A Polar Affair

by Lloyd Spencer Davis

  Campbell and Levick really do not wish to establish their winter quarters here. They have read Borchgrevink’s disparaging reports of the place, which only confirm what their own eyes can see: they would be trapped on a narrow spit of land, surrounded by mountains and glaciers so ragged and rugged that they would be prevented from exploring the land to the north and west, which is now the target of their new orders. Levick sums their situation up succinctly:

  On this little patch of peninsular (sic), about a triangular mile in extent, we are absolute prisoners until the sea freezes over in the autumn and allows sledging, as the mountains inland are simply impassable for sledges . . .

  The only possibility to go anywhere from Cape Adare is to winter over and hope that in the spring, the waters of Robertson Bay remain frozen long enough that they will be able to pull their sledges across the ice to their quarry. It is a risky plan, but they are running out of options as fast as the Terra Nova is running out of coal. They had spent the previous few days cruising westward from Cape Adare, but were faced with a coastline that consisted of sheer cliffs over one thousand feet high and, as Campbell wrote wryly in his log, “No sign of a possible landing anywhere.”

  The Terra Nova needs to make the long journey back to New Zealand for coal and resupplies and will not return to Antarctica until the following summer. Campbell, Levick, and Priestley discuss their choice: landfall in a desolate and daunting place offering at least a chance of exploring Antarctica westward of Cape Adare or the ignominy of a winter spent twiddling their thumbs in New Zealand. They opt for Cape Adare.

  It is difficult getting their stores and the pieces of their prefabricated hut ashore through the swell and the ice, while the Terra Nova stays nearby for a couple of days. Borchgrevink’s hut is still standing there “in good preservation,” as Levick notes, in the midst of the penguin colony that covers the entire spit of land that is Ridley’s Beach. Campbell even confesses that he likes the design of the Norwegian hut much better than their own—at least for a small party—although it is already occupied by a molting penguin they christen “Percy.” Borchgrevink’s hut is dirty and stinks because of the penguins, but the men are forced to stay in it while they erect their own hut next door. Percy, is not to be evicted so easily, however, and he takes up station at the door of Borchgrevink’s hut.

  Other penguins are attracted by the activity of the human newcomers and naively walk over to investigate. Unfortunately for them, Campbell must make amends after discovering that the sixteen carcasses of mutton they have unloaded from the ship are “covered with green mould.”

  I am sorry to say that a great many visitors we knock on the head and put in the larder; Percy, however, is sacred.

  Percy stays with them for two weeks, sharing the storeroom of Borchgrevink’s hut with the six men who have now changed from the Eastern Party to the Northern Party. One day, suddenly, he is gone. Priestley fears that Percy, having finished molting, has shown up at the hut in his fancy new suit of feathers only to be “taken for a stranger and killed” by the men.

  On March 4, their own hut is ready and the men move into their new quarters with much fanfare that includes “a great house warming, gramophone concert, (and) whiskey toddy.” Their six beds are arranged in position. On one side—the side with windows—there are the beds of the “officers”: Levick, Priestly, and Campbell. On the opposing wall, with no windows and less space, are the beds of the “men”: Abbott, Dickason, and Browning. They may very well be in the Antarctic, and even then isolated by even the standards of the Great White Continent, but Campbell is not about to let slip any of the disciplines or structures that in the navy masquerade as procedure but are really just a way of maintaining order.

  As the men prepare themselves for the winter among the remnants of the penguin colony, there is nothing at this stage to suggest that Levick takes any more interest in the penguins beyond their culinary value. Although there is a hint in his reaction to killing Percy’s mates, if not Percy himself, that suggests he has a soft spot for the penguins:

  . . . dear little things, and I hate having to kill them.

  The Shokalskiy pulls in to Robertson Bay and I find it exactly as the Northern Party had found it over a century before: a heaving sea covered in loose pack ice surrounds the spit of Ridley Beach making a landing problematic.

