A Polar Affair Read online

  A

  POLAR

  AFFAIR

  Antarctica’s Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

  LLOYD SPENCER DAVIS

  To Wiebke

  for completing my song

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE · THE LURE OF ANTARCTICA

  HOMOSEXUALITY

  ONE · VICTORIAN VALUES

  TWO · TERRA AUSTRALIS

  THREE · THE THREE NORWEGIANS

  PART TWO · ALL ROADS LEAD TO CAPE ADARE

  DIVORCE

  FOUR · FIRST OBSERVATIONS

  FIVE · BOYHOOD DREAMS

  SIX · LOST OPPORTUNITIES

  SEVEN · COURTSHIP

  EIGHT · DECEPTION

  NINE · THE EASTERN PARTY

  PART THREE · CAPE ADARE

  INFIDELITY

  TEN · THE NORTHERN PARTY

  ELEVEN · THE WORST JOURNEY

  TWELVE · THE RELUCTANT PENGUIN BIOLOGIST

  THIRTEEN · THE RACE BEGINS

  FOURTEEN · COMPETITION

  FIFTEEN · TIMING

  PART FOUR · AFTER CAPE ADARE

  RAPE

  SIXTEEN · HOOLIGANS

  SEVENTEEN · WEATHER

  EIGHTEEN · DOGS

  NINETEEN · WINTER

  TWENTY · RETURN JOURNEY

  PART FIVE · AFTER ANTARCTICA

  PROSTITUTION

  TWENTY-ONE · THE DEPRAVITIES OF MEN

  TWENTY-TWO · AFTER THE WAR

  TWENTY-THREE · THE POLE AT LAST

  FURTHER READING · KEY REFERENCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ENDNOTES

  INDEX

  PROLOGUE

  It is October 13, 1911. A cold day in Antarctica, even by Antarctic standards. Pack ice extends to the horizon from the tiny spit of land that is Ridley Beach at Cape Adare. A white, windswept tableau, it has been battered into a state of bleakness by the blizzard that masses overhead and pushes hard up against the mountains it hides. It is as uninviting a place as it is possible to find. And yet, as the man squints ahead of him, he can make out a little black-and-white person, a penguin, leaning into the wind, straining, marching toward its destination. This beach. This season. A chance to prove itself.

  The man looks at the penguin with some ambivalence. He would rather be pulling sledges than stuck here, marooned on a piece of land not much bigger than a football field, which he will soon have to share with thousands of the little monochromatic blighters that are somewhere out there, in the snow and the ice, moving unerringly toward him. He is dressed against the cold, but his face remains exposed. Still tanned by the sun even after a winter’s darkness, you could be forgiven for mistaking him as someone other than an Englishman. That night, in the comparative warmth of his hut, with a sigh that is part frustration, part fascination, he takes a fountain pen and in a blue-bound notebook writes, “1st Penguin arrives Oct. 13th,” which he underlines with a sweep of the blue-black ink. It is the beginning of the world’s first serious study of penguins.

  It is January 14, 1912. A cold day in Antarctica, even by Antarctic standards. A line of men, real men, strain and lean into the wind as they pull a laden sledge across an ice-covered flat and featureless landscape, trudging toward their destination. They are on a mission to prove themselves. The South Pole. Their destiny. Their duty. As Englishmen.

  It is March 29, 1912. Nearly eleven weeks have elapsed. Of the five men who marched to the Pole, only three remain, pressed against each other in their caribou sleeping bags. Outside, the wind tears mercilessly at their tent, the spindrift of snow flying inside the tent taunts them as much as the cravings from their empty bellies. To go outside means instant death; to stay inside means a lingering one. The Englishman with the round face picks up his pencil. He glances at the still bodies of his companions. Perhaps they are already dead? And, in a small black-bound notebook, he writes for the last time.

  We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.

