It is October 1984, and, arguably, I have accomplished my boyhood dream too: I am sitting in a Starlifter jet once more, heading to Antarctica for the second time. Admittedly, it has not been as difficult for me to obtain my dream as it was for Amundsen, yet I can now justifiably claim to have also fulfilled its modified aspiration, the one I added seven years earlier on an evening at Cape Bird when I met my first Adelie penguin. I am going back to Antarctica as a fully fledged Antarctic penguin biologist, not someone who views penguins as a substitute for seals or a ticket to the ice. I am now Dr. Davis and I have a masters thesis and a couple of publications about penguins under my belt. I am leading a team of five researchers on a three-month study to examine the breeding behavior of Adelie penguins.
After we land in McMurdo and complete our survival training at New Zealand’s Scott Base, we take a helicopter out to Cape Bird to begin the study with no less of an audacious goal than that of observing a subcolony of Adelie penguins around-the-clock for an entire breeding season. Nothing like it has ever been attempted before with any bird. We are only able to contemplate this because of the unique set of circumstances afforded to us by the Adelie penguins.
They breed from late October to late January, in the Antarctic summer when there is twenty-four-hour daylight. They are relatively large birds that nest close together on open ground, making them easily observable. Further, they are unafraid of us, having been virtually unexposed to humans, allowing us to set up an observation post near to their nests without affecting them going about their normal business.
The only difficulty is that they all look alike, making identification and observation of individuals impossible. I solve this problem by using a technique I had employed when studying the behavior of ground squirrels in Canada for my PhD, a species where all the individuals also look alike. In that instance, I caught the squirrels and painted a large identifying code that consisted of a letter and a number on their backs using Lady Clairol blue-black hair dye. Such hair dye is never going to work on the black backs of the penguins, but the principle of marking them should. At the start of the season, before the penguins even begin to start breeding, we catch all eighty-three penguins in the subcolony. We weigh them, measure them, put an individually numbered metal band around one flipper and, importantly, paint a coded combination of a letter and number on their backs using white enamel paint. Over the course of the penguins’ breeding season, the paint will wash off and fade, eventually disappearing altogether when they molt their feathers at the end of the breeding season. In the meantime, it gives us the perfect way to quickly and accurately identify all individuals in the subcolony.
We set up a tent as an observation hide. Not to obscure us from the penguins—because, truly, they couldn’t give a damn about our nearby presence—but to shield us from the worst of the Antarctic weather when observing the penguins through all twenty-four hours of each day. Two blizzards with one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds within the first few days soon put paid to that. The first destroys the tent; the second blows away our other tent. Thereafter, I opt to use the wooden crate that our generator had been transported in. It is too small for an observer to get fully inside, but it breaks the wind from tearing at the upper parts of our bodies and, thereby, provides a modicum of protection. Nevertheless, it can be bloody cold sitting out there for hours at a time, so we always dress in full survival gear and take with us a thermos of hot coffee or hot chocolate and some comfort food.
Our observation post is above the subcolony, and from there we have a perfect view of all the nests. We record the behavior of the eighty-three individual penguins present in the subcolony throughout the breeding season.
As masochistic as it might seem to sit outside in the Antarctic for three continuous months, the results are worth it. The first thing we observe is that these birds, which have been presumed to be largely monogamous, are anything but. They turn out to be what I call “serially monogamous,” in that they seem to have only one partner at a time, but switch partners whenever a better opportunity affords itself. During the courtship period, about one-third of all the birds copulate with two partners, and some even do so with three.
Throughout that summer, as I sit in the generator box overlooking the colony, flanked on one side by the glacier that is the Mount Bird Ice Cap and on the other by the Royal Society Mountain Range, sitting across the ice-encrusted waters of McMurdo Sound, I contemplate why that should be. It is not like these are one-night stands or a bit of sex on the side. These start out as the penguin equivalent of marriage. Why commit to one bird then a few days later turn your back and commit to another? Biologically, let alone morally, where was the literal fucking sense in that?
