When he was twenty-one, so the murmurs go, he had an affair with a married woman, Minnie Blanchard, during a stopover in San Francisco. As was so often the way in such Victorian times, the Admiralty averted any scandal by promptly sending Scott back to England.
In the aftermath of the Discovery Expedition, Scott had become something of a celebrity. At a luncheon party in March 1906, he had met Kathleen Bruce, a sculptress of Scottish and Greek descent. Dark-skinned, bouncy, and flirtatious, Kathleen embraced a Bohemian, impulsive, fun-loving attitude to life. She is everything that Scott is not. She is a feminist before feminism will even have a name.
She also has a powerful and peculiar obsession: to bear a son who will become a hero. For that to occur, nothing will do quite so well as the boy having a father who is a hero too. Scott fits the bill perfectly. Already well known for his Discovery exploits, much greater acclaim surely beckons Scott in the form of the South Pole. Another expedition, to get to the South Pole this time, is not just a venture that Kathleen is prepared to support, she wants it more than anything.
After the wedding, Kathleen stays in London while Scott attends to his naval duties in Devonport and makes preparations for his next, as yet unannounced, expedition to the Antarctic. She does, however, summon Scott to London at the appropriate time in her menstrual cycle in order that he may impregnate her. It is a tactic that works brilliantly, and she writes to him early in 1909 to say that she is pregnant, barely hiding her ultimate motive:
Throw up your cap & shout & sing triumphantly, meseems we are in a fair way to achieve my end.
Ernest Shackleton is as romantically different to Scott as it’s possible to be. Big-shouldered and barrel-chested, he has a square jaw and thick dark hair that he parts down the middle. He is deep-voiced and charming; a rogue who spouts poetry.
While he was in the Merchant Navy, it seemed that every port held one girl, if not more, for him. Yet in June 1897, when he was just twenty-three, his erotic ramblings were brought, if not to a stop, then a pause: he met Emily Dorman, the friend of one of his sisters.
Tall and slim, Emily is blessed with big features: a prominent nose, big blue eyes, and large teeth that make for a particularly attractive smile. She is six years older than Shackleton and well educated in the arts. She shared his love of poetry and introduced Shackleton to the poems of Robert Browning. Thereafter, Browning became Shackleton’s favorite too. He was smitten with Emily, but at first she paid him little heed, which only increased his determination to pursue her.
For Emily, the daughter of a well-to-do solicitor, Shackleton, a merchant seaman, was considered a little too beneath her class. It was the major reason why he signed up for Scott’s Discovery Expedition to Antarctica: to impress Emily and prove himself worthy of her love, as well as being a way to accumulate some much-needed funds.
Shackleton asked Emily to marry him just before leaving for Antarctica with Scott in 1901. Perhaps fearing rejection, he sent a letter to her father requesting her hand in marriage only as the Discovery set sail. Her father replied in the affirmative, but by the time his answer caught up with the Discovery in New Zealand, he had died.
Shackleton confessed that he wanted to be engaged to Emily so as to thwart others who might be interested in her while he was away for years in Antarctica. As he put it in a letter to her, it is “a man’s way to want a woman altogether to himself.”
Despite being betrothed to Emily while in the Antarctic, such monogamous appreciations apparently did not go both ways. When invalided home by Scott, Shackleton had a romance with an adventurous young woman called Hope Paterson on the ship he took back to England from South Africa. He even wrote her a poem that concluded passionately:
Though the grip of the frost may be cruel and relentless its icy hold
Yet it knit our hearts together in that darkness stern and cold
Nevertheless, on April 9, 1904, after a courtship period lasting some seven years, Shackleton finally married Emily Dorman in Christ Church, near Westminster Abbey.
Yet, while on the Nimrod Expedition, he discovers, climbs, and names a mountain after Hope Paterson. Ostensibly, Mount Hope has been named because it lifted the spirits of the men upon reaching its summit, but subsequently he sends Hope a piece of rock from the mountain’s top. It is mounted in silver metal with a small plaque that reads “Summit Mount Hope” and gives its height (2,785 feet) and geographical coordinates. Evidently, Antarctica is not the only land he has explored and laid claim to.
