But at Birdie Bowers’s insistence they built themselves a stone igloo. And then, aware that a storm was coming, they hastened down to the rookery and collected five eggs, cushioning them in their mittens. Poor Cherry-Garrard took two, but smashed them both. It wasn’t just the darkness; he was also hopelessly short-sighted and the cold meant that he had no chance of wearing his glasses.
It was when they returned to their igloo, three remaining eggs in hand, that the storm struck. It shattered the canvas roof of their igloo. Rocks and snow rained down on them and the wind tore through like an express train. Beaten down by the force of the hurricane, they cowered in their sleeping bags, sucking on snow for water. But somehow, for the two long days that followed, they clung on to some shreds of their selves. They huddled together; they said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’; they sang hymns, feebly, against the roar of the wind.
And then, when the storm finally died down, they staggered out of the igloo and went to look for their tent. I still can’t believe they did that. In the half-light, in the aftermath of the most ferocious storm they had ever witnessed, they decided to look for their tent. It should have been impossible; there was almost no chance of finding it. But they went looking anyway. And perhaps the hymns had worked, because—miraculously—there it lay, intact, closed up like a furled umbrella, less than a kilometre away. Now they knew they would live.
Cherry-Garrard described Wilson and Bowers as ‘gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how good their companionship was.’13 Both of them perished with Scott on the way back from the Pole, leaving Cherry-Garrard haunted by their deaths.
The eggs they collected are now housed by the Natural History Museum in its tiny outpost in the Hertfordshire town of Tring. One of the embryos is there too, sitting on a shelf in a jar of spirits, a forlorn white scrap with bulbous eyes, soft beak and tiny, perfectly formed wings. The remaining two embryos were passed from scientist to scientist, until 1934, when C. W. Parsons of the University of Glasgow finally concluded they had not ‘greatly added to our knowledge of penguin embryology’.14
Cherry-Garrard was a romantic, especially about the process of discovery. ‘Science is a big thing if you can travel a Winter Journey in her cause and not regret it,’ he wrote.15 And though the samples they collected turned out to be scientifically useless, he didn’t regret it. Not one bit. With his two companions, he was the first person in the world to see emperor penguins in the wintertime, eggs balanced on their feet to protect them from the sea ice, huddling together against the cold and wind and darkness.
‘After indescribable effort and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and we were the first and only men who had ever done so' he wrote. ‘We were turning theories into facts with every observation we made.’16 He, Wilson and Bowers were the first to share the penguins’ world and the first almost to perish in it. And they did it all through sheer bloody-minded, insane, heroic effort.
The next morning, I walked back down on my own for another look at the Adélies. I passed Shackleton’s hut, stumbling slightly on the stubbly volcanic rock streaked white with old guano. A skua down in a hollow began beating its wings and scolding me. When it saw it had my attention it took off, flapping in an unnecessarily showy way. Beyond it I could just see the egg on the ground that it was trying to distract me from.
I steered politely away and continued down to the colony, where I found a warm spot out of the wind. I was careful not to get too close to the penguins. The Antarctic Treaty forbids you from approaching any wildlife here—though it’s OK if they come up to you. (To do the work that David and all the other researchers do here requires careful scientific justification and vast numbers of forms and permits. Even to visit here I had to be included on one of his permits, but after what he said I had no intention of violating the penguins’ personal space, or, indeed, their sense of self.)
My vantage point was surprisingly restful. Most of the penguins were lying on nests, chattering vaguely to themselves. Occasionally, a bird trotted by for what I now recognised as a nest relief. Several were returning to empty nests. Thanks to the blocking sea ice the journey for food had taken too long. Their mates had finally given up and left, the eggs had been stolen by skuas, and most of the stones had been spirited away by other penguins. All that was left was a slight hollow in the rocks and a pitiful few stones that nobody else wanted. But the incoming birds sat there anyway. Occasionally one would stand and stretch its body and neck until it was comically elongated and then snapped back like a rubber band into the normal penguin shape. Then it would flap its flippers madly. This curious ritual passed in waves throughout the colony, as contagious as a yawn.