I stare out at the rounded shape of Beaufort Island sitting some fifteen miles off Cape Bird, which in the super-clean Antarctic air looks so much closer. I stare out at the Ross Sea with its shifting cover of pack ice and icebergs that is constantly changing from one glance to the next. Sometimes its waters heave with minke whales, sei whales, and most exhilarating of all for me, killer whales. And though I never quite land a satisfactory answer to these questions about the apparent immorality of the penguins, I get a sense that the answer must somehow lie there in the blue waters of the Ross Sea before me; that somehow the requirements for a penguin to breed and feed so far south creates the circumstances where all the perceived wisdom about monomorphic seabirds being monogamous can be thrown out the window or, in my case, tossed out of the generator box.
It is January 22, 1985, near the end of the breeding season and instead of taking our helicopter directly back to Scott Base, we go via Cape Royds in order to census and measure the breeding success of a small colony of Adelie penguins that nest even a little closer to the South Pole than do those at Cape Bird. In fact, they nest closer to the Pole than any other birds. Even so, we discover they have managed to rear 3,457 chicks to fledging age this season.
Cape Royds also has another claim to fame: it is where Ernest Shackleton built a hut from which he made his own attempt to get to the South Pole.
In 1907, Ernest Shackleton is determined to prove himself “a better man than Scott.” He launches his own expedition to get to the South Pole. Rober Falcon Scott is livid. Scott demands that Shackleton promise to steer clear of McMurdo Sound and the Ross Island area of Antarctica, which he regards as his “own field,” as he puts it.
Initially, Shackleton tries to be true to the public undertaking he has given to Scott, albeit reluctantly, to stay away from McMurdo Sound. He heads, instead, for the inlet Borchgrevink had discovered in the Ross Ice Shelf and the nearby Balloon Bight, which, in a sign of the pique that has now infected his relationship with Scott, he refuses to call by Scott’s name, instead calling it Barrier Inlet. However, when he gets there on January 24, 1908, he discovers that the Ross Ice Shelf, which is really an enormous moving glacier, has calved off a huge section of ice that has taken away both Borchgrevink’s bight and Scott’s nearby one, thereby destroying the easy access to the ice shelf and the virtual highway to the South Pole that he had glimpsed from the balloon six years before. In their place, a large bay, or indentation, has formed in the edge of the ice shelf where whales abound. Shackleton renames the area the Bay of Whales, but he is not about to set up camp in such an unstable area nor one without such easy access as it had enjoyed before. He makes a tentative push eastward in a bid to get to King Edward VII Land, but the path of his ship, the Nimrod, is immediately blocked by a dense concentration of pack ice. Shackleton, just as quickly, decides to turn the Nimrod around and head westward.
Whether intentionally or by dint of conditions that Shackleton said left him no choice, Shackleton ignores his public undertaking to Scott and sets up his base at Cape Royds on Ross Island.
I am standing in front of the door to Shackleton’s hut three decades after my first visit. On that occasion, the experience of going inside Shackleton’s dimly lit hut had proven as close to a religious experience as I had ever had. It had seemed to me more of a shrine to an extraordinary man than it was a receptacle for the very ordinary things it contained: cans of meat, old boots, a broken sled, a broken promise, and the echoes of hearty comradeship. This time, however, I have come not seeking Shackleton but the ghost of Murray Levick.
To the detective in me, it is becoming clear that I need to reconstruct the sequence of events that took Levick to Antarctica in order to understand how he should become the world’s first penguin biologist. I have a hunch that there are important clues to be found by examining Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition of 1907–09 and this hut in particular.
Snow is falling lightly and the clouds are dark and bruised. The piles of wooden expedition boxes and bales of hay outside the hut have been tidied up somewhat and there is a new skin of some light-gray, rubbery-looking material that has been applied to the roof by conservators, but otherwise the hut looks the same as it did three decades earlier, or, indeed, when it was built more than a century ago.
