The Worst Journey in the World (17 page)

With the open water we left behind the albatross and the Cape pigeon
which had accompanied us lately for many months. In their place we found
the Antarctic petrel, "a richly piebald bird that appeared to be almost
black and white against the ice floes,"
^[53]
and the Snowy petrel, of
which I have already spoken.

No one of us whose privilege it was to be there will forget our first
sight of the penguins, our first meal of seal meat, or that first big
berg along which we coasted close in order that London might see it on
the film. Hardly had we reached the thick pack, which prevailed after the
suburbs had been passed, when we saw the little Adélie penguins hurrying
to meet us. Great Scott, they seemed to say, what's this, and soon we
could hear the cry which we shall never forget. "Aark, aark," they said,
and full of wonder and curiosity, and perhaps a little out of breath,
they stopped every now and then to express their feelings, "and to gaze
and cry in wonder to their companions; now walking along the edge of a
floe in search of a narrow spot to jump and so avoid the water, and with
head down and much hesitation judging the width of the narrow gap, to
give a little standing jump across as would a child, and running on the
faster to make up for its delay. Again, coming to a wider lead of water
necessitating a plunge, our inquisitive visitor would be lost for a
moment, to reappear like a jack-in-the-box on a nearer floe, where
wagging his tail, he immediately resumed his race towards the ship. Being
now but a hundred yards or so from us he pokes his head constantly
forward on this side and on that, to try and make out something of the
new strange sight, crying aloud to his friends in his amazement, and
exhibiting the most amusing indecision between his desire for further
investigation and doubt as to the wisdom and propriety of closer contact
with so huge a beast."
^[54]

They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the
Antarctic world, either like children, or like old men, full of their own
importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white
shirt-fronts—and rather portly withal. We used to sing to them, as they
to us, and you might often see "a group of explorers on the poop, singing
'She has rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and she shall have
music wherever she goes,' and so on at the top of their voices to an
admiring group of Adélie penguins."
^[55]

Meares used to sing to them what he called 'God save,' and declared that
it would always send them headlong into the water. He sang flat: perhaps
that was why.

Two or more penguins will combine to push a third in front of them
against a skua gull, which is one of their enemies, for he eats their
eggs or their young if he gets the chance. They will refuse to dive off
an ice-foot until they have persuaded one of their companions to take the
first jump, for fear of the sea-leopard which may be waiting in the water
below, ready to seize them and play with them much as a cat will play
with a mouse. As Levick describes in his book about the penguins at Cape
Adare: "At the place where they most often went in, a long terrace of ice
about six feet in height ran for some hundreds of yards along the edge
of the water, and here, just as on the sea-ice, crowds would stand near
the brink. When they had succeeded in pushing one of their number over,
all would crane their necks over the edge, and when they saw the pioneer
safe in the water, the rest followed."
^[56]

It is clear then that the Adélie penguin will show a certain spirit of
selfishness in tackling his hereditary enemies. But when it comes to the
danger of which he is ignorant his courage betrays want of caution.
Meares and Dimitri exercised the dog-teams out upon the larger floes when
we were held up for any length of time. One day a team was tethered by
the side of the ship, and a penguin sighted them and hurried from afar
off. The dogs became frantic with excitement as he neared them: he
supposed it was a greeting, and the louder they barked and the more they
strained at their ropes, the faster he bustled to meet them. He was
extremely angry with a man who went and saved him from a very sudden end,
clinging to his trousers with his beak, and furiously beating his shins
with his flippers. It was not an uncommon sight to see a little Adélie
penguin standing within a few inches of the nose of a dog which was
almost frantic with desire and passion.

The pack-ice is the home of the immature penguins, both Emperor and
Adélie. But we did not see any large numbers of immature Emperors during
this voyage.