If nothing else, the rock, an echo of those prized by the penguins mating outside his hut at Cape Royds, is an indication that Shackleton is probably more penguin than he is a man of his word when it comes to marital fidelity. Among polar explorers, that is not a distinction he will have to himself.
The handsome hero Fridtjof Nansen is almost as famous for his affairs as he is for his conquests of Arctic regions. Perhaps the real surprise comes in July 1909. While Kathleen Scott is pregnant with her much wished-for son, the monk-like Amundsen, who had professed not to need women when on the Belgica, who has known sex—if at all—only in brothels and igloos, falls in love for the first time in his life at the age of thirty-seven.
His boyhood dream accomplished, having made the Northwest Passage, Roald Amundsen, like Robert Falcon Scott, has more ambitious polar plans. He is now setting his sights on the goal that had eluded his hero, Nansen: the North Pole. At a ball in Oslo, which Amundsen attends only out of duty that he might find backers among the elite of Norwegian society to support his new expedition, he meets a woman who had been in his class during his short-lived period at medical school in Kristiania University. Sigrid Castberg is married to a wealthy businessman. She agrees to help Amundsen raise money from her rich friends.
Where previously Amundsen had known only a kind of cold fusion between himself and the opposite sex, with this slim woman with the high cheekbones there is a chemistry of a different kind.
The Grand Hotel in Oslo is an ornate affair that sits at the corner of Karl Johans Street and Rosenkrantz Street. From its corner balcony Fridtjof Nansen had received an ovation from the adoring crowd “amid the bunting and the cheers” the day he returned from Greenland, and so inspired the seventeen-year-old Roald Amundsen to become a polar explorer. Twenty years later, Amundsen has a different kind of exploration making his heart tremor with “throbbing pulses.” He has been given a room at the hotel for his use when he is working in the city on his forthcoming expedition. One night, after dinner with Sigrid, ostensibly an innocent meeting about support for the new expedition, he goes to his room where, discreetly, she joins him sometime later. He is awkward and unsure, but she kisses him and the last piece of the ice shelf that has kept this man so stiff and removed from feminine involvements melts away. They make love on the bed and, for a moment, this normally aloof and calculating man becomes a bowing, immensely grateful male penguin in her hands. Amundsen is smitten.
I am out of my metaphorical generator box and it is now my turn to stay at the Grand Hotel. More than a hundred years after Amundsen, the hotel still manages to pull off its trademark style of understated opulence. There is marble where it needs to be, a dining room with a delightfully vaulted ceiling, plush chairs, and an abundance of tasteful artwork. The twin elevators, sheathed in brass, lead to what are now eight floors, many more rooms having been added since Amundsen’s day. Yet the rooms on the first three floors overlooking Karl Johans Street are original. Sadly, there is no record of exactly which room Roald Amundsen and Sigrid Carsten used, but I imagine that it is the room I am in. Certainly the twelve-foot-high stud would not have changed, and the bay windows, while double-glazed now, are consistent with the original design. The chandelier might be a different one, but I am assured there would have been something similar in its place. The subdued gray walls and carpets are all brand-new and recently renovated, but I suspect that could Roald Amundsen have stood with me in that room, the only significant difference he would notice would be the big flat-
screen TV. Not that it would matter to him. He had been intent on watching something else: Sigrid undressing. And if the bed then were a bit more uncomfortable than the massive king-size bed that is here now, I doubt that he would have noticed.
At almost exactly the same time that Amundsen is experiencing love for the first time, the same is happening to Douglas Mawson on the other side of the world in Australia. In August 1909, Mawson meets Francisca Delprat at a dinner party. The six-foot-tall, seventeen-year-old Dutch-born beauty has long, dark hair and an accent that Mawson finds as alluring as the rest of her. She had lived in Spain before emigrating to Australia with her family and goes by her Spanish nickname “Paquita,” which means “free.” If that were not enough for the gobsmacked Mawson, she is also keenly interested in both geology and him, and not necessarily in that order.
