A POLAR AFFAIR

Antarctica’s Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

By Lloyd Spencer Davis

In the annals of polar exploration, Robert Scott’s 1910 expedition to the Antarctic remains an enduring example of the murderous traps of our coldest continent. During this mythic voyage of bravery, folly and — ultimately — horror, Scott and his colleagues hauled heavy sleds over glaciers and mountains, only to find that Roald Amundsen, a more savvy explorer, had arrived at the South Pole several weeks earlier. Weakened, famished and frostbitten, they then turned and attempted the punishing 900-mile trek to their station at the coast. Two men perished along the way; the rest died bundled in a tent during a blizzard, only 11 miles from a food depot. As he was freezing to death, Scott wrote what is perhaps the most famous diary entry of the 20th century: “We are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. For God’s sake look after our people.”

Thankfully, not everyone died on Scott’s expedition. A number of his companions awaited his return at a hut on the coast, while a smaller branch of the expedition — known as the Northern Party — explored a nearby area called Cape Adare. One member of this group was George Murray Levick, a doctor who studied the habits of a large Adélie penguin population. Levick, as Lloyd Spencer Davis notes in his sprawling, fascinating and sometimes exasperating book, “was indisputably the father of penguin biology.” Indeed, many decades later, Levick’s work influenced the author in his own scientific study of penguins. Yet Levick’s published writings don’t square with his actual observations. Davis writes, “He … covered up the most salacious parts of his field notes with a code that used Greek letters. Why?”