Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration

by David Roberts

  By November 21, the men realized that they were approaching a massive glacier that sprawled across their path, flowing from some unknown headland to the south down to the ocean, where it pushed a terminal tongue into the sea many miles beyond the coastline that bordered it. The team would eventually name this ice flow the Mertz Glacier.

  In a true mountain range such as the Himalaya or the Alps, a glacier stands out clearly from the surrounding faces, ridges, and stable snowfields that compose the peaks themselves. In Antarctica, the distinction is far less clear. A glacier blends in almost seamlessly with the vast plateau of snow and ice that fringes it. No explorer welcomes a glacier crossing, for the powerful and tortured movement of the ice downhill tears its surface into crevasses and seracs, or towers and blocks of ice that teeter unsteadily above one’s path. The most jumbled and chaotic stretches of glacier, called icefalls, can be too dangerous for even expert alpinists to cross with light packs—let alone men and dogs hauling sledges laden with over 1,000 pounds of gear and food.

  Crevasses, or deep cracks in the ice, are formed by the stress of the glacier’s flow, as one massive chunk of frozen H2O detaches from another. An “open” crevasse presents a relatively benign threat, for the explorer can see its outlines and scrupulously detour around it. It is the hidden crevasse that causes glacial travelers to lose sleep. As storms blow the surface snow into drifts and grotesque congealed shapes, an initially open crevasse can be covered with a snow bridge that completely hides its menace. The Australian explorers called these bridges “lids.” They can be so fragile that the mere weight of one’s body on the bridge causes it to collapse, or pokes a deadly hole in it, plunging the unwary traveler into the dark depths below.

  No region on earth possesses deeper or more treacherous crevasses than Antarctica. And what wreaks havoc with every team of explorers that tries to traverse its unforgiving wastes is the fact that crevasses there are not confined to the glaciers. Even the relatively immobile shelves of the plateau itself are subject to the stress and fracturing that open huge cracks, and the drifting surface snows easily pave them over with bridges that are all but indistinguishable from the safe terrain on either side. In other words, crevasses can develop almost anywhere in Antarctica where there is snow, which is more than 99 percent of the continent.

  Mawson had his first encounter with this fiendish peril on November 20, still several miles short of the edge of Mertz Glacier. In his expedition narrative, The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson left a dramatic account of the event. After “smooth travelling” all afternoon,

  Suddenly without any warning the leading dogs of my team dropped out of sight, swinging in their harness ropes in a crevasse. The next moment I realized that the sledges were on a bridge covering a crevasse, twenty-five feet wide, the dogs having broken through on one edge. We spent some anxious moments before they were all hauled to the daylight and the sledges rested on solid ground.

  Not long after that debacle, two unharnessed dogs, Ginger Bitch and Blizzard, broke through other snow bridges and managed, by scrambling frantically with their forepaws, to crawl back to the surface. Undaunted, Ginger Bitch a few hours later “gave birth to the first of a large litter of pups”—fourteen in all by the following day.

  On November 21, the men climbed onto the Mertz Glacier. Now the crevasses grew more numerous, but most of them seemed open and visible. Wending their way slowly through a maze of cracks, the men grew weary. They stopped for lunch, pitching the tent to gain a couple of hours’ respite from the wind. Mertz cooked up tea while Ninnis and Mawson strolled off to photograph a “blue abyss” nearby. As Mawson later recounted:

  Returning, we diverged on reaching the back of the tent, he passing round one side and I on the other. The next instant I heard a bang on the ice and, swinging round, could see nothing of my companion but his head and arms. He had broken through the lid of a crevasse fifteen feet wide and was hanging on to its edge. . . . After hauling him out I investigated the fissure and found nought but black space below; a close shave for Ninnis.

  To their horror, the men discovered that they had pitched the tent on top of the same crevasse. They packed up as quickly as they could and marched on.

  By November 21, according to Mertz’s calculation, the men had traveled 73 miles from Winter Quarters, not counting “detours.” That was less than one-fourth of the total distance the men hoped for. Mawson had given all the teams a deadline of January 15 to return to the base camp hut, for the Aurora was due on that date to pick the men up at the end of the expedition.