  Borchgrevink’s hut still stands there as solid and sound as it was when he built it. There is a small wooden awning that remains beside it, the leftovers from the Northern Party’s hut, which has long been blown to smithereens by the katabatic winds that rip across Ridley Beach from the Polar Plateau. And, in the fate of those two huts, evidenced so starkly on a beach at Cape Adare, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of breeding Adelie penguins, there is everything you need to know about what it takes to be successful in Antarctica and why the race between a Norwegian, brought up living in snow and ice, and an Englishman, with good intentions but no such experience, should turn out as it did.

  The seeds of that outcome were already being sown while the Northern Party was sorting out its accommodation at Cape Adare. It was not possible for a party to carry enough food to get to the South Pole and back, and so, during February 1911, Amundsen and Scott’s men were out laying depots of food and fuel.

  It is February 18, 1911. On the very same day that the Northern Party is coming ashore at Cape Adare, Scott is establishing his farthest south food depot in anticipation of their assault on the South Pole the following spring. It is at 79°28´30˝S and they call it One Ton Depot in recognition of the amount of food and supplies it contains. It has taken the depot party of thirteen men, eight ponies, and twenty-six dogs twenty-four painful days to get the supplies this far. The motor sleds had broken down and could not be used for laying the depots at all.

  The ponies are what is really holding them back. Gran, the Norwegian skiing expert, whom Nansen had recommended to Scott, is dumbstruck that Scott will not use skis, which he demonstrates can move easily on the snow. But even he is forced to abandon his skis as it proves not possible to lead a pony while on skis. The temperatures drop below -4°F and, with the blizzards they encounter, the wind chill is much colder still. The ponies cannot handle the cold and the men are forced to stop their progress, building snow walls to shelter the ponies as best they can. By contrast, the dogs just settle down under the snow as comfortable as can be. The blizzards are only “a pleasant rest” for the dogs, Scott writes in his diary, “They are curled snugly under the snow and at meal times issue from steaming warm holes.” Meanwhile, the ponies are suffering: “so frozen they can hardly eat,” observes Gran.

  Three ponies had proven so miserable that Scott sent them back early to Cape Evans. And because one of the remaining ponies Scott has with him, Weary Willy, is so profoundly distressed, Scott decides against pressing on further south even though their initial plans had been to site their final depot at 80°S. They are forty miles shy of that mark.

  The pony handler, Titus Oates, argues with Scott, saying they should kill Willy and depot the meat for the dogs and men, while making sure the final depot is closer to the Pole. But Scott will not tolerate perpetuating “this cruelty to animals,” as he calls it. In a reply that borders on insubordination as much as it does prophecy, Oates says, “I’m afraid you will regret it, Sir.”

  The journey back is slow and fraught. Along the way, Willy dies.

  In fact, of the eight ponies they have started with, only two will make it back to Cape Evans alive: three, including Willy, die because they have become emaciated and physically distressed, unable to cope with the blizzards and the cold.

  Birdie Bowers leads a party consisting of himself, Tom Crean, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and four of the ponies across the sea ice toward Hut Point. They camp on the frozen ice. However, the wind shifts and the ice breaks up into small floes. Bowers wakes and looks out the tent to discover the ice has split apart under the very line where the ponies are tethered. One of them has disappeared, presumably drown
ed in the freezing waters of McMurdo Sound. At much risk to themselves, the men try to get the ponies and equipment to the solid barrier ice by jumping across floes each time an opportunity arises, slowly making their way to the safety of the barrier. At any time, the wind might shift again, blowing them up McMurdo Sound and to oblivion. Killer whales track their every move. In the end, they manage to get one of the ponies onto the barrier ice, but two fall in the water, and although they retrieve them, the ponies cannot go on. Oates, who has joined them by now, kills the first with his pickaxe, then Bowers must do the same for his pony. It is a grisly business but an extraordinarily lucky escape for the three men who had been trapped on the ice floes with the ponies. Bowers may well lament that he is left “carrying a blood stained pick-axe instead of leading the pony,” but the real miracle is that he is left able to consider that at all.

