For Priestley, another freshly back from Hell, the real prize offered by going back to Cape Royds is the chance to finally climb Mount Erebus, the mountain that had almost killed him when he endured a blizzard for three days in just his sleeping bag during Shackleton’s expedition. In addition to Priestley, Dickason and Abbott are part of the party. Ironically, when they are at five thousand feet, they are able to clearly make out Mount Melbourne in the distance, a marker for Evans Coves and the area that had afforded so much misery for them. They never dreamed throughout their long winter that they might be looking at it now from such relative safety and from so far away. Their bodies are still recovering from the intervening miles and months. In fact, Dickason suffers altitude sickness.
It is December 12, 1912. Priestley, Abbott, the Norwegian Gran, and one other finally stand on the top lip of the crater that is the 12,448-foot active volcano, Mount Erebus; the mountain named after Ross’s ship.
It is December 14, 1912. An even bigger mountain faces Mawson and Mertz. They repack their sledge, discarding everything they can to lighten the load. They make a “thin soup” for themselves by “boiling up all the old food-bags.” The dogs are given “some worn-out fur mitts, finnesko and several spare raw hide strips, all of which they devoured.” After a brief burial service for Ninnis at the crevasse edge, they turn westward and march toward a death that waits for them as assuredly as their friend’s. It is only a matter of time before three will have become none.
It is not long before they kill the first of their dogs, feeding him to the others and saving some of the meat for themselves. The meat from the dogs, which are starving even more so than the men, is “tough, stringy and without a vestige of fat” to the extent that Mawson says, “it could not be properly chewed.” Even so, like Levick before him, Mawson must do the math. There is no point diving into their measly food rations now if they cannot last the distance: they must eke them out, rationing them so that as the men propel themselves forward there is at least a prospect that a little may be left for tomorrow’s journey.
They are starving and losing condition now almost as fast as the dogs. Using the tent cover that had been on Mawson’s sledge, Mertz has been able to fashion a shelter of sorts: at its peak it is only four feet high and there is just enough room for the both of them, but when it is surrounded by blocks of ice it does shelter them from the almost persistent wind.
Mawson has done the math alright, but he knows the drill:
On sledging journeys it is usual to apportion all food-stuffs in as nearly even halves as possible.
On December 28, 1912, they kill the last of their dogs, boiling the skull and taking it in turns to eat exactly their own share like well-behaved penguin chicks without the need of parental intervention. No feeding chases necessary.
If there had been one, there is little doubt that Mawson would have won. They are both losing condition, both losing their skin, which is peeling off them in large patches. But Mertz is in a particularly bad way, and although the weather is often so bad to keep them bed-bound in their makeshift tent, it is Mertz’s inability to get going that is keeping them from progressing.
Like Oates taking away even the dog’s chance that Scott, Wilson, and Bowers might have had, Mertz’s deteriorating condition is doing the same for Mawson. Yet still he sticks with him. Mawson’s diary entry on January 6, 1913, could have been written by Scott about Oates.
A long and wearisome night. If only I could get on; but I must stop with Xavier. He does not appear to be improving and both our chances are going now.
The next day Mertz is no better and unable to move. Mawson is sounding more like Scott than ever, “this is terrible; I don’t mind for myself but for others. I pray to God to help us.”
In the early hours of January 8, 1913, Mawson reaches out to his companion to find him stiff. But by now a blizzard is blowing, the food is almost all gone, and he is still about one hundred miles from the hut. The math looks obvious to him:
There appeared to be little hope of reaching the Hut. It was easy to sleep on in the bag, and the weather was cruel outside.
It is three days before he can get going again, but his feet hurt so much he decides to take off his boots to examine them. He is shocked by what he finds: “the thickened skin of the soles had separated in each case as a complete layer.” Using bandages, he binds the soles of his feet back in place and puts six pairs of woolen socks over them.
It takes him the best part of another month but, miraculously, on February 8, 1913, Mawson stumbles into the base at Cape Denison. The Aurora has just left that morning, but five men have voluntarily stayed behind for another winter in the hopes that they might find the missing Mawson, Mertz, and Ninnis. Using the radio towers at the Cape Denison hut, they send a message to the ship, but the weather deteriorates, preventing it from getting back and Captain Davis has no option but to take the Aurora to pick up Mawson’s Western Party, leaving Mawson to face another winter in Antarctica, but one with plenty of food.
At Cape Evans, the men are hoping that their ship will come for them. However, no one knows when, or even if, the Terra Nova will return. Campbell, as the senior officer, has assumed command of the whole expedition, and in an act of supreme irony given what the Northern Party thought they had left behind them, on January 17, 1913, he orders the killing of seals and penguins should they need to endure a third winter in the Antarctic. The next morning Cherry-Garrard finds two seals and butchers them, but that afternoon, to the relief of everyone, the small ship is sighted steaming up McMurdo Sound. The following day, the remaining mules and three dogs are shot, the hut is shuttered up, and all board the Terra Nova to head further south to Hut Point for one last task: the erection of a memorial to the Polar Party.