  Those words would help turn Robert Falcon Scott, failed polar explorer, into a hero: a household name synonymous with courage and perseverance against the odds; a man embraced by a nation. Even his dying postscript—For God’s sake look after our people—sounds more like a plea to a higher authority to go easy on the whole populace of Great Britain than it does the last wish of a dying man for his beloved wife and son.

  Scott’s frozen body lies half in, half out of his sleeping bag; an arm over his good friend, the doctor Edward Wilson; his little black notebook and pencil tucked beneath his shoulder. The scrawled signature: R. Scott. Not Robert or Robert Scott, but R. Scott. Stiff and formal, British through and through, even in death.

  It is the same day, March 29, 1912, and 220 miles to the north of Scott’s tent, the other Englishman, the one who had been studying penguins—also a doctor, also a member of Scott’s last Antarctic expedition—crawls into a sleeping bag in a hole dug into a bank of snow where he shall spend the entire Antarctic winter with five companions. He picks up his own pencil and writes, “Blowing hard all day.” It is the beginning of the most amazing story of Antarctic survival and adventure ever told, in a place replete with amazing stories and the frozen last breaths of other adventurers. It is the story of the unsung hero of Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition, a man who would become the world’s first penguin biologist but whose achievements will be lost in the public adulation and sympathy for Scott and his thwarted attainments.

  It is the story of George Murray Levick.

  PART ONE

  THE LURE OF

  ANTARCTICA

  Homosexuality

  There is an impression that nature is not just red in tooth and claw, but red-blooded to boot, especially when it comes to sex. Males compete with each other to fornicate with as many females as they can. It is why male elephant seals are so much bigger than their female counterparts; it is why male red deer have antlers; it is, after all, the basis for evolution according to Darwin. Survival of the fittest is really a euphemism for survival of those who fuck the most and thereby sire the most offspring. Survival, in this sense, has got very little to do with longevity: you survive through your children and their children and so on. Heterosexuality, sex between a male and a female, is not a lifestyle choice so much as it is the essence of life itself, the means by which we perpetuate ourselves—at least as far as we vertebrates know it. Consequently, the notion that sex might occur between members of the same sex has long been seen as unnatural and, given the way natural selection works, unlikely: sex without the prospect of producing progeny would seem to be the epitome of an unsuccessful evolutionary strategy. Homosexuality, using this logic, must be an affectation, a foible of human sociology rather than a product of our biology. For a boy brought up in the Victorian era of Great Britain, sodomy was something sordid, an unspoken evil, and certainly the last thing he would expect to see in wild animals. However, life would make a habit of unfolding in unexpected ways for George Murray Levick.

  CHAPTER ONE

  VICTORIAN VALUES

  It is October 28, 1996, a good day in Antarctica by Antarctic standards. Clouds cover half the sky, yet visibility is unimpeded all the way across the sound to massive mountains that sit on the distant horizon like lost children of the Himalayas. It is a balmy 14°F and the breeze from the north is not strong enough even to ruffle the patches of dark blue water that lie sandwiched between pieces of pack ice, which extend like a giant jigsaw puzzle all the way to the mountains.

  I am sitting with a group of Adelie* penguins at the Cape Bird colony that is located on Ross Island. It is a half-hour helicopter ride from the hut at Cape Eva
ns where Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his party had set out on their ultimately fatal mission to become the first humans to stand on the South Pole. The risks of my own adventure are ostensibly more those of boredom than any loss of life or limb: I am taking my turn, sitting for hours in the Antarctic open, keeping the mating behavior of the penguins that surround me under constant surveillance. The research being undertaken by me and my team is beginning to reveal that the bedroom antics of the penguins are not exactly like their public personas, which would paint them as virtuous imitations of little people that mate for life; the darlings of the Christian Right; the poster children for monogamy. Not entirely boring, I suppose, but I am certainly not prepared for what follows.

