We have witnessed an unexpected war crime of sorts. It looks like theft under the guise of sex. Hence, we start to concentrate our attention on what is happening with these sexy crimes, expecting to document just how dumb the males can be. Being duped sixty-two times seems like a lot, but maybe it can get worse than that: the Baralong of penguin wars?
What we observe leaves us gobsmacked. On ten occasions, the female, when approaching the male like this, does get in his nest, does let him fuck her, and then she picks up one of his stones and takes it back to her nest, where her actual partner—the “cock” that is going to be looking after the eggs she produces—is sitting on her first-laid egg none the wiser.
Stones really are the currency of the colony, the things that Levick has shown convincingly keep the eggs free of meltwater. In the penguins’ world, they are worth something. To them, they are really the equivalent of dollars or goats. The exchange of sex for a stone is, surely then, prostitution by another name.
Perhaps the males that are being duped are not so stupid after all? There is the possibility, however faint, of feathered fornication. And, all for a price measured in stones.
Prostitution is often said to be the “oldest profession.” We humans and our near ancestors have been around for about six million years at most, but, given that penguins have been around for sixty million years, it seems there really is some truth to that.
While our observations may not have shocked Samuel Beeton, they definitely would have poleaxed Murray Levick. Even if he did not consider these war crimes, I know him well enough by now to be certain that he would have regarded the behavior of the penguins as criminal.
I continue to sit in Levick’s chair, taking in everything I have learned about Murray Levick. He is a far more complex individual than the cardboard cutout censored scientist I had started out investigating. There is so much to admire about him, but I realize I have become invested in wanting him to be even better than that, to be my inspiration, my new Cherry-Garrard.
He does not need to be Cherry exactly. I want him to have, instead, written The Best Journey in the World: that canoe trip down the Saskatchewan, from the Rocky Mountains, through Edmonton, past the window of my office in the Biological Sciences Building where I had analyzed my penguin data from that first summer I had spent studying the penguins at Cape Bird, past Owen Beattie’s office where he analyzed his data from autopsying Franklin’s men, right down to Lake Winnipeg.
I write now, to read later, that if I dont do this trip I ought to be led out and shot.
Well, Murray, did you? I have been through Campbell’s diaries and papers deposited in the Memorial University of Newfoundland. I have re-read through Levick’s prodigious writings found in Cambridge at the Scott Polar Research Institute, and in London at the British Exploring Society, and in a book of Zoological Notes in a drawing room in Kensington. I have been through every other archive I can find that contains even a morsel of Levick’s life. And nowhere is there even a hint that Levick or Campbell ever did make that trip across Canada that so occupied their minds in the snow cave, either down the Saskatchewan River or on motor bikes.
Then, quite by chance, the archivist at the British Exploring Society had informed me about a letter written by a retired naval man in Vancouver. It says that Murray Levick arrived on his doorstep having ridden a bike right across Canada. Except that, it cannot have been Murray Levick: this was the 1950s, Levick was near eighty, near death. It could only have been his bike-riding son, Rodney Beeton Murray Levick, fulfilling his father’s wish, moving beyond his father’s shadow in the only way that he could.
Sitting in Levick’s chair, looking around his room, I feel a sense of freedom. He is no longer my Amundsen, he is simply my “father” as a penguin biologist, the person who, wittingly or not, has nurtured my interest in penguins and their sexual behavior. Were he here, sitting in the room with me, puffing slowly on his pipe, I hope he would have taken a quiet sense of satisfaction in my own discoveries about the remarkable sexual activities of penguins, in much the same way I hope he would have appreciated Rodney’s achievement.
In the end, Murray Levick has shown himself to me in ways that I could not have imagined at the outset of this journey. His meticulous discipline, a product of his Victorian roots stretching as far back as his initial upbringing in Newcastle upon Tyne, predisposed him to be a great observational scientist even without any zoological training. It predisposed him to be the crucial character responsible for the survival of six men in circumstances so precarious that, realistically, the likelihood of survival was virtually nonexistent.
The Murray Levick I have come to know was not so much slow, as Wilfred Bruce and others asserted, as he was preoccupied. He lived in his own mind. How many women did he fuck in his head? How many mental motorbike trips did he take across Europe, Canada, and elsewhere? The Victorian upbringing that had made him great, equally had constrained him. Like his contemporary, Baron Walter Rothschild, Levick worried about airs, about how he would be perceived. It caused him to cover up the bawdy bits about his birds; it caused him to refrain from emotion in his personal life, to resist the urge to leap. And yet, when forced by circumstances to stand up and be counted, it made him more like Amundsen than Scott: calculating, meticulous, detailed. These same qualities also made him ideal as a scientist, an acute observer without the mawkish predispositions that characterized other scientists of his day.
