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A POLAR AFFAIR
1 A report this past summer that two male penguins at the Berlin Zoo had adopted and were hatching an egg was no surprise to New Zealand naturalist
Lloyd Spencer Davis. From his decades of field work, he knew penguin behavior included homosexuality, infidelity, divorce, rape, and even necrophilia.
However, he had been surprised a few years earlier to learn that these behaviors had been discovered by the author of the very first book on penguins,
George Murray Levick, a surgeon and naturalist on Robert Scott's 1911 Antarctic expedition.
2 Levick, in keeping with the public morality of Victorian England, found penguin sex reprehensible, confining his observations to logbook entries
encrypted in Greek characters. His short paper on the subject as a chapter in his landmark Antarctic Penguins: A Study of their Social Habits, was
suppressed by the publisher and remained unknown until 2012, when a copy was found in a file box at the British Museum. Antarctic Penguins, thoroughly
bowdlerized [expurgado], "treats the mating behavior of the penguins as if they were married couples," writes Davis. As a result, "pretty much every book,
documentary and scientific paper" up until the late 1990s, "collectively suggest that penguins are prim and proper [recatados e bem comportados],
monogamous little creatures that mate for life.”
3 To correct the historical and biological record, and to give belated credit to the man who discovered a century earlier the sexual life of penguins, Davis
consulted Levick’s original notes and visited important sites in the naturalist’s career. The result is the book A Polar Affair: Antarctica’s Forgotten Hero and
the Secret Love Lives of Penguins, an expert journalistic retelling of the Antarctic expeditions of the early twentieth century, centered on Levick’s year of
observing penguins. The climax of what otherwise would have been routine field work is a harrowing [horrível, traumático] trek by Levick and several
companions to explore Antarctica’s north coast, where they were forced to spend the winter in a snow cave. Without Levick’s rationing of seal meat and
his community-building readings from a book of stories, no one would have survived. Levick’s saga [narrativa épica] is interwoven with well-worn threads
about the explorers Scott, Nansen, Amundsen, and Shackleton, occasionally interspersed [entremeada] with evolutionary insights Davis gleaned [colheu]
from his own observations of penguins.
4 Ironically, the sex lives of the humans in this story are as tangled [embaraçadas, complicadas] as those of the penguins. Fridtjof Nansen was as famous
for his romantic conquests as his "conquests of Arctic regions." Roald Amundsen dallied [namorava por divertimento] with married women. Robert Scott's
wife, Kathleen Bruce, embodied raw sexual selection – she chose Scott, according to her own testimony, so she could bear [dar luz a] a hero's son – and
she may have had liaisons with several of his friends. Murray Levick, notably, is one of the few figures in this book to have comported himself as a
supposedly proper penguin. Davis's book is, thus, a welcome look behind the scenes, representing Levick as a brilliant explorer and a keen observer of
nature.
Adapted from Natural History, October 2019.
According to the information in the article, Lloyd Spencer Davis
