Antarctica (7 page)

For the first few weeks after hatching, at least one parent will stay with the chick. But when the chicks are bigger and more demanding, both parents will go off to feed at the same time, saving some fish for themselves and regurgitating the rest into their offsprings' gaping gullets. By now, the chicks will probably be in a crèche, kept safe by adults that are hanging around or still tending nests. When they are seven or eight weeks old the chicks will lose their soft brown down to reveal a grown-up blue and white penguin suit that will soon turn black. From the first week of February they will head for the sea and be on their own.

Released from their duties, the parents will feed voraciously for a few weeks to regain their fat reserves. Then they will haul out on sea ice floes and moult. This is apparently the one time these little penguins do not smile. David told me that when they're moulting they don't like to be touched. They just sit there, he said, scowling, wanting no other penguins anywhere near, until they have lost their old plumage and grown a new one. And then, as the first fingers of winter touch the continent, they will head north. Not too far, though, for they are true Antarcticans. They may retreat a little, to the edge of the open water to wait out the winter, but they never leave the ice. And then, at the start of spring, they return loyally to the exact same nesting spot, to start all over again.

At least, that was what normally happened. But the past few years had been challenging ones for the Adélies of Ross Island. In March 2000 a massive chunk of the Ross Ice Shelf broke off to create one of the largest icebergs ever seen. Though it subsequently broke into several pieces, the biggest of these—called B15a
²
—still measured more than a hundred miles long, and was larger than the state of Delaware.

B15a wedged itself across much of the mouth of McMurdo Sound, blocking the route back from the penguins' winter homes to their summer nesting spots with a giant white cliff. The only options were to turn left and head to the massive colony at Cape Crozier, on Ross Island's eastern side, or to turn right, double back on yourself for miles, and then round a corner and find the way here to Cape Royds. Crozier was by far the easier route.

So what did they do? Thanks to the activities of David and his colleagues, many of the penguins in both colonies wore bands on their flippers, marking who they were and where they were born. That turned out to be the perfect opportunity to find out how loyal they really were to their place of birth. And much to David's surprise the answer was . . . not very. Royds banded birds had been showing up at Cape Bird, thirteen miles away, and even at Cape Crozier, which was forty miles from where they were supposed to be. Very few had gone the opposite way.

‘This has rewritten the book on immigration and emigration,' said David. ‘Adélies were supposed to be highly philopatric—religiously returning to the colony where they were born. But now we know that their behaviour is much more pliable than we thought.'

That was great—in a way. But the megaberg brought a darker side, too. The sea ice would normally break up during the summer, but the gigantic cliffs of B15a had encouraged it to stay around. Adélie colonies are usually within a kilometre of open water, to enable the parents to forage for food quickly and easily, since they can swim much faster than they can walk. But thanks to the iceberg, sea ice now stretched farther than we could see.

And the Adélies were suffering. ‘There are so few birds,' said David. ‘You'd normally have non-breeding birds or practising juveniles to chase the skuas away, but there's nobody this year younger than four, and lots of birds who had been trying to breed have now abandoned their nests.'

He went off to check who was still here, stepping carefully between the nests, stopping to make pencil notes in an orange notebook. Then he beckoned me over in delight to see the first chick of the season. Above the background cackling there was suddenly a racket that to my inexpert ear sounded like some kind of territorial challenge. But David beamed and said, ‘That's a returning partner ready to take over.' Much cawing and squawking followed; the two penguins threw their heads up into the air and opened their beaks operatically wide, and then snaked their sinuous necks around one another, to the left, and the right, and the left, and the right. Then, in a heavily choreographed move, the one on the nest stepped aside and the new one immediately shuffled in to take over. The eggs beneath were visible for a bare second or two; they were a little larger than duck eggs and just off-white. The returning female settled down, stood up, shuffled the two eggs around, and sat down again. Her relieved mate hung around for a few moments, picking up a few stones and adding them to the nest.

