1912

by Chris Turney

  Mawson was all too aware that scientific results in themselves could not compete against what David had called the ‘microbe of sport’. It was important to follow Shackleton’s example and engage people with a strong visual record of the expedition: the BAE had shown just how powerful photographs were for scientific work and in exciting the public. Fate would deliver the expedition Frank Hurley, then a little-known photographer based in Sydney. Hurley had purchased a Kodak box brownie camera when he was seventeen and by his early twenties was running a postcard business in Sydney.

  At twenty-five Hurley cornered Mawson in a train compartment and talked non-stop through the journey. His enthusiasm was infectious. Three days later Hurley was hired and charged with a wider remit than that of his day job: he was to keep a film record of the expedition’s exploits. Unfamiliar with this new technology, called a cinematograph, he learned to operate the hand-cranked movie camera in just a few days. The expedition now had a dedicated professional photographer who would go on to repeatedly put himself in danger for the best possible shot, and who scribbled above his Antarctic work bench ‘Near enough is not good enough.’

  With stores and staff appointed, financing once again became the priority. After Mawson’s presentation, the Royal Geographical Society marked their approval by contributing £500—the same as was given to Scott—while the promise of shares in future mineral discoveries helped secure thousands more pounds from investors. Several of the Australian state governments chipped in, offering a total of £18,500, while the federal government matched the funds provided to Shackleton, £5000—followed up later with a further £5000—but New Zealand controversially declined. Significantly, the British government also chipped in £2000. With loans and grants, Mawson could count on £39,000. Although considerably short of the £48,000 target, he had his expedition—and it was all arranged in just one year.

  To maintain public interest in the enterprise—and keep funds flowing—Mawson looked to Scott’s motorised sledges for supporting work on the ice. After reviewing the designs of the vehicles, however, he regretfully concluded they would not do. Instead, Mawson thought flight might be a better money-spinner. It was a shrewd move. Only ten years before, the Wright Brothers had famously made the first powered flight; the technology had advanced swiftly since then, and with it public excitement about the possibilities of air travel.

  Scott’s wife, Kathleen, was an enthusiast and encouraged Mawson to take a plane for reconnaissance purposes. An unimpressed Skelton wrote to Scott in 1911: ‘Mawson is apparently taking an airplane with him and a soldier called Watkins to fly in it,—really it is very silly,—wonderful flights have been made this year,—but we haven’t got anywhere near the so-called conquest of the air yet, even in Europe, and going up in the Antarctic seems to me to be only asking for trouble.’

  Negotiating with the manufacturer Vickers, Mawson acquired a single-winged two-seater with skis for landing on ice for under £1000, on credit. The pilot Hugh Evelyn Watkins told Flight magazine, ‘it is doubtful if the airplane will be used for the final dash to the Pole, as it would have to surmount the great ice barrier.’ Although Mawson had no designs on the South Geographic Pole, the magazine ended on the exasperated note: ‘What hope is there of surmounting it if it could not be done by aeroplane?’ Regardless, the plane was shipped to Australia, with much fanfare.

  Wild wrote of this episode in his unpublished memoirs: ‘Like almost all British explorers, Mawson had found a great difficulty in raising the necessary funds for his expedition…and he had planned to use the aeroplane to assist in this. For this purpose a huge marquee was erected on the race course, thousands of invitations sent out, and a sufficiency of refreshments of every kind provided for the guests. The Governor of South Australia promised to attend with his family, and to open the proceedings by taking the first of a series of short flights which would be given during the day at a charge of £5 a trip.’

