It is October 28, 1996, a good day in Antarctica by Antarctic standards. Clouds cover half the sky, yet visibility is unimpeded all the way across the sound to massive mountains that sit on the distant horizon like lost children of the Himalayas. It is a balmy 14°F and the breeze from the north is not strong enough even to ruffle the patches of dark blue water that lie sandwiched between pieces of pack ice, which extend like a giant jigsaw puzzle all the way to the mountains.
I am sitting with a group of Adelie* penguins at the Cape Bird colony that is located on Ross Island. It is a half-hour helicopter ride from the hut at Cape Evans where Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party had set out on their ultimately fatal mission to become the first humans to stand on the South Pole. The risks of my own adventure are ostensibly more those of boredom than any loss of life or limb: I am taking my turn, sitting for hours in the Antarctic open, keeping the mating behavior of the penguins that surround me under constant surveillance. The research being undertaken by me and my team is beginning to reveal that the bedroom antics of the penguins are not exactly like their public personas, which would paint them as virtuous imitations of little people that mate for life; the darlings of the Christian Right; the poster children for monogamy. Not entirely boring, I suppose, but I am certainly not prepared for what follows.
One penguin approaches another. They bow deeply to each other in what is usually a surefire prelude to courtship. Except that, in this instance, both the penguins are males. The approaching male then mounts the other male. If such unexpected debauchery were not surprising enough, afterward, the penguin that has played “female,” reciprocates by mounting the first male, ejaculating and depositing sperm on his homosexual lover’s genitals in precisely the same manner as occurs in a normal mating between a male and a female penguin.
On this day, I, Lloyd Spencer Davis, penguin biologist, discover something new about the lives of penguins that is completely at odds with the view of penguins promulgated in pretty much every book, documentary, and scientific paper, which collectively suggest that penguins are prim and proper, monogamous little creatures that mate for life, such that if one needs a blueprint against which to measure the human ideals of marriage and fidelity, one need look no further than penguins.
At least, so I thought.
Fifteen years later, Douglas Russell, who goes by the unlikely title of senior curator of birds’ eggs and nests at Britain’s Natural History Museum, is sifting through a filing box of reprints in the library at the museum’s storage and research facilities in Tring. He takes out a three-page printed manuscript that he has never seen before. Printed along its top are the words, NOT FOR PUBLICATION. The manuscript is entitled, The Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin and it is written by Royal Navy Staff Surgeon G. Murray Levick, a doctor who had accompanied Captain Scott to Antarctica and acted as sometime zoologist and photographer in addition to his medical duties.
Russell has chanced upon seemingly the only surviving copy of a manuscript written by Levick in 1915 about the sexual behavior of penguins—one of apparently one hundred copies—that got as far as being printed but then, for whatever reason, was prevented from being published.
Robert Falcon Scott’s last expedition to Antarctica, known as the Terra Nova Expedition, was as much a scientific quest as it had been a quest to get to the South Pole. At its conclusion, it was incumbent upon the surviving members of the expedition to publish the results of their findings. Murray Levick, who had studied Adelie penguins while stationed at Cape Adare, duly produced a book called Antarctic Penguins: A Study of Their Social Habits, which was published in 1914. It was the first book ever published about penguins.
I had come across Levick’s book in 1977, when I began my own studies of Adelie penguins in Antarctica. It was one of three books about penguins that I took down to the Antarctic with me, along with others by Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. While, to be sure, it had provided some baseline behavioral observations of Adelie penguins, it otherwise had seemed fairly quaint to me in the way it characterized the penguins.
For the next thirty-five years, I went about my merry way, blithely “discovering” the truth about the sexual behavior of penguins. That is until, nearly a century after it had originally been written, Douglas Russell published Levick’s paper on the sexual habits of Adelie penguins in the journal Polar Record, along with a commentary by him and two penguin researchers, Bill Sladen and David Ainley.