Ostensibly, it was Robert Falcon Scott—even more so than Borchgrevink, Amundsen, Nansen, or anyone else—who was responsible for Murray Levick coming to Antarctica and ending up at Cape Adare with nothing to do. However, I believe that the influences that led Levick to study Adelie penguins and, especially, their sexuality, are too many to place solely at Scott’s door. As I stand there brushing the snow and volcanic grit from my boots in preparation for going inside, it is apparent that some of the responsibility for turning Murray Levick into the world’s first penguin biologist can be laid at this door: the door of Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds.
I think back to Christmas 2007. In the days leading up to Christmas, a report emerged that two chalk sketches of penguins on blackboards had been found in a basement at the University of Cambridge. Given the ephemeral nature of chalk on blackboard, it seemed amazing that they should have survived at all because they were dated from 1904 and 1909, making them 103 and 98 years old. Even more amazing were the identities of the artists. The first was signed by Robert Falcon Scott and came from a public lecture he gave at Whitworth Hall in Manchester on December 1, 1904, less than three months after getting back to England from the Discovery Expedition. The second was signed by Ernest Shackleton, from a public lecture about his Nimrod Expedition, given at the same hall five years later.
Aside from the novelty value of the sketches, the media commentary focused on cheap asides along the lines of both men being better explorers than they were artists. For me, that was not the striking thing at all about the drawings. In fact, to be fair to both men, they are actually pretty good representations of Antarctic penguins to have been drawn quickly on a blackboard while giving a lecture to an audience that cannot have ever seen such animals.
No, for me, the striking thing is that Scott chose to draw an Emperor penguin, while Shackleton drew an Adelie penguin. That single act spoke volumes about where each’s affinities lay concerning penguins.
Scott’s zoologist and friend, Edward Wilson, had expressed disgust about the prospect of living at Cape Adare among the smell of all the Adelie penguins. While Scott had been out on the Antarctic Plateau man-hauling sleds toward the South Magnetic Pole, Wilson had been at Cape Crozier admiring the audacity of the Emperor penguins to breed there during the Antarctic winter. Scott chose to moor the Discovery at Hut Point and used that as his base. Devoid of nearby penguin breeding colonies, most penguins whose wanderings took them to the ice edge around Hut Point were likely to be Emperor penguins. The Emperor penguin is pompous and grand, a perfect reflection of its name. It is large, beautifully colored, and it carries itself with a slow, stately kind of grace. It is easy to imagine that Scott would have been most smitten with Emperor penguins. They mirrored his own values; those of a man who prized the conquest of Antarctica when it was “more nobly and splendidly won.”
By contrast, Shackleton chose to base his expedition beside a colony of the stubby, raucous, black-and-white Adelie penguins. While it was not the primary consideration at all in where he decided to build his hut—ice conditions prevented Shackleton from getting as far south as Hut Point in 1908—he nevertheless chose, to me at least, the most scenically attractive place in all of the Ross Sea area. His hut is backed by the active volcano, Mount Erebus, which rises over twelve thousand feet above sea level with an ever-present plume of smoke emanating from its crown. Across the ice-covered waters of McMurdo Sound, the view is of the magnificent Royal Society Range. The hut itself is nestled beside a small lake and about three thousand pairs of Adelies make the surrounding buttresses of volcanic rocks their homes during the summer. The Adelie penguins were not just Shackleton’s neighbors, in a sense, they were his companions too.
It is 1908. Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition includes the biologist James Murray. Given Hanson’s untimely death just as the Adelie penguins were beginning to arrive at Cape Adare during Borchgrevink’s expedition nine years earlier, and given Scott’s decision six years earlier to set up his base at Hut Point, miles from any penguin colony, Murray has the opportunity to become the world’s first penguin biologist gifted to him on a plate. He is living in the hut at Cape Royds, literally yards from the nesting Adelie penguins.
Murray, however, is monumentally not up to the task. An insight into his perspective may be gathered from his reaction to Cape Royds itself.
To the biologist, no more uninviting desert is imaginable than Cape Royds seemed when we made our first landing, and for long afterwards.
