A Polar Affair Quotes

“thing that in the pornography industry is called the “cum shot.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“However, after this, Levick’s scientific logic lets him down. He assumed that the adult penguins cooperated to feed all the chicks in the crèche. Had he marked the chicks and adults, he would have seen that parents feed only their own chicks.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“Scott realizes now what awful cripples our ponies are and carries a face like a tired old sea boat in consequence.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“Had I been in my generator box, observing Kathleen Scott and Douglas Mawson during their lunch, I might have described them, in penguin terms, as approaching each other cautiously and bowing. That is, in the very preliminary stage of courtship when a female investigates a male performing his ecstatic display. Most often it goes nowhere: she turns and runs away. Most often.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“Of course, not everything we think we know about penguins turns out to be true.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“There is so much irony in this. Scott had been distraught to learn that Amundsen had based himself in the Bay of Whales for his own attempt to get to the South Pole. Cherry-Garrard was with Scott when he received Campbell’s news about the Norwegians:”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“Campbell is not about to let slip any of the disciplines or structures that in the navy masquerade as procedure but are really just a way of maintaining order.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“And so it is that the three Norwegians have conspired to alter the course that Levick’s life takes that day: Borchgrevink had discovered that in this area the barrier (perhaps by virtue of being bent and broken by an underwater island over which it passed) was accessible, then Nansen had given his ship Fram to this other Norwegian, this “fine looking man” as Campbell described him, who had sailed it here and set up camp on the only avenue available to the British to carry out their intended exploration.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“Rather than going right along the Ross Ice Shelf until they get to King Edward VII Land, Scott proposed that perhaps they should land at the Bay of Whales, or Balloon Bight, as he insists on still calling it,”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“Herbert Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, or “camera artist,” as he prefers to call himself, tries to photograph a pod of six killer whales that are attempting to hunt penguins at the edge of the sea ice. He takes his camera and tripod to the very edge of the sea ice but the whales, seeing him, go under the ice, coming up and breaking it into small floes. Ponting is left rocking on one of the floes when one of the whales rears out of the water, its head over the edge of the floe, trying to grab him.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“The women accompany their husbands on the ship as far as Taiaroa Head. When it comes time to transfer to the tug, Kathleen, unlike the other wives, chooses not to kiss her husband goodbye. She will say later that she did not wish to make him sad in front of the other men. Yet this stiff and formal parting speaks volumes about their pairing.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“that moment, Atkinson was at Hut Point and about to leave with Demitri and the two dog teams to take food and fuel to the Polar Party, just as Scott had requested of him. Instead, they took the dogs to get Evans and brought him back to Hut Point on one of the sledges. Atkinson, the doctor, needed to stay with Evans if he was to have any chance of surviving at all.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“The ship has been to the Cape Evans Hut to pick up personnel going back to New Zealand, including the dog driver Meares, who had become so upset with Scott’s leadership that he had requested he go home early.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“(really, both are just the tips of great mountains that poke through the top of the Beardmore Glacier),”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“The largest of them, Petty Officer Taffy Evans, a mountain of a man, and from the outset the strongest of them all, gets the same rations as the rest of them. If they are inadequate for the smallest of them, they are pitiful for him. He is suffering the most and his condition is exacerbated because Scott’s plan had called for him to change the runners of the sledge from twelve-foot ones to ten-foot ones when they were on the plateau; a process that took him many hours to accomplish and damaged his hands badly from the cold. He fingers are covered now in large painful blisters from frostbite.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins

“He is suffering the most and his condition is exacerbated because Scott’s plan had called for him to change the runners of the sledge from twelve-foot ones to ten-foot ones when they were on the plateau; a process that took him many hours to accomplish and damaged his hands badly from the cold. He fingers are covered now in large painful blisters from frostbite.”
― Lloyd Spencer Davis, A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins