The Terra Nova, with Scott in charge, is en route between South Africa and Australia. Still needing more financial support for his expedition, Scott has sent Bill Wilson and the wives ahead in a fast ship so that the good doctor may continue fundraising there until they can all meet up in Melbourne.
It is during this period that Scott and Campbell start to divvy up who shall be in the Eastern Party and who shall be in the Shore Party to support the push for the Pole. Campbell is to lead the Eastern Party and, as they shall be on their own for upward of a year, he needs a medic. There are two surgeons assigned to the expedition: Murray Levick and Edward Atkinson, who is five years younger than Levick. They decide that Levick is the obvious choice for the Eastern Party, given his expertise in diet and physical exercise—although, presumably, such skills would also be valuable on the proposed march to the pole.
In truth, Scott is just as happy not to have Levick in his lot as he is for Campbell to have him. Despite having picked Levick for the expedition, Scott is none too impressed with him. As he puts it:
He seems quite incapable of learning anything fresh. Left alone, I verily believe he would do nothing from sheer lack of initiative.
In fact, the Eastern Party will require Levick to do triple duty: in addition to being its medic, he is expected to act as the Eastern Party’s zoologist and photographer.
As for a geologist to map and describe the hitherto unexplored Kind Edward VII Land, that job is to go to the Australian, Raymond Priestley, who had been with Shackleton on the Nimrod Expedition. Priestley is in Sydney and shall travel independently, meeting the Terra Nova when it gets to Lyttelton in New Zealand.
When it comes to deciding upon the three able-bodied seamen to be assigned to the party, Campbell has already taken a shine to the handsome and physically impressive petty officer, George Abbott, the tallest man on the expedition. Very fit and already at thirty with graying hair, Abbott has been learning taxidermy from Dr. Bill Wilson, who describes him as “an exceedingly nice gentlemanly fellow and a tower of strength.” It is almost inevitable, then, that Abbott should be known as “Tiny” among the men. Petty Officer Frank Browning is a torpedo expert who grew up on a farm and, at twenty-eight, is selected because he is very adaptable. Short, lithe, and dark-haired, he goes by the even more unlikely name of “Rings.” The last of the three is the young Able Seaman Harry Dickason, who, at twenty-five, is already proving to be a skilled cook. Almost as short as Browning, the light-haired Dickason has the most obvious of nicknames: “Dick.”
An investigation into how Murray Levick could go from being picked for the Eastern Party to becoming a man fascinated by penguin sex would ideally involve interrogating all the members of the Eastern Party: Levick, Campbell, Priestley, Tiny, Rings, and Dick. Except for one problem: they are all long dead.
I am in Cambridge, England’s beautiful university town with its cobbled streets and colleges, pubs and punts, all of which have been traversed by some of civilization’s greatest minds. From Isaac Newton to Ernest Rutherford to Stephen Hawking, I cannot help wonder which of them may have put their boots on the same cobblestones where I place my feet now. I am there to go to the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute. It was founded in 1920 by two members of the Terra Nova Expedition, Raymond Priestley and Frank Debenham, to be used primarily as a repository for materials from polar exploration. Its current location is a rather bland, gray building on Lensfield Road. There is the usual security to get in, though perhaps not as tight as that at Tring. You do need to book ahead to reserve one of the few desk spaces allocated for research in the tiny reading room. I have booked a whole week. Eventually, I am led into a small gray room and ushered to a desk. There are already two others sitting at theirs, eyes down, reading. I am shown the blue catalogue files and then told that I can ask to see literally anything in their collection. Anything. Letters written by Scott. Letters written by Shackleton. Letters written by Kathleen Scott. Anything at all.
