A Polar Affair

by Lloyd Spencer Davis

  As horrible as his experience of living in a snow cave during the Antarctic winter may have been, it must have paled into something close to a fond memory compared to the horrors of the war to which Levick is exposed, literally, firsthand. A crew member on the Bacchante recalls helping Levick “by throwing amputated limbs over the side.”

  Levick is in the last party to leave Gallipoli. For many New Zealanders and Australians (who suffered over 8,700 casualties of their own at Gallipoli), Levick is not a hero for what he did in Antarctica, and certainly not for what he did for the penguins, but for what he did for them at Gallipoli.

  The full name of the recipient of Levick’s letter is the superbly monikered Mayson Moss Beeton, though Levick does not dare to call him by either his first or his second name, even though the man is only eleven years older than he. Beeton has the distinction of being the son of Isabella Mayson, who had married his father, publisher Samuel Beeton, and then published a book in 1861 called Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. It became a Victorian publishing sensation, selling over sixty thousand copies in its first year with advice for housewives that reflected a strong dose of Victorian values, especially those of hard work, thrift, cleanliness, and devotion to one’s husband. However, the day after giving birth to Mayson Moss Beeton on January 29, 1865, she developed a fever and died a week later, aged only twenty-eight. Ironically, her death was caused most likely by an absence of those Victorian values that she espoused. Samuel, it seems, had contracted syphilis from a prostitute, which he had unwittingly then passed on to Isabella.

  Within three years of her death, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management had sold nearly two million copies but things did not go well for Samuel after Isabella’s death. He was forced to sell his publishing business and died when Mayson was just twelve. Mayson had his mother’s writing chops and grew up to become a journalist for the Daily Mail, the newspaper that would break the story of Scott’s death and begin his transformation into a superhero; but his real acumen, unlike his father’s, proved to be in running a business. In 1905, he established a timber mill in Newfoundland, becoming president of the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company.

  During World War I, Beeton has been appointed the director of timber supplies for the British War Office. However, that is not the reason why Murray Levick is writing to him from Gallipoli. Beeton also happens to be the father of Edith Audrey Mayson Beeton, born on July 30, 1890, when Levick was already fourteen.

  Audrey, who, like Levick, prefers her second name, has joined the Red Cross during the war and become part of a team specializing in massage and electrotherapy, which just happens to be another specialty of the world’s first penguin biologist, Murray Levick. In January 1915, she finds herself working at St. George’s Hill Military Hospital in Weybridge. Her autograph book from the time is full of signatures from New Zealand soldiers in her care, and it seems quite possible that some of them have been invalided back to this picturesque sweep of English countryside from the blood-soaked sands of Gallipoli after being treated there by Levick himself. That summer she takes a course in massage therapy for disabled soldiers.

  She is twenty-four when she meets Levick. Tall and an outstanding athlete, she is already an English international at lacrosse. Levick is thirty-eight, a veteran of some of the most harrowing experiences imaginable and many that are not; a man focused on fitness, health, endurance, and hardship. She is not a classical beauty: she has an oval mouth that always seems like it is struggling to contain all her teeth, a more than adequate nose, high cheekbones, and dark hair that she keeps cropped quite short and often hidden under a turban. She has broad shoulders and she is strong, both physically and mentally. Neither is he classically handsome, but he is similarly strong, both physically and mentally. Like a pair of almost identical Adelie penguins, they are made for each other. While Levick is deployed on the HMS Bacchante, they write to each other and to “Dear Mr. Beeton,” who is to become Levick’s father-in-law and a man he will be destined to call “Sir” rather than “Mr.” or “Mayson,” if for no other reason than Beeton, like Mawson and Shackleton, will be knighted.