Nothing exemplifies that more than one last piece of Levick’s writing that, miraculously, also turns up a century after he wrote it.
In 2012, conservators from the New Zealand Antarctic Program are cleaning out the snow that has accumulated for more than one hundred years beneath Scott’s hut at Cape Evans, threatening its foundations. They discover a small brown notebook.
Inside it, there is the same small neat writing that I had first seen in the room of a third-floor apartment in London. It is Levick’s, left behind when he “hastened slowly” aboard the Terra Nova on January 19, 1913. There is no sex. There are no penguins. It contains, instead, the exposures and details for the processing of each photograph he has taken.
And, in those framed photographs, which lie on the floor all around me as I sit in Levick’s chair in his house in Budleigh Salterton, there is everything that you need to know about Levick. He had asked the Terra Nova Expedition’s photographer, Herbert Ponting, to teach him photography. Ponting was a photographer of uncompromising excellence but he did not particularly like Levick. Consequently, Levick was left to largely teach himself. His first attempts were appalling: washed out, overexposed, and poorly composed. But Levick had a goal and he was dogged about achieving it. In Carsten Borchgrevink’s abandoned and freezing hut at Cape Adare he worked on developing his photographs while George Abbott worked out with a punching bag beside him. He kept notes. In the little brown book. And, eventually, Levick became a highly accomplished photographer, second only to Ponting.
I am a photographer myself. I look critically over the photographs surrounding the chair, left there for me by the current owners of Levick’s house. Almost all feature Adelie penguins. They are beautiful. It is as if Levick is most comfortable with facade, like Newcastle upon Tyne never left the boy that was born there. He is happiest showing the world what penguins look like. His photographs have no need for words, no need for codes. People can interpret them as they wish. Only Levick knows the secrets that those photographs contain.
I sit there in Levick’s chair, contemplating the significance of those secrets about the penguins’ sexual behavior that he had uncovered, and then just as surely covered up again; only for me to walk unknowingly in his footsteps and find the same secrets. Penguins are not the monogamous paragons of virtue we had all thought them to be. But should we think less of them for their sexual excesses, as the Victorian Levick so clearly did?
In many ways, the penguins are as much a product of their environment as they are of their biology. Antarctica is a harsh mistress. She exac
ts a high price from penguins and men for being with her; for getting things wrong; for being late; for not having enough food, the right feathers, or the right clothes; or, simply, for not being fat enough.
As my research has shown, it is not that evolution finds virtue in homosexuality, divorce, infidelity, rape, or prostitution: these are simply the consequences, the collateral damage, in the competitive race these penguins are in to breed successfully in an environment where the tolerances for success are tiny. Natural selection is all about the winning, not the route taken to get there.
It is us who try to set ourselves apart from nature and pretend we are different. It is us who try to live our lives by a set of religious and social mores. It is us who judge so harshly a man who would use a proven method of dogs and skis to get to the South Pole and with the same breath, create a virtue of failure, of being unprepared in an environment that does not suffer fools either gladly or otherwise.
When I first went to Antarctica in that Summer of ’77, in addition to Levick’s book and two others about penguins, I took with me my much-loved, much-read copies of the complete works of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. One of the first things I did, when getting to the little green hut at Cape Bird, was to copy out a passage from Thoreau’s journals and pin it to the wall above the window in the lab:
Color, which is the poet’s wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline or pencil sketches and become men of science.
I wanted it to be a constant reminder to me to not lose sight of the color in that world outside my window. And, I suppose, that’s what I wanted my Levick to be: a man of science but with Thoreau’s sensibilities. I am sure that is the man Levick himself wanted to be too. The would-be writer, the Second Act, which never quite came. Levick: constrained and quartered by the expectations society had placed upon him; his acceptance of a Victorian moral code that had been foisted on him since birth—the same one that had constrained Scott too, leading to his failure. Whereas men like Nansen, Shackleton, and even Amundsen embraced the color in the world around them irrespective of what society told them they should do.
In that sense, they were probably more like Walt Whitman.
Even in 1977, I had been struck by the superficial resemblance between Whitman’s lengthy and famous poem, “Song of Myself,” and the ecstatic calls of the male Adelie penguins, which they used to attract mates. When a male Adelie penguin stands on its nest of stones and, bill skyward, calls out to the world, it is a song of “self” no less than Whitman’s. But, I see now, from the vantage point of Levick’s chair, that the analogy goes far deeper than that. Near the end of his poem, Whitman wrote:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
And by that he meant that he—and by extension, all of us—are a mixture of many contradictions; multitudes, both good and bad.
My investigation of Levick and his observations of penguins, if it has revealed anything at all, it is that Whitman’s description of his condition—our condition—should apply as much to penguins as it does people. Our idols are never so virtuous as we make them out to be. The heroes from the Heroic Age could be deceptive, dishonest, and unfaithful. Even a Nobel Prize–winning explorer could have affairs.