  During the first eleven days of sledging, the men had averaged a little under seven miles per day. Eight weeks remained before the January 15 deadline. At the pace they had been traveling, in another four weeks of outward journey, the men would reach a point only 260 miles from Cape Denison, almost a hundred miles short of their goal. Yet Mawson firmly believed that, with their routine down pat and the loads steadily lightening, the team could pick up speed and reach the western peaks of Victoria Land, linking the unknown terrain to the Terra Nova discoveries from 1911.

  Sure enough, between November 22 and 30, the trio pushed eastward, covering as many as 14, 15, and 16 miles in single days. Though the sledgemeter was still unreliable, Mawson dutifully recorded its number of revolutions in his diary each evening. A total of 24,500 on November 27, with a factor thrown in for “sledgemeter slip,” thus translated into a day’s run of over 14 miles.

  A scientist in his very bones, Mawson began each day’s record in his diary with a notation of the hypsometer reading (a hypsometer was a device used to measure altitude above sea level, based on the boiling point of water), the temperature, the wind direction and velocity, the atmospheric and cloud conditions, and, when possible, his calculation of latitude and longitude. The day’s incidents are given curt and obviously understated play: “Great difficulty in getting over broad crevasse in morning.” Only rarely does emotion break to the surface. Mertz’s diary, though not nearly so data-centered, tends also to be dry and laconic. For one thing, the men were usually exhausted by the time they crawled into their sleeping bags. Writing a diary entry could loom as a dreary chore.

  It is only in The Home of the Blizzard that the drama of the last ten days of November gets full expression, and those pages make it clear that despite their increased pace, the men faced setbacks every day. Problems with the dog teams continued to bedevil their progress. “The dogs are in good shape,” wrote Mertz on November 25, but the very next day, “We had to shoot ‘Fusilier’.”

  On November 27, the men unharnessed the dogs to manhandle the sledges down a steep slope. When the animals were rounded up, a dog named Betli was missing. Mawson and his teammates expected the husky to show up later in the day, as Ginger had on November 19, but Betli never reappeared. The men concluded that the animal had either gotten irretrievably lost or had fallen into a crevasse.

  The very next day, Mawson shot Blizzard, one of the AAE’s favorite canines, born during the overwintering. Only two and a half weeks out of Winter Quarters, the huskies had been reduced from seventeen to twelve.

  High winds every day made sledging miserable. But the true enemy of the expedition was the relentless succession of crevasses. On November 22, the day after Ninnis’s “close shave” when he had caught himself by the arms as he started to plunge into a crevasse right next to the tent, the third and most heavily laden sledge went through a snow bridge, “but fortunately jammed itself just below the surface,” Mawson wrote. “As it was, we had a long job getting it back up again, first having to unpack the sledge until it was light enough to be easily manipulated.” It was a testimony to the men’s skill in strapping each piece of cargo tight to the sledge that they lost not a single package as the sledge dangled inside the crevasse. The strenuous and dangerous work of lying prone on the edge of the fissure, reaching into the depths, unfastening each piece of gear, and hauling it to the surface must be imagined, since Mawson alludes to it so glancingly.

&nb
sp; The next day, Ninnis’s sledge again plunged into a crevasse. Though it dangled just below the surface, once more the men had to lie on the edge of the void, attach the cargo box by box to a rope, unstrap each one from the sledge, and haul it to the surface. “The freight consisted chiefly of large, soldered tins, packed tightly with dried seal meat,” wrote Mawson. “Each of these weighed about ninety pounds.”

  On November 27, the men woke to bright sunshine and finally got a good look at the terrain ahead of them. As Mertz wrote in his diary, “In front of us there was a huge glacier with crevasses in the depths. In the distance there were broken ice blocks, and low hills, everything in white.” The Ninnis Glacier, as the AAE would later name this previously unknown ice flow, was considerably larger than the Mertz Glacier, which the men had traversed the previous week. More than 30 miles wide where they crossed it, the new glacier would require intricate routefinding and desperately hard work. It also occasioned the most serious near-catastrophe so far encountered by the trio.