He describes, in detail, the rotifers and other invertebrates he finds in the ponds around Cape Royds, but his observations about penguins are as far from scientific as it is possible to be.
There is endless interest in watching them, the dignified Emperor, dignified notwithstanding his clumsy waddle, going along with his wife (or wives) by his side, the very picture of a successful, self-satisfied, happy, unsuspicious countryman, gravely bowing like a Chinaman before a yelping dog—the little undignified matter-of-fact Adelie, minding his own business in a way worthy of emulation.
As a consequence, when the Nimrod, with Shackleton and his crew on board, finally leaves Antarctica at the end of the penguins’ breeding season, in February 1909, and heads back to England where Shackleton shall give his lecture at Whitworth Hall, the opportunity to become the world’s first penguin biologist still sits begging.
Yet, there is one crew member on the Nimrod destined to have a major impact on Murray Levick: it is the young geologist, Raymond Priestley. Born in 1886, a full decade after Murray Levick, Priestley is just twenty-one when he heads to the Antarctic on the Nimrod, having taken a break from his studies of geology at the University of Bristol. Handsome, tall and lean, with tousled hair, Priestley looks more like the child of athletes and actors than the son of the headmaster of Tewkesbury Grammar School.
That athleticism, if not the good looks, comes in handy when he is in a party of five men that sets out to climb the northern slopes of Mount Erebus. When the men leave the hut at Cape Royds, the weather is fine and so they opt to travel light, carrying but a single three-man tent with them.
As with so much that goes wrong during polar exploration, it is not so much the conditions themselves but the lack of preparations to deal with them that creates the need for heroic acts that separate survival from death, even if barely so. In this case, an almighty blizzard strikes while the men are high up on a glacier. In their tent, even by squeezing themselves in, there really is only room enough for four. Priestley volunteers to stay outside, hunkering down in his sleeping bag. For three days the wind and snow rage, battering Priestley while he lies helpless and frozen in his sleeping bag, blowing him slowly down the glacier toward precipitous hundred-foot-high ice cliffs. Without anything to drink, he uses his fingernails to scrape tiny fragments of ice from the glacier surface, which he sucks. After nearly two days, one of the men from the tent crawls out to bring him some chocolate. By the time the wind abates enough for the others to leave the tent again to look for him, his feet are frostbitten. They bring him to the tent where he lies upon the others.
As soon as they are able, the men abandon the climb and head back to the warm and comparatively roomy hut at Cape Royds. These men have failed to accomplish what they set out to do and almost squandered at least one of their lives—all through being unprepared for the challenges that being in the Antarctic can throw at them. On the other hand, it marks out Priestley as being made of special stuff. If in the future Murray Levick should ever need a companion when circumstances turn dire, he could hardly hope for a better person than Raymond Priestley.
There is another member of the Nimrod Expedition, another geologist, who will prove himself as mentally and physically the equal of either Shackleton or Priestley. On March 10, 1908, a strapping young Australian, Douglas Mawson is one of five men who are the first to reach the summit of Mount Erebus. If Mawson thinks the climb is hard or dangerous in any way, it will prove to be neither—at least in comparison to what he still has waiting for him in Antarctica.
During the summer of 1908–09, Shackleton’s party splits up into four groups: the Northern Party, consisting of three men including Mawson, head off with the aim of being the first to get to the South Magnetic Pole; the Western Party also contains three men, including Priestley and an Australian, Bertram Armytage; the Southern Party of four is headed by Shackleton, and it sets out with no lesser aim than to be the first to the South Pole. Finally, a party of five men remains at the Cape Royds Hut with biologist James Murray as their nominal leader in the absence of Shackleton.
