Chasing Murray Levick is not as easy as simply running after him. I cannot see him ahead of me, and he has left so little in his wake. Even his destination is not clear. Levick may well have become the world’s first penguin biologist, but, even at first glance, it is apparent that he never set out to study penguins. We share that in common. It was Antarctica, not penguins, that lured me, and I suspect Levick too.
When I was a small boy—pre-acne, pre-adolescence, pre-ambition—I became obsessed with Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s book, The Worst Journey in the World. Cherry-Garrard, like Levick, had been a member of Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition. His account of the expedition, a story of Antarctic heroism and adventure, gave me the ambition I had been lacking up till then: it established within me an absolute conviction that what I most wanted to do in life was go to Antarctica. It triggered a yearning for my own adventures and a desire to set foot on the Great White Continent that grew in me, year after year, like a benign but relentless cancer.
It is September 1, 1977, the first day of spring. I am a long-haired student at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand’s gateway to Antarctica. The New Zealand Antarctic Research Program operates out of Christchurch and I have joined the university as a PhD student intent upon studying Weddell seals in Antarctica. While I have long had an interest in seal biology, it is Antarctica that really seduces me. I could have studied seals virtually anywhere but I have chosen to come to the University of Canterbury solely because research on the Antarctic-living Weddell seals is my ticket to Antarctica.
Christchurch is flat and staid to my twentysomething eyes. Yet, even the wet spring weather, which has replaced the fog and chill of winter, cannot dampen my spirits as my scheduled departure date approaches. In my dingy bedroom of the St Albans house that I call home, the world has never looked brighter. I pack, unpack, and repack. I can barely sleep; barely contain my excitement.
Then disaster. Followed soon after by utter devastation. Just six weeks out from my departure, I am told that the research project I have planned is no longer viable. What to do? I want to go to Antarctica so desperately that, if seals cannot be my means to get there, what can? That is when, for the first time in my life, a thought about studying penguins waddles into my brain.
It is October 18, 1977, and I am on a U.S. Navy Starlifter jet, dressed in yellow, puffy, down-filled survival clothes, surrounded by bearded and much older men. I am heading to McMurdo Station in Antarctica and, from there, I will take a helicopter to the Adelie penguin colony at Cape Bird on Ross Island.
After six hours flying, I stare out the small round window and I am awed by the rugged land below, which is covered completely by a sheet of white ice through which peeks a chain of mountains. Even from thirty thousand feet I can make out crevices in their glaciers. One enormous glacier, the Drygalski Ice Tongue, sticks far out into the blue waters of the Ross Sea, which is dotted with millions of brilliant white ice floes, looking for all the world like God’s very own jigsaw puzzle as seen from the heavens. My pulse quickens with the anticipation of taking my first footsteps on the frozen continent below me, yet I know I am by no means the first to experience the lure of Antarctica.
Given the vastness of Antarctica and the notion of Terra Australis existing for over two thousand years, it seems astonishing to me that the continent remained hidden and unseen until about two hundred years ago. The Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen is credited with the first sighting of the Antarctic continent on January 28, 1820, with additional sightings by English and American sailors later in the same year.
Twenty-one years later and just four years into the reign of a young Queen Victoria, the English explorer James Clark Ross leads an expedition to Antarctica that discovers the Ross Sea, the large indentation in the continent of Antarctica sitting directly below New Zealand. The naturalist aboard Ross’s ship the HMS Erebus is Joseph Dalton Hooker, who snatches some Emperor penguins from the sea ice. The expedition also consists of a second ship, the HMS Terror, captained by Ross’s dear friend, Francis Crozier. Ross, Crozier, and the two ships leave their names on the features of Antarctica that will eventually become so familiar to both Levick and me.
The island sitting at the southernmost end of the Ross Sea is christened Ross Island, while its two volcanoes, one active and one dormant, are called Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, respectively. The easternmost point of the island, a breeding site for both Emperor and Adelie penguins, is named Cape Crozier. The northernmost point acquires the moniker, Cape Bird, after the first lieutenant on the Erebus, a not inappropriate appellation given that it is home to tens of thousands of black-and-white Adelie penguins each summer. It is destined to become my home too, the main base for my decades-long study of penguins.