  The plane was checked over and all appeared well. Watkins and Wild took the opportunity for one last test flight the next morning:

  The plane took off all right and had climbed to 500 ft when in making a turn it suddenly side slipped. We were almost down before Watkins got the plane straightened out, and the sensation was far from pleasant. We climbed again to about 150 feet when the plane put its nose down and dived. We were then over the centre of the race course and as the earth rushed at us, all my past life did not panorama before me. I felt no fear, just had time to think ‘Frank old boy your days of exploration are done,’ when we struck, and the plane fell over on its back on top of us. A heavy weight was on my chest and I could hardly breathe but was fully conscious. One leg was touching a hot cylinder and I was drenched in oil and petrol and in horrible dread that the machine would burst into flames. I lay it seemed a very long time when I heard Watkins grunt and then gasp out ‘Poor old bus, she’s jiggered up!’

  The plane was a write-off and the event had to be cancelled. Mawson was unimpressed and blamed Watkins for the accident, ‘as he had been very late at the Naval and Military Club the night before’. Although the plane could no longer fly, the engine and body were salvaged and shipped to Antarctica to be used as an ‘air tractor’. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Watkins was said to be ‘keenly disappointed’: this was the first time he had ever had a serious accident. He returned to England and promptly had another crash. When the war came the Royal Flying Corp decided to overlook him for service.

  With much excitement, the residents of the island state of Tasmania turned out in droves to farewell the heavily laden Aurora when it headed south from Hobart, on 2 December 1911. It had been an extraordinary year. Mawson had somehow managed to raise the necessary funds; appoint a team of scientists, engineers and ship’s crew; buy and provision a vessel; and obtain enough equipment and supplies to sustain a scientific expedition in the field for fourteen months.

  Remarkably the original plan, as put to the RGS, remained largely intact. There was one small exception: one of the bases would now be established on remote, subantarctic Macquarie Island, so it could operate as a relay station for Antarctic wireless messages and undertake scientific study. And because Macquarie Island fell under the jurisdiction of the Tasmanian state government, permission had to be obtained to work there; worryingly for Mawson, this was granted just five days before the Aurora left Hobart. Refusal would have thrown the whole expedition into chaos.

  Weathering a violent gale south of Tasmania, the Aurora sighted Macquarie Island in nine days. Almost immediately the men saw a beached sealing vessel. The Clyde had been wrecked on a reef after a particularly bad storm and the sealers on board had been stranded for months with barrels of oil collected from fur and elephant seals on the island. The shipwrecked men were waiting to be rescued when the Aurora arrived—and Mawson was not one to pass up an opportunity to offset his costs. He negotiated their repatriation to Australia on a second, smaller expedition vessel that was returning to Tasmania. All the men had to do was pay for the cost of the charter.

  Negotiations complete, a wireless mast was quickly erected on the island, and on a promontory at the northern end expedition members unloaded enough building materials, supplies and scientific equipment to support five men over the next year. Davis had some doubts about the leader of the group, the meteorologist George Ainsworth. On arrival Davis suggested that, in selecting the site of the base, ‘it would be well to ask the islanders their opinion as having lived on the island they would probably know the sheltered spots. This idea was ridiculed by this gentleman who informed me with great dignity that what Ferrel—some meteorologist who had never been to the island—said was good enough for him. Well I am glad I shall not be with Ainsworth—he is an ass.’

  But at least Mawson was reassured that this phase of the expedition was complete. The rest of the Australasian expedition could push on south.

  The omens were good as the Aurora went south from Macquarie Island. For the first couple of days the sun came out and there was
only a light northerly wind, allowing the men a well-earned break after two punishing weeks building the base on Macquarie Island. It was time to consider what might lie ahead, off the map. Some questioned whether there was even any land between Cape Adare and von Drygalski’s Kaiser Wilhelm II Land.

  The little known about the region was almost entirely based on reports made more than seventy years earlier. When Ross had found his path to the South Magnetic Pole checked by the mountains of Victoria Land, French and American fleets were exploring the icy seas to the west, south of Australia. The French were led by Jules Sébastien César Dumont D’Urville, who headed south from Hobart in 1839 and, after weaving his way around numerous tabular bergs, came across land.