  It is July 18, 1915. At exactly the same time Levick is on the Bacchante helping save the lives of soldiers at Gallipoli, Shackleton is on a different ship, the Endurance, in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. It is part of his two-pronged plan to make the first crossing of Antarctica: from the Weddell Sea to the South Pole and onto the Ross Sea. They had left England on August 15, 1915, just over a fortnight after the declaration of war. At the outbreak of the war, Shackleton had immediately offered himself and his ships to fight the war, but no lesser figure that Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, had turned him down and asked him to proceed with his audacious plan. The ship Shackleton had bought off Mawson, the Aurora, has taken a second party to the Ross Sea, whose job it will be to lay depots in order for Shackleton’s Transantarctic Party to continue on to Ross Island once they have reached the South Pole.

  The problem for Shackleton is that the Endurance is stuck fast in the winter sea ice and going nowhere. In a deep touch of irony, the ship had been built for the Belgian explorer Adrien de Gerlache, the man whose ship the Belgica had previously been frozen in the Antarctic, nearly costing Amundsen his life had it not been for Frederick Cook. Shackleton had renamed the ship Endurance after his family motto, Fortitudine Vincimus: By Endurance We Conquer. However, unlike the Fram, which was designed with a rounded hull so that it would rise up when trapped in ice, the Endurance has been built for strength, designed to bash through the ice, and does not have a rounded hull.

  Strength alone is not enough for the Endurance. The Antarctic ice is much stronger, and as the winter turns into spring, the ship can resist no more: the hull of the Endurance is crushed.

  It is October 27, 1915. Shackleton gives the order to abandon ship. Shackleton has dug them into a hole of his own making. They camp on the ice for over five months, drifting northward with the pack ice until, on April 8, 1916, the ice floe they are on breaks up. Using the three lifeboats they have taken with them from the ship, they manage to get to Elephant Island a week later: a small hunk of land off the end of the Antarctic Peninsula. It is the first time the men have stood on solid ground for nearly five hundred days, but they are as isolated as it is possible to be, well beyond the line where they might have even a glimmer of reason to expect to be rescued.

  Nine days later, Shackleton takes five men with him in one of the lifeboats, the James Caird, to which they have rigged a sail. They travel through mountainous seas that Shackleton describes as the largest waves he has seen in all his years at sea, until they finally reach King Haakon Bay on South Georgia on May 10, eight hundred miles from Elephant Island. The problem is that they are on the wrong side of the island to the whaling station at Stromness that is their potential salvation. There is a range of rugged, unclimbed, unexplored mountains between them and Stromness. They are exhausted from the boat journey and have little food and little equipment. Still, taking two men with him, Shackleton really proves this time that by endurance he can conquer. They arrive at the whaling station thirty-six hours later, guided by a mixture of incredible endurance, bravery, luck, and, as Shackleton believes, God:

  I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.

  It is May 16, 1916. Douglas Mawson goes to see Kathleen Scott at her home on Buckingham Palace Road in London to discuss a relief mission for Ernest Shackleton. He had returned to England without Paquita or their baby daughter, Patricia, a couple of months earlier to assist with the war effort by working for the Ministry of Munitions based in Liverpool. However, he has also been appointed to the Admiralty Committee for the relief of Shackleton’s Imperial Transantarctic Expedition.

  Mawson, like Nansen, had already been taken into Kathleen’s orbit at the time her husband did the dirty on him and usurped his plans to go to Cape Adare. But
if he was like Pluto then, a dwarf planet far away, he becomes like Mercury now, drawn closer and closer in her gravitational field and warmed by her. He starts by dining at her place, then they go out together dining and dancing, and finally, down to a cottage for the weekend on a white sandy beach at Sandwich in Kent, within earshot of the battles being fought on the other side of the English Channel.

  Did she just bow deeply to him or did she lie down in his nest? It is clear from their language to each other that there was romance of some sort in the air. Mawson wrote to her after yet another weekend together at the cottage, “will always be able to enjoy it—certainly when you have forgotten all about it, it will be fresh with me . . . the aftermath of contemplation lingers on.” It could have been her rhubarb pie he is discussing, but it just doesn’t feel like it. Their liaison lasts for two months, three tops, until Paquita and baby come out from Australia.

