It is 8:00 P.M. when I get to Sollis Park on the anniversary of Johansen’s suicide. The park is dark, deserted, and covered in a six-inch layer of snow. It is small and triangular-shaped. It feels more like wasteland than it does the last vestige of nature in a city of concrete and bricks.
I stand in the middle of the park and look around. I am brought to my knees, despite the cold and dampness of the snow, for exactly the same reason I had been when viewing Charles Bonner’s grave in Port Chalmers: this seems such a sad setting, a place as far removed from the grandeur of polar exploration and national heroes as it is possible to be. Though, in this case, there is an exception.
The park is overlooked by the National Library, a beautifully proportioned, salmon-colored brick building. I look up at its windows and wonder about the books it contains. Perhaps Johansen felt that his story belonged there too, along with those of Nansen and Amundsen? And, just maybe, his final deed was his alcohol-inspired way of getting to his personal pole and the recognition he felt he deserved?
Certainly, failure and recognition are not mutually exclusive.
Under the cover of darkness, in the early hours of February 10, 1913, the Terra Nova hoves to off the small coastal port of Oamaru, a bit up the coast from Port Chalmers. Refusing to identify itself to the night watchman, a dingy is sent ashore containing Dr. Atkinson and Lieutenant Pennell, captain of the ship. As soon as they are able in the morning, they send a coded telegraph so that family members may be informed that Robert Falcon Scott and his four companions are dead. In accordance with an agreement with Central News to be the sole agent for worldwide rights to the expedition’s story, they cable an initial report about the deaths, including in it Scott’s message to the public; painful words written nearly a year earlier in the tent that even now still contains his body on the Ross Ice Shelf. Then they get the hell out of there, but deliberately take their time, thirty-six hours, to sail the short distance up to Lyttelton.
The news is broken first in London’s Daily Mail. The world already knew that Scott had lost the race for the South Pole, now it learns that he, Wilson, Bowers, Oates, and Evans have all failed to return. By the time the Terra Nova slips through the entrance to Lyttelton Harbor on the morning of February 12th, flags at half mast, it is as if a great tragedy has occurred that has personally affected all who are there to greet the ship. As Cherry-Garrard describes it:
We landed to find the Empire—almost the civilized world—in mourning. It was as though they had lost great friends.
Despite his failures, the recognition and adulation for Scott has begun in a way that it never had for Johansen. The Daily Mail manages to praise Scott while, unwittingly for sure, pointing to the reasons for his failure. It adapts a poem by Tennyson. Not the words that adorn the cross atop Observation Hill in Antarctica, but the words the same poet wrote in response to the death of John Franklin:
Not here! The white South has thy bones; and thou
Heroic sailor soul
Art passing on thine happier voyages now
Towards no earthly Pole.
Franklin: the man who failed to pioneer the Northwest Passage; the man whose ships, the Erebus and the Terror, would be the first in the Ross Sea before ending up on the bottom of the Arctic Sea; the man who was as ill-prepared for the realities and rigors of polar exploration as Scott had been; and yet—this is the deepest irony—the man who would inspire the childhood dreams of Roald Amundsen, leading to him eventually beating Scott to the South Pole.
Even in death, Hjalmar Johansen, life can sometimes seem unfair.
Coincidentally, the partners of two polar explorers are at sea at about the same time.
Paquita Delprat is in the Indian Ocean, sleeping in her bunk aboard the Roon, when a cabin boy delivers a message. It says that her fiancé, Douglas Mawson, has narrowly survived a tragedy in the Antarctic that has claimed the lives of his two companions, Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis. She is upset but thankful for the news that her Douglas has survived, even if it means that he must spend another winter in Antarctica, and they, another winter apart.
Kathleen Scott is in the Pacific Ocean aboard the RMS Aorangi, heading to Port Chalmers for a scheduled rendezvous with her husband, Captain Scott. She had left their now three-year-old son, Peter, with her mother. On her way from England, she had taken time out to assuage the adventurous spirit that had never really been quenched in her since marrying Scott. She traveled right across the United States on trains and horseback. By chance, in New York she had met the explorer Robert Peary in an elevator. He happened to be there for a dinner honoring Amundsen, and Kathleen could not help herself: she snuck a look inside the banquet at the man who had beaten her husband. Amundsen, she wrote in her diary, “looked unspeakably bored.”