Mawson and his two companions do what Scott was unable to do and they become the first humans to make it to the South Magnetic Pole, which is situated on the Polar Plateau in as isolated and unwelcoming a place as it is possible to be. Mawson and the others are taunted by death on so many occasions that it seems inevitable that if it is not this crevasse, it will be the next in which they fall into oblivion. There is also the almost complete physical and mental breakdown of the party’s leader, which requires a reluctant but, as it proves, highly capable Mawson to take over. Somehow, he leads them all to the conclusion of their 1,260-mile journey over some of the worst conditions ever encountered by polar explorers at either end of the Earth. They manage to just make a fortuitous rendezvous with the Nimrod, having failed to reach the coast before the ship sailed by, searching for them. The first officer of the Nimrod, John King Davis, convinces the captain to go back to check an area where some grounded icebergs may have obscured their view at the base of the Drygalski Ice Tongue. There, behind the bergs, they find the newly arrived members of the Northern Party.
Priestley and his men also have a lucky escape. They enjoy a successful time exploring the region around the Ferrar Glacier but then, in a bid to ease the difficulties of the Nimrod to get to them because of the frozen sea ice around their rendezvous point at Butter Point, they camp on the sea ice. During the night, they awake to discover that the ice has broken out and they are floating on the Ross Sea: in all likelihood, the last bit of sailing any of them will ever do. For a day they are carried away from the shore by the wind, but at one point it turns and blows the ice floe back toward the shore. They calculate that the ice floe they are on might just catch an edge of the sea ice jutting out from the land and, in the briefest few seconds that it does so, they haul themselves and their sledge to the safety of the shore before the ice floe is driven north in what would have been their route to a certain death. Soon afterward the Nimrod arrives to pick them up.
Of all the parties, though, it is Shackleton’s Southern Party that has it worst. Initially, they proceed south across the Ross Ice Shelf with four ponies—all that remain of the ten that had left Lyttelton on the Nimrod a year earlier. The ponies do not prove as resilient as the men and, one by one, they must be put down, until the very last of them falls to his death down a huge crevasse as they negotiate the Beardmore Glacier. The Beardmore Glacier is a 125-mile glacier that Shackleton has discovered, which acts like a very dangerous road from the barrier ice of the Ross Ice Shelf, through the mountains, to the Antarctic Plateau itself. The going is painful and painfully slow: the men haul their two sleds up strastugi, which are sharp-edged waves of ice formed by the wind. They fall, it seems, as often as they go up: down strastugi, down crevasses, until it seems like they can move no more. Their clothing is woefully inadequate as they walk into fierce winds that freeze their faces including the hairs inside their nostrils. They are getting weaker by the day: the exertion and dysentery from a terrible diet weakening each of them equally. Despite having meat from the horses and even the remaining feed intended for the horses, which they add to their soup—or “hoosh,” as they call it—that they eat each morning and night, they are forced to cut rations to a few biscuits and two small bowls of hoosh each day. The four men are running out of food.
Finally, when within 112 miles of the Pole, Shackleton is forced to call a halt to their slog. While they still, somehow, have the will and probable strength to make the Pole itself, there is no way they would have enough rations to get back alive. Even at that point, their getting back is not a sure thing. When eventually they arrive at their food depot, the four men can barely walk and are close to death. One of them collapses and can go no further. Shackleton makes the decision to leave two of them there, while he and another make a dash over the last thirty-eight miles to Scott’s old store hut at Hut Point where, according to Shackleton’s written orders before the parties had gone their separate ways, there are supposed to be food supplies and a party waiting. There are neither. Yet after a cold night spent without sleeping bags (they had left theirs behind to travel more quickly), they light a fire to signal the Nimrod, which they hope is still somewhere in McMurdo Sound, and, sure enough, having already picked up the personnel from Cape Royds, the Nimrod is headed to Hut Point.
After a bath and some food, despite being physically knackered from his harrowing journey of 1,700 miles, walking to a point closer to the Earth’s axis than has been attained at that time at either the North or the South Poles, Shackleton insists that it be he who returns with two others to get the remaining two men from his party.
Once all are safe and sound onboard the Nimrod, they head north for New Zealand, sailing past the hut at Cape Royds but not setting foot in there again.