  One penguin approaches another. They bow deeply to each other in what is usually a surefire prelude to courtship. Except that, in this instance, both the penguins are males. The approaching male then mounts the other male. If such unexpected debauchery were not surprising enough, afterward, the penguin that has played “female,” reciprocates by mounting the first male, ejaculating and depositing sperm on his homosexual lover’s genitals in precisely the same manner as occurs in a normal mating between a male and a female penguin.

  On this day, I, Lloyd Spencer Davis, penguin biologist, discover something new about the lives of penguins that is completely at odds with the view of penguins promulgated in pretty much every book, documentary, and scientific paper, which collectively suggest that penguins are prim and proper, monogamous little creatures that mate for life, such that if one needs a blueprint against which to measure the human ideals of marriage and fidelity, one need look no further than penguins.

  At least, so I thought.

  Fifteen years later, Douglas Russell, who goes by the unlikely title of senior curator of birds’ eggs and nests at Britain’s Natural History Museum, is sifting through a filing box of reprints in the library at the museum’s storage and research facilities in Tring. He takes out a three-page printed manuscript that he has never seen before. Printed along its top are the words, NOT FOR PUBLICATION. The manuscript is entitled, The Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin and it is written by Royal Navy Staff Surgeon G. Murray Levick, a doctor who had accompanied Captain Scott to Antarctica and acted as sometime zoologist and photographer in addition to his medical duties.

  Russell has chanced upon seemingly the only surviving copy of a manuscript written by Levick in 1915 about the sexual behavior of penguins—one of apparently one hundred copies—that got as far as being printed but then, for whatever reason, was prevented from being published.

  Robert Falcon Scott’s last expedition to Antarctica, known as the Terra Nova Expedition, was as much a scientific quest as it had been a quest to get to the South Pole. At its conclusion, it was incumbent upon the surviving members of the expedition to publish the results of their findings. Murray Levick, who had studied Adelie penguins while stationed at Cape Adare, duly produced a book called Antarctic Penguins: A Study of Their Social Habits, which was published in 1914. It was the first book ever published about penguins.

  I had come across Levick’s book in 1977, when I began my own studies of Adelie penguins in Antarctica. It was one of three books about penguins that I took down to the Antarctic with me, along with others by Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. While, to be sure, it had provided some baseline behavioral observations of Adelie penguins, it otherwise had seemed fairly quaint to me in the way it characterized the penguins.

  For the next thirty-five years, I went about my merry way, blithely “discovering” the truth about the sexual behavior of penguins. That is until, nearly a century after it had originally been written, Douglas Russell published Levick’s paper on the sexual habits of Adelie penguins in the journal Polar Record, along with a commentary by him and two penguin researchers, Bill Sladen and David Ainley.

  It is late in the evening and I am sitting at my office computer reading Levick’s belatedly published paper on my screen. The building is deserted; everyone has gone home. I should have too, but I am glued to the seat of my red leatherette chair, unable to go anywhere. In his paper, Levick describes a litany of sexual depravities and misbehaviors committed by penguins.

  I am stunned. Staggered. Like I have been punched in the guts. It is bewildering, but strangely exciting too. I am struck by the realization that, for the better part of my career as a penguin researcher, I have been merely rediscovering what Levick had already discovered about the sexual behavior of penguins. It is as if George Murray Levick, having been denied his own voice, has somehow channeled himself through me. Nowhere is this clearer than in the last two sentences of Levick’s document.

  Here on one occasion I saw what I took to be a cock copulating with a hen. When he had finished, however, and got off, the apparent hen turned out to be a cock, and the act was again performed with their positions reversed, the original “hen” climbing on to the back of the original cock, whereupon the nature of their proceeding was disclosed.

  It could have been exactly the same encounter I had observed on Cape Bird and then described in my own manuscript, which I had published as original research eighty-three years after Levick’s observations!