In a surprising twist to the story, Ross, Crozier, the Erebus, and the Terror all leave their mark on the Arctic too.
Not long after Ross returns to England from the Antarctic in 1843, the ships Erebus and Terror are taken under the command of Sir John Franklin, with Crozier once more at the helm of the Terror, on an expedition charged with finding the much sought after, but hitherto unrealizable, Northwest Passage: a sea route connecting the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Arctic Ocean. They sail from England in May 1845, and by September the following year, both ships have become trapped in the Arctic sea ice. Within a year, Franklin and many of his men are dead. Crozier takes over command of the remaining expedition members but, eventually, they too succumb. Without any word from the expedition for three years, the British Admiralty sends James Clark Ross to search for Franklin and his friend Crozier, which he does for the better part of two years to no avail. A reward of £20,000 leads to many more expeditions going in search of the Franklin Party: the grave sites of three of the crew are found on Beechey Island and, later, the remains of others on King William Island.
All 129 men of the Franklin Expedition perished. It remains, to this day, the largest single disaster and loss of life in the history of polar exploration.
And, more than a century and a half later, it remains in the news.
It is September 2, 2014. The icebreaker CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier, belonging to the Canadian Coast Guard, is in the calm waters of Queen Maud Gulf in the Canadian Arctic, surrounded by a sea and landscape christened with acknowledgements to Queen Victoria and the Franklin Expedition, which had gone missing on her watch: Victoria Island, Victoria Strait, and Franklin Strait. On board the icebreaker, two Parks Canada archaeologists are watching the output from a side sonar when they see the almost perfectly formed apparition of the hull of a ship lying in thirty-six feet of water like a ghost from the past, eerily well preserved and ethereal on the screen. No less than the Canadian prime minister himself, Stephen Harper, announces to the world that a Canadian expedition tasked with finding Franklin’s ships has, indeed, found the HMS Erebus. He describes it as, “a really important day.”
I am in my office, sitting in my red chair reading the news on the BBC website. I stop my rocking, my hands grip the chrome arms of the chair so hard it is a wonder that I do not crush them. I am frozen before the brown, X-ray-like sonar images playing in the clip that accompanies the news report. The ship looks perfect save for its broken stern; the stern that housed the captain’s cabin and might even now, I suppose, house Franklin’s body.
In his piece to camera, the Canadian PM waxes lyrical about how exciting this all is and what it means to Canadian history and folklore—but none of that excites me. I am elated by what it all means for the southern extremities, not the northern extremities of the world. This is, after all, the ship on which Joseph Dalton Hooker collected the Emperor penguin that had stood to attention before me in the Rothschild Museum in Tring. This is the ship that gave its name to Mount Erebus, the most prominent landmark in the part of Antarctica I have come to think of as my second home. Most significantly, this is the ship whose final voyage would be responsible for eliciting the urge to explore polar regions in a young Roald Amundsen and, therefore, as I am beginning to realize, the ship that would set in motion the events that would lead to Murray Levick turning up at Cape Adare and undertaking his study of penguins. And here it is, staring back at me in all its sepia-colored glory, unexpectedly tangible and real, despite disappearing 166 years earlier.
It is beyond “important,” to me, Stephen Harper.
That exhilaration is still with me as I find myself walking with quickening steps down a gravel path toward a white wooden house on the banks of the Glomma River in Norway. The sun is strong enough to have melted the recently fallen snow, though the air remains crisp and cold. As I approach the door, which is placed dead center on the front side of the house, the most telling object is not the bust of a man with a nose that would not look out of place on any bird of prey, but surely the pair of red wooden skis that are leaned against the wall on the left side of the door. They are very short and very old: the type of skis that might have been used by a young child near the end of the 19th century. For this is the place where on July 16, 1872, Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen, who learned to ski almost before he could walk, was born four years before Murray Levick.