From where I sat, I could see a lone penguin heading off for food. It looked very thin. Perhaps it was one of the males that had just been relieved. If so, he hadn’t wasted much time getting out of there. I watched as he skipped down the slope and hopped over on to the sea ice. He looked like one of the seven dwarfs, on his way to work. Chest thrust out, flippers held out rigidly for balance, he trotted busily along, rocking from side to side, the embodiment of industry and effort. Hi ho, hi ho.
Yesterday evening, over camp dinner, I’d reminded David of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s comment that no creature on Earth had a more miserable existence than an emperor penguin. I’d said that all Antarctic penguins seemed to have a tough life, and I wouldn’t like to be reincarnated as any of them.
‘It’s definitely you against the world if you’re an Adélie,’ David had replied. ‘There’s a lot of things conspiring to extinguish your life force. You’ve got the ice, the ocean, big waves. You’re trying to negotiate your way back to your colony, and land on a beach that’s being pummelled by ice chunks that weigh tonnes, and there are leopard seals hanging around wanting to eat you. Even back at the colony you still have to worry about stone thieves and skuas, and when, or whether, your mate will come back to relieve you. But I dunno. They seem to smile a lot. They’re probably happy.’
‘Even this year, when all their efforts are doomed by the iceberg?’
‘You feel sorry for the parents who are doing their best to replace themselves. They don’t know it, but I know that it’s impossible. You can’t just tell them, “You should just hang out now, relax, try again next year.” It can be a little sad.’
Now I watched as the black spot grew smaller against the ice, taking the first steps of his thirty-kilometre round trip. There was something idiotically noble and, yes, almost human, about this endeavour, this appalling bloody-mindedness. There was no chance that there would be anything left to play for when he returned but he was doing it anyway. I remembered now what David said to me when I first arrived: ‘Penguins have no selfdoubt.’ Trot trot trot, he went. Trot trot trot.
A large black eye was watching me steadily through the tight mesh of a fence. Its owner stood almost as high as my waist. He was pressed up against the wire, a few white feathers poking through. I was on the outside. He, however, was trapped. Leaning over the fence and looking down on him, I could see the smooth black top of his head, and the stripe of Velcro that had been glued on to his back. He continued to stare fixedly ahead.
My new acquaintance was an emperor penguin, the tallest and most regal of all Antarctica’s birdlife. It was also, currently, an inmate of the ‘penguin ranch’, which was a set of brightly coloured huts out on the sea ice, a few hours’ drive from McMurdo. I had come here in my favourite vehicle—the Mattrack with the bizarre triangular wheels that I’d also used to visit the seal camp—on a gorgeous sunny day, the temperature barely below freezing, the air completely still. The sign on the door behind me showed a Wild West cartoon of an emperor penguin, complete with cowboy hat, merrily riding a Weddell seal. Until now I had been in a buoyant mood, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for this magnificent bird. He looked like he was in prison.
The chief scientist of the operation, Paul Ponganis from Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, came out of the
hut to greet me. Paul was another old Antarctic hand; he had been coming here about as long as David Ainley, and had a similar weather-beaten look, although his floppy white hair was tidier and more luxuriant, and he was much more at ease with people.
There are almost 100,000 pairs of emperors around the Ross Sea and about 350,000 around Antarctica, which is to say about 350,000 breeding pairs in the world. Like the Adélies, emperors are true Antarcticans; they never stray far from the continent’s encircling ice. Paul sets up this emperor camp every year. He comes out on to the sea ice, catches a few non-breeding penguins and keeps them in a holding pen like the one in front of us. The fence ran unevenly round a large patch of ice containing perhaps a dozen birds, all standing more or less still in the bright sunlight.
