ALONE
ON THE ICE
The Greatest
Survival Story
in the History of
Exploration
DAVID ROBERTS
Dedication
For Sharon—
without whose love and support
I would not be a writer today
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
1. Forgotten by God
2. Prof Doggo
3. Cape Denison
4. The Home of the Blizzard
5. The Painful Silence
6. Dead Easy to Die
7. Winter Madness
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Picture Section
Copyright
Also by David Roberts
1
FORGOTTEN BY GOD
It was a fitful start to the most ambitious venture ever launched in Antarctica. After eight days of arduous toil on the featureless plateau of snow and ice, the three men were camped only 20 miles from their base, the sturdy hut at Cape Denison in which the whole party had wintered over during the previous ten months. Those eight days had been plagued by backtracking trips to relay loads, by constant tinkering with balky gear, and by a two-day storm with gales so strong the men could not budge from their tent.
The date was November 17, 1912. Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE), was a thirty-year-old lecturer in mineralogy and petrology at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. He was already the veteran of one expedition to the southernmost continent, during which he had served heroically from 1907 to 1909 under the command of Sir Ernest Shackleton.
Mawson’s tentmates were Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz. Born in London, a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers, Ninnis had Antarctica on the brain, having unsuccessfully applied for Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova expedition shortly before Mawson snatched him up for his own team. Mertz was a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer from Basel, Switzerland, as well as a highly accomplished skier and mountaineer.
Among the eighteen hands who had spent the first year in the Cape Denison hut, which the men called Winter Quarters, both Ninnis and Mertz were exceptionally well-liked. Ninnis had been nicknamed Cherub by the crew, “partly on account of his complexion,” recalled one teammate, “which was as pink and white as that of any girl. He was tall and rather ungainly in build, and had more boxes of beautiful clothes than seemed possible for one mere man.”
In the best-known portrait of Ninnis, he sits in full uniform, hands clasped on the hilt of his sword, as he looks upward with a serene and innocent gaze. An eloquent diarist, Ninnis recorded in a breathless outburst his incredulity at finding himself in Antarctica only days after the ship made landfall at Cape Denison in January 1912:
From the creation the silence here has been unbroken by man, and now we, a very prosaic group of fellows, are here for an infinitely small space of time, for a short time we shall litter the land with tines, scrap timber, refuse and impedimenta, for a short time we shall be travelling over the great plateau, trying to draw the veil from a fractional part of this unknown land; then the ship will return for us and we shall leave the place to its eternal silence and loneliness, a silence that may never again be broken by a human voice.
Xavier Mertz was nicknamed X by his teammates, who teased him throughout the expedition on account of his uncertain command of English, German being his first language. He was much admired, however, for his skill on skis (one teammate hailed him as “a magnificent athlete”), for his sense of humor, and for his skill at making omelettes out of penguins’ eggs, on which the whole team feasted on the eve of their departure from Winter Quarters.
In a studio portrait, Mertz sports the bushy mustache of an alpine montagnard, while his sidelong gaze seems to project both wariness and intelligence. His diary, written in German, is plainspoken, with occasional flights of reverie or passion. On November 17, 1912, despite the disheartening start of the journey across the plateau, Mertz recorded his dawning joy at the prospect of discovery in a brief passage akin to Ninnis’s outpouring from the previous January: “from now our route goes farther on, into unexplored land, which no human eyes have yet seen.”
Over the winter, Douglas Mawson had proven himself to be a firm leader who detested idleness and demanded the maximum of effort from his men. Yet he had also won unstinting loyalty from all but one or two, for he had worked harder than all of them, chipping in to help with the most onerous and dangerous of tasks. An innate tendency toward aloofness was tempered by his personal charm. Unlike Scott, who on his expeditions preserved the distinction between officers and men with a naval rigor that extended to separate messes on shipboard, Mawson fraternized constantly with his teammates, ate with them at a communal table, and both gave and sought advice at every hand.
Lean, six feet three inches tall, with piercing blue eyes, Mawson cut a striking figure at the age of thirty. In his own way he was as strong and athletic as Mertz, and his endurance and capacity to withstand pain would become legendary. The best-known studio portrait of Mawson, taken in 1911, reveals an impossibly handsome face, with just the hint of a receding hairline. In the photo Mawson holds a penetrating gaze that proclaims his calm composure and adamantine will.
A certain reserve also stamped the man’s character. There is little or no evidence of any women in his life before the age of twenty-seven, when, at an outdoor dinner party in the Australian mining town of Broken Hill, he met a seventeen-year-old beauty named Paquita Delprat. She was the well-born daughter of Dutch parents, with an admixture of French and Swiss on her mother’s side. It was love at first sight on both sides, although a year would pass before they met again. In December 1910, they became engaged, but their marriage would be postponed until after the completion of the AAE.
Throughout the expedition, Mawson wrote letters to Paquita, even though he knew it would be months before she would be able to read them. And from the Netherlands and Australia, Paquita wrote her own letters, even as her fears about her beloved’s safety grew and darkened in what she called “this everlasting silence.”