  Setting foot on a small island at what he called Pointe Géologie, D’Urville raised the flag and claimed the area for France. For the first time a piece of Antarctica was named after love, with the French leader bestowing the title Adelie Land, ‘to perpetuate…my deep and lasting gratitude to my devoted wife’. After a brief stay collecting geological samples and a few unfortunate penguins, the French left, only to come across an American expedition led by the controversial Charles Wilkes.

  If there were a prize for an Antarctic expedition with the poorest preparation and lowest morale, Wilkes’s effort would be a strong contender. His ships were ill equipped for the icy conditions and, though he claimed to have a scientific agenda, Wilkes went out of his way to lose as many of the expedition scientists as possible before heading south. When the French and American ships met one another, they kept going—in opposite directions. After the encounter the Americans completed an impressive 1700-kilometre voyage, much of it through dangerous pack ice surrounding what we now know to be the eastern Antarctic. On returning home Wilkes confidently proclaimed he had discovered a continent in the south and, perhaps not unreasonably, expected to be welcomed as a hero. Instead, the American found himself mired in controversy, his reliability as an observer questioned, his leadership disputed.

  D’Urville wrote of their meeting in the south, ‘I would have been glad to give our co-explorers the results of our researches…it seems the Americans were far from sharing these feelings.’ Wilkes in turn accused the French of fleeing. Tragically, D’Urville and his wife died in a train accident shortly after the Frenchman’s triumphant homecoming, abruptly ending the argument. But, finding the French asserting they had landed on what was now thought to be a continent on 19 January 1840, Wilkes contended he had done so a few days before.

  Complaints came thick and fast, and not merely from the French. Wilkes’s claims of other land sightings were dogged by seemingly contradictory reports from those on the expedition, and the men had not appreciated his old-fashioned, tough leadership—119 of the 342 dying, deserting or discharged during the voyage. Wilkes found himself court martialled, charged with unbecoming behaviour, including handing out illegal punishment, and accused of ‘deliberate and wilful falsehood’. He escaped with a reprimand but continued to flirt with disaster, notoriously nearly dragging Britain into the American Civil War when he hauled Confederate officers off a British vessel.

  For want of an alternative guide, Wilkes’s alleged observations formed a cornerstone of the Australasian plan—even though Ross was known to have sailed over land that Wilkes had mapped and Scott’s Discovery had shown many of the so-called landfalls were false. As the Aurora approached the frozen coastline, Mawson was all too aware he was relying on observations similar to those Ross and Scott had disproved.

  Sighting the first bergs on 29 December 1911 the crew was told to be vigilant, watching for icy hazards while scanning the horizon for land. It was a frustrating time: for Davis, the ship was continually threatened; for Mawson, the supposed land remained obstinately hidden. Since D’Urville had landed on Adelie Land no one else had been back, while Wilkes’s finds seemed non-existent.

  Before departing Australia, Mawson had become engaged to Paquita Delprat, the daughter of a mining engineer in Broken Hill, and among his numerous letters of affection he wrote to her of his frustration with Wilkes’s claims of finding an Antarctic coastline: ‘We met heavy impenetrable pack in several directions and failed to break through to the land. Much of this disappointment and trouble I find today are due to an undue reliance I had placed in the accounts of Commander Wilkes who made explorations here in 1840. His accounts are largely erroneous and misleading.’

  Mawson had expected to find land by the beginning of January. The plan had been to establish the main base of operations as close as possible to the South Magnetic Pole, allowing the scientists to complement the measurements Mawson had made in 1909. With no land in sight the Aurora was forced west, away from the magnetic meridian. And the further west the vessel went, the less the chance of raising Macquarie Island on the wireless system. They had to make landfall, and soon.

  ‘During the afternoon of January 6,’ Mawson recorded, ‘an ice cliff loomed up ahead, extending to the horizon in both directions. This proved to be an immense barrier tongue—afterwards named the Mertz glacier—pushing 60 miles out to sea from a great ice-capped land. This land, along which we steamed during the next two days, had never before been seen. Its continuity with Adelie Land was subsequently proved.’ After cautiously working their way around the glacier over the next two days, the men of the Aurora discovered a small rocky outcrop and bay alive with penguins and seals. They had found a site for their first base.

