Roald Amundsen has certainly learned the lessons from Eivind Astrup. Using skis and dogs, his party of five leaves their first depot at 80°S on October 26, with four sledges, each carrying 880 pounds, twice the weight of Scott’s. Although the ice conditions and weather across the barrier are oftentimes difficult; with fog and snow drift making visibility difficult; and gales, crevasses, and sticky ice making progress difficult; they still make excellent time. Amundsen knows the importance of resting both dogs and men in this environment. He sets specific targets for each day that are mostly about fifteen miles and never more than twenty. They cover the distance in five to six hours, with the dogs pulling both the sledges and the men on their skis.
By contrast, Scott and his men plod through the snow with their ponies, moving at only about half the speed of the Norwegians and sometimes much less. Moreover, their days are long: marching for eight to ten hours to attain distances of ten miles or so, and rarely more than thirteen. By the time they stop each day, the ponies and men are completely exhausted.
That is not to say that Amundsen has it easy. He is just better prepared for the conditions. They are well equipped with the “eskimo” style of their clothes. In fact, the garments made of reindeer fur, so helpful when laying the depots in the brutal cold before winter, are now too warm. They leave them unworn on the sledges, finally abandoning them altogether to save weight. They have the tools and experience needed for navigating. The men are all expert skiers and dog drivers and, importantly, they are used to these types of conditions from their northern upbringing. Amundsen and his party experience more than twice as many days of gale force winds on their way to the Pole as does Scott’s party, but they still manage to travel on more than half of them. Scott, his men, and their “unpromising lot of ponies” are unable to travel on any of them.
One thing that distinguishes Amundsen’s journey from that of Scott is that Scott is following a known route: the “road” up the Beardmore Glacier discovered and traversed by Shackleton in 1908, that he knows for certain can take him from the barrier to the Polar Plateau. Amundsen is heading south into uncharted and untraveled lands. His means of getting from barrier to plateau is completely unknown, if one exists at all.
Amundsen has been heading due south, happy to stay on the barrier ice as long as possible. But on November 17, they have gone as far south as they can on the barrier and they find themselves at the base of the Transantarctic Mountains, a line of unbroken peaks of twelve thousand feet, fifteen thousand feet, or more that stretches for 2,000 miles from Cape Adare across the whole of the Antarctic continent. Their only option to get to the pole is to somehow find a way to travel up the mountains to the plateau, which consists of ice that is miles thick and is held behind the mountains like a dam, with the ice spilling over between the peaks as heavily crevassed, steep, and dangerous glaciers.
No obvious way beckons. Setting up camp, Amundsen and his men scout options. Amundsen chooses an especially daunting one: a steep, wide glacier marked by “crevasses and chasms,” which he will eventually name Axel Heiberg Glacier after his patron for both his Gjoa and Fram Expeditions.
The route is so steep that in places the dogs must crawl on their bellies, struggling to get the purchase they need to pull themselves up, let alone the sledges with them. In the steepest pitches, they double-team the dogs, using two dog teams per sledge and relaying: going back to repeat the climb with the sledges that had been left behind. All the while, the dogs are egged on by their drivers and, particularly Bjaaland, the most brilliant of skiers, who goes ahead to coax the dogs up what Amundsen describes as “pit after pit, crevasse after crevasse, and huge ice blocks scattered helter skelter.”
It remains one of the greatest of polar feats ever achieved: in four days they manage to negotiate an unknown and deceptively dangerous route, pulling one ton of food and equipment up ten thousand feet over a distance of forty-four miles. Yet, through all the journey so far, Amundsen never loses his connectedness to the world around him. He never thinks of it as an awful place. To the contrary, he is smitten with its beauty as much as he had been with Sigrid Castberg, and he is just as glad to be here.
Glittering white, shining blue, raven black . . . the land looks like a fairytale. Pinnacle after Pinnacle, peak after peak—crevassed, wild as any land on our globe, it lies, unseen and untrodden. It is a wonderful feeling to travel along it.
Once on the edge of the Polar Plateau, they set up camp, and as per Amundsen’s original plan, they shoot all but eighteen of the dogs who are then fed the flesh of their valiant but not so lucky comrades. At Amundsen’s insistence, the men eat some of their dogs’ flesh too, in order to ward of scurvy, his lesson from the Belgica and Frederick Cook still etched in his memory.
Despite Amundsen’s determination to use dogs with the consequence of that being the need to sacrifice the majority of them, it is not something that he relishes.
. . . there was depression and sadness in the air—we had grown so fond of our dogs. The place was named the “Butcher’s Shop.”
Levick is at Cape Adare and continuing to make notes about the penguins in his blue-bound book. His own revulsion to what he sees is, unlike Amundsen, not apparent from what he writes but, rather, what he does with what he has written.
After writing down his initial observations of mate switching, mysteriously, at some time afterward, he goes back and covers up the next sentence with a pasted piece of paper and Greek letters.
Hove to off Cape Adare, with the penguins in sight of me and the shattered remains of the hut where Levick wrote his Zoological Notes, I sit in my cabin on the Shokalskiy reading once more through his Zoological Notes on my laptop, using the photos I had taken earlier in the book-lined apartment in London.