  When it is time for Mawson to return to Australia, Kathleen hosts a party for Mawson but pointedly does not invite Paquita, who perhaps understandably has taken a strong disliking to Kathleen. Invited to the party, however, is one of Kathleen’s other planets: the mighty Jupiter himself, Fridtjof Nansen.

  The pack ice is again Shackleton’s nemesis. Using ships from first the Falklands, then Uruguay, then Chile, Shackleton tries to get to Elephant Island and is prevented from doing so each time by the thick pack ice. Eventually, on the fourth attempt he gets there, and on August 25, 1916, picks up all his remaining men from Elephant Island. Everyone has been rescued, everyone has survived. No need for the Daily Mail, Shackleton is now a bona fide superhero.

  Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott, indisputably the three leading figures of Antarctic exploration, had spun a web of circumstances that had ensnared the life of my Murray Levick and turned him, at least for a time, into a penguin biologist. Levick’s snow cave buddy, Raymond Priestley, sums up the differences between the three men this way:

  For scientific discovery, give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel, give me Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when you are seeing no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

  Yet Murray Levick is an amalgam of all three. He had been the moral, if not the actual leader, of the Northern Party, the person most crucial to their survival. In that, he was like Shackleton. He was meticulous in his organization, the untrained scientist in him dwelling alongside Amundsen. And he had Scott’s stamina and perseverance. The rugby man. The physical fitness nut.

  As I continue my quest to find the real Murray Levick, I am struck that he, like Hjalmar Johansen, has not had the recognition he deserved. And what of his penguin studies? Did he go back to them after the war?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  AFTER THE WAR

  November 11, 1918. The Allies and Germany sign the armistice that brings an end to “the war to end all wars.”

  Five days later, Murray Levick marries Audrey Beeton in Christ Church on Broadway near Westminster Abbey and the British Houses of Parliament. It is a beautiful church that, appropriately, had started being built in 1841 at exactly the same time that James Clark Ross was edging the Erebus and the Terror into the Ross Sea for the first time, only four years into the reign of Queen Victoria. In a sense the church is the very embodiment of Victorian values, with its delightfully elegant and tall spire that has been removed and put to the side of the main body of the church, like a “cock” sitting beside a “hen,” as Levick might have put it. The church is the perfect setting for the joining together of two people who themselves embody Victorian values.

  There is another connection too: it is where Ernest Shackleton and Emily Dorman had faced each other over fourteen years earlier and also vowed to honor and obey each other until death do them part. To mate for life, no less.

  The war has taken a toll on Levick personally, as if it had been one of his own limbs that he had tossed over the side of the Bacchante. He had retired from the navy the year after Gallipoli, furloughed on the “grounds of unfitness.” Thereafter, he worked in the electrical department at Tooting Military Orthopaedic Hospital in London, where he specialized in electrical therapy. In March 1918, he had even resumed writing about science, except that this time it was not about penguins. He published a paper in the British Medical Journal about using electrical stimulation to activate the muscles of soldiers with “trench foot,” a condition whereby prolonged exposure of their feet to the damp and cold of trenches caused them to become numb and, if left untreated, begin to rot.

  However, surely, now the worst is behind him—the snow cave, the war—and with his marriage, a new beginning, a brighter future beckons?

  I am sitting in Christ Church Gardens in the heart of London. The church where Murray Levick and Audrey Beeton were joined together in holy matrimony was destroyed in the Blitz during the Second World War. All that remains of the church are these manicured gardens with the mown lawns and carefully trimmed trees. The place is overshadowed by a large chaotic statue to the British composer Henry Purcell, although I am inclined to think that its wild unconstrained nature probably more accurately reflects the music man than does the one of Amundsen I have seen outside his home at Uranienborg. As I sit there, watching the pigeons searching for bread crumbs at the base of Purcell’s likeness, I am beginning to understand how the war could have overshadowed everything for Levick; how it should take precedence over his penguin work. I can also understand how it would alter his perceptions about how he might best contribute to society. Writing about penguin sex must have seemed so frivolous, insulting even, to the memories of those who had lost their lives, their legs, or their loved ones in the Great War. Is that what they had fought for? So that he could enlighten them about necrophilia, pedophilia, and rape in penguins? No, I can see why, at best, medicine must have seemed a more worthy option and why, at its worst, writing about penguins having sex would have seemed as depraved as the acts he described.

