Ocean Notorious

by Matt Vance

  The geographic poles, invented by cartographers, coincide with the axis of rotation of the planet; finding them is a simple matter of drawing lines and figuring out a basic navigational equation. However, the magnetic poles – focal points of Earth’s magnetic field, which protects life on the planet from the roaring breath of the sun – have a habit of wandering.

  This had perplexed the most brilliant minds for over two thousand years. The earliest ideas on the nature of magnetism came from a Greek philosopher, Thales, in the sixth century BC. Thales believed something called ‘soul’ drove movement in the universe: if a thing could move objects it possessed a soul. Magnetism could attract and move iron and so, by his deduction, it must have a soul.

  The Chinese were first to harness the mysterious force for practical purposes when they invented a magnetic divining instrument around the first century AD. This early compass took the shape of a spoon, with the handle pointing to magnetic south. Unusually for a northern hemisphere culture, the south became their cardinal point. From it they were able to determine the direction of winds and lay out villages, houses and gardens according to the harmonious laws of feng shui.

  It was this use of the instrument to align the layout of their cities that gave the Chinese their first clue as to the mercurial nature of magnetic south. The street grid of the southern section of the town of Shandan had two distinct orientations. The older part was aligned true north–south, while the newer part was aligned eleven degrees east of north. This had occurred because, in the years between the building of the two, the magnetic spoon had deviated with the moving magnetic pole.

  This was perturbing. How and why did this strange force that attracted the compass needle move? Over the centuries different theories came and went. In the thirteenth century the direction of the magnetic needle was thought to be due to large iron-rich mountains at Earth’s poles. Lodestone, a piece of iron, was known to attract a compass needle so it made sense that the poles must have mountains of the stuff. The theory seemed to make sense and was rapidly taken up. Since the magnetic poles of the planet could not be visited, speculation and fantasy ran riot. Rumour had it that the magnetic force at the poles was so great it could pull iron fastenings from the planks of ships foolish enough to voyage into the poles’ icy grip.

  By the seventeenth century other qualities of magnetism were being discovered, such as the tendency for a compass needle to dip as it moved away from the equator. The closer the needle came to a magnetic pole the more vertical it became. This was considered the best method of finding a pole’s location. The discovery of compass dip was the earliest hint of the apple core shape of the magnetic field that surrounds the Earth.

  Much later this dip led to the discovery of the magnetosphere, which extends thousands of kilometres into space and protects the Earth from the charged particles of solar winds and cosmic rays. Without it these particles and rays would wipe out the upper atmosphere, including the ozone layer and any protection from harmful ultraviolet radiation. During solar storms it is this that produces the shimmering Aurora Australis, but more importantly it allows our thin atmosphere to survive and life to blossom beneath it.

  With the acceptance in the late seventeenth century of geology as a science in its own right, scientists began to focus on magnetism in rocks. A French geologist, Achille Delesse, suggested that lava flows from volcanic eruptions were magnetised in alignment with Earth’s magnetic field as the lava cooled and formed solid rock. By the time Mawson began his fledgling career as a geologist this theory was still fundamental to any study of Earth’s crust. Around the time he first ventured south in pursuit of the south magnetic pole, another Frenchman, Bernard Brunhes, head of the Puy-de-Dôme Observatory that sat on top of an extinct volcano, made a discovery that literally set the world on its head. Brunhes’ study of ancient lava flows revealed that at times Earth’s entire magnetic field had reversed its polarity.

  The world of geology and geophysics was in flux and the potential for world-changing research was ripe. Despite centuries of study into magnetism, no one had yet reached the south magnetic pole. In the late 1830s, attempts had been made by Frenchman Jules Dumont d’Urville, American Charles Wilkes and Briton James Clark Ross. All had been thwarted by weather and ice.

  Mawson had joined Ernest Shackleton’s expedition with the encouragement of Edgeworth David, his geology professor at the University of Sydney, who was also planning to join the team when it reached Australia. Initially Mawson and David intended to stay in Antarctica for the summer and return with the expedition’s ship, the Nimrod. However, Shackleton had offered them the chance to winter over, and with it the opportunity to visit the south magnetic pole early the following summer.

