Field Notes: They Came Home to Lyttelton

In my journal for The Entire Earth and Sky, I wrote,

I drove home to Lyttelton in my green truck, made a cup of tea, and curled up in bed. From my bed, I could look out a large window to the port. Later that night, a red coastal freighter would arrive, as it did each week, and begin unloading a cargo that often seemed to be entirely clanging metal bars. At that moment, the port was still, illuminated by melon halogen lights, lights that urged gulls to forget the night. They flew in a wide arc, silent, circling. Norris had given me a copy of his Antarctic book, which was sold at the Canterbury Museum. It collected a series of newspaper columns he contributed to a local paper, detailing the specific stories of Lyttelton and Canterbury men who sailed during the Heroic Age.

As I read, I could hear his voice. Some of the ships took expeditions to the Antarctic, then turned around and came home to Lyttelton where the crew waited out the frigid, ship-crushing winter season. Thus, Scott’s second and final ship, the Terra Nova was moored at Lyttelton for long periods during 1910-1913. The ship had dropped off Scott and the exploration team at Cape Evans. They would return in the spring thaw to fetch Scott and his victorious party, home from their dash to the South Pole.
You can imagine how people in Lyttelton would have felt, looking down into the port and seeing the Terra Nova in their midst. Norris was almost equally devoted to the ships themselves, the old sailor in him coming through, I reckoned, and he recorde the Terra Nova’s fate: She had vanished during World War II off the coast of Greenland, where she was in the service of the U.S. Navy.

I put the book down and recalled a photo in the Lyttelton Museum, an image that had captured a moment of pageant and freak show, P.T. Barnum does a wilderness act: Eleven men in Burberry anoraks, hoods extended and obscuring their faces. They wore harnesses and towed sledges just as five men would do en route to the South Pole. The first holds a crumpled Union Jack hastily hoisted on a pole. Two young boys galloped in from the right, skinny legs, knee breeches and caps, white collars glistening. The street mired in mud, the hillside homes cloaked in a faint coal-smoke haze. Behind the marchers, a regimental band, wearing topcoats with brass buttons. These Antarctic sailors march deliberately, suggesting they know where they are going – and in fact, they do – back to the quayside, a left turn and then two blocks down the steep hill, back to their ship’s chores, then off to sea. Later, the photos will show these men at sea, faces masked by cold and ice, skin darkened and shining from coal and blubber smoke.

I returned to his book, in an eloquent essay, They Came Back to Lyttelton, he listed more than a dozen and their fates. There was Lance Corporal A.H. Blissett who served aboard the Discovery. By the time Norris knew him, he was Harry Blissett, a rather gruff watersider, or dockworker. He had frightened Norris as a child. Blissett was the first to find an Emperor penguin’s egg, a moment Scott had recorded on January 28, 1903, “all the news seems good. Blissett has discovered an Emperor penguin egg and his messmates expect him to be knighted.”

Hugh McGowan had served as an engineer with Shackleton’s 1904-1906 Nimrod expedition and continued that work back in Lyttelton.

W.W. Knowles had been an able-bodied seaman on the Terra Nova. He worked as a watersider for many years in Lyttelton.

The Morning, a relief ship sent out in 1903 – I considered the odd moment of language meeting purpose, mourning, the feeling of showing deep sadness following the death of somebody – sailed to find and bring home Scott and his Discovery crew when they were late returning in 1903. She had two Lyttelton men aboard: Arthur Beaumont, able-bodied seaman, who later worked in Lyttelton as a watersider and crane operator, and Jack Partridge, who sailed with the Morning and then headed south again in 1907 on Shackleton’s Nimrod. He became fireman on the Lyttelton Harbour Board’s dredge Te Whaka.

Not all the Lyttelton men were seamen. Local boy Eric Norman Webb, Norris noted, was just twenty-two when selected by the legendary Australian polar scientist and explorer Douglas Mawson to head south.

Webb served as chief magnetician with the 1911 Australasian Expedition, and was key in locating the South Magnetic Pole. The magnetic pole describes, for the Earth’s magnetic field, the equivalent of the geographic South Pole. The South Magnetic Pole is not fixed, and drifts like a cloud across water, land, ice. In 2003 it hovered off the Antarctic coast, over the Southern Ocean. Webb went on to become a world authority on hydroelectric power.

The next morning, I wandered along the town’s quiet streets. Someone had broken the windows of two shops the night before. Drunken sailors? Young hooligans? I climbed cement stairs by the museum and sat down in Baden Norris Gardens, dedicated to his work as historian and naturalist, turned and gazed out across the deep turquoise water to Diamond Harbour on the other shore. A bay cruise boat, black and white, pulled slowly away from the quay, a dolphin-watching trip. Earlier in the year a pod of Orcas had made the unusual move of swimming into the harbour and gobbling up a lot the tiny, rare Hector’s dolphins that also called Lyttelton home. Those that remained were keeping a low profile. No one had seen any in months.

Penguins Go to the Zoo...

Each day as part of my iGoogle page I get a feed of jokes. Most are not my taste: I guess I prefer to laugh privately or perhaps it's that the whole joke set-up construct makes me nervous.

Who knows.

At any rate, today I got this joke from Comedy Central: Penguins go the zoo...
A man drives to a gas station and has his tank filled up. The gas pumper spots two penguins sitting in the back seat of the car.

He asks the driver, "What's up with the penguins in the back seat?"

The man in the car says "I found them. I asked myself what to do with them, but I haven't had a clue."

The clerk ponders a bit then says, "You should take them to the zoo."

"Hey, that's a good idea," says the man in the car and drives away.

The next day the man with the car is back at the same gas station. The clerk sees the penguins are still in the back seat of the car.

"Hey, they're still here! I thought you were going to take them to the zoo."