It is late in the evening and I am sitting at my office computer reading Levick’s belatedly published paper on my screen. The building is deserted; everyone has gone home. I should have too, but I am glued to the seat of my red leatherette chair, unable to go anywhere. In his paper, Levick describes a litany of sexual depravities and misbehaviors committed by penguins.
I am stunned. Staggered. Like I have been punched in the guts. It is bewildering, but strangely exciting too. I am struck by the realization that, for the better part of my career as a penguin researcher, I have been merely rediscovering what Levick had already discovered about the sexual behavior of penguins. It is as if George Murray Levick, having been denied his own voice, has somehow channeled himself through me. Nowhere is this clearer than in the last two sentences of Levick’s document.
Here on one occasion I saw what I took to be a cock copulating with a hen. When he had finished, however, and got off, the apparent hen turned out to be a cock, and the act was again performed with their positions reversed, the original “hen” climbing on to the back of the original cock, whereupon the nature of their proceeding was disclosed.
It could have been exactly the same encounter I had observed on Cape Bird and then described in my own manuscript, which I had published as original research eighty-three years after Levick’s observations!
I lean back in my chair, my hands gripping its chrome arms, and swivel around to glance at the bookshelves behind me. They are laden with books about penguins and filing boxes full of reprints about penguins that have been labeled and sorted alphabetically by the first authors’ surnames. There must be copies of over two thousand scientific papers about penguins sitting on those shelves, a veritable compendium of penguin research and all we know about these distinctive and charismatic creatures. And yet, save for a few inconsequential notes from early explorers, there is not a single substantive scientific paper about penguins among them that predates 1915. Arranged along the bottom two shelves there are, if I include those with my name on their dust jackets, forty or so books about penguins. In their midst is the somewhat tattered green cover of my copy of Levick’s book, Antarctic Penguins: A Study of Their Social Habits, which had been printed in 1914. Nothing else on those shelves even comes close to its age.
George Murray Levick—or Murray Levick, as he preferred—was indisputably the father of penguin biology: the first real penguin biologist, the first person to study penguins in a systematic way. Everything else on those shelves came after him. Yet far from being quaint, the paper I have just finished reading, written in 1915, although not published until 2012, proves that he had discovered things about penguins that the rest of us who adorn those shelves took another one hundred years to discern.
I spin around in my chair like a child on a playground merry-go-round—gleeful but confused, trying to process everything. I stop before my reflection in the darkened window. The white of my hair is what I see most clearly staring back at me. For three and a half decades, I have believed that I have been forging my own path: a scientific explorer intent on exposing the truth about the mating habits of penguins. In fact, all I have been doing, apparently, is following in someone else’s footsteps, even if time, or censorship, or whatever, has obliterated his footprints.
To learn that Levick has walked before me like an unseen ghost, well, I realize then and there that I need to get to know this man who has been like my personal Sherpa, if silent and invisible. Why was he silenced, censored, prevented from letting the world know about the truth about penguins? By whom, and for what reason? Or, did he choose to shut up about what he had seen? Douglas Russell’s commentary in Polar Biology mentions evidence that suggests Levick himself may have been complicit in the silencing of his results: he had covered up the most salacious parts of his field notes with a code that used Greek letters. Why?
I need to know. Levick is an enigma to me. I know he wrote his book about penguins, of course, but I know little else. A quick online search suggests that neither does anyone else. The records about Levick are sparse, at best.
He was born in the English city of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1876. He studied medicine. He joined the Royal Navy. He accompanied Scott on the Terra Nova Expedition and, as a member of the Northern Party, overwintered on Inexpressible Island in a snow cave. He served in the First World War, made a name for himself as a doctor afterward, and established something called the Public Schools Exploring Society. He died in 1956.
As I drive home for dinner, rehearsing my apology for being late, it occurs to me that if I am to turn detective and discover the real story behind Murray Levick, then I should start at the beginning. As it happens, I am due to go to England and a side trip to Newcastle seems like it should be as good a place as any to begin to find out about Levick and what made him the man I would become.