What I am most interested in are the diaries of the men who were part of the Eastern Party. Those of the leader, Victor Campbell, are not held here, but pretty much everything else is. Campbell’s diary, however, has been published as a book. Indeed, Priestley’s account of the expedition, based upon his diaries, had been published in 1915. And, nearly a century later, the terse diary of Harry Dickason with its brief entries had been published. I am particularly interested in the diaries of the much more loquacious G. Murray Levick, only one of which is available in published form. I ask for one and it is brought to me and placed on what is a sort of soft beanbag for support. My fingers shake with excitement as I reach for it.
I am able to smell Levick on the pages, touch him, climb inside his head. These are not zoological notes, his writings about science. These are the thoughts of the man born George Murray Levick. What moved him, what didn’t. What happened to him, yes, but, most intriguingly, what he wished would happen to him. What he thought of his fellows and what he thought about life.
It feels like such a privilege to be here. At last it seems that I have caught up with my man, my Amundsen, and while I cannot talk to him directly over the next week, this is surely going to be the next best thing. I barely notice the comings and goings of the others in the small room.
It is October 12, 1910, when the Terra Nova arrives in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay. It is a huge wide bay and Kathleen insists on Wilson and the wives going out to meet the ship in a launch. Kathleen has been unfavorably disposed to both Hilda, Teddy Evans’s wife, and Oriana, Bill Wilson’s wife. This has led to tensions between the three of them, causing Wilson to reveal that he is ill-suited to be a penguin:
I hope it will never fall to my lot to have more than one wife at a time to look after.
Scott and Kathleen, along with the other two couples, then take the launch back to the city and the hotel where they are staying. At the hotel, Kathleen hands Scott the mail that is waiting for him, including an envelope containing a cable.
Scott opens it. It contains nine words. Nine words that will forevermore change his life and, indeed, that of Levick too:
BEG LEAVE TO INFORM YOU FRAM PROCEEDING ANTARCTIC AMUNDSEN
This time it is Scott’s turn to be secretive with his crew: he does not tell them for fear of affecting morale, though he does ask Gran what he can make of the cable. Gran is no help, and so Scott cables Nansen asking if he can tell him Amundsen’s destination. Nansen’s reply is even more concise than Amundsen’s cable had been: UNKNOWN.
It is October 28, 1910. The Terra Nova pulls into Lyttelton Harbor in New Zealand. In the middle of the harbor is a small green island, Quail Island, which is being used as a quarantine station for livestock and any arriving immigrants to New Zealand who are deemed sick. From 1906, it has also housed a small leper colony. For the last six weeks it has been home to forty-nine exotic animals: nineteen white Manchurian ponies and thirty Siberian dogs, which have been brought there by Cecil Meares and Wilfred Bruce, one of Kathleen’s older brothers. Scott has determined, based upon Shackleton’s experience on the Nimrod Expedition, that ponies and motorized sledges are his best means to get to the pole. Fridtjof Nansen had begged Scott to take dogs and, in deference to him, they are taking thirty, though that is not nearly enough needed to get to the pole, for they are intended only for support work: assistance with setting up food depots and the like.
Scott may have viewed Levick as lacking in wit and initiative, but Levick shows plenty of both on the journey down to Antarctica as he squirrels away supplies and equipment that might be useful to the Eastern Party, knowing full well that Scott’s own Polar Party will have first call on such things once they are in the Antarctic.
The Terra Nova’s last port of call is Port Chalmers, my home town. On a hill above my house sits a monument to Scott and his crew: a thirty-foot-high cairn of local stones with an anchor atop. I go past that monument every day and it never fails to connect me to Levick and those times. As I look down on our small town, with most of its houses and shops unaltered since Scott’s time, it always makes me smile to imagine that as much of the crew was out enjoying the last delights of civilization, be they of the alcohol or feminine kind, Levick was sitting in his cabin stuffing goodies under the mattress. Levick alludes to the feminine attractions of Port Chalmers when in the first entry in his Antarctic diary he writes:
I think most of us feel regrets a (sic) leaving New Zealand, as we have all made friends, and some of us I dare say, more than friends.