No matter how many times I return to them, I am always shocked by the first evidence of his strange behavior: a piece of paper cut out to cover a few lines of text and covered in Greek symbols.
This was clearly an afterthought: something he decided to do after writing his initial observations. In the first instance, on October 17, the paper is cut so that it covers only the second half of one line before covering up the six subsequent lines of text completely.
The paper that covers the text is the same paper as the journal itself and presumably has been cut from elsewhere in the journal or one just like it. Indeed, one of the pages in the notebook near the front has been ripped out. At 300 percent magnification, the patched paper and the underlying paper can be seen to share the same embossed details. The covering paper is also the same weight and color as the original.
The covered-up lines are faintly visible beneath the pasted paper. By boosting the magnification and contrast, I can make out the text below. He had crossed it out by running a squiggly line through it before covering it up. Such extraordinary secretiveness for what are supposed to be just scientific notes.
The code itself is easy to break: a schoolboy’s code, no doubt learned by the young Murray Levick at St Paul’s School in London, an elite public school for boys, as a way of passing “secrets” to his classmates.
I decipher the coded section after his initial observation on October 25 about mate switching. It reveals that the mated pairs responded to the mate switch by copulating frequently afterward. It is such a shame that he chose to keep such observations secret because, remarkably, they are eighty years ahead of their time.
It is October 30, 1993. I am at Cape Bird observing the courtship period of the Adelie penguins. This time I am accompanied by a softly spoken postdoctoral fellow, Fiona Hunter, who has a toughness and ease in this environment that even Amundsen would admire.
When Adelie penguins switch partners during the courtship period, as I had observed in my earlier research, a potential dilemma for the male penguin arises if his female partner already has sperm inside her reproductive tract from another male. The costs of that are potentially very high.
Penguin eggs and chicks require a lot of care and investment by both parents. It is impossible for the female to rear the eggs and chicks alone. However, if a male were to spend an entire summer rearing another male’s offspring, his own evolutionary fitness would be markedly reduced while benefitting that of the female’s initial lover.
Fiona and I discover that male Adelie penguins have developed counterstrategies to use in exactly those situations where their partners have already been doing the wild thing with another male: they bonk like crazy. Like once every three hours. And whereas pairs typically put a halt to conjugal capers once the first egg is laid, as there is plenty of viable sperm remaining in her reproductive tract to fertilize the second egg just before it is laid three days later, males with partners that switch to them from another male continue to copulate right up until the time the second egg is laid.
These males are engaging in a kind of biological warfare using sperm as their weapons. Their frequent fornication is in an attempt to swamp any sperm from their predecessor that might be remaining in the female’s reproductive tract with their own sperm.
This sperm competition, where the sperm of two-timed males are in a race to beat the other penguin’s sperm to fertilize the female’s two eggs is, I suppose, not much different to having two parties racing to the South Pole. There can be only one winner and much will depend on the strategies they employ to get to their goal. DNA evidence indicates that this counterstrategy by the two-timed male penguins, whereby they essentially blast the female’s cloaca with sperm, is effective: very few male Adelie penguins end up rearing offspring that are not their own.
In other species of penguins I have studied, such as Erect-crested penguins, mate-switching is not so common and copulation rates are an order of magnitude lower. Or, put another way, a more manageable, if less enjoyable, once every thirty hours. In fact, as part of their Sperm Wars, Adelie penguins fornicate so often during the courtship period that the males can literally run out of sperm, and, even then, they will continue to bonk their female partner even though they are firing blanks.
Fiona and I know all this because we collect the semen by swabbing the females’ cloacas after they have been mated, and with the most bizarre piece of methodology I have ever used in my scientific career: by inducing male penguins to copulate with a dead penguin. We had a taxidermist mount a dead penguin in such a way that it resembled the mating position of a female lying in the nest: tail raised, head tilted back. To collect sperm from males we wrap a cellophane covering over the dead bird’s nether regions and simply collect the semen deposited on it by the males. The males need no encouragement at all to mate with the dead female.
In fact, so little does the “female” need to resemble reality that we discover we can use a fluffy toy penguin instead. Fiona had bought one from the Antarctic Centre in Christchurch just before our flight to Antarctica. When we place the toy penguin prostrate on the ground beside a subcolony of penguins, the males practically line up to mate with it.
This accords with another of Levick’s coded observations. On November 10, 1911, there is a large passage pasted over. Transcribing the code of Greek letters, it reads:
This afternoon I saw a most extraordinary site (sic). A Penguin was actually engaged in sodomy upon the body of a dead white throated bird of its own species. The act occurred a full minute, the position taken up by the cock differing in no respect from that of ordinary copulation, and the whole act was gone through down to the final depression of the cloaca . . .
The dead bird is the carcass of a fledgling from the previous breeding season, one of those Levick had observed the previous February that had been too slow to fledge. As such, it is more an example of necrophilia than it ever was sodomy.
The pasted text continues, although, perversely, Levick chooses to use English instead of Greek:
On returning to the hut I told Browning, hardly expecting to be believed, but to my surprise he at once said that he had seen the same thing several times, done to dead bodies . . .