Murray Levick was a child of the Victorian era. Born on July 3, 1876, in Newcastle upon Tyne in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria, he was brought up in a society where the acquisition of high personal moral standards was a developmental stage every bit as expected and predictable as a child’s second teeth. Furthermore, while teeth may fall out over a lifetime, no such lapses were excusable when it came to morals. Sex was something reserved for heterosexual couples and, even then, only if they were married to each other.
It has not always been that way. Newcastle, which occupies a jot of land in the northeast of England, has a history of debauchery every bit as profound as its reputation for being an industrial town, depressed and blackened with coal dust. It is true that the expression “taking coals to Newcastle” originated there and, for more than seven hundred years, Newcastle really was the coal capital of Great Britain, the literal engine room for the Industrial Revolution. However, long before that, it had a reputation for being dirty in another kind of way.
When I arrive there, my first impression of Newcastle is that it is all shiny-bright and ultramodern, nestling comfortably on the banks of the River Tyne with an architectural poem—the Gateshead Millennium Bridge—connecting both sides of the river with glorious sweeping arches. The hotel too is very modern, with views of the river. However, as I look beyond Newcastle upon Tyne’s modern veneer, I start to see signs of its ancient roots and a heart that has been beating for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
The Romans established a fort and small settlement called Pons Aelius on the north bank of the River Tyne at what was then the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall. Aelius was the clan name of Emperor Hadrian, who had visited Britain in 122 C.E. and ordered the construction of a wall. By the beginning of the 5th century, the Romans had put up the shutters and left, leaving the town—by then called Monkchester—to the mercy of first the Danes, and then the Normans. It was William the Conqueror’s eldest son, Robert Curthose, who would set the enduring tone for the place and give the town its modern name: he built a castle there in 1080 and, thenceforth, it became known as New Castle.
If ever one needed convincing that it is indeed strange that Murray Levick should have felt compelled to disguise a little bit of bad behavior in penguins behind a veil of Greek letters, one need only look to Robert Curthose and his father for perspective. William the Conqueror, who was also known by the equally prophetic title, William the Bastard—apart from being illegitimate, he was also the instigator of the Domesday Book—was the Duke of Normandy in France until he decided to invade England in 1066 and become its first Norman king. His son Robert would go on to sire several illegitimate children of his own, devastate large areas of France, and fight incessantly with his father and two brothers. But not in the way of normal families: they did so with armies. He once even managed to wound his father in battle. When eventually William was killed, at someone else’s hand in yet another battle, Robert succeeded his father as the Duke of Normandy, but it would be his two younger brothers, first William Rufus and then Henry I, who would each become king. A chagrined Robert led several insurrections against his brothers to no avail. After forty some years of raping, pillaging, and warring, Robert, then aged about sixty, was captured by Henry’s men and imprisoned for the last quarter of his life.
Sexual misconduct, sibling rivalry, and the inhumane treatment of others were clearly de rigueur in society in the past, to such an extent that the behavior of penguins would have seemed pretty tame by comparison. Yet the Victorian values of Levick’s upbringing, a consequence of the timing of his birth, left him, it seems, unable to even mention masturbation or homosexuality in penguins, let alone in men.
In the 140 years since Murray Levick was born, the pendulum in Newcastle has certainly shifted back the other way, so that the city today is more something that Robert Curthose would recognize rather than the Victorian Levick.
Evening is falling as I make my way down to the River Tyne. The curvaceous Gateshead Millennium Bridge is lit subtly, while on the other side of the river it seems that all the coal in Newcastle is being burnt to light up the modern and equally curvaceous new arts center: it reflects from the river’s surface like some sort of giant neon painting. There are lots of people out and about, but I notice that most of the foot traffic that negotiates the sweeping arch of the bridge is moving toward me. At a series of bars on my side of the Tyne, men and women congregate like penguins at the start of the breeding season, seemingly as intent on mating as any of the penguins that Levick and I have studied.
