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

by David Roberts

  Under Mawson’s direction, the men loaded one sledge with fifty pounds’ more weight than the other. That craft would carry virtually all the dog food and human rations, as well as the most essential gear, including the tent. The six strongest dogs would pull it, with Ninnis in command. Guiding the lighter sledge, Mawson would come second, following Mertz’s scout on skis. Ninnis would take up the rear. The thinking was that if any sledge broke through a crevasse, better that it be the less vital one. Mawson chose thereby to take on the most dangerous role for the rest of the expedition. (Because his skis more evenly distributed his weight, Mertz was the least likely to break through a snow bridge.)

  The men did not start moving on December 13 until 2 p.m. Under overcast skies that gradually cleared, with the temperature rising to 29 degrees Fahrenheit, they accomplished a creditable run of 13¾ miles, camping only at midnight.

  Mawson could well take satisfaction in his team’s achievement. By the evening of the 13th, the men had crossed some 295 miles of terra incognita. If they could push on for another week, or even only four or five days, they ought easily to match the goal of 350 miles from Winter Quarters.

  That day, however, the men received two hints of danger ahead. Gazing into the distance, Mawson discerned, “We are apparently coming to another great glacier with its attendant troubles.” Even more ominously, the men were startled by sudden sharp noises that seemed to surround them. In his diary, Mawson dryly recorded, “Booming sound heard today.” Neither he nor Ninnis had ever experienced the like. But Mertz, the Swiss alpinist, had. He wrote:

  Soon we reached a flat area, which we crossed until midnight. At 8 pm, it suddenly cracked a few times under us. The vault of the ice masses seemed to break. The sound was similar to far cannon shots. My comrades were a little afraid, as they never heard before the sound when huge ice masses broke off.

  The booming sound was produced by the sudden settling of gigantic layers of unstable snow, some of them perhaps under the men’s very feet. In the mountains, such reports are surefire warnings of avalanches about to break loose.

  Ninnis’s fingers were causing him more and more pain. That morning, Mawson lanced the worst of the two infected digits. “During the day he had much relief,” Mawson noted. And that night, Ninnis got his first good sleep in three days.

  “We were a happy party that morning,” Mawson later wrote of the team’s departure on December 14, “as we revelled in the sunshine and laid plans for a final dash eastwards before turning our faces homewards.” The temperature at 9 a.m. was 15 degrees Fahrenheit, with a light breeze out of the east-southeast. In the lead, Mertz sang some of his favorite songs, whose notes wafted back to his companions. At noon, only a quarter mile out of camp, Mawson paused to take sun angles to calculate the team’s latitude. Then the men headed on.

  Shortly after noon, Mertz paused and held up his ski pole, the signal that he was crossing a crevasse. Mawson took note. By now, the procedure had become a daily routine. To compute his latitude equations, Mawson climbed onto his sledge to ride behind the pulling huskies. In The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson recounts what happened next:

  A moment later the faint indication of a crevasse passed beneath the sledge but it had no appearance of being in any degree specially dangerous. However, as had come to be the custom I called out a warning to Ninnis. The latter, who was close behind walking along by the side of his sledge, heard the warning, for in my backward glance I noticed that he immediately swung the leading dogs so as to cross the crevasse squarely instead of diagonally as my sledge had done. I then resumed my work and dismissed the matter from my thoughts.

  There was no sound from behind except a faint, plaintive whine from one of the dogs which I imagined was in reply to a touch from Ninnis’s whip. I remember addressing myself to George, the laziest dog in my own team, saying, “You will be getting a little of that, too, George, if you are not careful.”

  When next I looked back, it was in response to the anxious gaze of Mertz who had turned round and halted in his tracks. Behind me nothing met the eye except my own sledge tracks running back in the distance. Where were Ninnis and his sledge?

  At once Mawson jumped off his sledge and hurried back along his tracks. “I came to a gaping hole in the surface about eleven feet wide. The lid of the crevasse that had caused me so little thought had broken in; two sledge tracks led up to it on the far side—only one continued beyond.” The 70-foot alpine rope was packed on Mawson’s sledge. Frantically, he signaled to Mertz to bring the sledge back to the edge of the crevasse. Meanwhile,

  I leaned over and shouted into the dark depths below. No sound came back but the moaning of a dog, caught on a shelf just visible one hundred and fifty feet below. The poor creature appeared to have a broken back, for it was attempting to sit up with the front part of its body, while the hinder portion lay limp. Another dog lay motionless by its side. Close by was what appeared in the gloom to be the remains of the tent and a canvas food-tank containing a fortnight’s supply.