The captain of the Aorangi personally fetches Kathleen to his cabin and hands her a cable. The cable says Scott and his men have perished after reaching the pole.
As she tells the story herself, she responds:
Oh, well, never mind! I expected that. Thanks very much. I will go and think about it.
What she does do is go straight to a ninety-minute Spanish lesson and, later, plays five games of deck golf. As she writes in her diary the same day, “Let me maintain a high, adoring exaltation, and not let the contamination of sorrow touch me.”
Kathleen’s stoic reaction to the news may, on the one hand, seem as unfathomable as sleeping with the mentor to her husband’s rival. On the other, she has always been upfront about her desire to have a hero for a son. She had reasoned that having a hero as his father should be a good start. Perhaps, even, a dead hero?
It is February 2013. A year after Douglas Russell had discovered the hitherto censored paper by Murray Levick about the sexual depravities of penguins. Now, another unpublished paper has come to light, this one also censored from the public’s gaze for about a century. Except that this one really is just a piece of paper, a note, written in pencil.
When Dr. Edward Atkinson crawled inside Scott’s tent, eleven miles south of One Ton Depot, to collect the personal belongings from the three frozen corpses it contained, he had found a note written by Kathleen in pencil, which had been kept by Scott in a pocket close to his heart. In it, she refers to Peter by their pet name for him, Doodles, but mostly she refers to Scott himself:
Look you—when you are away South I want you to be sure that if there be a risk to take or leave, you will take it, or if there is a danger for you or another man to face, it will be you who face it, just as much as before you met Doodles and me. Because man dear we can do without you please know for sure we can. God knows I love you more than I thought could be possible but I want you to realize that it wouldn’t be your physical life that would profit me and Doodles most. If there’s anything you think worth doing at the cost of your life—Do it. We shall only be glad. Do you understand me? How awful if you don’t.
How awful, indeed. But there is little doubt that Scott understood her completely.
When Kathleen finally gets to New Zealand, she is given Scott’s diaries. With them is a letter, addressed to her by Scott inasmuch as it says, “To My Widow.” He begins, “Dearest darling, we are in a very tight corner now I have my doubts of pulling through,” and goes on to plead with her to, “Make the boy interested in natural history if you can.” Its ending, unlike his own, is rather abrupt:
I think the best chance has gone we have decided not to kill ourselves but to fight it to the last for that depot but in the fighting there is a painless end so don’t worry.
And, just like the last time she has seen him—on a boat in Port Chalmers—the last time he addresses her, there are no kisses. He understood alright.
It is March 31, 1914, and there are kisses aplenty. After getting back from Antarctica, Douglas Mawson is marrying Paquita in Melbourne. The next day they leave for England, arriving in London on May 3, where they are met at Victoria Station by none other than Sir Ernest Shackleton. The expedition still has debts of sever
al thousand pounds and Mawson needs to somehow raise enough money to pay his creditors. Over dinner with Kathleen Scott on May 21, she offers to make an anonymous payment of £1,000 to Mawson from the royalties received from the publication of Scott’s journals, the two-volume set, Scott’s Last Expedition. She reasons that Mawson is owed this as compensation for Scott having usurped his plans to go to Cape Adare and sending Murray Levick and company there instead. Shackleton also steps in to help in his inimical way, which, like his support four years earlier for Mawson’s original plans to go to Cape Adare, arguably benefits himself more than it does Mawson: he buys Mawson’s ship the Aurora for a new venture he is planning at the bargain-basement price of only £3,200.
Just over a month later, June 29, 1914, Mawson is, like Shackleton before him, knighted by the king, King George V. Except that the contrast could not be greater: the Great Caresser bonded with the Great Crooner; the family man king and the new family man Mawson. At least, that is the way it all seems.