‘Stones are penguin currency,' David said. ‘They are a prime factor in an Adélie penguin's self-esteem.' They are important because they keep the eggs high and dry, free from any meltwater that might run by. If the temperature just topped the freezing point, snow could melt. But the water would quickly freeze again, and if it were touching an egg, the chick inside would freeze, too. The bigger your pile of stones, the safer your eggs, and the more you can thrust out your chest and trumpet and crow to the penguins around you. Stones are the penguin equivalent of designer brands or fast cars. They are the outward, in-your-face signs of success. ‘Once penguins have accumulated a big pile they become very possessive. They will steal stones and squabble over them. There's no chance to replace stolen stones when the skuas are around—you have to sit tight and wait for your mate. So every time there's a nest relief the outgoing bird is supposed to find new stones to add to the pile.'

Our newly relieved male made a few half-hearted efforts. Normally he would stick around for an hour doing this, but this one was woefully skinny beside his plump partner. After just a few minutes, he turned and headed off to the slope that led down to the sea ice.

We watched him go. ‘This experiment with the iceberg was made to order,' said David. ‘But now it's getting old.'

 

Between David's tent and the penguin colony, a wooden hut rose incongruously on the rocks. Its outer walls had been bleached blond by the sun and the scouring effect of dirt and wind. Inside, as for the other Antarctic huts of the heroic age, it looked almost new, but the furnishings were old-fashioned enough to give it a historic air. There was a dual portrait on the wall of King George V looking regally to the side, and his consort Queen Mary staring out into the hut. On one side was a wood-burning stove and oven, with a metal chimney. The shelves still bore slightly rusty tins of food whose antique lettering declared their contents: ‘Kippered Herring', ‘Pure Preserved Cabbage', ‘Irish Brawn'.

This last could also have aptly referred to the leader of the expedition that built this hut, the boss himself, Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton was born and initially brought up in Ireland, and, although he moved to England at the age of ten, to a private school that raised true sons of the British Empire, he never quite lost his Irish brogue. His snooty fellow pupils mocked him for his background, but he knew how to hold his own. One friend said of him: ‘If there was a scrap, he was usually in it.'
³

Back in 1902, Shackleton had been part of Captain Scott's
Discovery
expedition, for which the first hut had been built at Hut Point. Scott had chosen Shackleton as one of the two men to join him on the first ever attempt to reach the South Pole. But the journey was poorly planned and the outcome woeful. All three explorers ended up suffering from scurvy, and they barely managed to drag their overburdened sledges nearly five hundred kilometres from base before having to turn back. Scott knew that Shackleton was liked and respected and somehow seemed a threat to his authority. He was also looking for someone to blame for the fiasco. He declared that Shackleton was medically unfit for duty and ordered him home.

This new attempt on the Pole, which Shackleton had cobbled together using a tiny ship called the
Nimrod,
was his response to that earlier humiliation. It was vital that he succeed, particularly as Scott had been livid when he heard that Shackleton was now striking out on his own.

The contrast between the two men was marked. Scott was a commissioned officer in His Majesty's Royal Navy; Shackleton—whose physician father could not afford to send him into the Navy—had learned his seamanship in the less prestigious Merchant Navy. Scott was formal; Shackleton was charismatic. Scott drew a strict division between officers and men; Shackleton had an open-plan attitude to the architecture of leadership.

So much was clear inside the hut that Shackleton built here at Cape Royds, where he arrived in February 1908. Every man was treated equally, and given his own space. The edges of the hut were divided into two-man cubicles, 400 square feet, each with a suitable nickname. One was so immaculate, with such highbrow books along its shelves, that it was dubbed ‘1 Park Lane', then the smartest address in London; another was crudely called ‘The Taproom' since one of its occupants suffered chronically from diarrhoea; still another, which belonged to the two scientists and contained a jumble of bizarre instruments and devices, was ‘The Old Curiosity Shop'.