  The pole was lying over Victoria Land in the western Ross Sea. With Alistair Mackay, one of the expedition’s two doctors, Mawson and David set out on October 5, 1908 to chase this mobile enigma. Their 2,000-kilometre journey by sledges was a race against time: the men had to return to the Nimrod before the first licks of autumn again iced up the western Ross Sea. Over 122 days they crossed the sea ice of McMurdo Sound, gained access to the interior of Victoria Land, found what they thought was the position of the pole, and hurried back to the coast.

  There is a fine photo of the three men standing next to a flag somewhere in Victoria Land. Whether the flag was on the south magnetic pole is still a matter of debate, but that they even got close says much about them. It was a remarkable feat. David would later describe Mawson as ‘the real leader who was the soul of our expedition to the magnetic pole … an Australian Nansen of infinite resource, splendid physique, astonishing indifference to frost.’

  Alistair Mackay, Edgeworth David and Douglas Mawson at what they believed to be the south magnetic pole, January 16, 1909.

  The achievement of Mawson, Mackay and David would be completely eclipsed by the spectacular failure of expedition leader Shackleton. While they were in Victoria Land, Shackleton and three companions had headed to a pole that did not roam about. The Irish-born Englishman would come within 180 kilometres of the south geographic pole and nearly kill himself and the others in the process. His torrid tale of survival would fuel the passions of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott, men also chasing the illusive aurora of fame.

  Although Mawson showed respect for his fellow explorers Shackleton and Scott in his journals, part of him despised the vanity and hoopla of the battle to be the first to reach the South Pole. When Scott invited him to join his 1910 Terra Nova expedition he firmly turned him down.

  Mawson had the sort of qualities Scott admired: he was considered, intelligent and strong. Had he gone on the expedition he would almost certainly have been selected for the final team to try for the South Pole and have died with them on the return journey. Instead, he set about preparing his purely scientific expedition, aimed at carrying out a geological survey of the 2,000-mile coastline of Antarctica that lay to the south of Australia and at taking detailed measurements of the south magnetic pole.

  After selecting a team of mainly Australian and New Zealand scientists, Mawson fitted out a Newfoundland sealing vessel, Aurora, and headed south. After travelling along the coast he eventually found a site for a winter base at Cape Denison in Commonwealth Bay, landing there on January 8, 1912. The men quickly built the hut near a small natural harbour that was calm and windless on the day they arrived. This turned out to be an aberration. Before long Cape Denison became known as the home of the blizzard. Modern records rate it as one of the windiest places on the planet.

  In the latter half of 1912, when conditions warmed up, the scientists made five major sorties from the main base and two from a smaller western base to study the geology and weather of the region. Mawson’s own team had two goals: to look for mineral deposits along the coast and visit the magnetic pole. With the benefit of hindsight, he had acknowledged that the expedition he endured in 1909 had failed to find the pole’s exact position. By observing changes in deviation the men believed it had
now drifted from the western Ross Sea to King George V Land, just within striking distance of Cape Denison.

  Mawson chose for his team Xavier Mertz, a Swiss mountaineer, and Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis, a former lieutenant in the Royal Fusilliers, who was in charge of the expedition’s forty-nine Greenland huskies. Mawson had chosen these dogs for the sledging parties because their strength and stamina in polar conditions meant the men could travel long distances and retrieve geological samples without the pain and futility of man-hauling the sledges.

  The team spent five weeks slogging through 560 kilometres of rough coastal terrain. On December 14 they began to traverse an area of snow-covered crevasses. Mertz and Mawson had just crossed a large snow bridge when they turned to see the bridge collapse and a giant crevasse open up, swallowing Ninnis, six of their best dogs, and their largest sled, which contained their main tent, some of their sleeping bags and most of their supplies. They rushed back to the edge of the crevasse. Below they heard at first a faint whimpering from a dog that had landed on a small ledge, but soon there was only silence.