  On November 29, as usual, Mertz was in the lead scouting on skis, while Mawson brought up the tandem pair of sledges roped together and pulled by six huskies, followed by Ninnis and the heaviest sledge in the rear. For once, in The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson gives the dramatic incident its due:

  Just before lunch my two sledges were nearly lost through the dogs swinging sharply to one side before the second sledge had cleared a rather rotten snow bridge. I was up with the dogs at the time, and the first intimation of an accident was observing the dogs and front sledge being dragged backwards; the rear sledge was hanging vertically in a crevasse. Exerting all my strength I held back the front sledge, and in a few moments was joined by Ninnis and Mertz, who soon drove a pick and ice-axe down between the runners and ran out an anchoring rope.

  It was a ticklish business recovering the sledge. It could not be lifted vertically as its bow was caught in a V-shaped offshoot from the main fissure. To add to our troubles the ground all about the place was precarious and unsafe.

  After some unsuccessful efforts to salve it, Ninnis and Mertz lowered me [on a 70-foot alpine rope] down to where a rope could be attached to the tail end of the sledge. The bow-rope and tail-rope were then manipulated alternately, until the bow of the sledge was manoeuvred slowly through the gaping hole in the snow lid and finally its whole length was hoisted into safety.

  On November 29, having added up the distance the three men had covered during their first twenty days of sledging, Mawson noted in his diary, “Not less than 220 m[iles] straight to do.” However arbitrary the team’s destination, somewhere on the edge of Victoria Land, Mawson was fiercely committed to it. And he could not hide his discouragement. In a rare outburst of emotion, he wrote in his diary that day, “We have had a most aggravating morning. . . . Dogs very done—things are looking serious for onward progress. This afternoon will mean much for our prospects. If only we could have a straight-out proposition instead of these endless snow hills and crevasses.”

  The men had sledged every day since they had waited out the two-day storm on November 14–15. But on the 30th, they awoke to “whirlies”—violent bursts of wind coming from all points of the compass, interspersed with weird lulls of dead calm. The worst gusts reached 75 mph. Instead of packing up, the men loitered in their tent through the morning and early afternoon. Mertz voiced his displeasure in the pages of his diary: “It’s difficult to travel in this region. When there is sunshine, a gale blows with more or less drift. When it’s windless, the clouds bring a bad diffused light.” And, “We have stiff backs because we are sleeping on hard ground, and we have terrible dreams.” What was more, “We are always hungry after a work day and also in the morning.”

  It is no mean feat to plan the rations for a nine-week sledge journey in the Antarctic. Many a team has verged on starvation by underestimating the food a party in the field would need, or the time it would take to reach a certain goal and return. To minimize the likelihood of running out of food, Mawson had imposed a Draconian regulation upon his companions. On “rest days,” when storms confined the men to their tents, they would drastically reduce the amount of food they ate.

  Unwilling to waste a whole day in the tent, the men got started after 4 p.m. on November 30, trudging a mere three miles before camping on a shelf surrounded by crevasses. The next day they left the Ninnis Glacier behind them. Looking forward to faster and safer sledging, the men were vexed by a new difficulty. With summer waxing, the temperatures rose, turning the snow soft and wet. On December 1, the thermometer registered a new high of 34 degrees Fahrenheit. “The snow became so sticky,” Mawson wrote, “that it was as much as we and the dogs could do to move the sledges up the slopes.” Despite a full day’s arduous labor, the men gained only six miles.

  On December 2, a new obstacle worked its mischief—hard ice contorted into a labyrinth of sharp sastrugi, ranging from two to three and a half feet tall. “The sledges flew round,” wrote Mertz, “at times turned over, so we had to put them upright, push them, etc. I nearly broke my right forearm when the heaviest sledge did a forward roll over me. The dogs were doing the best they could, but often they didn’t have enough strength.” The team made nine miles that day, “a good performance as the surface at times drove us to despair.”