The Otago Harbor is beautiful, a narrow band of sheltered and shallow water that draws the eye up to Taiaroa Head with its lighthouse and the narrow entrance to the harbor slotted between the headland and a spit of sand on the other side. The departure of the Terra Nova from Port Chalmers in the mid-afternoon on November 29, 1910, is notable less for its cheering send-off than it is for the almighty row that takes place in the hotel between Kathleen Scott and Hilda Evans just before the ship leaves, which becomes a three-way battle when Oriana Wilson steps in to try to break them up.
Titus Oates, the man in charge of the ponies, says in a letter to his mother:
. . .there was more blood and hair flying about the hotel than you would see in a Chicago slaughter house in a month.
The women accompany their husbands on the ship as far as Taiaroa Head. When it comes time to transfer to the tug, Kathleen, unlike the other wives, chooses not to kiss her husband goodbye. She will say later that she did not wish to make him sad in front of the other men. Yet this stiff and formal parting speaks volumes about their pairing.
In penguins, reinforcement of the pair-bond, which they do by mutual calling, is a good predictor of whether a pair will stay together or divorce.
My finding from the summer of ’85 that pairs that had been unsuccessful in their breeding attempt the previous season have a higher likelihood of divorce can be explained precisely by the lack of reinforcement of their pair-bond. When male and female Adelie partners greet each other, they do so by engaging in a Mutual Call. The pair trumpet loudly in unison, standing breast to breast, their bills pointed skyward, waving their heads and necks about each other.
It occurs particularly when a bird that has been at sea arrives at the nest to greet its partner. It is the way they recognize each other and affirm their bond. In humans, we kiss and hug each other.
Because the pair takes turns going away to sea for about two weeks or more during the first two incubation stints, if they lose their eggs for whatever reason, they will have only two or three occasions to reinforce their bond: during courtship and at the nest changeovers that occur at the end of the first and second incubation spells. After that, the birds change places on the nest virtually every day or two, so there are many, many more times to perform their mutual greeting and reinforce their pair-bond for those pairs that manage to raise at least one of their chicks to fledging. During the Antarctic winter, the pair are not together as they migrate north. When they return to the colony to breed at the start of the following season, pairs that have had the opportunity to frequently reinforce their bond are more likely to reunite. Pairs develop a stronger relationship or bond borne of their frequent mutual calling at nest relief, which is something that only successful pairs experience.
Kathleen boards the tug beneath the white and red lighthouse of Taiaroa Head. She says goodbye to her husband, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, but deliberately refrains from kissing him. Deliberately refrains from reinforcing their pair-bond.
She will never see him again.
I am leaving New Zealand on a Russian ship, the Akademik Shokalskiy, bound for the Ross Sea, as I attempt to follow in Levick’s footsteps. I have the potential to get seasick just looking at water and I have purchased about $300 worth of various seasick tablets.
All starts calmly enough, but within a day we are battered by a massive storm. Waves break over the bow of the ship as it plunges from one huge wave to the next. In my bunk, I am thrown with considerable force from one end of the bulkhead to the other with each pitch and roll of the ship. I take several different types of pills to no avail: I am seasick, but, then, so is almost everyone else, including most of the crew and the onboard doctor. After two days, the wind abates and we are left to count the damage. Most of us are badly bruised from being thrown about. One person has a broken collar bone. Another has internal bleeding and needs to be airlifted off the ship in a dramatic long-distance helicopter rescue when we reach the Auckland Islands.
It is November 29, 1910. The Terra Nova has turned south after clearing the heads at Otago Harbor. It is supremely overloaded. Below decks is completely full and they have been forced to store the three motor sleds, forty tons of coal, two thousand gallons of gasoline, and the pony fodder on the upper deck. It is not much bigger than the Fram, yet the Terra Nova has sixty-five men, nineteen ponies, thirty dogs, and three motor sleds on board. By contrast, Fram has just nineteen men aboard her, each with his own small room, and ninety-seven dogs. The overladen Terra Nova is slow and wallows in the sea, causing many of the men to be seasick. Campbell notes that, “We must hope for fine passage,” but that is not to be. Three days out from New Zealand, they are hit by a frightful storm.