Murray Levick during this period, on the other hand, gives no sign of any form of engagement with the fairer sex. I discover some of his correspondence and it is exclusively to other males; exclusively work-related. If he were a penguin, I daresay that he would be one of those young unpaired males, setting up a nest on the periphery of a subcolony, collecting stones with which to attract a potential mate, only to have them stolen by a neighbor when he has his back turned.
From my time at Cape Bird, observing the real penguins around-the-clock throughout the courtship period in 1984, it seemed that while the penguins engaged in a bit of mate switching from one to another, there was nothing like the infidelities exhibited by a Peary, a Nansen, or a Shackleton. The penguins may engage in serial monogamy, having multiple partners sequentially in the one breeding season, but it seemed that they only ever had one partner at a time. And surely, once they had settled on a partner and produced eggs with it, conventional wisdom said that it should benefit them to stay together, if not mate for life. Divorce should be low. At least, that is what I anticipated.
It is late October 1985, and I have been bitten by a bug much more potent than the mosquito in Levick’s brucellosis experiment: I am infected with the desire to go back to Antarctica again, to once more sit in my generator box observing the mating behavior of my penguins in the subcolony at Cape Bird.
Adelie penguins return to breed in the same subcolony from one year to the next. Even though the paint markings of my penguins had been lost once the birds had molted at the end of the previous breeding season, their numbered flipper bands can still be used to identify each bird.
The winter is a hard time for penguins. Once they have graduated from being chicks, it will remain the period of greatest risk throughout their lives. Many succumb during the annual winter migration, when the birds are forced to go north to avoid the worst that the Antarctic can throw at them. Usually, about one in every six penguins will fail to complete the journey each year, but during the worst winters as many as a quarter of them will die.
Yet even when both partners from the previous season have made it back safely to the subcolony, I discover a remarkable thing that season: about one-third of the erstwhile pairs do not reunite; they divorce. This seems extraordinary for a bird that we are repeatedly told mates for life.
My students and I adopt a familiar routine. We hunker down in the generator box, observing the sexual soap opera being played out in front of us.
Usually, although not always, the male arrives at the subcolony at the start of the new breeding season before his partner from the previous season. The nests of Adelie penguins consist of little more than scrapes in the hard ground that are lined with stones, although from one breeding season to the next, the stones get scattered around and so there is little to mark a particular nest other than the slight depression made by the penguins’ scraping feet over many years. Remarkably, the penguins, once they have established a breeding site, go back to the same subcolony the next season and, in the majority of cases, the exact same nest site.
The male then sets about collecting stones to line the nest, either by getting them from outside the subcolony or stealing them from his neighbors’ nests. An industrious male will build a nest that resembles a large dog’s bowl, with the flooring and walls constructed of little stones. However, these “bowls” are not to keep water in but, actually, to let it out. Snow storms can occur at any time during the Antarctic summer, sometimes completely burying the penguins. Eggs are porous and the embryos they contain would soon die if the eggs were to sit for long in water. The stones allow the meltwater from the snow to drain away, leaving the eggs, which are tucked under the breeding bird’s belly, nice and dry.
During the period of courtship, males—and especially unattached males—perform what has been called, rather incongruously, an ecstatic display. It starts with the male fluffing the feathers on the back of his head to form an angular crest rather than the smoother, rounder shape of an Adelie penguin when at rest. He then puts his head down, tucks his bill under one flipper, and emits a growling sound. Straightening up, he points his bill skyward, puffs out his chest and emits a series of stuttering grunts, all the while waving his flippers rhythmically as if a reminder of a time when his ancestors could fly. At last the grunts, which have been increasing in intensity, reach a crescendo and the call ends with a long, sustained, cry.
The male will then repeat the whole thing. And it is contagious. Other unattached males will call similarly. These are advertisements. Songs of Self. If these penguins were Ernest Shackleton, they would be reciting the poetry of Browning, for the purpose of their ecstatic calls is the same: to seduce would-be partners.