I had seen many photographs of emperors, but they were even lovelier in the flesh. Their bellies were a soft creamy white. On each side of their heads was a white patch that shaded into gold. The side of their beaks bore a stripe of pink, which changed to a deep purplish blue at the tip. Their necks were impressively mobile. Some retracted them until they almost disappeared while others snaked their heads upwards or bent through what seem like impossible angles to preen their feathers or scratch their backs. They were sinuous and amazingly graceful. When one of the penguins balanced on one foot and his tail to scratch his head with the other foot, he still managed to look poised and polished.
Unlike the busybody Adélies, these birds had apparently decided that energy should not be wasted in stress or panic. Their strategy was not to pack the entire breeding cycle into the few short months of the Antarctic summer, but to start early, brave the darkness and cold, turn their collective backs to the wind and incubate their eggs through the depths of the winter. That way, the chicks would become independent at the height of summer, when there was maximum food to be had. This is also why Cherry-Garrard and his friends had to make their winter journey; if they had waited till spring, the eggs would already have hatched.
In the centre of the pen a rough round hole, cut into the sea ice, was floating with pale green slush. A penguin emerged suddenly from inside the hole with a rush of wings and water. He landed on the ice with a thump, stood up and started to shiver, tapping his feet, quivering and shaking his head. ‘That’s Jerry—he shivers the most,’ said Paul. ‘The peripheries get cold when they dive—the wings can get to 32°F. And he’s a good hunter so he’ll have all this cold fish in his stomach. He has to warm everything up.’
As if in sympathy, the other birds started shaking their heads and stretching their wings out to the sun. But every movement was still somehow refined. If the Adélies were the over-caffeinated Jack Russell terriers of the penguin world, these creatures were more like Great Danes, measured and stately, using energy only when it was strictly called for.
I knew that the birds weren’t exactly trapped; they were free to dive any time they liked. But the hole inside their pen was the only one around—Paul had checked carefully that there were no cracks in the ice for a radius of several kilometres—so they always had to come back to where they started. And seeing them confined on the surface like this was making me feel uncomfortable. Paul noticed me staring again at the first penguin I saw, the one pressing up against the wire. ‘That’s Zachary, my favourite,’ he said. ‘Whenever we’re doing something with one of the other birds he comes over, checks us out, squawks at us, pecks at our bums.’
I was glad Zachary still had spirit. But something about the way he was pushing up against the wire made me want to bust him and all the other emperors out of the place. And yet, if I pulled down the fence, they would simply walk on to another patch of identical ice and do exactly what they were doing now. They were not humans. They were animals. I must not anthropomorphise them. Regardless of the presence of the fence, they were currently behaving just as nature intended.
I shook myself mentally and tried to pay attention. Paul was now telling me what he did with the penguins. Knowing that they had to come back here at the end of every dive meant he could attach sophisticated measuring devices to the birds, and recover the data when they returned. He glued on those Velcro strips with epoxy resin, then attached mini backpacks containing instruments that measured, for instance, the oxygen in their lungs and blood. ‘As long as the backpack doesn’t wobble, the birds don’t mind,’ Paul said. ‘Unless you work with these birds you don’t realise how strong they are. The backpack is nothing to them—it weighs less than two pounds.’ But what about the Velcro strip? ‘No problem. When they moult, they lose theVelcro and the glue, too.’
And the whole point of this effort was to follow these creatures underwater. Emperors are the most accomplished divers of all Antarctic birds—they can plunge to an amazing 1,500 feet below the surface and stay down for fifteen minutes, holding their breath all the way. To do this, they have developed some bizarre Antarctic adaptations. They slow down their heart rate and reduce their metabolism so dramatically that they end up diving in what to us would seem like a coma. They also have to eke out what little oxygen they have in their lungs, drip-feeding it to their muscles to make it last.