We soon became acquainted with the sea-leopard, which waits under the
ice-foot for the little penguins; he is a brute, but sinuous and graceful
as the seal world goes. He preys especially upon the Adélie penguin, and
Levick found no less than eighteen penguins, together with the remains of
many others, in the stomach of one sea-leopard. In the water the leopard
seems "a trifle faster than the Adélies, as one of them occasionally
would catch up with one of the fugitives, who then, realizing that speed
alone would not avail him, started dodging from side to side, and
sometimes swam rapidly round and round in a circle of about twelve feet
diameter for a full minute or more, doubtless knowing that he was
quicker in turning than his great heavy pursuer, but exhaustion would
overtake him in the end, and we could see the head and jaws of the great
sea-leopard rise to the surface as he grabbed his victim. The sight of a
panic-stricken little Adélie tearing round and round in this manner was
sadly common late in the season."
^[57]

Fish and small seal have also been found in its stomach. With long
powerful head and neck and a sinuous body, it is equipped with most
formidable teeth with which it tears strips out of the still living
birds, and flippers which are adapted entirely for speed in the water. It
is a solitary animal with a large range of distribution. It has been
supposed to bring forth its young in the pack, but nothing definite is
known on this subject. One day we saw a big sea-leopard swimming along
with the ship. He dived under the floes and reappeared from floe to floe
as we went, and for a time we thought he was interested in us. But soon
we sighted another lying away on a floe, and our friend in the water
began to rear his head up perpendicularly, and seemed to be trying to
wind his mate, as we supposed. He was down wind from her, and appeared to
find her at a distance of 150 to 200 yards, and the last we saw of him he
was heading up the side of the floe where she lay.

There are four kinds of seal in the Antarctic; of one of these, the
sea-leopard, I have already spoken. Another is called the Ross seal, for
Sir James Ross discovered it in 1840. It seems to be a solitary beast,
living in the pack, and is peculiar for its "pug-like expression of
countenance."
^[58]
It has always been rare, and no single specimen was
seen on this expedition, though the Terra Nova must have passed through
more pack than most whalers see in a life-time. It looks as if the Ross
seal is more rare than was supposed.

The very common seal of the Antarctic is the Weddell, which seldom lives
in the pack but spends its life catching fish close to the shores of the
continent, and digesting them, when caught, lying sluggishly upon the
ice-foot. We came to know them later in their hundreds in McMurdo Sound,
for the Weddell is a land-loving seal and is only found in large numbers
near the coast. Just at this time it was the crab-eating seal which we
saw very fairly often, generally several of them together, but never in
large numbers.

Wilson has pointed out in his article upon seals in the Discovery
Report
^[59]
that the Weddell and the crab-eater seal, which are the two
commoner of the Antarctic seals, have agreed to differ both in habit and
in diet, and therefore they share the field successfully. He shows that
"the two penguins which share the same area have differentiated in a
somewhat similar manner." The Weddell seal and the Emperor penguin "have
the following points in common, namely, a littoral distribution, a fish
diet and residential non-migratory habit, remaining as far south the
whole year round as open water will allow; whereas the other two (the
crab-eating seal and the Adélie penguin) have in common a more pelagic
habit, a crustacean diet, and a distribution definitely migratory in the
case of the penguin, and although not so definitely migratory in the case
of the seal, yet checked from coming so far south as Weddell's seal in
winter by a strong tendency to keep in touch with pelagic ice."
^[60]
Wilson considers that the advantage lies in each case with the
"non-migratory and more southern species," i.e. the Weddell seal and
the Emperor penguin. I doubt whether he would confirm this now. The
Emperor penguin, weighing six stones and more, seems to me to have a very
much harder fight for life than the little Adélie.

Before the Discovery started from England in 1901 an 'Antarctic Manual'
was produced by the Royal Geographical Society, giving a summary of the
information which existed up to that date about this part of the world.
It is interesting reading, and to the Antarctic student it proves how
little was known in some branches of science at that date, and what
strides were made during the next few years. To read what was known of
the birds and beasts of the Antarctic and then to read Wilson's
Zoological Report of the Discovery Expedition is an education in what one
man can still do in an out-of-the-way part of the world to elucidate the
problems which await him.