The males all look alike, to my eyes at least, and evidently to other penguins too. The calls of penguins, however, are individually distinct and, therefore, individually identifiable. Each penguin’s call is like a fingerprint. My students and I investigate whether there are characteristics in the ecstatic calls of males that might make one male more attractive to females than another.
Adelie penguins usually breed for the first time when three to six years old. Virgin females prospect for their first partner by checking out unattached males when they are performing their ecstatic displays, oftentimes walking directly up to the calling males. What we find is that prospecting females prefer males with deeper voices: the Ernest Shackletons of the penguins’ world. To me, that all makes sense. Call frequency is influenced by body size, with the largest males being able to produce the lowest frequencies. Such males probably also have the largest fat reserves. If staying power (the ability of an incubating male to continue fasting and not desert the eggs) is a good predictor of breeding success, as I had found during my first stint studying the penguins in 1977, then a big fat male, one able to produce a deep voice, would make perfect sense as the sexiest thing a virgin female could choose.
But what about experienced females? In almost all seabirds, there is an advantage of re-pairing with a previous partner, especially one with which a bird has previously been successful.
We observe that these experienced females, the ones that we had followed from the generator box throughout the previous breeding season, are not so focused on the calling concerts put on by the unattached males. The thing they seem most intent on getting close to is their previous nest site. They go back to it. If their previous partner is there by himself, they will scream their welcoming, which is quickly and simultaneously returned by their old mate, and, this time, is fittingly called a Mutual Call. However, if he is not there, then the urgency to breed in the short Antarctic summer takes over pretty quickly and the females will pair up a new male within a few hours, sometimes even a few minutes.
There are several characteristics of the newly chosen males that we thought might be crucial to the females’ decisions. And make no mistake: any decision making or discretion is exercised solely by the females. The males will bonk anything that comes within a flipper’s length of them and lays upon the ground. As nests on the outside of the subcolony are most prone to skua predation, we anticipate that females might show a preference for males with central nests. Males that are ex
perienced, especially those that have been previously successful at breeding, we suspect might also prove attractive to the females.
Throughout that courtship period in 1985, we are able to record the identities of all the unpaired males in the subcolony at the exact time each female arrives, and hence match the characteristics of the chosen male against the characteristics of the available males.
Surprisingly, the one feature that stands out as being important to the female is the proximity of the available male’s nest to her previous nest site, with females preferring the nearest available neighbor. This makes sense when we observe the subsequent mate switching patterns in the subcolony. If a female’s previous partner eventually turns up, she will typically dump her new partner and move back to their old nest site with her old mate (especially if not too many days have elapsed). Similarly, if the previous female partner of the new male shows up and finds him newly betrothed to their neighbor of the previous season, the old partner will fight like hell with the interloper, typically driving her off and leading, again, to another mate switching.
Much of the fighting that had previously been observed in Adelie penguin colonies during the courtship period had erroneously been recorded as males fighting for females—as is the case in many vertebrate species—when in fact, it is mainly females fighting for males.
During that summer of ’85, I find two other features that also influence the divorce rate. If the pair had previously reared chicks together successfully, they have a higher likelihood of re-pairing; however, if they are asynchronous in returning to the colony from their long winter migration, then they have a higher likelihood of divorce. In the short Antarctic summer, no Adelie female can afford to wait too long for a previous male partner no matter how good he may have been.
In 1909, Murray Levick has yet to prove how good he is as a partner, but he is starting to show how good he could be to an expedition where, like incubating eggs, endurance might be the difference between success and failure. He is stationed in the coastal town of Shotley on the Suffolk coast east of London. It is here that the Royal Navy operates a training ship as part of a shore-based training establishment, which is used primarily to attract boys into the navy. It is called the HMS Ganges, and Levick has been posted here as a medical officer. It is now that he starts to take a special interest in the physical training of others.
A Polar Affair Page 10