  We broke back the edge of the hard snow lid and, secured by a rope, took turns leaning over, calling into the darkness in the hope that our companion might be still alive. For three hours we called unceasingly but no answering sound came back. The dog had ceased to moan and lay without a movement. A chill draught rose out of the abyss. We felt that there was no hope.

  The team’s whole modus operandi was predicated on the assumption that if a sledge broke through a snow bridge over a crevasse, it would be the first one, steered by Mawson, pulled by the weakest dogs, and carrying the least vital gear and supplies. By December 14, thanks to the consumption of food in the last few days, Ninnis’s sledge weighed only 30 pounds more than Mawson’s. Later the men would guess that the simple fact that Ninnis was walking beside his sledge while Mawson rode his made all the difference—a man’s weight borne on the small surface of his boots could provide the punch necessary to break a hole in the snow, collapsing the whole bridge. Still, it seemed unthinkable that everything—six dogs, sledge, and Ninnis—could hurtle unchecked into the void of what had seemed to Mertz and Mawson a quite ordinary crevasse.

  Using a fishing line, the two survivors measured the depth of the shelf that had caught the two dogs and some of the debris as 150 feet below the surface. They tied their alpine rope to whatever bits of cord they had that might hold a man’s weight, but realized this improvised safety line reached nowhere near the distant shelf. There was no possibility of descending into the crevasse to search for Ninnis.

  Deeply shocked, Mertz and Mawson tried to figure out what to do next. “In such moments,” Mawson later wrote, “action is the only tolerable thing.” Driven by a desperation born of their long-cherished exploratory goal, that afternoon the two men pushed on to try to reach a height of land from which to make their last assessment of the terrain to the east. Mawson took a final set of observations, calculating the distance from the hut at Cape Denison as 315¼ miles.

  Then they returned to the fatal crevasse. Once more, they shouted into the abyss “in case our companion might not have been killed outright, and, in the meantime, have become unconscious. There was no reply.”

  At 9 p.m., the men held a burial service beside the edge of the crevasse. “Then Mertz shook me by the hand with a short ‘Thank you!’ and we turned away to harness up the dogs.”

  In a stupor, the pair sledged through the night, regaining their campsite of December 12 after an adrenaline-fueled march of 24 miles. Despite their exhaustion and horror, both men wrote about the day’s events in their diaries. So rigorously ingrained was Mawson’s scientific bent that he began his entry for December 14 with six lines dutifully recording temperature, wind, sky conditions, and geographic coordinates, before confessing, “A terrible catastrophe happened soon after taking latitude.” Mertz, on the other hand, got right to the point: “At 4 am, we were on the way back, but without our friend Ninnis. Our dear old Ninnis is dead.”

  The men had realized in an instant what the l
oss of the second sledge meant. With it were gone not only Ninnis and the six dogs in the best condition, but nearly all the men’s food, all the dogs’ food, the tent, their spade, their pick, and numerous other pieces of gear. They still had their sleeping bags and a stove and fuel, and they managed that night to jury-rig a tent out of a spare tent cover. But Mertz had lost his over-trousers and helmet, crucial clothing made of a heavy cotton called burberry, woven so tight that it was effectively wind- and waterproof. The men were five weeks out from Winter Quarters, with at most a week and a half’s worth of rations. They realized that to have any hope of returning alive, they would have to kill and eat the remaining dogs one by one.

  Of the burial service, Mertz wrote, “We could do nothing, really nothing. We were standing, helplessly, next to a friend’s grave, my best friend of the whole expedition.”

  In his own diary, after detailing the accident, Mawson added a single line: “May God Help us.”

  2

  PROF DOGGO

  Mawson’s family cherished a vignette of the two-year-old’s behavior aboard the clipper ship Ellora, as he sailed with his father, mother, and older brother from London to Sydney in 1884. According to the oft-told tale, one day in mid-voyage Douglas climbed off the cot affixed to his mother’s bunk, escaped the cabin through a door left open, roamed the deck as the ship pitched and rolled, and climbed the rope ladders strung to manage the sails, heading for the top of the main mast, before a sailor followed him and seized the child in his hands.