  I lean back in my chair, my hands gripping its chrome arms, and swivel around to glance at the bookshelves behind me. They are laden with books about penguins and filing boxes full of reprints about penguins that have been labeled and sorted alphabetically by the first authors’ surnames. There must be copies of over two thousand scientific papers about penguins sitting on those shelves, a veritable compendium of penguin research and all we know about these distinctive and charismatic creatures. And yet, save for a few inconsequential notes from early explorers, there is not a single substantive scientific paper about penguins among them that predates 1915. Arranged along the bottom two shelves there are, if I include those with my name on their dust jackets, forty or so books about penguins. In their midst is the somewhat tattered green cover of my copy of Levick’s book, Antarctic Penguins: A Study of Their Social Habits, which had been printed in 1914. Nothing else on those shelves even comes close to its age.

  George Murray Levick—or Murray Levick, as he preferred—was indisputably the father of penguin biology: the first real penguin biologist, the first person to study penguins in a systematic way. Everything else on those shelves came after him. Yet far from being quaint, the paper I have just finished reading, written in 1915, although not published until 2012, proves that he had discovered things about penguins that the rest of us who adorn those shelves took another one hundred years to discern.

  I spin around in my chair like a child on a playground merry-go-round—gleeful but confused, trying to process everything. I stop before my reflection in the darkened window. The white of my hair is what I see most clearly staring back at me. For three and a half decades, I have believed that I have been forging my own path: a scientific explorer intent on exposing the truth about the mating habits of penguins. In fact, all I have been doing, apparently, is following in someone else’s footsteps, even if time, or censorship, or whatever, has obliterated his footprints.

  To learn that Levick has walked before me like an unseen ghost, well, I realize then and there that I need to get to know this man who has been like my personal Sherpa, if silent and invisible. Why was he silenced, censored, prevented from letting the world know about the truth about penguins? By whom, and for what reason? Or, did he choose to shut up about what he had seen? Douglas Russell’s commentary in Polar Biology mentions evidence that suggests Levick himself may have been complicit in the silencing of his results: he had covered up the most salacious parts of his field notes with a code that used Greek letters. Why?

  I need to know. Levick is an enigma to me. I know he wrote his book about penguins, of course, but I know little else. A quick online search suggests that neither does anyone else. The records about Levick are sparse, at best.

  He was born in the English city of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1876. He studied medic
ine. He joined the Royal Navy. He accompanied Scott on the Terra Nova Expedition and, as a member of the Northern Party, overwintered on Inexpressible Island in a snow cave. He served in the First World War, made a name for himself as a doctor afterward, and established something called the Public Schools Exploring Society. He died in 1956.

  As I drive home for dinner, rehearsing my apology for being late, it occurs to me that if I am to turn detective and discover the real story behind Murray Levick, then I should start at the beginning. As it happens, I am due to go to England and a side trip to Newcastle seems like it should be as good a place as any to begin to find out about Levick and what made him the man I would become.

  Murray Levick was a child of the Victorian era. Born on July 3, 1876, in Newcastle upon Tyne in the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria, he was brought up in a society where the acquisition of high personal moral standards was a developmental stage every bit as expected and predictable as a child’s second teeth. Furthermore, while teeth may fall out over a lifetime, no such lapses were excusable when it came to morals. Sex was something reserved for heterosexual couples and, even then, only if they were married to each other.

  It has not always been that way. Newcastle, which occupies a jot of land in the northeast of England, has a history of debauchery every bit as profound as its reputation for being an industrial town, depressed and blackened with coal dust. It is true that the expression “taking coals to Newcastle” originated there and, for more than seven hundred years, Newcastle really was the coal capital of Great Britain, the literal engine room for the Industrial Revolution. However, long before that, it had a reputation for being dirty in another kind of way.

  When I arrive there, my first impression of Newcastle is that it is all shiny-bright and ultramodern, nestling comfortably on the banks of the River Tyne with an architectural poem—the Gateshead Millennium Bridge—connecting both sides of the river with glorious sweeping arches. The hotel too is very modern, with views of the river. However, as I look beyond Newcastle upon Tyne’s modern veneer, I start to see signs of its ancient roots and a heart that has been beating for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.