Antarctica (9 page)

The nights should have brought some respite. But the men shivered so painfully and uncontrollably in their sleeping bags that they feared their bones might break. Cherry-Garrard wrote that the two worst jobs of the entire enterprise were first getting into the bag, and then having to stay there for six hours. ‘They talk of chattering teeth,' he said, ‘but when your body chatters you may call yourself cold.'
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The call to wake and start the day's pulling came as a blessed relief, but, in the darkness and fumbling cold, it still took five full hours just to strike camp.

‘I don't believe that minus seventy temperatures would be bad in daylight,' Cherry-Garrard wrote, ‘not comparatively bad, when you could see where you were going, where you were stepping, where the sledge straps were, the cooker, the primus, the food; could see your footsteps lately trodden deep into the soft snow that you might find your way back to the rest of your load; could see the lashings of the food bags; could read a compass without striking three or four different boxes to find one dry match.'
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Conditions were worse than any of the men had ever dreamed of, but nobody wanted to be the first to say so. The expedition leader, Bill Wilson, repeatedly asked the other two if they wanted to return and each time they said no. Later he stopped asking and merely apologised, again and again, for the horrors he had led them into.

Still they trudged on, across the white emptiness of Windless Bight where the snow was so cold that it was like pulling over sand. The men could no longer drag their sledges in tandem. Instead, they had to relay them. Fumble and fasten your harness; heave through the cold and darkness for one mile; unfasten yourself; trudge back; hook up to the second sledge; heave, trudge, unhook, repeat. And all by the light of a naked candle, in temperatures that would freeze your soul.

Next came Terror Point, where the sea ice crams into the island creating mountainous pressure ridges over which they hauled their sledges, one at a time, up, over, down the other side, this one first and then back for the other. And then there were the crevasses. It was impossible in the darkness to see the snow bridges that draped them. All you could do was crash through, hope your harness would hold, climb out, crash through again, and hope and climb and crash and hope again. When they finally reached the emperor rookery, their bodies and minds were all but destroyed.

But at Birdie Bowers's insistence they built themselves a stone igloo. And then, aware that a storm was coming, they hastened down to the rookery and collected five eggs, cushioning them in their mittens. Poor Cherry-Garrard took two, but smashed them both. It wasn't just the darkness; he was also hopelessly short-sighted and the cold meant that he had no chance of wearing his glasses.

It was when they returned to their igloo, three remaining eggs in hand, that the storm struck. It shattered the canvas roof of their igloo. Rocks and snow rained down on them and the wind tore through like an express train. Beaten down by the force of the hurricane, they cowered in their sleeping bags, sucking on snow for water. But somehow, for the two long days that followed, they clung on to some shreds of their selves. They huddled together; they said ‘please' and ‘thank you'; they sang hymns, feebly, against the roar of the wind.

And then, when the storm finally died down, they staggered out of the igloo and went to look for their tent. I still can't believe they did that. In the half-light, in the aftermath of the most ferocious storm they had ever witnessed, they decided to look for their tent. It should have been impossible; there was almost no chance of finding it. But they went looking anyway. And perhaps the hymns had worked, because—miraculously—there it lay, intact, closed up like a furled umbrella, less than a kilometre away. Now they knew they would live.

Cherry-Garrard described Wilson and Bowers as ‘gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how good their companionship was.'
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Both of them perished with Scott on the way back from the Pole, leaving Cherry-Garrard haunted by their deaths.

The eggs they collected are now housed by the Natural History Museum in its tiny outpost in the Hertfordshire town of Tring. One of the embryos is there too, sitting on a shelf in a jar of spirits, a forlorn white scrap with bulbous eyes, soft beak and tiny, perfectly formed wings. The remaining two embryos were passed from scientist to scientist, until 1934, when C. W. Parsons of the University of Glasgow finally concluded they had not ‘greatly added to our knowledge of penguin embryology'.
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Cherry-Garrard was a romantic, especially about the process of discovery. ‘Science is a big thing if you can travel a Winter Journey in her cause and not regret it,' he wrote.
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And though the samples they collected turned out to be scientifically useless, he didn't regret it. Not one bit. With his two companions, he was the first person in the world to see emperor penguins in the wintertime, eggs balanced on their feet to protect them from the sea ice, huddling together against the cold and wind and darkness.