The teeth of a crab-eating seal "are surmounted by perhaps the most
complicated arrangement of cusps found in any living mammal."
^[61]
The
mouth is so arranged that the teeth of the upper jaw fit into those of
the lower, and "the cusps form a perfect sieve ... a hitherto
unparalleled function for the teeth of a mammal."
^[62]
The food of this
seal consists mainly of Euphausiae, animals much like shrimps, which it
doubtless keeps in its mouth while it expels the water through its teeth,
like those whales which sift their food through their baleen plates."
This development of cusps in the teeth of the [crab-eating seal] is
probably a more perfect adaptation to this purpose than in any other
mammal, and has been produced at the cost of all usefulness in the teeth
as grinders. The grit, however, which forms a fairly constant part of the
contents of the stomach and intestines, serves, no doubt, to grind up the
shells of the crustaceans, and in this way the necessity for grinders is
completely obviated."
^[63]

The sea-leopard has a very formidable set of teeth suitable for his
carnivorous diet. The Weddell, living on fish, has a more simple group,
but these are liable to become very worn in old age, due to his habit of
gnawing out holes in the ice for himself, so graphically displayed on
Ponting's cinematograph. When he feels death approaching, the crab-eating
seal, never inclined to live in the company of more than a few of his
kind, becomes still more solitary. The Weddell seal will travel far up
the glaciers of South Victoria Land, and there we have found them lying
dead. But the crab-eating seal will wander even farther. He leaves the
pack. "Thirty miles from the sea-shore and 3000 feet above sea-level,
their carcases were found on quite a number of occasions, and it is hard
to account for such vagaries on other grounds than that a sick animal
will go any distance to get away from its companions"
^[64]
(and perhaps it
should be added from its enemies).

Often the under sides of the floes were coloured a peculiar yellow. This
coloration is caused by minute unicellular plants called diatoms. The
floating life of the Antarctic is most dense. "Diatoms were so abundant
in parts of the Ross Sea, that a large plankton net (18 meshes to an
inch) became choked in a few minutes with them and other members of the
Phytoplankton. It is extremely probable that in such localities whales
feed upon the plants as well as the animals of the plankton."
^[65]
I do
not know to what extent these open waters are frequented by whales during
the winter, but in the summer months they are full of them, right down to
the fringe of the continent. Most common of all is the kind of sea-wolf
known as the Killer Whale, who measures 30 feet long. He hunts in packs
up to at least a hundred strong, and as we now know, he does not confine
his attacks to seal and other whales, but will also hunt man, though
perhaps he mistakes him for a seal. This whale is a toothed beast and a
flesh-eater, and is more properly a dolphin. But it seems that there are
at least five or six other kinds of whales, some of which do not
penetrate south of the pack, while others cruise in large numbers right
up to the edge of the fast ice. They feed upon the minute surface life of
these seas, and large numbers of them were seen not only by the Terra
Nova on her various cruises, but also by the shore parties in the waters
of McMurdo Sound. In both Wilson and Lillie we had skilled whale
observers, and their work has gone far to elucidate the still obscure
questions of whale distribution in the South.

The pack-ice offers excellent opportunities for the identification of
whales, because their movements are more restricted than in the open
ocean. In order to identify, the observer generally has only the blow,
and then the shape of the back and fin as the whale goes down, to guide
him. In the pack he sometimes gets more, as in the case of Balaenoptera
acutorostrata (Piked whale) on March 3, 1911. The ship "was ploughing her
way through thick pack-ice, in which the water was freezing between the
floes, so that the only open spaces for miles around were those made by
the slow movement of the ship. We saw several of these whales during the
day, making use of the holes in the ice near the ship for the purpose of
blowing. There was scarcely room between the floes for the whales to come
up to blow in their usual manner, which consists in rising almost
horizontally, and breaking the surface of the water with their backs. On
this occasion they pushed their snouts obliquely out of the water, nearly
as far as the eye, and after blowing, withdrew them below the water
again. Commander Pennell noted that several times one rested its head on
a floe not twenty feet from the ship, with its nostrils just on the
water-line; raising itself a few inches, it would blow and then subside
again for a few minutes to its original position with its snout resting
on the floe. They took no notice of pieces of coal which were thrown at
them by the men on board the ship."
^[66]