Just an hour before his departure on the great overland journey that would win Mawson his lasting fame, he wrote to Paquita from the hut on November 10:
I have two good companions Dr Mertz and Lieut Ninnis. It is unlikely that any harm will happen to us but should I not return to you in Australia please know that I truly loved you from an admiration of your spirit. . . .
Good Bye my Darling may God keep and Bless and Protect you.
Since the second decade of the twentieth century, Mawson has lurked in the shadow of his contemporaries Scott, Shackleton, and the great Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen. In part this is because he was Australian. (Though born in England, Mawson emigrated to New South Wales with his family at the age of two.) But the greater reason for the neglect of Mawson and the AAE lies in the fact that, unlike nearly all the Antarctic explorers of what is called the heroic age (1897–1917), Mawson was completely uninterested in reaching the South Pole. What mattered to the man instead—and what drove the vast ambitions of the AAE—was the urge to explore land that had never before been seen by human eyes, and to bring back from the southern continent the best science that men in the field might be capable of.
The AAE, then, had set its focus on the stretch of Antarctica that lay directly
south of Australia—a 2,000-mile-long swath of ice and land that was still terra incognita. After wintering over at Cape Denison, Mawson had divided his team into three-man sledging parties, each sent out to explore in different directions. His own Far Eastern Party, with Mertz and Ninnis, had taken on the most ambitious mission of all—to push at least 350 miles east and south, exploring and mapping a huge tract of land no one else had ever glimpsed. If the trio could cover that distance, it would link the vast unknown with land spotted the previous year from the Ross Sea by men aboard Scott’s Terra Nova. A colossal blank on the map of Antarctica would be filled in for the first time.
Aboard the Aurora, the ship that took the men south from Australia, were thirty-eight Eskimo huskies from Greenland. Ninnis and Mertz, who alone among the team members had sailed from London to Hobart with the ship, had spent the long ocean voyage caring for the dogs and getting to know their individual characters. In the process, they had become very fond of the animals. They (and other team members) gave the huskies whimsical names, including Ginger Bitch, Gadget, Jappy, John Bull, and Blizzard. Shackleton and Franklin were named in honor of famous polar explorers. Pavlova was an homage to the great Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, who, intrigued by the news of the upcoming expedition, had come on board the ship in London and presented Ninnis with a ballerina doll as a token of good luck.
Not all the dogs had survived the voyage south, and others perished during the first winter. On November 10, when Mawson, Ninnis, and Mertz set off from the hut, they took seventeen dogs to haul three sledges. The total weight of their impedimenta was 1,723 pounds. Of that, 475 pounds were food for the men, based on a calculation of nine weeks of travel, each man consuming a little less than two and a quarter pounds per day. The dog food—almost entirely seal meat, seal blubber, and pemmican—added up to 700 pounds, or two-fifths of the team’s total supplies. Even so, it was taken for granted that if a dog could not keep up, it would be shot and fed to the other huskies.
The discouragements of the first week weighed heavily on all three men. To measure distance, the team used a “sledgemeter,” a wheel tethered to one of the sledges that counted revolutions to add up to a daily total of miles traversed. But the very first day, as Mawson wrote in his diary, the sledgemeter “got badly damaged by dogs running away for a few minutes—these meters are much too flimsy for dog sledging on ice.”
Each night the men crawled into sleeping bags made of reindeer hide with the fur still attached on the inside. Weighing ten pounds each, the bags were warm enough, but instead of resting atop some kind of mattress, they were laid directly on the ground cloth that served as a tent floor. Mertz complained, “In the morning I had backache, because I am still not accustomed to sleeping on hard ice and snow.” Another nuisance derived from the fact that the reindeer fur was constantly molting, so that “in some mysterious way” reindeer hair regularly found its way into the mugs from which the men ate their dinners.
A 35 mph wind kept the men tent-bound on November 12. The next day, despite the wind blowing unabated, the trio pushed on to a camp 18½ miles from their base. There, during a spring foray, a party had laid a depot of supplies, but in conditions verging on whiteout, Mawson’s team could not find it.
Now a two-day storm struck, confining the men to the tent on November 14 and 15. “Strong blizzard threatened to demolish tent,” Mawson wrote in his diary. “Wind increased to about 80 mph during the night. I did not think the tent would stand, so took all most valuable things into my bag.” The men got no sleep that night. On the 15th, “We are all feeling pretty rotten having no exercise. Ninnis quite faint at noon.”
During the storms, the huskies simply curled up tail to head in the snow, their fur insulating them from the bitter cold and the drifting snowfall. Each morning Mertz had to dig some of them out of their lairs. Still, he insisted, “Our Eskimo dogs are always happy. They jump around when I give them food. They look like snowballs with the ice and the snow lumps which hang on their fur.”
Yet all was not well with the dogs. On the 15th, Pavlova gave birth to a litter of pups. They were instantly devoured by the huskies, including their own mother. (Such an event, so shocking to the dog-loving armchair observer, was a norm in the grueling conditions of Antarctic travel.)