The ship is leaking and begins taking in lots of water. Their pumps fail. The men are forced to bail her out with buckets and a hand pump, which as Campbell nonchalantly observes is, “very slow work as the men were constantly being washed off their legs.” Throughout the raging storm, they scramble frantically, trying to clear the pumps while being thrown about and throwing up.
By the time the storm ends and they can assess their damage, two ponies are dead, and a dog and ten sacks of coal have been washed overboard.
It is Christmas Day 1910. The progress of the Terra Nova has been inhibited by dense pack ice. To date, the men’s only real interaction with the wildlife has been to kill it and eat it. Crabeater seals are served as steaks, which according to Levick, “is excellent. More tender than beef steak and quite as good to eat.” They stew Adelie penguins, which Levick finds:
. . . a really first class bird—rather like blackcock to taste, but a good deal better—the flesh is black, like seal meat.
His appreciation of seal and penguin meat is probably just as well, given the diet that awaits him in Antarctica. In fact, the penguin meat is so good that stewed penguin forms part of their first Christmas dinner in the ice.
The day before, on Christmas Eve, Levick noted the men sang, “in a horrible discordant manner,” to Adelie penguins that had gathered about the stationary ship. At the end of the performance, the penguins stood around, “cawing and bowing their appreciation.”
Eventually the pack ice eases and the Terra Nova is able to make its way down to Ross Island. The sea ice has not broken out completely, and they cannot get to Scott’s preferred landing at Hut Point, his old site from the Discovery days. Instead, they decide to set up the hut and base a little farther north at Cape Evans, where they arrive on January 5, 1911. They begin the long and weary process of unloading. They soon learn that this is an environment where the line that separates success and survival from failure and fatality is a very fine one, indeed.
Herbert Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, or “camera artist,” as he prefers to call himself, tries to photograph a pod of six killer whales that are attempting to hunt penguins at the edge of the sea ice. He takes his camera and tripod to the very edge of the sea ice but the whales, seeing him, go under the ice, coming up and breaking it into small floes. Ponting is left rocking on one of the floes when one of the whales rears out of the water, its head over the edge of the floe, trying to grab him. Ponting jumps from floe to floe and is able to get back safely to the fast sea ice and, as Levick admiringly notes, “To his great credit he saved his camera and tripod.”
Levick is a great admirer of Ponting and desires desperately, given his new duties for the Eastern Party, to learn the craft of photography from Ponting. However, Ponting is less enamored with the persistent Levick, and to Levick’s disappointment, largely ignores him. Levick records in his diary:
I find I can’t get any information out of Ponting—He won’t give anything away as to his methods of exposure, developing, etc, though I should not think he can lose much by teaching me.
A second calamity is potentially more serious as far as the expedition’s aims go. The men have unloaded the third of the three motor sledges from the ship and are pulling it across the sea ice toward the land where the hut is being erected, when half a mile from the ship, the ice suddenly gives way and the heavy motor sledge sinks, immediately pulling two men with it into the water. One of them is Priestley and he is by far the one in the most precarious position: pulled completely under and, at one stage, under an ice floe. It is my childhood inspiration, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who comes to the rescue. He skis over to the men left standing on the broken ice—who have by now hauled Priestley and the other seaman out of the freezing water—with a lifeline that is used to haul each of them to safety. There is no such happy ending for the motor sled, however: it is in 120 fathoms of water and well beyond being hauled to safety.
It is January 16, 1911. Levick, Campbell, and Priestley leave the main party to get their digs sorted out at Cape Evans and ski over to Cape Royds; the first persons to go there since James Murray shut the door on the hut and the opportunity to be the world’s first penguin biologist.