  I am sure that Sydney Harmer no longer had to tell Levick to shut up. He had come to that conclusion himself. He had already used his code of Greek letters to cover the up the worst of his Pygoscelis pornography. His Zoological Notes had been locked away, put out of sight until an antiquarian book dealer living in an elegant apartment not too far from where I am sitting on the park bench should acquire them nearly ninety years later. His book about the penguins had been published, so he had satisfied that ambition. He had published his official report on penguins for the Terra Nova Expedition—which was even more anodyne and anthropomorphic than was his book. But he has done his duty: to Scott, to the expedition, to the penguins. After Gallipoli, as far as I can tell, he never has anything to do with penguins again.

  Given Levick’s observations at Cape Adare about the wild sex lives of the penguins, it is interesting that his own attitudes to sex seem to have been quite different. There really is something of the prude attached to his writing and one could be forgiven for thinking that, despite his fascination with the carnal exploits of penguins, he was simultaneously repulsed by them and, perhaps even, that he did not care for sex at all.

  It is December 8, 1920. Audrey and Murray Levick’s son, Rodney Beeton Murray Levick, is born. Murray Levick has the decency to bury his own name as Rodney’s third, rather put the father’s name first, which had so irked him about his own name. However, irrespective of what he calls Rodney, it is almost impossible to find any mention of Rodney, this product of his own loins, whom Levick hides from view almost as surely as he does his descriptions of the sexual goings-on of the penguins. Possibly, this is because Rodney is, as the British so quaintly put it, “not the full quid.”

  It is January 5, 1922. South Georgia. Shackleton is back for yet another expedition in the Antarctic, back at the very place where “the hand of Providence” had lead him to safety nearly eight years earlier. This time it takes him on a different journey. In the early hours of the morning, he has a heart attack and dies. He is just forty-seven.

  Seventeen years have
passed since Shackleton and Emily said their vows in Christ Church. Now, perhaps mercifully from Emily’s perspective, death really does do them apart. At her request, Shackleton is buried in South Georgia. On the one hand, it is a gesture that he should remain, like Scott, where he has fallen, bonded forever with the Antarctic realm that has so consumed him and other explorers of the Heroic Age. There is also an inkling that she does not want him back.

  Shackleton had continued his philandering ways, like the protégé of the Great Caresser that he had always been, even before meeting Emily. There was not just Hope Paterson, there was a string of affairs, like he was one of Levick’s lusty penguins high on testosterone. In an interview given in the United States, Lady Shackleton states that she does not believe in reading children fairy stories where the marriage ends happily ever after as by doing so, she might encourage girls to believe that marriage is their only option. “How wrong that is,” she is reported to have said.

  It is March 3, 1922. Wrong or not, all the planets have aligned for Kathleen Scott and only one is left visible. She is getting married again, this time to Edward Hilton Young, the First Baron Kennet. They have a son, Wayland Hilton Young, who will become the Second Baron Kennet and, like his father, a politician. His half-brother, Peter Scott, the son of Robert Falcon Scott and Kathleen, will grow up to found the World Wildlife Fund. Kathleen undeniably fulfils her first husband’s wishes by making Doodles “interested in natural history,” but in an equally marvelous manifestation of her influence, Wayland, while still a member of Parliament, will write a book called Eros Denied, which is nothing less than a manifesto for the sexual revolution. What Levick has tried to suppress in penguins, the second son of Scott’s wife makes a virtue of in humans. Indeed, Wayland would agree with Emily Shackleton: “how wrong that is” that marriage and monogamy should be seen as a girl’s only options.