‘After indescribable effort and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and we were the first and only men who had ever done so' he wrote. ‘We were turning theories into facts with every observation we made.'
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He, Wilson and Bowers were the first to share the penguins' world and the first almost to perish in it. And they did it all through sheer bloody-minded, insane, heroic effort.

 

The next morning, I walked back down on my own for another look at the Adélies. I passed Shackleton's hut, stumbling slightly on the stubbly volcanic rock streaked white with old guano. A skua down in a hollow began beating its wings and scolding me. When it saw it had my attention it took off, flapping in an unnecessarily showy way. Beyond it I could just see the egg on the ground that it was trying to distract me from.

I steered politely away and continued down to the colony, where I found a warm spot out of the wind. I was careful not to get too close to the penguins. The Antarctic Treaty forbids you from approaching any wildlife here—though it's OK if they come up to you. (To do the work that David and all the other researchers do here requires careful scientific justification and vast numbers of forms and permits. Even to visit here I had to be included on one of his permits, but after what he said I had no intention of violating the penguins' personal space, or, indeed, their sense of self.)

My vantage point was surprisingly restful. Most of the penguins were lying on nests, chattering vaguely to themselves. Occasionally, a bird trotted by for what I now recognised as a nest relief. Several were returning to empty nests. Thanks to the blocking sea ice the journey for food had taken too long. Their mates had finally given up and left, the eggs had been stolen by skuas, and most of the stones had been spirited away by other penguins. All that was left was a slight hollow in the rocks and a pitiful few stones that nobody else wanted. But the incoming birds sat there anyway. Occasionally one would stand and stretch its body and neck until it was comically elongated and then snapped back like a rubber band into the normal penguin shape. Then it would flap its flippers madly. This curious ritual passed in waves throughout the colony, as contagious as a yawn.

From where I sat, I could see a lone penguin heading off for food. It looked very thin. Perhaps it was one of the males that had just been relieved. If so, he hadn't wasted much time getting out of there. I watched as he skipped down the slope and hopped over on to the sea ice. He looked like one of the seven dwarfs, on his way to work. Chest thrust out, flippers held out rigidly for balance, he trotted busily along, rocking from side to side, the embodiment of industry and effort. Hi ho, hi ho.

Yesterday evening, over camp dinner, I'd reminded David of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's comment that no creature on Earth had a more miserable existence than an emperor penguin. I'd said that all Antarctic penguins seemed to have a tough life, and I wouldn't like to be reincarnated as any of them.

‘It's definitely you against the world if you're an Adélie,' David had replied. ‘There's a lot of things conspiring to extinguish your life force. You've got the ice, the ocean, big waves. You're trying to negotiate your way back to your colony, and land on a beach that's being pummelled by ice chunks that weigh tonnes, and there are leopard seals hanging around wanting to eat you. Even back at the colony you still have to worry about stone thieves and skuas, and when, or whether, your mate will come back to relieve you. But I dunno. They seem to smile a lot. They're probably happy.'

‘Even this year, when all their efforts are doomed by the iceberg?'

‘You feel sorry for the parents who are doing their best to replace themselves. They don't know it, but I know that it's impossible. You can't just tell them, “You should just hang out now, relax, try again next year.” It can be a little sad.'

Now I watched as the black spot grew smaller against the ice, taking the first steps of his thirty-kilometre round trip. There was something idiotically noble and, yes, almost human, about this endeavour, this appalling bloody-mindedness. There was no chance that there would be anything left to play for when he returned but he was doing it anyway. I remembered now what David said to me when I first arrived: ‘Penguins have no selfdoubt.' Trot trot trot, he went. Trot trot trot.