Paul’s backpacks sought to measure all of this by recording the birds’ oxygen levels at every stage of the dive. ‘We can see how low the oxygen goes,’ Paul said. And on the longer dives, his instruments showed that the penguins were returning on empty. By the time they judged the size of their hole, adjusted their swimming speed and shot back up into the air they had almost no oxygen left to speak of. ‘They can function at the very far end, at levels so low that we would pass out.’17
In principle, Paul just wanted to understand how the birds achieve all this. But there could even be some kind of human application. Oxygen is powerful stuff. We breathe it to get enough energy from our muscles to be big and vigorous but, untamed, it can also tear our bodies’ cells to shreds. In human heart attacks and strokes, oxygen gets temporarily shut off, but the real damage happens when the gas comes flooding back in unchecked. When these birds took their first breaths back in the air after a long dive, they had to be able to handle going instantaneously from zero to plenty. Maybe the penguins had some kind of special antioxidants. Maybe there was something we could borrow.
To the side of the hut was the entrance to the ‘Observation tube’, a cylinder sunk through the sea ice, which could give you a hint of the emperors’ underwater world. From the surface it looked like a wide plastic chimney painted hospital green. Paul hefted off the wooden cover and I stepped gingerly in, feeling with my feet for the triangular hoops that served as a stepladder. For the first time I realised how thick the sea ice here was. I had accepted the idea that we could drive on it, build huts on it, land planes on it, but still it was shocking to climb down three feet, six feet, ten, fifteen and not have reached the water.
By the time I arrived at the bottom of the tube, where there were Perspex windows and a viewing platform, I was shivering in the dank coldness. A ghostly green light was filtering through the thick overhead ice, just enough to make out the many penguins in the water around me. I was astonished by the way they moved. On the surface they were sinuous and graceful and a little bit slow, so in the water I had half expected them to be like seals, writhing and balletic. But no. They were torpedoes. They were bullets. Whoosh! They ripped past me, leaving only a trace of tiny bubbles in their wake. Like shooting stars they were there, and then they were gone.
Dumont d’Urville, the main French base in Antarctica, is a haven for penguin researchers. Not only is it built around an Adélie colony, but it is also the only year-round station on the entire continent that has an emperor penguin colony within strolling distance. The movie The March of the Penguins was filmed there, and French scientists have been studying their imperial neighbours continuously since 1956.
The base lies more than 1,500 miles south of Hobart, at the very edge of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, and the usual way to get there is by sea. Long-suffering French Antarcticans sail back and forth between Hobart a
nd DDU, as the locals call it, on a notorious little ship. The Astrolabe is bright green and plucky and 200 feet long, with a rounded hull that helps prevent her from being crushed in the pack ice but does little or nothing for her stability as she lurches through the big seas of the roaring forties and the furious fifties. The journey south can take anything between five and ten days, while waves lash the windows all the way up to the bridge, the ship yaws and rolls and most people lie in their beds, groaning weakly and trying not to think of food.
Luckily for me, there was another way. The French had an agreement with the Italians to share the use of a Twin Otter plane each summer season. It usually flew between the Italian and French bases, but if I had not mistaken a crackly HF radio conversation, it would swing by McMurdo to pick me up and fly me and a couple of other passengers over to DDU.
The plane was piloted by a cheerful Canadian called Bob Heath, who looked like a dark-haired Santa Claus. He was bearded, and rotund, with a booming belly laugh and an irreverent line in pre-flight briefings. ‘You have the usual choice between too hot and too cold. If you’re too hot or too cold let us know. We won’t change anything, but we’ll look sympathetic.’ (I learned later that he spoke both French and Italian fluently but with equally atrocious accents, and that everybody loved him.)
The temperature on board might not have been perfect (too hot, in this case, and we all ended up stripping off most of our compulsory cold-weather gear) but the flight itself was gorgeous. We passed over the sepia mountains and sweeping glaciers of the Dry Valleys before hitting the blank white slate of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. The first sign that we were reaching the coast was a set of crevasses running in parallel lines as the ice sheet began to feel the sloping of the rock beneath. As the ground steepened, the ice became stippled and tinged with blue until it terminated abruptly in great white cliffs that reminded me, incongruously, of the chalk cliffs of Dover.
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