It has stopped snowing for the moment. Yet the dark purple clouds swirling overhead suggest that there is more to come. There is a new sign screwed to the door of Shackleton’s hut that proclaims, This building and its contents are a historic shrine . . .
It had been biologist James Murray, who having shared the summer of 1908–09 at Cape Royds with the penguins, had been last to go through that doorway. During that summer, while the other three parties were out risking life and a number of limbs in the name of exploration and science, he had nowhere else he needed to be, no other task to perform than to stay where he was, cheek-by-jowl with a colony of Adelie penguins. It seems flabbergasting to me that, as the expedition’s biologist, he did not set about studying the Adelie penguins given the unfettered opportunity afforded to him.
Yet if nearly five decades as a biologist have taught me anything, it is that there are two types of biologists. One, to which I claim affinity, is attracted by the rawness and excitement of the great outdoors and especially those charismatic megafauna like big cats, wolves, bears, seals, whales, and yes, penguins. Danger and drama are constant companions for such scientists and, truth be told, a big part of the attraction too. The other type of biologist is generally happy indoors, looking down a microscope or prodding their biological subjects with some piece of equipment or another. Mostly, they are fascinated by small creatures where the biggest danger they face is spilling a hot cup of tea over their white lab coats. James Murray was one of the latter. The things that beguiled him most while at Cape Royds were the tiny rotifers he dredged from the bottoms of small lakes. He was fascinated by how hardy they were, conducting experiments to show that they could survive freezing or, conversely, really hot temperatures. All the while, outside the windows of the Cape Royds hut, a colony of knee-high penguins performed the perverse and debauched behaviors that characterize their mating, untroubled by Murray’s eye any more than they had been by those of Hanson, Borchgrevink, or Wilson before him.
To the contrary, among the limited notes Murray wrote about the penguins, he opined:
. . . the Adelie appears to be entirely moral in his domestic arrangements.
The inside of the hut is suffused with a soft dull light from a couple of small windows, desaturating further the room’s already sepia-colored contents: a stove, some beds, items of clothing and boots, and stacks of various cans and goodies that brought such humor to the room over one hundred years earlier. The sign is right: it still feels more church or shrine than it does the refuge of men who could walk to within 112 miles of the South Pole or lie outside in a blizzard for three days and survive. I speak in whispers, if I speak at all. So completely have the room and its contents been preserved in the dry cold of Antarctica, and so artfully have they been protected by conservators, that to pass through that door is to travel back in time. Shackleton, Priestley, Mawson, and the others might have just stepped outside.
I stand alone in the hut. Something keeps me there, immersed in a childhood dream that is so tangible I can smell the blackened air that comes from cooking seal blubber on the stove; I can touch Priestley’s sock as it hangs to dry, having done its best to protect his foot from frostbite as he hunkered down in the blizzard; I can feel the inside of Shackleton’s sleeping bag with molecules of him left there still to shake my hand. If the spirit of Antarctica resides anywhere, it is here. I stand there waiting, absorbing everything the men have left behind. I know they will not be stepping inside again, but honestly, I would not be surprised to see them, lost as I am in an eerie world somewhere between trance and truth.
With a sigh, I take a final glance at the photo on the wall of King Edward VII and walk out the door, closing it behind me. Shackleton had done something similar before he had left on his attempt to march to the South Pole. In fact, the evening before he left, the sun had come through the window and spotlighted the photo of the king in profile—all whiskers and sternness—in a way that it had never done so before. Shackleton, a spiritual if not a religious man, took that to be a splendid omen for good luck when, on October 29, 1908, he went out the door of the Cape Royds hut and headed into the white nothingness that lay before him in order to seek glory for king and country, and, it has to be said, not a little for himself.
Four months later it would be biologist James Murray who, after a summer spent with the penguins would shut the door of the hut for the very last time, leaving the penguins still unstudied, before he boarded the Nimrod and departed to pick up the exhausted, near dead members of the Southern Party.
Neither James Murray nor Ernest Shackleton could have imagined that the next person to go through that door would be Murray Levick.