Surgeon Commander George Murray Levick (Photo courtesy of the British Exploring Society).
Borchgrevink’s Hut at Cape Adare, Antarctica, site of the world’s largest Adelie Penguin colony.
Roald Amundsen (Photo courtesy of the Fram Museum, Oslo).
An Adelie Penguin worse for wear after an encounter with a Leopard Seal.
Carsten Borchgrevink, Norwegian explorer: the first man to walk on the Antarctic Continent and the first to overwinter there.
Scott’s Hut, Cape Evans, Antarctica.
Douglas Russell with the unpublished manuscript by Murray Levick, which he discovered.
Scott’s Hut Point Hut, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.
Inside Shackleton’s Hut, Cape Royds, Antarctica.
Joseph Hatch’s discarded digesters, King Penguin colony, Macquarie Island.
Leopard Seal and the Shokalskiy, Cape Royds, Antarctica.
Leopard Seal and the Shokalskiy, Cape Royds, Antarctica.
Lloyd Spencer Davis sitting in Levick’s chair in his house in Budleigh Salterton.
Sketch by Victor Campbell of the meeting of the Terra Nova and Fram, Bay of Whales (Courtesy of the QEII Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland).
Shackleton’s Hut, Cape Royds, Antarctica.
Adelie Penguin, Antarctica.
Emperor Penguin, Antarctica.
Nansen’s study, Polhøgda, Oslo
Penguin expert and Antarctic explorer Lloyd Spencer Davis blends natural history, evolutionary biology and stories of adventure in his new book A Polar Affair: Antarctica's Forgotten Hero and the Secret Love Lives of Penguins.
The 'forgotten hero' of the title is George Levick, the doctor on Robert Falcon Scott's tragic Antarctic expedition of 1910.
Levick became an enthusiastic observer of penguins while he was marooned down South over an Antarctic winter. But the practices he saw there were so depraved, and the couplings so sordid, they were suppressed and sanitised for a Victorian audience.
Lloyd Spencer Davis' previous books include Penguin: A Season in the Life of the Adelie Penguin for which he received the PEN (NZ) Best First Book Award for Nonfiction.
He is also the author of Looking For Darwin, which won the CLL Writer's Award.