Roald Amundsen is the youngest of four sons of a Norwegian seafaring family. When he is two, the family moves to Christiania, the capital of Norway (changed to Kristiania in 1877 and now called Oslo). Their house there adjoins the forest, and Roald, his brothers, and a gang of other friends ski and play in the outdoors. One of his playmates, a boy eight years older than him, is Carsten Borchgrevink. Borchgrevink and Amundsen will prove to be crucial factors in Murray Levick ending up studying penguins. “Penguin biologist” was never an intended destination for Levick. As I am beginning to discover, he gets there through a series of unintentional circumstances: the Accidental Penguin Biologist.
Amundsen is eight or nine when the story of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition “captivated his imagination.” It proved to be the pivotal point in his life, filling him with the desire and determination to become a Polar explorer, in much the same way that Cherry-Garrard’s account of polar adventure and drama had so affected me as a young boy.
Amundsen’s boyhood desires receive a huge boost in 1888 when his countryman, the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, does what many before him have failed to do: he leads the first expedition to cross the Greenland ice cap. Nansen brings many innovations to Arctic exploration, including the use of light sledges, specially adapted clothes and tents, an efficient cooking system, and most particularly the use of skis rather than snowshoes for traveling across the polar regions. Nansen returns triumphantly to Norway in 1889 and, as he sails up the fjord to Kristiania, there among the welcoming crowds is a tall, somewhat short-sighted seventeen-year-old schoolboy.
As Roald Amundsen described it:
That day I wandered with throbbing pulses amid the bunting and the cheers, and all my boyhood’s dreams reawoke to tempestuous life. For the first time something in my secret thoughts whispered clearly and tremulously: if you could make the North West Passage!
And there it is. In that strange amalgam of childhood friend and childhood hero, an unlikely troika of three Norwegians emerges—Amundsen, Borchgrevink, and Nansen—whose lives will ultimately become entwined with that of a rugby-playing thirteen-year-old who is, at that moment, a thousand miles away in England. Through a series of unlikely events, they will conspire to lead him, admittedly accidentally, to embarking upon the world’s first serious study of penguins. Yet, all this is still far beyond the ken of the young Murray Levick. His family had moved from Newcastle when he was just four. As a schoolboy at St. Paul’s School in London, he showed an aptitude for sport—especially gymnastics and rugby—if nothing else. The lure of the polar regions and the hardships that lie ahead are still far away from his thoughts.
Not so for the seventeen-year-old Roald Amundsen. It is, perversely, the hardships of polar exploration after which he hungers most.
Yet, many obstacles stand in the way of Amundsen setting out on his ambition to be the first to complete the Northwest Passage, to try to do what neither Franklin nor Crozier could do in an area that even the great explorer James Clark Ross had found impenetrable. Not least, Amundsen’s father dies when Roald is just fourteen, and his mother, upon whom he depends for financial support, is determined that he shall become a doctor. Amundsen duly enrolls at Kristiania University but proves to be as poor a student as he is poorly motivated for a life in medicine. Two events do, however, inspire him.
First, Nansen begins building a new ship for an audacious return to the Arctic, whereby he plans to allow the ship to get frozen in the pack ice and then be carried in the ocean currents across the Arctic, providing him with the opportunity to become the first person to reach the North Pole. His ship, the Fram, is revolutionary, with a rounded reinforced hull that is designed to rise up when squeezed by pack ice and, thereby, withstand the enormous pressures that would destroy other ships. In 1893, Amundsen is part of the crowds that once more line the shores of Kristiania in order to, this time, bid Nansen and the Fram farewell.
Second, that same year, Amundsen attends a lecture by Eivind Astrup, who had accompanied the American explorer Robert Peary on a 1,250-mile crossing of the Greenland ice cap on skis. Astrup is less than a year older than Amundsen. The previous year, when he was just twenty-one, Astrup had been awarded the Order of St. Olav, Norway’s highest honor, making him the youngest ever recipient. Astrup is credited with pioneering the use of dogsleds combined with skiing for polar travel, using skills he learned from the Inuit. Amundsen is so inspired by his young countryman that he leaves the lecture and immediately, that night, sets out on a winter ski expedition in conditions that are suitably Arctic-like.
On September 9 of that same year, Amundsen’s mother dies and, soon afterward, he leaves the university to pursue his own dreams rather than her dreams.
Today, the Fram Museum sits on the shores of Oslofjord in sight of where Amundsen stood to cheer on his childhood hero, Fridtjof Nansen. The sign on its glass door says that it opens at 10:00 A.M. I am fifteen minutes early, eager to get in. This is a museum devoted to polar exploration and, in pride of place, greeting me as I enter, is the Fram itself. It is unexpectedly large and looks in perfect condition, nearly as good, I imagine, as the day that Nansen commissioned it. The color palette of its rounded hull is striking, being painted with three equally wide swathes of white, black, and red. The ship itself is made of three layers of hardwood, with the bow reinforced by horizontal strips of iron. It looks as hard as granite; as solid as any rock.
I lay my hand upon its hull and feel a spasm of electricity—a direct connection with Levick that is not dissimilar to the one I had experienced when first leafing through the pages of his Zoological Notes in a London flat. I set about availing myself of the museum’s resources to help decipher why this connection to the world’s first penguin biologist through a Norwegian ship should feel so powerful to me.
The place to start, I decide, is with another Norwegian ship and another Norwegian polar explorer: Amundsen’s childhood friend, Carsten Borchgrevink.
Eleven days after the death of Amundsen’s mother, a ship called, appropriately enough, Antarctic, sets out from Norway on an expedition organized by Norwegian entrepreneur Henrik Bull to go sealing and whaling in subantarctic and Antarctic waters. When the Antarctic passes through Melbourne on its way south, Carsten Borchgrevink, who had earlier emigrated to Australia, convinces Bull to take him on as a deckhand and part-time naturalist. Unable to find many whales around the subantarctic islands, Bull and the ship’s captain, Leonard Kristensen, decide to take the ship south into the Ross Sea. There, on January 24, 1895, they lower a small boat, and a party of seven men, including Bull, Kristensen, and Borchgrevink, make the first recorded landing by men on the Antarctic continent. The place, a spit of land on the northern extremities of the Victoria Land coast, had been named half a century earlier by James Clark Ross as Cape Adare. By chance, this spit of land just happens to contain the world’s largest breeding congregation of Adelie penguins.
From the outset, then, the first tentative footsteps of humans on the Antarctic continent have become crossed with those of the Adelie penguins. They will, through the cascade of events I am trying to uncover, lead to Murray Levick sitting among the penguins seventeen years later, writing observations in a blue-bound notebook. Given that some Adelie penguins can live up to twenty years or more, and given that the Cape Adare colony contains well over half a million birds, some of the penguins that watch those first humans arrive in their midst must also be there seventeen years later when Levick, eventually, takes his own tentative footsteps on the same spit of land.
In between, the penguins must endure a return visit by one of those men who rowed ashore in the small boat near the end of their breeding season in January 1895.
The first of the boat’s occupants to actually set foot on the Antarctic continent is either Borchgrevink or Kristensen. Both claim to be first. However, Borchgrevink departs the Antarctic in Melbourne as it sails home and, by the time the ship reaches Norway and Kristensen can make his claim of priority, Carsten Borchgrevink has already told the world that he was first and it will be Borchgrevink who evermore is known as the first man to set foot on the Antarctic continent. Whether a giant lie or a giant leap for mankind, it is, either way, a small yet important step on the road to uncovering the sexual antics of Adelie penguins.
Borchgrevink thereafter rushes to the Royal Geographical Society in London where, on August 1, 1895, at the Sixth International Geographical Congress, he proposes mounting a scientific expedition to Cape Adare. He describes Cape Adare in benign terms:
“. . . here the unbound forces of the Antarctic Circle do not display the whole severity of their powers.”
If not a deliberate lie, Borchgrevink cannot have been further from the truth. However, while the congress recognizes the importance of Antarctic exploration, the president of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir Clements Markham, harbors plans for the society’s own expedition to Antarctica and he fiercely opposes Borchgrevink’s proposal.
Without Markham’s support, Borchgrevink goes in search of private funding for his proposed expedition to Cape Adare. Eventually, much to Markham’s chagrin, he finds it in the form of British publisher Sir George Newnes.
As it turns out, it is not Markham that Borchgrevink need worry about. Other competition is coming from the most unlikely of quarters.