The carpenter has fashioned a large twelve-foot cross out of Australian jarrah, a hardwood, and in a procession that must have looked for all the world like that accompanying Jesus up Calvary Hill, seven men from the search party, including Cherry-Garrard, carry the cross to the top of the nearby 754-foot-high Observation Hill. In addition to carving into the cross the names of the five men who had succeeded in marching to the South Pole but died trying to get back, there had been debate about including a quote from the Bible. It was Cherry-Garrard who interceded and insisted that it was most appropriate to use, instead, a line from Tennyson.
When erected, the cross stands nine feet out of the ground and overlooks the barrier ice, which was both a route and a resting place for the five men. Cherry-Garrard picks up a piece of the basalt rock at the base of the cross, a memento for Bill Wilson’s wife, Oriana, “Facing out over the Barrier, we gave three cheers and one more.”
It is October 18, 1977, and my first night in Antarctica. I am twenty-three, more than a full decade younger than Murray Levick when he got to spend his first night there. I am much closer in age to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who was just twenty-four when doing the same. And, just as Bill Wilson had taken the young and inexperienced Cherry-Garrard under his wing, an older and much more experienced zoologist named Gordon Grigg looks out for me. At midnight we grab a bottle of scotch and climb Observation Hill, which sits between New Zealand’s Scott Base and the US Antarctic base of McMurdo. It is early enough in the summer season for the sun to still set, and the clouds surrounding Mount Discovery to the southwest are a brilliant orange. The cross has weathered but the inscription carved into its crossbar is clearly visible:
CAPN R F SCOTT RN
DR E A WILSON CAPN L E G OATES INSDRGS LT H R BOWERS RIM
PETTY OFFICER E EVANS RN
Below the names, on the trunk of the cross, there is Cherry-Garrard’s chosen line from Tennyson:
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
We lean against the base of the cross and take slugs of whiskey straight from the bottle. It is very cold—perhaps -20°F—but we stay there for a long time, warmed by the whiskey and stilled by the harsh beauty of it all. At this stage of my life, I know the story of the fi
ve men who did not return from the South Pole, but I know nothing of the six men from the Northern Party who had observed the cross being carried up there.
The Shokalskiy arrives at McMurdo and moors next to Scott’s hut at Hut Point, exactly as Scott had moored the Discovery in 1902. I am on my fifteenth trip to Antarctica. Once again, I climb Observation Hill at midnight and contemplate the cross. By now I know a lot about the story of Levick, Campbell, Priestley, Abbott, Browning, and Dickason. I cannot help reflecting on how death has made a hero of Scott and the Polar Party in a way that the survival of Levick and the rest of the Northern Party has not.
When the Shokalskiy gets to Cape Evans, I go to Scott’s Hut. It is impossible to not be moved by it. In the dry, frozen Antarctic environment, the hut is so well preserved it is as if Campbell has just shut its door for the last time before boarding the Terra Nova. I think back to my first time at the hut and the thing that most moved me then was the skeleton of one of the dogs, still tethered, still lying where it had been shot outside the hut. The skeleton has since been removed. This time, it is the sight of Scott’s bed that leaves me heartbroken. Soft light filters through a small window and, in the hut’s dark interior, illuminates his caribou sleeping bag, which is pulled back, as if awaiting his return.
In that pathetic scene there is so much sadness, not just for Scott but for my man Levick too. I am struck by the thought that had Levick not returned, he too would have been a hero and his journals, too, would have been made public at that time. As it was, Levick returned to England as one of the blank faces of the expedition, his incredible story of survival lost in the noise surrounding Scott’s death; the contents of his zoological notebook left a secret for over a century.
It is January 26, 1913. On its way out of the Ross Sea, the Terra Nova stops at Inexpressible Island in Terra Nova Bay to pick up the Northern Party’s depot of remaining geological samples and to allow some of the others to see the snow cave where the six men had endured the unthinkable. Campbell leads a party to the snow cave that includes Wilfred Bruce, who is stunned by what he sees:
Everything jet black & horribly greasy & smelling of blubber.
It is not the image of Antarctica, the big white continent, that Murray Levick had in mind when applying to his old boss, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, to join the Terra Nova Expedition. And neither had the true behavior of the penguins proven to be what he had in mind either.
If he is sad at leaving all this behind, he does not say. It is sadness at leaving behind the bodies of Captain Scott and their other four companions that casts a pall over the mood of all those on board the Terra Nova as it steams past Cape Adare and away from Antarctica.
PART FIVE
AFTER ANTARCTICA
Prostitution
In the morally righteous and sexually repressed world of Queen Victoria’s Great Britain, into which Murray Levick was born, prostitution was viewed as the Great Social Evil. In London alone, it was estimated that over 8,600 prostitutes were plying their trade. They were almost exclusively poor or working-class women who turned tricks for middle- and upper-class men. For them, it provided a livelihood and a means of survival at a time when jobs were hard to come by; for the men, it was an opportunity to give vent to hormonally driven behaviors at a time when society was doing its best to put the kibosh on sex.