 

A large black eye was watching me steadily through the tight mesh of a fence. Its owner stood almost as high as my waist. He was pressed up against the wire, a few white feathers poking through. I was on the outside. He, however, was trapped. Leaning over the fence and looking down on him, I could see the smooth black top of his head, and the stripe of Velcro that had been glued on to his back. He continued to stare fixedly ahead.

My new acquaintance was an emperor penguin, the tallest and most regal of all Antarctica's birdlife. It was also, currently, an inmate of the ‘penguin ranch', which was a set of brightly coloured huts out on the sea ice, a few hours' drive from McMurdo. I had come here in my favourite vehicle—the Mattrack with the bizarre triangular wheels that I'd also used to visit the seal camp—on a gorgeous sunny day, the temperature barely below freezing, the air completely still. The sign on the door behind me showed a Wild West cartoon of an emperor penguin, complete with cowboy hat, merrily riding a Weddell seal. Until now I had been in a buoyant mood, but I couldn't help feeling sorry for this magnificent bird. He looked like he was in prison.

The chief scientist of the operation, Paul Ponganis from Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, came out of the hut to greet me. Paul was another old Antarctic hand; he had been coming here about as long as David Ainley, and had a similar weather-beaten look, although his floppy white hair was tidier and more luxuriant, and he was much more at ease with people.

There are almost 100,000 pairs of emperors around the Ross Sea and about 350,000 around Antarctica, which is to say about 350,000 breeding pairs in the world. Like the Adélies, emperors are true Antarcticans; they never stray far from the continent's encircling ice. Paul sets up this emperor camp every year. He comes out on to the sea ice, catches a few non-breeding penguins and keeps them in a holding pen like the one in front of us. The fence ran unevenly round a large patch of ice containing perhaps a dozen birds, all standing more or less still in the bright sunlight.

I had seen many photographs of emperors, but they were even lovelier in the flesh. Their bellies were a soft creamy white. On each side of their heads was a white patch that shaded into gold. The side of their beaks bore a stripe of pink, which changed to a deep purplish blue at the tip. Their necks were impressively mobile. Some retracted them until they almost disappeared while others snaked their heads upwards or bent through what seem like impossible angles to preen their feathers or scratch their backs. They were sinuous and amazingly graceful. When one of the penguins balanced on one foot and his tail to scratch his head with the other foot, he still managed to look poised and polished.

Unlike the busybody Adélies, these birds had apparently decided that energy should not be wasted in stress or panic. Their strategy was not to pack the entire breeding cycle into the few short months of the Antarctic summer, but to start early, brave the darkness and cold, turn their collective backs to the wind and incubate their eggs through the depths of the winter. That way, the chicks would become independent at the height of summer, when there was maximum food to be had. This is also why Cherry-Garrard and his friends had to make their winter journey; if they had waited till spring, the eggs would already have hatched.

In the centre of the pen a rough round hole, cut into the sea ice, was floating with pale green slush. A penguin emerged suddenly from inside the hole with a rush of wings and water. He landed on the ice with a thump, stood up and started to shiver, tapping his feet, quivering and shaking his head. ‘That's Jerry—he shivers the most,' said Paul. ‘The peripheries get cold when they dive—the wings can get to 32°F. And he's a good hunter so he'll have all this cold fish in his stomach. He has to warm everything up.'

As if in sympathy, the other birds started shaking their heads and stretching their wings out to the sun. But every movement was still somehow refined. If the Adélies were the over-caffeinated Jack Russell terriers of the penguin world, these creatures were more like Great Danes, measured and stately, using energy only when it was strictly called for.

I knew that the birds weren't exactly trapped; they were free to dive any time they liked. But the hole inside their pen was the only one around—Paul had checked carefully that there were no cracks in the ice for a radius of several kilometres—so they always had to come back to where they started. And seeing them confined on the surface like this was making me feel uncomfortable. Paul noticed me staring again at the first penguin I saw, the one pressing up against the wire. ‘That's Zachary, my favourite,' he said. ‘Whenever we're doing something with one of the other birds he comes over, checks us out, squawks at us, pecks at our bums.'