"Oh, I did," says the driver, "And we had a swell time. Today I am taking them to the beach."


The first thing that came to mind were the Magellanic penguins at the SF Zoo, a rather sad-looking bunch in their cement pond. Not so long ago, maybe five years or so, some new penguins born and bred in Ohio came aboard the island. This arrival triggered a massive "migration" of the original gang, who proceeded to swim as though making the long commute from northerly to southerly latitudes in wide open seas.

If I am in the right mood, these sorts of penguin stories can make me bawl.


This, of course, made me think of all the penguin stories I had heard from my friend, the Antarctic curator Baden Norris (he runs the Lyttelton Museum on New Zealand's South Island) -- who had also for many years run a bird hospital and nursed many penguins back to health. Penguins are endemic to New Zealand's South Island and actually considered something of a smelly mess.

One of my favorite stories was that of Percy the Penguin and I included in THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY as a field note.

Field Notes
I imagine if penguins were to study us the way we study them, they might be intrigued by how we adapt to and construct our habitats. Maybe they would investigate our habitat construction in places like New York. How we stack boxes of stone one on top of the other and then argue amongst ourselves about what colour the inside of these dens should be. How we change the den’s colour randomly. Or do we do so for other reasons? Perhaps, as scientists do in the Antarctic, they would be curious about whether or not helicopter noise disrupted our breeding habits. I don’t know about you, but I would feel disrupted by a helicopter full of penguins descending on my den, determined to shove a thermometer up my rear end and check my body temperature. Penguins may be the most carefully studied of all Antarctic wildlife and there was a lot of grumbling among Antarctic scientists about duplication and relevance. Yet penguins hold our attention in ways seals do not. Why is this so? And why do we insist on making them into comical little men in dinner suits, carrying silver trays of champagne? Baden had run a bird “hospital” for many years. As part of this, he had worked with the indigenous species called the blue or little penguin, Eudyptula minor, (the Maori name is korora, and it is the world’s smallest penguin. This penguin weighs about one kilo, or 2.2 pounds, and stands no more than 25 cm high. These penguins have suffered from gruesome predation, and introduced species like ferrets, stoats, weasels, house cats, and the family dog, make fast work of them. Among those in his care was a penguin that had arrived with a damaged bill and blind in one eye. Baden named him Percy and said he never could have survived again in the wild. While he lived with Baden, Percy got to know Baden’s cats, who came to treat the little bird with respect, and treat him as part of the household. Baden explained how other penguins were in hospital because they had become oil contaminated. To cure them, Baden gave them detergent baths, then carefully checked that all residue was removed. After about five weeks, most were ready to be reintroduced to the wild. They usually did not want to go, he added. He recalled one particular day when he had four to release, how he took them down to the beach and shooed them all toward the sea, then sat on the beach and watched them swim away. One by one, they came back to the beach and sat down next to him. Then the five watched the surf roll onto the beach at Sumner. Two penguins tired of this, and wandered back toward the waves, but the other two were quite determined to come home with Baden. So Baden brought them to the beach again the next day, and this time one turned from the waves. A few days later he, too, agreed to swim out to sea. Returning to the sea was no longer an option for Percy. He came to have a taste for cat food and enjoyed daily swims with Baden in the surf. Percy rode to the beach in the boot, or trunk, of Baden’s white car. When they finished their swim, Percy waddled back to the car park. He always knew which car was ours, he was a smart penguin, Baden recalled. I pictured the two of them rolling in the turquoise South Pacific waters. So Percy lived his half-penguin, half-human life making a comfortable nest in the cold furnace in the basement. During one of the South Island’s torrential rainstorms, he was moulting, and water surged into his moulting area and by the time Baden found him, he was ice-cold and water logged. Wrapped in shawls and held tight, Percy died. Down the coast from Baden’s home, many years later, the town of Oamaru became home to a set of wooden burrows and bleachers, a habitat restoration project with spectators, where tourists paid to watch penguins emerge from the sea as night descended. They hopped up the rocky beach. When we visited, one turned towards where I sat with my children and came to within a few feet of us, looking steadily at our family. Then the penguin turned towards the hills and began to climb towards the burrows. In the gift shop, we bought small plastic replicas of the little blue penguins. They were made in China and stood as tall as my thumb.

10 THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT ANTARCTICA

What a great day for Antarctic news: The last supply ship in dumped off about 16,000 condoms to make it through the winter. Good on ya, mates, as my Kiwi colleagues say. The first part of THE ENTIRE EARTH AND SKY is a "gazetteer" of Antarctic facts. And then there are facts strewn around the book. How about this one: 46,800 cans of beer are ordered each year for Scott Base, the New Zealand base in the Ross Sea. (Wine, you ask? 2,268 bottles.) At any rate, I plan to include fact lists each week over the austral winter, in honor of our colleagues toughing it out in the 24-hour darkness of the deep south. While some might call such lists random, there is also an argument that all of these ideas were carefully selected from the tens of millions floating around out there -- do you see the link?

1) Antarctica is the only continent where people compete on an annual basis for the chance to reside and work there.
2) Antarctica was once the center of the Gondwana supercontinent, which included Africa, India, South America, and Australia.
3) 98 percent of the continent is covered by ice; with a volume of 30 million cubic kilometres.
4) The weight of the ice has depressed continental bedrock by 600 meters.
5) Antarctica contains 70 percent of the Earth's fresh water in the form of ice.
6) When winter darkness descends, the community shrinks to 1,000.
7) Ice crept across Antarctica about 40 million years ago and has remained largely intact since then.
8) On Nov. 29, 1929, Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd of the U.S. Navy became first to fly over the South Pole.
9) At the South Pole, the ice is 2.8 kilometers thick.
10) People who live and work at the South Pole are called "polies."