The earliest references to prostitution date back to the 18th century B.C.E. and it, perhaps deservedly, is often referred to as the “oldest profession.” There is an assumption—actually, much more than that, an agreement—that prostitution is a peculiarly human phenomenon. After all, it requires there to be some form of currency that can be exchanged for sexual favors. For us, that could be anything from coins to goats; anything of value, in other words.
It is hard to imagine other animals trading sex for inanimate objects or, even, goats. Least of all, penguins. Indeed, the only objects at all that have any perceived value in colonies of Adelie penguins are stones: the penguins use them to line their nests. The prospect that a female penguin might allow a male to hump her for a price measured in stones is something beyond the ken of even Murray Levick, who has witnessed everything from necrophilia to pedophilia, from self-gratification to rape by penguins. No, when it comes to sexual depravities, even the Victorian Levick knew that we humans are in a class of our own.
He had only to look at the way men fought with each other to realize the limitless bounds of the moral void that accompanies us compared to the other members of the animal kingdom.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE DEPRAVITIES OF MEN
Somehow, I had hoped that my trip on the Shokalskiy would have revealed more of Murray Levick than it did. It had helped me understand why he did what he did in Antarctica; how the circumstances conspired to make him the world’s first penguin biologist. It had helped me realize the extent of the horrific obstacles that he had overcome to just survive and return from Antarctica; what a hero he was in his own right. But it did not help me to understand what he did after that; why he buried the most interesting and novel parts of his penguin data, whether by design or at the request of others.
I am standing in front of a locked gate. A sign on the fence indicates that it is under video surveillance. It is the entrance to Roald Amundsen’s property, Uranienborg, on the banks of the Bunnefjorden. I have come here to try and understand how the fates of those men whose lives had become interwoven with Levick’s had changed once they returned from Antarctica.
Amundsen had won. He had gotten to the South Pole first. But he was painted as the villain in the piece: the coldhearted, calculating, deceitful clinician who was carried to the pole on the backs of his dogs. It was the story read to me when I was seven years old.
Behind me, on a small rise, there is a statue that tells the same story. It is of Amundsen standing, staring into the distance, fixated on the prize to the exclusion of all else. With him are not his men, not a sledge, not skis, not Sigrid. It is one of his dogs.
It probably did not help his reputation that Amundsen had deliberately deceived Nansen and the king. And it was true that he could be calculating, coldhearted, even. On his way back from Antarctica, during a stopover in South America, Amundsen learned that Sigrid was interested in pursuing their relationship. When back in Norway, he had his friend Herman Gade inform her that he did not wish to see her again.
However, while he tried to keep it hidden from public view, as much as Levick did the sexual escapades of the Adelie penguins, inside Amundsen was a romantic side that Sigrid had unleashed. Roald Amundsen had been in London giving talks soon after Christmas following his triumphant return from Antarctica. There, a young female was attracted to his ecstatic display and a mate-switching took place: the baton was passed to a replacement that outwardly resembled Sigrid. She was young, just twenty-six at the time, beautiful, and perhaps most tellingly, married. Kristine Elisabeth Bennett, somewhat appropriately, went by the name Kiss.
Earlier that year, when Amundsen had published his account of his expedition, entitled simply, The South Pole, he had chosen a particularly telling quotation from author Rex Beach to begin chapter two:
The deity of success is a woman, and she insists on being won, not courted. You’ve got to seize her and bear her off, instead of standing under her window with a mandolin.
Amundsen had begun chapter two in his heart in similar fashion. Yet as much as he tried to seize her and bear her off, Kiss resisted. At one point, he gifted to Kiss, in his will, the property somewhere down the locked driveway before me now.
I look about. There is nobody around. I jump the fence, hoping that no alarms will go off, that no one will be looking too closely at the video monitor.
The house is magnificent: a large, two-storied gray-and-white Swiss chalet nestled upon slabs of shield rock, almost on the banks of the fjord, and surrounded by forest. It is as idyllic a property as I have ever seen. On the only flat area between the front steps and the pier, I can see where he must have e
rected Framheim’s hut that he had tested out so thoroughly with Sigrid’s help. To suggest that his property should go to Kiss, this supposedly coldhearted man must have really loved her. He was playing a mandolin under her window.
As I leave, I glance once more at the statue. If the real Amundsen can be so different from the public persona, perhaps the same applies to Levick? Maybe he wasn’t the stuck-up Victorian prude that I had assumed on first reading? Of course, Amundsen and Levick were not the only ones conflicted after coming back from Antarctica.
It is January 3, 1913. Hjalmar Johansen, the man who should have gotten to the North Pole with Nansen and the South Pole with Amundsen, but in the end did neither, walks along the snow-encrusted footpaths to Sollis Park in the central part of downtown Oslo. Just over four months earlier, he and all the other members of the Fram Expedition had been honored by King Haakon VII with the South Pole Medal, echoing the way Shackleton’s men on the Nimrod Expedition had been awarded the Polar Medal from King Edward VII. By now, however, alcohol has got the better of him in a way that the snow and ice of the polar regions never could. He has become a drunkard and a wife beater; a broken man whose own childhood dreams have been taken from him. Like Eivind Astrup and Bertram Armytage before him, he takes out a gun and shoots himself.
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