Scott himself has little desire to go there because of it being Shackleton’s base. As he writes in a letter to Kathleen, “Always I have had the feeling that Cape Royds has been permanently vulgarized.” It is the reason why he had initially considered setting up his base at Cape Crozier. “There is no trail of Shackleton there,” he says to her, revealing how deeply he is tormented by the big Irishman—the big knighted Irishman.
Levick and Priestley are first to go to Shackleton’s hut, Priestley’s old home from the Nimrod Expedition. They break away ice around the door and enter the large dark room, as the windows had been covered with shutters. Levick lights a candle that is by the door. His response on seeing it is uncannily like mine a lifetime later:
In the middle of the hut was a long table with the remains of their last meal.
A tray of bread scones stood on a box, and tins of every description of food stood in piles on shelves round the walls, whilst the mens (sic) beds stood at intervals around the sides. All the little personal belongings of the late expedition lay about, as they had left them on their hurried departure.
It really was like they had just stepped out of the hut. No one felt that more than Priestley, who found the experience of going back to the hut where he had lived “very eerie.”
I expect to see people come in through the door after a walk over the surrounding hills.
Levick takes a walk through the penguin colony, observing the adult birds “bringing in food for their little downy youngsters.” Apart from acknowledging the hard work evidenced by these parent birds there is not a scintilla of enthusiasm for the penguins, nor any evidence that he has any wish to study them himself. To the contrary, he writes in his diary that, “Their habits and characteristics have been so well described by Wilson in his ‘Discovery’ reports that it is no good repeating them here . . .”
He is much more focused on killing Weddell seals, which they cache in the snow and ice for later, and pilfering what they can from Shackleton’s hut for their own ends on the Eastern Party. He is more taken with the hoofprints he can see of Shackleton’s ponies that remain in the snowbanks than he is with the penguins.
It is January 26, 1911, and, following a speech from Scott, the Terra Nova leaves Cape Evans with all the Eastern Party onboard, intent on establishing their base to explore King Edward VII Land. While en route to Antarctica, Scott had discussed with Campbell a possible change from the original plans. Rather than going right along the Ross Ice Shelf until they get to King Edward VII Land, Scott proposed that perhaps they should land at the Bay of Whales, or Balloon Bight, as he insists on still calling it, and use that as their base to get to King Edward VII Land. This provides two advantages from Scott’s perspective. It enables the party to check up on Shackleton’s explanation that Balloon Bight and the easy access it afforded to the shelf has disappeared—something that Scott does not quite believe or trust about Shackleton’s explanation for abandoning his original commitment to stay away from the McMurdo Sound region, which Scott regards as his territory. Additionally, it will save precious coal, allowing the Terra Nova to explore the coastline west of Cape Adare on its way back to New Zealand, where it shall spend the winter. Ironically, the hard-done-by Scott is anticipating exploring the very region that Mawson has proclaimed to be his focus, if not his territory.
The ship stops briefly at Cape Royds where this time Levick’s only interest in the penguins is to collect twenty of them for food, along with picking up the frozen seal meat they had cached there. Once they leave behind Ross Island, they travel eastward along the Ross Ice Shelf, keeping close to its sheer face.
I am on the Shokalskiy doing the same, sailing within yards of the hundred-foot-high sheer cliffs of ice. It is daunting: an impenetrable, perfectly flat-topped block of ice stretching as far as I can see. The occasional crash of falling ice and the scattered icebergs that have calved off its face are the only hints that this giant sheet of ice is alive and moving. The sea is deep, an inky black, yet where its swell undercuts the edge of the wall of ice, the light reflects as a bright turquoise even though the day is dull and cloudy. The walls are impossibly steep and chiseled, like a giant sculptor—a giant Rodin or Kathleen Scott—has hacked at the edge of the shelf with a giant chisel and mallet. A pair of minke whales swim in the narrow space between us and the wall of ice. Quite fitting really, because at the only place where the wall could be breached, Shackleton had found such an abundance of whales that he named it the Bay of Whales.