Meanwhile, just as Borchgrevink has been stepping onto the Antarctic, Nansen and the Fram have been drifting in the Arctic. After leaving Norway, Nansen took his ship and embedded it in the dense pack ice north of Siberia, where, as predicted, it drifted with the currents that were moving the ice in what was mostly a northerly direction. However, the speed of their drift is much slower than Nansen has anticipated so he hatches a Plan B. When the Fram reaches 84°N, he and Hjalmar Johansen abandon the ship, leaving the remaining crew to continue their drift across the Arctic, while Nansen and Johansen take a dogsled and make a dash for the North Pole. Even with the dogs, progress is slow and when they get to 86°13´6˝N, the farthest north any human has ever been, Nansen decides they must turn back, leaving the prize of the pole unclaimed.
After an extraordinary seventeen-month-long journey full of danger and daring, using initially the dogsled and then kayaks that they had built while on the Fram, the pair are eventually reunited with the Fram in the Norwegian city of Tromsø. Altogether, the Fram had spent three years drifting in the Arctic ice. Following their long years of absence, on September 9, 1896, Nansen and the Fram return triumphantly to Kristiania, confounding the experts who had predicted their demise. The Fram and every single one of the men on the expedition has survived.
The same cannot be said for all polar explorers. In January of the same year, the body of the twenty-four-year-old Eivind Astrup is found in the snow near the Norwegian village of Hjerkinn: he has shot himself with a revolver. The blood-soaked snow surrounding his body is a bleak reminder that one of the biggest dangers to polar explorers stems not from the cold or starvation but, rather, their own psychology. What depressed Astrup sufficiently to take his own life is unknown, but just as suicide is destined to become an all too frequent occupational hazard of polar explorers, so too, it turns out, are their sexual infidelities. And it is likely that the one may feed off the other. While Fridtjof Nansen has been away trying to reach the North Pole using the dogsled and ski method devised by Astrup, it is rumored that Eivind Astrup has been having an affair with Nansen’s wife, Eva. Sexual misdemeanors in the polar regions are not, it would seem, the province of Adelie penguins alone.
If the North Pole is still up for grabs, so too are other prizes. Inspired by Borchgrevink, a Belgian naval officer, Adrien de Gerlache, decides to mount his own expedition to Cape Adare, where he intends that he, not Borchgrevink, shall become the first man to winter on the Antarctic continent.
Earlier, de Gerlache had been bitten by a similar bug to that which had so infected the young Amundsen and would eventually infect me: he wants desperately to go to Antarctica. Perhaps not surprisingly then, in 1896, as de Gerlache readies his ship the Belgica for the journey south, who but Amundsen himself should volunteer to serve on the expedition without pay. Amundsen has by then obtained his Mate’s Certificate through working on sealing ships off the Greenland coastline in order to get polar experience. He is accepted by de Gerlache as second mate.
The Belgica leaves for the Antarctic in 1897. From Amundsen’s perspective, the best thing about the expedition is its American doctor, Frederick Cook, who had explored Greenland with Robert Peary. Amundsen sets about gleaning everything that he can about polar travel from the Peary-trained Cook.
Otherwise, the expedition is mostly a disaster, teetering at times on the brink of their annihilation. The pack ice proves too much of an obstacle for de Gerlache to get to Cape Adare, so he decides they should become the first men to spend a winter in the Antarctic by emulating Nansen and driving the Belgica into the midst of the pack ice until the ship becomes entrapped. Unlike Nansen, de Gerlache is ill-prepared for the cold, the darkness, and, in particular, the ravages of scurvy from a diet deficient in vitamin C. Many of the men, de Gerlache included, suffer from scurvy, and in the brutal cold and dark isolation become physical and psychological wrecks. Cook saves them all by insisting that they eat seals and penguins, a rich source of vitamin C. Well, all but one: a crew member refuses to eat the seal meat and dies.
It is not just vitamin C that they lack. One of the unspoken aspects about polar exploration is the sexual deprivations it imposes upon those undertaking such missions, which are often measured in years. Arguably, those in the north might fare better than those in the south given the presence of the local Inuit. Robert Peary is with his wife only three years out of their first twenty-three years of marriage, but in addition to the two children he has with his wife, he also has an Inuit mistress and fathers at least two children with her. But there is no such salve for loneliness in the South. Yet the diaries of the men going there are characteristically silent on the subject of sex or, even, their desires for sex. Men of the Victorian era are not expected to voice such thoughts, even though, doubtless, they must have them.