  In one terrifying moment scientific exploration and the quest to reach the south magnetic pole had been replaced by bare-knuckle survival. Mawson wrote in his diary, ‘May God help us.’ He and Mertz turned west to try and reach their base at Cape Denison, nearly 500 kilometres away. With rations scarce, they began to supplement their diet by killing and eating the weakest of the remaining dogs. Christmas dinner consisted of dog stew. Boxing Day breakfast was dog brain. A few days later they were down to dog paw stew, which Mawson noted took somewhat more cooking to make palatable.

  The emaciated pair began to lose strength and suffer frostbite. With Mertz in a bad way, Mawson saw to it that his companion got the dogs’ livers, which he thought would be the most nourishing part. This proved disastrous. Unbeknown to him the liver of a dog contains enough vitamin A to produce a toxic condition called hypervitaminosis. By early January Mertz had become incapacitated and incoherent. On the evening of January 7, Mawson was forced to hold him down as he raved and thrashed about in a delirium. Within hours the thirty-year-old Mertz was dead.

  Memorial to Xavier Mertz and Edward Sutton Ninnis, Cape Denison.

  After burying him in the ice Mawson whispered another prayer, cut his sled in half with a penknife, stacked it with geological specimens and the tiny amount of food left, and set out alone on the remaining 160 kilometres to Cape Denison.

  Mawson’s journey would be described by Edmund Hillary as probably the greatest story of lone survival in polar exploration. Near the end, Mawson’s feet had had enough. The skin on the soles became detached in such a way that he was able to step out of them like a pair of shoes. He smeared the raw new skin with lanoline, strapped the old skin back on with bandages, and covered his feet with six pairs of socks and fur boots. Just hours after the Aurora had departed north for the winter, Mawson skidded down a slope to the base hut. Such was his state that the first of the party to spot him is reported to have said, ‘My God, which one are you?’

  In the hut Mawson was nursed back to health by the small group of men who had been selected to winter over in case by some chance a survivor turned up. As he spent the long hours of darkness recovering his strength and worrying about the expedition’s finances the expedition’s wireless operator, Sidney Jeffryes, slowly lost his mind. In September he transmitted a message to Australia declaring himself the only sane man present and accusing his comrades of a conspiracy to murder him. With five months before the Aurora would return, Jeffryes was relieved of his duties and treated as an invalid.

  Douglas Mawson never again attempted to visit the south magnetic pole. Meanwhile it wandered off the Antarctic continent until today it is 185 kilometres out to sea, deep in the Southern Ocean where only sailors can pester it.

  Shackleton’s hut, Cape Royds.

  A dead lion

  77°32′S

  In 1909 Ernest Shackleton wrote to his wife, ‘Better to be a live donkey than a dead lion.’ With rations low and scurvy setting in, the explorer had turned back a tantalising 180 kilometres from the South Pole, resisting the pull of the south through strength of will, cocaine-based marching tablets, and a knack of getting away with his life.

  The hut Shackleton returned to lies on a small rocky outcrop at Cape Royds on the shores of McMurdo Sound. The view from here is uniquely Antarctic. It’s a black and white affair with no scale, smell or sense of time. The peace is broken only in summer when a rowdy Adélie penguin colony sets up shop.

  Shackleton chose Cape Royds not for the penguins or the vista, but for the open, ice-free ground on which to build a hut, and for the access it gave him to the Ross Ice Shelf and the cold white heart of Antarctica beyond. Six years earlier he had been a junior officer on Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery expedition. During the main southern section of the first foray into the continent’s interior he had suffered a physical collapse and had to be transported on one of the sleds. On January 14, 1903, the expedition’s doctor Edward Wilson had written in his diary: ‘Shackleton has been anything but up to the mark, and today he is decidedly worse, very short-winded and coughing constantly, with more serious symptoms that need not be detailed here but which are of no small consequence one hundred and sixty miles from the ship.’