At first, the Terra Nova, captained by Harry Pennell with assistance from Wilfred Bruce and Victor Campbell, takes a course directly to King Edward VII Land, but like Shackleton three years before, they meet a barrier of dense, impenetrable pack ice. Turning back, they head for Scott’s Balloon Bight, arriving there in a gale, late on the evening of February 4, to find that, indeed, it and the nearby bight discovered by Borchgrevink have gone, replaced by a large bay and now the edge of the shelf is considerably farther to the south. It is the Bay of Whales, just as Shackleton had said and Priestley already knew. At least Priestley is glad to have “set the matter at rest finally.”
It is just after midnight on February 4, 1911, as the Terra Nova edges its way deep into the bay and, yes, there are whales blowing around them. Bruce is on the bridge when he sees the most unexpected of sights. They are at the extreme end of the great Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. It is a place that Bruce has already described in a letter to his sister as being the most desolate place in the world. And yet, here, tied up to the ice, is another ship.
As Levick records after he is woken and rushes on deck with the rest, “None of us needed to be told that it was the ‘Fram’.”
They moor the Terra Nova nearby and Campbell, Levick, and Priestley ski over to what they think is the Norwegians’ hut, only to realize it is a store. Going over to the Fram, Campbell goes aboard and from the lone watchman learns that their hut is actually two miles away from the edge of the ice and that Amundsen is expected at the ship at 6:00 A.M.
It is February 4, 1911, 6:30 A.M. Amundsen is driving a dog team and an empty sledge to his ship to pick up supplies. He sees the men driving the two teams ahead of him stop and then wave their arms wildly. When he gets to them, he involuntarily starts gesticulating too: all of them now waving their arms like “incurable lunatics.”
We had talked of the possibility of meeting the Terra Nova . . . but it was a great surprise all the same.
Amundsen heads down to the Terra Nova to meet Campbell. He looks older than Campbell expected, a “fine looking man” with “hair nearly white.” From Priestley’s perspective, however, what impresses him most is the perfect control and ease with which Amundsen works his dog team.
I think that no incident was so suggestive of the possibilities latent in these teams as the arrival of Amundsen at the side of the Terra Nova. His dogs were running well and he did not check them until he was right alongside the ship. He then gave a whistle, and the whole team stopped as one dog.
The inescapable conclusion is clear to everyone on the Terra Nova that morning, not Priestly alone. In what is now, beyond any doubt, an out-and-out race for the Pole, “The principal trump-card of the Norwegians was undoubtedly their splendid dogs.”
The exchanges between the men are very cordial. Amundsen invites Lieutenant Pennell, commander of the Terra Nova, Campbell, and Levick to come to their hut and base, called Framheim, to have breakfast. It is Levick’s turn to be impressed.
We found them all men of the of the very best type, and got on very well.
Amundsen offers that the English can set up their base next to his, and the Norwegian-speaking Campbell is tempted. They can certainly reach King Edward VII Land from here and carry out their ambitious plan for exploring the untouched land. But Bruce and others argue against it on the grounds that, “the feelings between the two expeditions must be strained.”
There is nothing more for it. After reciprocating, by hosting Amundsen and some of his men for lunch on board the Terra Nova, they cast off at 2:00 P.M., turning their backs on their mission.
And so it is that the three Norwegians have conspired to alter the course that Levick’s life takes that day: Borchgrevink had discovered that in this area the barrier (perhaps by virtue of being bent and broken by an underwater island over which it passed) was accessible, then Nansen had given his ship Fram to this other Norwegian, this “fine looking man” as Campbell described him, who had sailed it here and set up camp on the only avenue available to the British to carry out their intended exploration.
The Terra Nova will now head first to Cape Evans to deliver the news and drop off the two ponies that they have with them, as Scott will need all the help he can get if he is to beat the Norwegians and their dogs. Then, they will head north to Cape Adare.
If Levick is perturbed by the events of February 4, 1911, such a pivotal day in his life, he does not let on. In summing it up in his diary, he writes, “This has been a wonderful day.”