The Belgica is a notable exception because Lieutenant Georges Lecointe, the second in command, produces a publication called, suggestively enough, The Ladyless South. In it, he ascribes to Amundsen the comment, “Yes, sir, I love it,” when referring to the absence of women. Through high school, university, and afterward, Amundsen had displayed little interest in the opposite sex. He exhibits an aura of monasticism mixed with a spoonful or two of misogyny, all of which ensure that he is happiest when he is on ice. He professes no need for the warmth of a woman. If Victorian values suppressed sex, or at least the overt demonstration of it, it would seem that such social mores are wasted on Amundsen: apparently, he has no need for sex anyway.
When the sun returns on July 23, 1898, the problems for the Belgica and those on board are far from over. They sit imprisoned in the pack ice with no foreseeable way out.
As the Belgica sits locked in the sea ice of Antarctica’s Graham Land, thwarted from reaching its destination of Cape Adare, Carsten Borchgrevink is setting out from England on his ship the Southern Cross on the somewhat inappropriately named British Antarctic Expedition: the money may have come from Sir George Newnes, but twenty-six of twenty-nine in the crew are Borchgrevink’s Norwegian countrymen.
It takes the Belgica seven months to finally get free of the ice. Once more, it is Frederick Cook who saves them: he proposes cutting and blasting a channel in the ice to reach an open lead of water about a mile away. On February 15, 1899, the channel opens sufficiently for the Belgica to finally start her engines and begin the tortuous journey home. By then, Borchgrevink is just two days sailing from Cape Adare.
All in all, the Belgica Expedition is a lesson to Amundsen about the importance of being prepared for conditions in the high latitudes. Perhaps most significantly of all, it gives Amundsen the excuse to contact Fridtjof Nansen after getting back to Norway.
I stood in Nansen’s villa at Liysaker and knocked on the door of his study. “Come in,” said a voice from inside. And then I stood face to face with the man who for years had loomed before me as something almost superhuman: the man who had achieved exploits which stirred every fibre of my being.
The friendship forged between these two Norwegians in that moment is destined to impact Murray Levick. Yet, in 1899, while Amundsen, Nansen, and Borchgrevink are setting in train the events that will drive Levick to become the world’s first penguin biologist, Levick himself is proving himself more capable than Amundsen in at least one regard. He is studying medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, and although he does not distinguish himself as a great student, he is at least sticking with his studies. There are no indications, however, that thoughts of Antarctica have ever crossed his mind and, certainly, no penguins.
Ironically, while Levick has left behind so little evidence of himself, the two ships that were the first to penetrate the Ross Sea—arguably the initial step in the train of events leading Murray Levick to Cape Adare—continue to reveal themselves despite nearly 170 years passing since they were lost and sunk during Franklin’s expedition.
It is September 3, 2016. History repeats. A Canadian expedition finds the HMS Terror sitting in eighty feet of water in Victoria Strait, some sixty miles due north of where the Erebus had been found almost exactly two years earlier. Appropriately enough, it is found in Terror Bay off the coast of King William Island. Apart from a coating of kelp and other marine life, it is similarly well preserved.
Notes left by the crew reveal the Erebus and Terror became locked in the ice on September 12, 1846, and two years later those still surviving out of the original 129-member crew abandoned the ships. Yet none lived long enough to be found and rescued. It is a fate that so easily could have befallen de Gerlache and the men of the Belgica were it not for Frederick Cook’s ingenuity.
Carsten Borchgrevink, as he crashes through the pack ice on the Southern Cross during his approach to Cape Adare, is much better prepared than either Franklin or de Gerlache, but he is not prepared for Cape Adare itself. It has been the lure of Antarctica, the mystique of the unknown frozen continent, which had taken him to Cape Adare in the first place and is bringing him back again now. It is the same lure that will eventually bring men like Scott and Levick there and, ultimately, me. Yet Borchgrevink and his men will come to loathe the place.
Some lure!