  When they got back to base, Scott despatched his junior officer on the relief ship Morning, feeling he ‘ought not to risk further hardships in his present state of health’. Scott’s dismissal of him became a giant chip on Shackleton’s shoulder that never went away. He was prepared to risk his life and the lives of others to prove he was a better man than Scott.

  Back in England, he bided his time, turning down an opportunity to return to Antarctica on the second relief ship. He dabbled in a speculative Russian troop-transporting company and stood for the 1906 general election as Liberal Unionist candidate for Dundee. Neither venture was successful.

  It was while he was working for an industrial magnate, William Beardmore, that his chance came. With Beardmore’s financial backing, Shackleton rapidly patched together an old whaling and sealing barque called the Nimrod and an enthusiastic expedition team. With preparations underway he was informed by Scott that McMurdo Sound and the open beaches were his, Scott’s, and he should look elsewhere for a base. He mumbled a promise to his former leader.

  On New Year’s Day 1908, in order to preserve its precious coal supplies, the Nimrod was towed from Lyttelton in New Zealand 1,400 nautical miles south by tug to the Antarctic Circle. At the sight of the first icebergs the tow was dropped and the ship travelled on into the depths of the Ross Sea looking for a suitable place to base the expedition.

  Shackleton searched for sites on the eastern Ross Ice Shelf and the rugged coast of King Edward VII Land. When nothing suitable revealed itself, he was forced to break his word to Scott and retreat to the known waters of McMurdo Sound. An ideal site was found at Cape Royds and the offloading procedure was begun, hindered by bad weather, a moving ice edge, and a bad relationship between Shackleton and the captain of the Nimrod, Rupert England.

  Interior of Shackleton’s hut, Cape Royds, photographed by Laurence Aberhart.

  After a long winter Shackleton and three other members of the expedition, Frank Wild, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams, reached latitude 88°23'S by man-hauling a sled. They were 180 kilometres from the South Pole, the closest anyone had come and six degrees closer than Scott had reached four years earlier. For most of the return journey they were on half rations. At one point Shackleton gave his daily biscuit to an ailing Frank Wild, who wrote in his diary: ‘All the money that was ever minted would not have bought that biscuit and the remembrance of that sacrifice will never leave me.’

  All that remains today is Shackleton’s small wooden hut at Cape Royds and a large piece of Antarctic history. In that one summer of 1908–09 members of the expedition had located the south magnetic pole, summited Mount Erebus and come within a whisker of reaching the South Pole.

  Ov
er a century later I arrived at Cape Royds with photographer Laurence Aberhart. By now I had given up my work guiding on an icebreaker for the security of a job as communications adviser for a government organisation dedicated to understanding Antarctica. The role had all the frustrations of working for a bureacracy but the bonus was the chance to show artists around the frozen white edge of the continent.

  To watch Aberhart as he quietly paced Shackleton’s hut looking for the perfect shot was to see an art finely honed. His camera was over 120 years old, even older than the camera used by Shackleton’s team to record their expedition. A large wooden monstrosity, it had an accordion lens and large negative plates, which Laurence would insert in the side. At the back was a long velvet hood under which he would then tinker in a world of shutter speeds and composition.

  The dingy interior of the hut required exposures of up to an hour. This meant a lot of waiting around. During one of those long exposures Laurence and I were standing outside the hut discussing the ills of the world and into our second cup of tea when we heard from the south the familiar thump-thump of a helicopter. On the shores of McMurdo Sound any kind of movement and sound are notable, this one was the more so as it was coming our way.

  The helicopter swept up the headland and came to a halt at the landing pad nearby. The blades were still whining down when a hurried delegation of three disembarked and came towards us. Their red jackets and survival boots gave them the waddling gait of penguins. As the largest one approached, the other two fell in behind. I noticed the man had a badly fitted, red-tinged toupee and a very large moustache. He pumped my hand and told me his name, which included the title ‘Ambassador’. We knew this already as it was emblazoned on the name tag of his jacket.