty simple: bring back as much krill and fish as fast as they can manage for their chick. But parents that have two chicks, in years when food is so difficult to fetch, face a curious choice: should they attempt to feed both equally and almost certainly be unsuccessful, or should they favor one chick at the expense of the other, and have at least “a penguin’s chance” of fledging it successfully?
Even more curiously, Adelie penguins have at their disposal a potential mechanism for meting out the dinners differently to their offspring. They are one of only a few species of penguins that engage in what are known as feeding chases. When chicks are crèching, typically a parent with a full belly returns to the subcolony and trumpets loudly. The chicks can recognize their parent’s call and so they come running over, sometimes with a gaggle of other, unrelated, chicks in tow. However, instead of feeding its begging chicks as might seem like the first duty of any responsible parent, they turn and scamper away, followed by the chicks. Any unrelated chicks soon lose interest and fall away. That does not stop the parent bird. It will often continue to run, sometimes for several hundred yards and oftentimes outside the subcolony, before stopping to feed one chick and before turning and running off again.
Crèche-age chicks look like koala bears with no ears and beer bellies: they are pear-shaped conglomerations of gray fluff, standing up to a foot tall, with two floppy flippers hanging at their sides. By themselves, they are as ineffectual at protecting themselves against skuas as a puff of wind would be. It is their collective mass in a crèche surrounded by the unemployed adults that protects them. Why, oh, why then, would a parent run out into the no-man’s-land between the subcolonies and risk having its chicks pounced upon by opportunistic skuas? Among the first things that Daniel and I observe is that, indeed, quite a few of these chasing chicks get attacked by skuas and then brutally killed. Typically, the skuas work in pairs, taking up to thirty minutes to kill a chick by tugging on either side and literally pulling it apart with beaks adapted for feeding on fish, not miniature koala bears.
This obvious potential cost of feeding chases to the parents’ breeding success suggests that there must be some advantage to the parents that comes from engaging in this weird form of food distribution. The most favored explanation proposed that it provided the parents with a mechanism to favor one of their kids if food was tight. As the eggs of Adelie penguins are laid three days apart, even though the first egg is only partially incubated until the second is laid, the chick from the first-laid egg typically hatches a day or more before its younger sibling. This gives it a head start in the race to grow ahead of its little brother or sister. By engaging in a feeding chase, so the argument goes, the bigger one will be able to outrun and outmuscle its smaller sibling, meaning it gets fed first. In times of plenty, there should be enough food left for the little squirt, but when times are hard, the big ’un gets virtually all the spoils. The scientists needed a suitable name for this so, of course, instead of calling it favoritism, they came up with the multisyllabic “facultative brood reduction.” It just means that, theoretically, the parents can adjust the size of their brood to the available food supply, condemning one of their chicks to become freeze-dried shadows of their former selves in years where the household income of krill is insufficient to rear both offspring.
It is a nice idea to explain what appears to be a not so nice behavior, except that, like a lot of theories in science, it is probably wrong. I had studied feeding chases during a previous summer at Cape Bird and found the complete opposite to this so-called brood reduction hypothesis. Rather than distributing food unequally to their chicks, I found that feeding chases helped parents distribute the food equally, counteracting the bullying get-out-of-my-way behavior of the biggest chick to its younger sibling. Even though the big first chick (the Mawson, if you like) tended to get the first feed by turning and running, the big chick often got separated from its parent, allowing the little chick (the Mertz, if you will) to get its fill. Let’s call it the “brood maximization” hypothesis, for want of a shorter word.
The problem with really deciding between these two competing hypotheses is that they both predict the same things when food is plentiful: that is, both chicks are going to get enough food. It is only when food is in short supply and there is not enough to feed both chicks that the differences can really be determined. In those circumstances, if the brood reduction theory is right, then the oldest, biggest chick should grow at the expense of the second smallest chick, which should likely starve to death. However, if feeding chases function to distribute food equally to both chicks, then when food is scarce, both should get fed, but grow at very much reduced rates.
The trouble with devising an experiment to test this is that no ethics committee in the world, with the possible exception of one with Per Savio on it, is ever going to let you deliberately deprive penguins of food to test this. That is where nature, even at its most terrifying, can be quite wonderful too: B-15A and C-16 provide a natural experiment, requiring parents to travel long distances over the ice and limiting the amount and frequency of dinners they can bring to their chicks.
The first thing we note is that parents with a single chick do not run far or much at all. That is, feeding chases really do seem to be about distributing the food when parents have two chicks: it is then that chases are likely to be prolonged and repeated many times. And yes, even in a season where food is as constrained as this one, we find the feeding chases act as mechanism for the parents to switch feeding between their chicks, and the small Mertz chicks do almost as well as the larger Mawson chicks.
One person who might have a hard time ac
cepting that is Cherry-Garrard. While the men wait at Cape Evans for the Terra Nova to return and pick them up, they have an unexpected bonus: a trip to Cape Royds. Cherry-Garrard wants to study the Adelie penguins and collect a series of penguin embryos from the colony there. Oddly, for the world’s first penguin biologist, Levick opts to forgo the opportunity to conduct more observations on the penguins and stays, instead, at the Cape Evans hut to work on his photographs and writing.
That leaves Cherry-Garrard free to give his opinion about the function of feeding chases unfettered by the need for any data or facts. In his view, the feeding chases really are to weed out the runts. “The Adélie penguin has a hard life: the Emperor penguin a horrible one. Why not kill off the unfit right away, before they have had time to breed, almost before they have had time to eat?”
Cherry-Garrard is certainly smitten with the Cape Royds penguin colony in a way that James Murray was not.
With bright sunlight, a lop on the sea which splashed and gurgled under the ice-foot, the beautiful mountains all round us, and the penguins nesting at our door . . . What then must it have been to the six men who were just returned from the very Gate of Hell?
Had he been assistant zoologist on the Nimrod Expedition, there seems little doubt that he would have claimed the crown as the world’s first penguin biologist. It is probably just as well he did not. His observations of the Adelie penguins at Cape Royds are no more scientifically accurate than his observations of the Emperor penguins at Cape Crozier. They contrast markedly with those of the man who has, indeed, just returned from the Gate of Hell.
A Polar Affair Page 26