Then, just as perversely, Levick switches back to using his code of Greek letters to say where these incidents observed by Browning have occurred.
It turns out that such necrophilia, as Browning and Levick’s observations might suggest, is not all that uncommon in Adelie penguins. Neither is Levick so far off the mark by implying that such behavior is similar in cause to the homosexual behavior that he, and subsequently I, would see. Our observations of homosexuality and necrophilia—indeed, my research with Fiona that showed male penguins will just as readily get it off with a fluffy toy as a female penguin—stem from the same root cause: males are not very discriminating in what they will fornicate with because the costs of making a mistake are so low. Sperm are cheap.
It all comes down to the relative size of the contribution that males and females make to mating. A male passes on his genetic material by way of sperm: tiny, almost invisible tadpole-like things that he produces in the hundreds of millions with every ejaculate. Sperm are cheap to produce and misplacing or misusing even a few million of them is of no consequence: there’s plenty more where they came from, for the most part.
By contrast, the female Adelie penguin passes on her genetic material in the form of eggs, and she produces just two of them each year. They are large and contain yolk and albumen to nourish a developing embryo. The females have a lot invested in each egg and they need to be cautious about with whom and where they mate: get it wrong and the whole breeding season’s opportunity is lost.
So, simply as a consequence of the differences in the size of their respective investments in eggs or sperm, females and males behave differently when it comes to sex. It pays for females to be extremely choosy about who, when, and where they mate. Males, on the other hand, can afford to throw caution to the wind and sow their wild oats wherever they like in the hopes that some will germinate and bear fruit, so to speak. It’s a condition that affects males of many species, including humans.
Levick more or less hints at this when he notes that “now the season is so far advanced there must be a certain number of both cocks and hens wandering about who have been left out in the race for partners . . .” He thereafter switches to more pasted Greek letters to excuse the behavior of the males on the basis that it is the only option left to them.
Who would have thought that a race to breed could be used as an excuse for necrophilia or sodomy; just as who would have thought that a race to the South Pole could lead to so much bloodshed?
It is December 9, 1911. Scott’s party has finally made it to the base of the Beardmore Glacier, trudging through storm after storm after storm. The five ponies that remain are thin and tired, at times sinking in the snow up to their bellies. Oates walks them away and shoots each in turn. The flesh is hacked from their bones. There is blood and guts everywhere. The men name this blood-stained place Shambles Camp. In that regard, they are not so different from the Norwegians: “shambles” originally designated a butcher’s place for slaughtering animals. Even its more modern connotation as a place of carnage seems appropriate.
The pony meat is frozen in the snow to act as a depot for the returning parties of men. Even at this stage, some of the men are looking almost as gaunt and tired as the ponies. None more so than the four men who had been in charge of the motor sledges: they have man-hauled their sledges through the same awful conditions as the ponies for almost four hundred miles to get this far.
It is a strange contradiction, indeed, that Scott can be so against sacrificing dogs for the purposes of Antarctic travel, yet he is so prepared to sacrifice the ponies, which Cherry-Garrard describes as “a horrid business.” Unlike dogs, which might be fed to their companions and thereby allow at least some of them to make the return journey, from the outset there was never any way to carry enough food to get any of the ponies back to base, even were they capable of walking another foot, let alone another four hundred miles. Scott’s plan had always called for the ponies to be killed.
By now Scott’s party is behind schedule. They have already started to eat into the rations intended for use on the Polar Plateau at the top of the glacier. The dogs should have turned back by now, but Scott makes a last-minute decision that they will go on for a couple more days, even though that means all the men giving up one biscuit per day of what are already inadequate rations for such backbreaking, calorie-sapping work.
Scott’s ponies all slaughtered by Shambles Camp; more than half of Amundsen’s dogs slaughtered by the Butcher’s Shop. However, nothing emphasizes the differences between these two expeditions more so than the locations of these abattoirs. Amundsen was already on the Polar Plateau and only 274 miles from the pole. Scott is still on the barrier, still with 10,000 feet to climb and still more than 430 miles to go to the South Pole. Plus, the dogs had been slaughtered on November 21, eighteen days before the carnage of Shambles Camp.
By any measure, Amundsen is well ahead, and his dogs and his men have proven their worth.
It is December 9, 1911. While Scott and his party are at Shambles Camp with the blood and entrails from their five ponies spread about the snow, Amundsen and his four men stay in bed late, resting in their sleeping bags. The day before they have passed Shackleton’s furthest south record, and they are now within ninety-five miles of their quarry. Amundsen has declared it a rest day “to prepare for the final onslaught.”
They make their final depot, taking care to mark the whereabouts of the cairn containing around two hundred pounds of food and fuel with thirty black planks taken from empty sledging cases in a line three miles long on either side of the depot. The next morning, the party that now consists of the five men, three sledges, and seventeen dogs, heads off south in glorious sunshine. “Sledges and ski glide easily and pleasantly,” according to Amundsen, across what is now a “quite even and flat” surface.
The competition is almost over.