I realize, now, that the penguin I fell in love with on my first evening at Cape Bird for being so adorable and fascinating, for carrying himself with such an admirable confidence that he could prosper in such an extreme environment whereas I could not, was undoubtedly also a cruel and ruthless animal. Almost certainly, he would have cheated on his mate if given even half a chance. He may well have fucked chicks or the desiccated corpses of other penguins. He may even have raped.
In weighing these contradictory multitudes in people and penguins, perhaps Whitman’s poem does not go far enough? Perhaps Emily and Ernest Shackleton were right all along: it is the Victorian poet Robert Browning, their favorite, to whom we should look for inspiration, if not answers?
The only poem of Browning’s with which I am familiar is “Porphyria’s Lover,” which was ingrained in me at school between lessons about Captain Cook and Joseph Banks. In it, Browning describes a young woman coming into a man’s cottage from out of a storm so violent it could have been an Antarctic one. She then proceeds to partially disrobe and begins to seduce him in what is clearly meant as an affront to the Victorian moral codes of the time; those very codes by which Murray Levick was not just brought up, he lived his whole life. But Browning does not stop there: the man strangles the girl with her own hair in order that he might preserve the moment. The poem ends with:
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirred,
And yet God has not said a word!
Browning confronts us with beauty, sex, and violence in Victorian society—a concoction that could just as easily describe the Antarctic and the penguins’ society that Murray Levick experienced—and he is asking us to judge. Not God. Us. For, despite the admonitions from religious and moral quarters that bind us, the reality is that the sky does not fall in from God’s hand. Any censuring comes from us.
Should Sidney Harmer and Levick have felt so compelled to censor the bad bits about the penguins’ behavior simply because they feared censure by us? The answer must surely be: no.
In the end, this is what we are left with: that penguins, in their many flawed ways, are really just mirror images of us. As Cherry-Garrard suggested in The Worst Journey in the World, the book responsible for my going to Antarctica and thereby studying penguins:
All the world loves a penguin: I think it is because in many respects they are like ourselves, and in some respects what we should like to be.
Certainly, when it comes to sex, as Murray Levick and I have found and the likes of Nansen, Shackleton, and Amundsen have demonstrated, they are even more like us than we could have ever possibly imagined.
And yet God has not said a word!
ILLUSTRATIONS INSERT
George Murray Levick, Surgeon Commander, in full dress uniform, World War I. Photo from the British Exploring Society, London, UK.
Lloyd Spencer Davis onboard the Shokalskiy. Photo from Scott Davis, ScottDavisImages.com.
Levick’s home, Budleigh Salterton. Photo from Lloyd Spencer Davis.
Murray Levick, self-portrait, on skis near Cape Adare. Photo from the British Exploring Society, London, UK.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard visits the Levicks, 1926. Left to right: Audrey Levick, Murray Levick, Rodney Levick, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Cherry-Garrard’s companion. Photo reproduced with the permission of the East Sussex Record Office, all rights reserved.
Roald Amundsen in Hobart, Australia, March 1912, after becoming the first person to reach the South Pole. Photo from The Fram Museum, Oslo, Norway.
Amundsen’s house, Uranienborg, Norway. Photo from Lloyd Spencer Davis.
Emerging from the snow cave, September 1912. Left to right: Abbott, Campbell, Dickason.
Left to right: Priestley, Levick, Browning. Photos from Victor Campbell’s album, reproduced with the permission of the Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John’s, Canada.
Base camp of the Public Schools Exploring Society 1937 Expedition to Trout River, Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, Canada. Photo from the British Exploring Society, London, UK.
Cover of Levick’s Zoological Notes. Photo from Lloyd Spencer Davis.
Pair of Adelie penguins photographed by Levick engaging in mutual calling. Photo from Victor Campbell’s album: reproduced with the permission of the Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John’s, Canada.
Fridtjof Nansen, 1896. Photo from The Fram Museum, Oslo, Norway.
Nansen’s desk with picture of his wife, Eva, on the left. Photo from Lloyd Spencer Davis.
Nansen’s home, Polhøgda.
Nansen’s study at the top of the t
ower in Polhøgda. Both photos from Lloyd Spencer Davis.
Sketches by Victor Campbell. Pair of Adelie penguins on nest of stones.
Sketches by Victor Campbell. Pair of Adelie penguins with two chicks on nest.
Sketches by Victor Campbell. The Terra Nova in Robertson Bay, Cape Adare, with Admiralty Range behind.
Sketches by Victor Campbell. The meeting of the Terra Nova and Fram in the Bay of Whales. All images reproduced with the permission of the Queen Elizabeth II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John’s, Canada.
A Polar Affair Page 32