  During the next three days, the sledging improved, as the men made successive runs of 12¼, 15, and 11¼ miles. On the last of those days, one more husky faltered. “Ginger in last few hundred yards,” Mawson noted in his diary, “has got worse and worse and now fell down—evidently done in, perhaps near pupping.”

  Between their starting date of November 10 and January 14, the day before the Aurora’s scheduled return, sixty-seven days intervened. The return journey, the men guessed, should be faster than the outward push, with lighter loads across known terrain. Yet the weakening of the dogs could undercut that assumption. If the men shaved the margin as thin as possible and allowed themselves forty days out and only twenty-seven back, that would dictate a turnaround date of December 19—only two weeks in the future.

  On December 6, a blizzard with winds up to 60 mph confined the men to their tent. Peeking out the door, Mertz could not even see the nearby sledges through the driving snow. When the storm failed to let up through the 7th and 8th, the men’s spirits plunged to a new low. “Taunted by vivid dreams in half dozing condition, Ninnis the same,” wrote Mawson on the 7th. “I hear him calling ‘Hike, Hike’ vociferously in his sleep.” (“Hike” was a dog command.) The next day, “This is an appalling state of affairs—when will it end?”

  To make matters worse, Mawson was suffering from a “swollen and burst lip” and from “neuralgia on left side”—a painful and debilitating condition that afflicted his nerves—while Ninnis had developed excruciatingly painful infections on the tips of two of his fingers. Stoic as ever, Ninnis made no complaint. As Mawson recalled in The Home of the Blizzard, “He had continued to do his share of the work and bore up splendidly under the ordeal. On several occasions I had waked up at night to find him sitting up in his sleeping-bag, puffing away at a pipe or reading.”

  There was, however, not much to read, as Mawson, to save weight, had strictly limited the number of books the men could carry to one apiece. As he wrote in The Home of the Blizzard, “Ninnis was not so badly off with a volume of Thackeray, but already, long ago, Mertz had come to the end of his particular literary diversion, a small edition of ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ and he contented himself with reciting passages from memory for our mutual benefit.”

  Only on December 9 did the wind drop sufficiently to allow the men to pack up and move on. Despite sledging through soft, deep, new-fallen snow, they covered fifteen miles that day. Mertz could not resist twitting his leader in his diary, “The dogs and my comrades moved with difficulty, because they sank into the snow. Mawson gradually realizes how useful the skis can be in Antarctica.”

  During the next three days, still hindered by drifts of new snow, the men made excellent progress, logging 1
2, 12½, and 11½ miles on successive marches. By December 11, they had gained an altitude of 1,800 feet above sea level, and they were pleased to see the terrain sloping slightly downhill ahead of them. The worst of the crevasses, they were convinced, lay behind them. On the 11th, Mertz calculated that the team had traveled 270 miles since leaving the hut on November 10.

  Thirty-three days out by December 12, Mawson’s team had run a monotonous gauntlet of snow and ice. Yet the men had made major discoveries, including that of the two huge glaciers across which they had so gingerly woven their way. They had proven that some 300 miles of Antarctica east of Cape Denison was solid land, not islands interspersed with frozen sea channels, as some geographers had hypothesized. They had discovered and named peaks and rocky outcrops thrusting out of the ice cap. On December 10, Ninnis had been the first to spot “small ice-capped islets fringing the coast to the north.” Although the men had been traveling steadily southeast, this new sighting proved that the continent itself cut away to the southeast. They could see headlands in the distance, the most prominent of which they named Cape Freshfield, after the great British mountaineer and explorer Douglas Freshfield, who was president of the Royal Geographical Society.

  Mawson could still not be sure that the vague features ahead were the same as the westernmost hills spotted by Scott’s crew aboard the Terra Nova in 1911, but he knew that he was close to linking up hitherto unknown country with Victoria Land.

  On the 12th, the men once again entered a region crisscrossed with crevasses, dictating renewed vigilance and a less direct course. The next morning, the team finally carried out the logistical reduction Mawson had planned almost a month before. They abandoned the battered sledge that had traveled always in the rear and always with the heaviest load, repacking their supplies on the two sledges that had taken less of a beating. The dogs were so famished they chewed the leather straps off the discarded vehicle.