Gadget, too, was pregnant. “A rather miserable animal,” in Mawson’s view, since she seemed incapable of hauling, Gadget was carried in a box on top of a sledge through the day’s march on November 16. When she failed to give birth, she sealed her fate. “We leave camp at 10 minutes to 12 (noon),” Mawson wrote dispassionately on November 17, “after killing and cutting up Gadget as she could not walk nor we carry her. She cut up into 24 rations counting 7 [unborn] pups.” That evening, “Dogs did not like ‘Gadget’ tonight, dogs very quarrelsome today.” By the next day, however, hunger trumped the huskies’ reluctance. “They ate ‘Gadget’ meat voraciously,” noted Mertz, “except ‘Shackleton,’ who turned his nose up.”
On November 18, Mertz crowed in his diary, “Beautiful weather, a miracle!” The Swiss alpinist surged ahead in a rapture of discovery. “We move in an unknown and infinite world, which exerts a very special attraction on us. We never know how the land would be, therefore it’s so interesting.”
Yet at the same time, the barrenness of the vast plateau was intimidating. A few days earlier, Mertz had written, “This area seems to have been forgotten by God.”
Trained since birth to pull sledges, the Greenland huskies, for the most part, performed their thankless task to perfection. Wrote Mawson later, “We found that they were glad to get their harnesses on and to be led away to the sledge. Indeed, it was often a case of the dog leading the man, for as soon as the harness was in place, the impatient animal strained to drag whatever might be attached to the other end of the rope.”
The endless sastrugi—ridges of hard, windblown snow—around and over which the sledges had to be carefully maneuvered, formed a fiendish gauntlet slowing progress throughout the journey. The dogs’ impetuosity caused many an overturned sledge. Even worse were downhill grades:
The sledges were now commencing to run more freely and improvised brakes were tried, all of which were ineffectual in restraining the dogs. The pace became so hot that a small obstacle would capsize the sledge, causing it to roll over and over down the slope. The dogs, frantically pulling in various directions to keep ahead of the load, became hopelessly entangled in their traces and were dragged along unresistingly until the sledge stopped of its own accord or was arrested by one of us.
Accustomed to being in control even in the most ticklish of logistical operations, Mawson lost his temper in the face of the sledging chaos. The depth of his irritation emerges not in the pages of his own diary, but in a telltale entry in Mertz’s. On November 19, on one more downhill slope, Mertz wrote, “I stopped, because I felt that the tempo was too fast for the sledges. This was correct: two sledges had turned over, and Mawson complained, believing again that the whole expedition was ruined.”
Even during storms, the glare on the polar plateau was so bright that the men had to wear goggles to ward off snow blindness. Yet the goggles were constantly fogging up due to exhaled breath. On November 19, Ninnis marched for too long without his goggles, and that evening suffered from a bad case of snow blindness. The affliction, caused by ultraviolet rays burning the cornea, is excruciating, for it feels as though grains of sand are being constantly rubbed across one’s pupils. A snow-blind explorer is also helpless to see where he is going.
As he would throughout the expedition, Ninnis bore this mishap stoically. Mawson ministered to his teammate with the treatment of the day: as Ninnis lay on his back in his sleeping bag, Mawson pulled open his eyelids and inserted tablets of zinc sulfate and cocaine hydrochloride under them. These medicines dissolved in Ninnis’s tears and gave him instant relief. (It could take days, however, for vision to return to normal.)
During the first week, the men had experimented with different configurations of d
ogs, sledges, and leaders. One man had to go solo in front, for otherwise the dogs, with no leader to indicate the intended path, would head off every which way. At first all three men took turns in the pilot role. They had brought only a single pair of skis, for among all eighteen teammates at Cape Denison, only Mertz was an accomplished practitioner of travel on the flat boards.
By November 20, the men had adopted the system they would use throughout their journey. Mertz usually took the pilot role, skiing at times far ahead of the rest of the team as he sought the best route through the bafflingly uniform landscape. Two sledges were tied together in tandem, with a dog team pulling from the front, managed by one man—usually Mawson—who walked or rode along. Those two sledges bore only half the total load of supplies. The third sledge, in the rear, hauled by another dog team and regularly supervised by Ninnis, bore the other half of the weight. The plan was deliberately to overload the third sledge, wearing out its runners while saving the wear and tear on the other two sledges. When enough dog food and human rations had been consumed, the third sledge would be abandoned.
The huskies continued to perform unevenly. On November 19, one of them, Ginger, suddenly ran away. Mertz ran after her but gave up the chase. That night in camp, as Mertz was feeding the dogs, Ginger showed up. “The runaway knew quite well where she could find food!” Mertz wrote in his diary.
Another dog, named Jappy, had begun to lag. On November 20, Mawson shot the husky, replenishing the dogs’ larder with fresh meat. “Jappy killed after dinner,” Mawson recorded laconically.
So monotonous was the endless plateau of snow and ice that any feature that interrupted it commanded the men’s attention and curiosity. One such cynosure was a genuine mountain sticking out of the undulating wasteland. Passing south of it on November 20, the men calculated its height as 1,700 feet above the surrounding terrain. They named it Aurora Peak after the plucky ship that had carried them to Antarctica.
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 1