  Perhaps the one lesson that all the men, with the possible exception of Scott, seem unable to see past, is that dogs, with proper handling, travel fast and are unaffected by the blizzards, which slow the ponies and lay them low.

  To make matters considerably worse for everyone, upon their return from laying the depots, they are met with the news that Amundsen is at the Bay of Whales with his hut well established upon the Ross Ice Shelf and already sixty miles closer to the South Pole than they are. Not only that, because his dogs are inured to the cold more than are their ponies, he will be able to depart ahead of them in the spring. The one lesson it seems that Scott has really learned from the depot laying is that to protect the ponies from the cold, “It makes a late start necessary for next year.”

  Meanwhile, Amundsen takes seven of his men with him and heads out from Framheim on seven sledges pulled by six dogs apiece. Able to travel at two to three times the speed of Scott and his ponies, the last depot they lay is at 82°S, about 175 miles closer to the pole compared to One Ton Depot.

  Amundsen has taken care to mark the route using marker flags and painted food cans placed every mile. He builds large six-foot-high cairns of snow and ice every three miles, in which he leaves a note giving the direction and distance to the next food depot. He establishes more than three food depots for every one the English do. Furthermore, the depots are marked by a line of flags transverse to the route, five miles in either direction. Amundsen is taking out insurance to ensure that even in bad weather, with snow drift and fog, they will be able find both the route and the food depots.

  Scott, by contrast, does not mark the route, and his less frequent food depots are marked by only a single flag atop a cairn of snow. By themselves, these might be considered risky as opposed to bad decisions. If there has been a bad decision, it is not laying the final depot, the one farthest south, at 80°S as planned. The decision to place One Ton Depot forty miles short of its intended location is one that will, as Oates predicts, likely come back to haunt Scott later. If there is one thing needed to survive that it is difficult to come by in the Antarctic, it is food.

  Penguins are caught in a dilemma whereby they must live in two worlds: using the land for breeding but the sea for feeding. During the summer of ’85, one of my PhD students is with me at Cape Bird and we are investigating what the Adelie penguins are eating when they are out in the Ross Sea.

  Of course, it is a lot easier to study their behavior on land than it is at sea. It is not like we can travel with them and record what they are eating. Instead, we do it by “reverse feeding”: that is, by getting the penguins to throw up what they have already consumed. This is not a technique for the fainthearted or indeed anyone with the slightest sensibilities about the welfare of animals. I daresay Scott would have disapproved.

  Essentially, we wait on the shore for the penguins to return to the beach from a feeding trip to sea during the incubation period, and then catch them. That is the easy bit. The “water-offloading technique,” as it is called, involves pushing a tube down the penguin’s throat so that it passes down the esophagus into its stomach. Sea water is then pumped into the stomach until the bird feels compelled to vomit: at which point the bird is held over a bucket, rather like a drunk puking into a toilet, and the contents of its stomach, which contain what it has eaten over the last twenty-four hours or so, come rushing out. To make sure that the stomach contents are completely flushed out, the process is repeated.

  To be honest, I hate sampling the penguins in this way. I am more Scott than Amundsen in that regard. Yet, there is one thing I detest even more: sorting through the vomits. It is not like you end up with a bunch of fresh sea creatures like you might pick up from a fishmonger’s. The spew contains the krill, fish, and amphipods eaten by the penguins, all of which are in various stages of digestion. I leave the sorting for my student to do.

  The good thing, from a scientific perspective, is that there are hard pieces of the animals that take a long time to digest even after the rest of them have been turned to mush by the bird’s stomach juices. These hard pieces can be used to identify the species eaten, the quantity, and even their size and age.