  ‘As a station for scientific investigations,’ Mawson wrote, ‘it offered a wider field than the casual observer would have imagined.’ But the timetable was slipping and the scientific program had to be rationalised. With a shortage of coastline suitable for landing, and having been forced so far west, Mawson decided to combine two of the bases into one, making this his Winter Quarters. Uninspired by D’Urville’s romantic streak or his own recent engagement, he named the new promontory Cape Denison after one of the expedition backers, Sir Hugh Denison, and their anchorage Commonwealth Bay in tribute to the recently federated Australia.

  Almost as soon as they decided to establish the base a storm blew up, sweeping the rocky outcrops free of snow and sending newly formed pack ice far out to sea. The storm blasted the men on shore for two days as they huddled together in tents, while Davis fought desperately to keep the Aurora off the rocks. With the winds finally subsiding, the men worked at a frenzied pace, taking ashore all the building material they needed for two huts, along with scientific equipment and stores for eighteen men, the former aircraft, one wireless mast, twenty-nine dogs and twenty-three tonnes of coal for fuel.

  They had to erect the huts quickly: the place seemed to be a magnet for storms. The wind would pick up suddenly, often with no warning at all, threatening the expedition. The churning sea surface tested Davis’s captaincy skills to the limit as he was frequently called upon to save the Aurora from being dashed against nearby reefs. For the men on shore conditions were equally wretched. The high winds, dangerous for those walking outside, seemed to drive the temperature lower. Although the concept of wind chill was yet to be developed, the men were all too aware of its effects. The expedition biologist, Charles Laseron, later remarked, ‘the landing of the stores seemed interminable, as all of us were bitterly cold and miserable.’

  The supplies were unloaded in eleven days and, after a further eleven, the wooden huts were habitable. The Winter Quarters were complete, to everyone’s great relief. After brief handshakes and cries of farewell, the Aurora headed west. Time was perilously short: Davis had to get Frank Wild’s Western Party established before the onset of winter.

  Mawson had asked that Wild be set down ‘not nearer than a couple of hundred miles, and preferably about 500 miles distant’. Obstacle after obstacle frustrated efforts to land the men, though, and Davis was exhausted. Through the fog and mist, the coastline appeared to be made of steep ice cliffs and shelves.

  Heading further west, ‘new land was sighted—icy slopes rising from the sea, similar to those of Adelie
Land, but of greater elevation.’ Soundings of the sea depth showed they were in shallow water and must be close to land. Now more sympathetic to their American predecessor, the men called this discovery Wilkes Land, to ‘commemorate the name of a navigator whose daring was never in question, though his judgment as to the actuality of terra firma was unreliable’. But they could not get close enough to land. The Aurora pushed on, more in hope than promise.

  Three weeks after leaving Mawson, the Aurora was 2400 kilometres west of Cape Denison when the ship suddenly came across a vast glacier tongue. Twenty-five metres high, this river of ice seemed to tower over the vessel and disappear far out to sea. It took two days to circumnavigate.

  The glacier was not land—but things were desperate, and at any moment the Aurora might become trapped by sea ice. Wild had to be dropped off as soon as possible if his men were to remain in Antarctica and do the work intended. And here they were in a relatively sheltered spot.

  Davis talked to Wild about whether the glacier might suffice, ‘which seems to me the only alternative just at present, I think it would be a risky business but would prefer it to going back. I feel pretty sure that if we do find land here it will be inaccessible.’ The spot did not enthuse Davis: ‘It is certainly a cheerless place, no sun all day, nothing but snow and gloom.’ In the end Wild decided there was no choice. The base commander wrote a letter confirming it was his decision alone—and, worryingly, stated that he felt as safe as Amundsen did on the Great Ice Barrier.