Shackleton was the only occupant of the hut who had a room to himself. But that was as much because he knew that the men sometimes needed to kick loose away from their leader as because he wanted privacy. Throughout the winter of 1908, the hut was a happy one. The boss may have had a quick temper, but it passed just as quickly. More importantly he had the knack of making everyone feel they were uniquely essential to the mission.

With the return of summer, on 29 October 1908, in brilliant sunshine and under a cloudless sky, Shackleton set out in pursuit of his dream. He was accompanied by three chosen companions, a support party, a motor tractor and a set of Siberian ponies each gamely pulling a load.

The motor tractor was soon struggling on the uneven surface of the great Barrier, and the ponies did not fare much better. But still the explorers marched on. The support crew deposited food and supplies for the return journey, and then on 7 November they left to return to Cape Royds. Shackleton and the three remaining men passed Scott's previous furthest point south with ease, and soon they were witnessing something no human had ever seen. They had reached the end of the flat white plain of the Great Ice Barrier, and in front of them rose a range of magnificent mountains. The four men climbed up one of the smaller mountains, which they named Mount Hope, to spy out the land. ‘There burst upon our vision an open road to the South,' Shackleton wrote. They had discovered a vast gleaming glacier, which he called the Beardmore Glacier after one of the expedition's wealthy sponsors. This would be their staircase south, up on to the great plateau of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

However, as they laboured up the glacier, and began to suffer from the high altitude they were attaining, Shackleton realised that their progress was worryingly slow. He had calculated their food based on achieving nineteen miles a day, but they were barely managing five.

Up on the plateau, the conditions grew worse. On Christmas Day one of the party, Frank Wild, wrote in his diary: ‘May none but my worst enemies ever spend their Xmas in such a dreary God forsaken spot as this. Here we are 9500 feet above sea level, farther away from civilization than any human being has ever been . . . with half a gale blowing, and drift snow flying, and a temperature of 52 degrees of frost.'
⁴

After a hearty Christmas dinner, Shackleton surveyed the remaining food and decided that they would have to cut their rations, making each week's food last ten days. ‘It is the only thing to do, for we must get to the pole come what may.'
⁵

The explorers of the heroic age mainly survived on tea, cocoa and pemmican—an unappetising mix of dried meat and fat that could be reconstituted in a stew called ‘hoosh', often with dried biscuits crumbled in. Every scrap mattered. They even devised a ritual called ‘shut eye' for allocating the portions: one person would turn his back and another would point to each of the servings of hoosh saying ‘whose?'.

And as the journey grew longer and the hoosh became thinner, the explorers were also increasingly prone to food dreams that were more like nightmares. They would find themselves, perhaps, at a food stand or a feast, with fresh bread and buns and chocolate and roasting meat. If they were lucky they at least got to taste it in their dreams; if unlucky, they woke night after night just as they were raising it to their lips.

The slope continued to rise, and the men continued to struggle. The air was not just high, but also dry; with limited fuel they could not melt much snow and they were becoming dehydrated. Shackleton recorded how, after every hour of pulling, they threw themselves on their backs for three minutes to recover.

On 2 January 1909, they passed the previous record for the highest latitude achieved at either Pole. Still they ploughed on, as their food supplies diminished. Finally, on 9 January they passed through the barrier of 89° and found themselves within a hundred miles of the Pole. It was so close now that Shackleton could almost smell it. He knew that the party could reach their goal. But he also knew that there was not enough food left in their sacks to sustain them for the journey home. If they continued now, they would certainly perish. Survival mattered more than glory. And so he did an extraordinary thing.

He gave the order to turn back.

Even now, they had cut their journey very fine. Their food stores were so low that they barely reached each depot before the previous cupboard was bare. The men were exhausted, starving, scarecrows. They were racing against their own broken bodies. ‘We are so thin that our bones ache as we lie on the hard snow in our sleeping bags,' Shackleton wrote.
⁶