  We discover that the penguins are eating mostly a small species of krill, known scientifically as Euphausia crystallorophias. This contrasts with the Adelie penguins breeding on the other side of Antarctica, where around the Antarctic Peninsula the penguins are eating almost exclusively a much larger species of krill known as Euphausia superba. Krill are small crustaceans that look like mini lobsters. They form part of the zooplankton, and in the summer in the Southern Ocean, they occur in enormous numbers. In fact, Euphausia superba, despite their small size, are estimated to collectively comprise nearly four hundred million tons of krill in the Antarctic’s ocean, making it perhaps the largest biomass of any species on the planet. Despite their collective mass, the penguins must find, catch, and eat a lot of individual krill if they are to derive enough energy to sustain their breeding. This is especially so for our penguins in the Ross Sea, which are reliant mainly on the much smaller species of krill. One of the birds we sample contains the remains of 41,938 individual krill in its stomach.

  While the water-offloading technique looks somewhat like waterboarding and akin to torture, the truth is that it does not harm the penguins in any way, even though it is no doubt unpleasant for the birds. Penguins are biological machines that are designed, essentially, to withstand long periods of fasting as they must nest on land away from their food sources. Losing what they have eaten during the last few hours will have little impact on their survival. Even so, I, for one, am glad that in the world of penguin research this technique has now been largely superseded by other techniques that can deduce much about what penguins have eaten from analyzing their feathers or their poo. Though, I will leave sampling the latter to my students too: bodily excretions, be they vomit or urea, are just not my cup of tea.

  Knowing what penguins eat seems less important to understanding the factors that influence their breeding success than knowing where they eat. My data, collected during that first summer in 1977, had shown that if feeding birds spend too long away at sea feeding, their partner on the nest will desert their eggs, or their chicks will hatch and starve to death because the partner on the nest cannot feed them. If the penguins are feeding close to the colony during these long incubation-period feeding trips, their tardiness would be inexcusable. Hence, it seems likely that they must be traveling long distances to get their food, and as a consequence, the difficulties of coordinating nest relief for a penguin couple will become magnified.

  Distance has a way of magnifying problems. It doesn’t just make the heart grow fonder, it can make the mind grow angrier.

  It is March 28, 1911, and Douglas Mawson is on the other side of the world, in London, making preparations for his expedition to Cape Adare when the Terra Nova reaches New Zealand’s Stewart Island. This sparsely populated island at the bottom of New Zealand is covered with luxuriant rainforest and is a complete contrast to the white treeless continent from where the Terra Nova has come. The news it relays to the rest of the world is, however, anythin
g but colorless: Amundsen is in the Bay of Whales; Scott is in McMurdo Sound; next summer there will be an all-out race between the two parties to get to the South Pole.

  Yet the thing that perturbs Mawson most in the news is that the Eastern Party has now given up their proposed exploration of King Edward VII Land and have, instead, been landed at Cape Adare. Mawson cannot hide his anger when approached by a reporter from the Daily Mail:

  It surprises me very much to hear that Captain Scott has landed a party at Cape Adare in face of the agreement between us and in view of the information I gave him . . . Captain Scott personally wrote to me the last thing before leaving Australia and asked me to furnish him with full details of my plans, and this I willingly did, giving him all particulars, including the statement that I intended to land at Cape Adare.

  There is so much irony in this. Scott had been distraught to learn that Amundsen had based himself in the Bay of Whales for his own attempt to get to the South Pole. Cherry-Garrard was with Scott when he received Campbell’s news about the Norwegians:

  For an hour or so we were furiously angry, and were possessed with an insane sense that we must go straight to the Bay of Whales and have it out with Amundsen and his men . . . we felt, however unreasonably, that we had earned the first right of way.

  Yet Scott thinks it perfectly okay to have his men usurp the territory that Mawson had claimed for his own expedition. Mawson has kept Scott informed of his plans, and now Scott has done a “Shackleton” on him.

  Kathleen Scott, upon seeing Mawson’s anguish laid out so bare in the newspaper, writes to Mawson to soothe his hurt and, later, invites him to lunch at her home. It does not assuage the anger Mawson feels toward Scott’s actions, but it does make him feel better about Kathleen. And, it has to be said, she feels a warmth for Mawson too. At that moment, her husband is in the Antarctic entering a dark cold winter, while Paquita, by now his fiancée, waits for Mawson in Australia.