Despite the years of abstinence that Antarctica imposed, it has not affected Mawson’s breeding success: no Reoccupation Period, no practice run, proves necessary for him. At the very moment that the king is telling the new Sir Douglas to arise, one of Paquita’s eggs, which has been fertilized by one of Mawson’s sperm, is burrowing into her uterus.
Other events are also taking place and developing at a much faster pace. Just the day before, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife had been assassinated in Sarajevo. Europe is careening down a seemingly unstoppable path toward war.
In little more than a month, the first shots are fired in what will become known as the Great War.
When Levick and the others on board the Terra Nova had headed back to civilization, they might have supposed that they were due a well-earned rest. But these are tough times and Great Britain is about to be drawn into a war with Germany that will involve much of the rest of the world.
Yet Scott had always pitched the Terra Nova Expedition as nothing if not a scientific expedition, rather than a straight-out race to the pole. It was one reason—arguably not a good enough one—why Scott, Wilson, and Bowers were still pulling those thirty-five pounds of rock samples with them on their sledge when they reached their final camp. It falls to the expedition’s survivors, therefore, to make sure that their scientific findings are written up before going off to fight the Huns.
In March 1914, just as Douglas Mawson is marrying Paquita Delprat on the other side of the world, Murray Levick publishes the first ever book on penguins, Antarctic Penguins: A Study of Their Social Habits. It is based upon the observations recorded in his blue-bound Zoological Notes. It is the book I shall take with me to Antarctica sixty-three years later. However, it treats the mating behavior of the penguins as if they are married couples, like Mr. and Mrs. Mawson. Nowhere in it does he mention the sexual escapades of the penguins that he has witnessed in Antarctica. While he is doubtlessly prevented from doing so by the keeper of zoology at the British Museum of Natural History—as Douglas Russell would later discover—Levick is clearly sensitive about the salaciousness of some of his findings too.
Throughout the winter in the snow cave, it would seem, from his diaries and those of the other men, that he did not discuss his observations of penguin sexual behavior with them, despite being cooped up with them in a way that one would have thought a little hanky-panky between adult penguins would have been the least of their worries. And of course, he went to the elaborate ruse of pasting over the most extreme sections of his Zoological Notes with the code using Greek letters that he had learned as a schoolboy.
Levick is only thirty-seven when he publishes Antarctic Penguins and he has already survived what one might imagine are enough adventures for a lifetime. Yet he must go into action as part of World War I, and no doubt at times, he and the other members of the Northern Party will have cause for wishing they were back in the snow cave on Inexpressible Island.
George Abbott—big, tough, handsome George, who could deal with any hardship it seemed, including slicing through the tendons on three of his fingers with barely a murmur—had suffered a nervous breakdown on the ship while going back to England. Once there, he is hospitalized in Southampton and discharged from the navy. He subsequently joins the Royal Air Force but dies from pneumonia in 1926, after flying without his helmet and googles, aged forty-six.
Frank Browning continues to serve with the navy throughout the war, and eventually retires in 1922. The year before, when he is thirty-nine, he marries Marjorie Bending, a woman sixteen years his junior. The couple have two children but, perhaps as a consequence of complications arising from his chronic illness and diarrhea when in the snow cave, he too dies young: in 1930, when only forty-eight.
Three months after returning from the Antarctic, Harry Dickason marries his cousin, Lillian Lowton. He continues to serve in the navy, and during the war he spends his time on the HMS Baralong, which is responsible for sinking German U-boats and famously, “taking no prisoners.” Dickason receives a Distinguished Service Medal for his role but the insinuation of apparent war crimes by the crew of the Baralong leads, in part, to the drafting of the Geneva Convention. As adept as he is at war with guns, Dickason has apparently learned little from the Adelie penguins when it comes to the Sperm Wars: he and Lillian have five children but Dickason is said to have been at sea when the fifth is conceived. He resigns from the navy in 1924 and lives for another nineteen years, dying at fifty-nine.
The “officers” fare a lot better than the “men” of the Northern Party when it comes to their longevity. Whereas the men live an average of fifty-one years, the officers live for an average of eighty-two years.