I enter the Pitcher & Piano, a contemporary bar that is all square lines, glass, and aluminum. A young man, in jeans and a T-shirt that barely covers his bulging belly, bumps into me, his attention diverted by a woman wearing a pink dress so short that it would scarcely qualify as a T-shirt. At this and three other bars, I push my way through throngs of bulging bellies and minuscule dresses so that, in breaks between the music, I might question these natives of Newcastle. Not one of them, it transpires, has even heard of Murray Levick.
I cannot help but reflect on the contradictions in all of this. Ever since another Victorian gentleman, Charles Darwin, described the phenomenon of sexual selection, it has been assumed that where males and females in a species look alike, they will be monogamous. Where they look different, like here—with beards and breasts, beer bellies and dresses being just the most obvious manifestations of the many sexual differences on display—then it is likely the species will be polygamous, with successful males having several partners. Yet, as patently sexually different as we are as a species, we live in a world where society’s mores, and particularly those emanating from our religious institutions, preach marriage and monogamy for us. Conversely, Levick’s observations, and subsequently those of mine, would seem to indicate that penguins, the cartoonists’ standby for look-alike conformity, are no more wedded to the idea of monogamy than are the inhabitants of Newcastle that surround me.
Murray Levick’s father was George Levick, a civil engineer, and his mother was Jeannie Levick. He had two older sisters, Ruby and Lorna. At the time of his birth, the family lived at 12 Whitworth Place. What the family home might have been like in Levick’s day is hard to say: I find that it has been torn down and replaced by a row of adjoining brick look-alike apartments that somehow epitomize the modern Newcastle. It is as if the people of Newcastle, in trying desperately to escape their meaner past, have created a facade that is—with the exception of one bridge—as bland as it is shallow.
Naively, perhaps, I have come to Newcastle expecting it to have some kind of monument to Levick, some traces of his roots. Yet in all of Newcastle I cannot find a single memorial, not a single plaque, with his name. If this were a crime scene, then it is as if all the surfaces have been wiped clean.
I am forced to change direction, to begin anew my quest for Murray Levick. At least there is one place where I know for certain there is evidence that Levick left behind: I must go to find the senior curator of birds’ eggs and nests at the Natural History Museum in Tring.
Another line of inquiry also points me to the museum’s bird collections: if Levick’s own family tree and roots have not proven helpful, perhaps those of the penguins might? Of all the world’s nine thousand species of living birds,† just nineteen of them are penguins. The specimens held in collections like those at Tring are more than just an assembly of dead representatives of the living; they also carry with them a history of their interactions with humans.
Penguins are found only in the Southern Hemisphere, and while they must undoubtedly have been known to natives of South Africa and South America for hundreds if not thousands of years, there are no written records to confirm that. It was not until European explorers ventured far enough south that we have our first confirmed sightings of penguins: in 1497 on Vasco da Gama’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and in 1520 off the coast of Patagonia during Ferdinand Magellan’s famous first circumnavigation of the globe. The African and Magellanic penguins that those early explorers encountered are characterized by having black bands on their white chests and are members of a group of penguins known as the banded penguins. They live at the lowest latitudes of any penguins. Indeed, Galapagos penguins, another member of their group, even live right on the equator. As such, these banded penguins are as far removed as it is possible to be from the Adelie and Emperor penguins encountered by Levick on Captain Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition.
Antarctica, however, has no natives. The first sightings by humans of the Antarctic-living Adelie and Emperor penguins could not occur until men were able to sail that far south. And that did not occur until the 19th century, during the life and reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901. In those days, it was common practice to include a naturalist on voyages of exploration, whose job it was to collect specimens of all the new creatures and plants that would inevitably be encountered. These specimens were then preserved, described, categorized, and typically deposited in museums. Museums like the one in Tring.
A Victorian museum for Victorian discoveries established by people with Victorian values: Could there be a better place to look for Antarctic penguins and my man Levick?