The geologist Raymond Priestley is the longest-lived of them all: he does not die until 1972, when aged eighty-seven. Upon his return to the United Kingdom he, like Levick, rushes a book into print. In his case, it is a version of his Antarctic journals, which he publishes in 1914 under the title Antarctic Adventure: Scott’s Northern Party. While it goes some small way toward publicizing the heroics of the Northern Party at a time when, despite the war, the world is still talking about Scott, most of the copies are destroyed in a fire when a bomb dropped from a German zeppelin hits the warehouse in which they are stored, muting the impact of Priestley’s voice. Ironically, during the war, Priestley works in areas associated with communications. Thereafter, he follows an academic career path, eventually becoming vice-chancellor of Melbourne and Birmingham Universities. Crucially, with Frank Debenham, he cofounds the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, which becomes a repository for the diaries and memorabilia of polar explorers, including most of those from the Northern Party, which, one day, will be read by me. Soon after returning from the Antarctic on the Terra Nova, he had married a New Zealander, Phyllis Boyd, and, in a curious twist, two members of the Terra Nova Expedition, Charles Wright and Griffith Taylor, married his two sisters.
Victor Campbell serves in the war at Gallipoli, for which he is awarded a Distinguished Service Order, and then he adds a slew of other distinctions to that for his exemplary service in the Dover Patrol and as part of the Zeebrugge Raid: an attempt to block German U-boats from using the Belgian port. He retires from the navy in 1923 and three years later his wife, Lillian, divorces him. Their relationship had never really recovered after Campbell’s time in Antarctica from the difficulties it had been experiencing before he went south. In another curious twist, thereafter he marries Marit Fabritious, a Norwegian who was the maid of honor to Queen Maud, the wife of the Norwegian King Haakon VII for whom Amundsen had claimed the area around the South Pole. They settle in Newfoundland, Canada, where he dies in 1956, aged eighty-one.
Levick, after going into action as part of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet in the North Sea, also finds himself at Gallipoli during the war.
Gallipoli is especially important for New Zealanders. Each year, we mark the anniversary of the landings by Allied Forces on the beaches of the Gallipoli Peninsula on April
25, 1915. During the eight months of the campaign, more than 130,000 men died, including 2,779 New Zealanders: a heavy toll for a country consisting of only one million people, at the time.
Levick by then has been promoted to surgeon commander. The caring he showed for the well-being of the other five men in the snow cave is evident again in the way that he looks after the New Zealand and Australian men, the “Colonial troops” as he calls them, who have been wounded in battle.
It is July 18, 1915. Murray Levick is on the Royal Navy cruiser the HMS Bacchante off Anzac Cove. He takes out his pen and writes again in the same neat flowing script he had used when writing out his Zoological Notes at Cape Adare. This time he is writing a letter. It is addressed to a “Mr. Beeton.” Levick describes how he left his ship, absent without leave, and boarded the H.M.T. Saturnia, after a Catholic priest told him the transport ship was full of seven hundred men and virtually no doctors. He found “the ship packed above and below by a mass of unfortunate men, the majority severely wounded.”
Many of the wounds had not been dressed since they left the field and were crawling with maggots, whilst the stink of these rotting wounds (on) the hot decks below was almost unbearable.
He stayed for four days, he tells Beeton, “refusing to return to my ship when they sent a boat for me.”
I was hoping that I would be court martialled, so that I could have an opportunity of making some sort of fuss, as this sort of thing had been going on for months, but nothing happened!
He notes that the wounded have been treated with “most scandalous neglect,” adding that, “The feeling among the Colonial troops at this callous neglect is very strong.”
Three weeks later and the Bacchante is bombarding Turkish troops and artillery installations in what will become known as the Battle of Chunuk Bair, a hill that is occupied by the Turks. An offensive involving largely New Zealand troops is launched on the evening of August 6. Two days of bitter fighting later, after briefly taking the hill only to lose it again, there are over eight hundred dead New Zealanders and nearly twenty-five hundred wounded, needing medical care from the likes of Murray Levick.
A Polar Affair Page 28