  Kicking and protesting loudly he was brought down by the grinning sailor.

  “Plucky little cuss! What will he do next?”

  Douglas Mawson was born on May 5, 1882, in the Wharfe valley of Yorkshire, England. His father had gone bankrupt in a clothing business he had started, and was reluctant to recoup his losses on the family farm he had inherited. Instead, he decided to emigrate to Australia.

  In the village of Rooty Hill west of Sydney, Robert Mawson set himself up as a grower of fruit trees and vineyards and a purveyor of wines and jams. These businesses likewise faltered. Only when he took a job as an accountant to one of Australia’s leading timber merchants was the father finally able to provide comfortably for his family. Douglas and his brother, William, attended a series of suburban schools, the most formative of which was the Fort Street Public School in Glebe Point, close to the center of Sydney.

  From Fort Street emerged a prophecy that, however apocryphal it sounds, may well have occurred, for the congenitally modest Mawson swore to it the rest of his life. Upon Mawson’s graduation at the age of sixteen, the headmaster of the school purportedly remarked, “What shall we say of our Douglas as an acknowledged leader and organizer? This I will say—that if there be a corner of this planet of ours still unexplored, Douglas Mawson will be the organizer and leader of an expedition to unveil its secrets.”

  Both William and Douglas entered the University of Sydney in 1899, even though Douglas was eighteen months younger than his brother. William turned to medicine (he eventually became a doctor), while Douglas gravitated toward engineering. In only three years, he graduated from the best university in Australia, earning his bachelor’s degree in mining. By 1901, at the age of nineteen, Mawson had decided that he wanted to be a geologist.

  The pivotal mentor in Mawson’s life was a professor at the university named T. W. Edgeworth David, who, “in his forties, with high cheekbones and a weathered and wizened face, gentle by disposition, always courteous, was an inspiring teacher much loved by his students.” David had participated in expeditions to various remote parts of Australia, and he organized, in 1897, an inquiry into coral atolls on the remote Pacific island of Funafuti that would win him worldwide acclaim within his field.

  David also had a keen fascination with Antarctica, and it was this passion that would transform not only his own career but that of his star protégé. In 1896, David had published a paper analyzing the rock specimens brought back from the southern continent by the Norwegian whaling expedition that had made the first landing on the mainland. Seaman Carsten Borchgrevink not only claimed to be the first man actually to set foot on Antarctic terra firma, but he had been in charge of gathering rocks to be studied by professional geologists. (Though Norwegian-born, Borchgrevink had emigrated to Australia in 1888.)

  In 1901, David exhorted his first-year geology class to write a letter tendering best wishes to Robert Falcon Scott as he set out on his Discovery expedition, the first concerted effort to reach the South Pole. And when Ernest Shackleton came through Australia on the eve of his own Nimrod expedition in late 1907 (the second attempt to sledge to the pole), David managed to raise five thousand pounds from the Australian government to help bankroll the privately funded venture.

  Several months earlier, David had written to Shackleton to ask whether he might join the expedition on the Nimrod to sail down to Antarctica to drop off the polar party, then return with the ship to Australia. If he did so, he would miss only the long summer vacation at the University of Sydney. Although he had studied ancient glaciation in Australia in the form of the marks it had left in the bedrock, David had never seen an actual glacier. Shackleton granted the request.

  In Sydney in December, Shackleton met with David, who, according to Mawson’s biographer Philip Ayres, “sang his old student’s praises.” Shortly thereafter, Mawson received a telegram from Shackleton that would change his life.

  After earning his bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1902, Mawson applied for the post of Junior Demonstrator in chemistry at the University of Sydney. The salary was a not-quite-princely one hundred pounds per year, but the teaching job would allow Mawson to pursue both a second degree and the field studies that were dear to his heart. David wrote the glowing letter of recommendation that clinched the appointment.

  In 1903, with David’s encouragement, Mawson joined a six-month expedition to the New Hebrides, the island chain in the Pacific that lies a thousand miles east of northern Australia. It would provide by far the greatest adventure so far in the twenty-one-year-old’s life.

  Though under the command of Royal Navy officers, the expedition had as its aim to study the geology and biology of the island chain. The natives of the New Hebrides had the reputation among the few Europeans who had penetrated their homeland not only of being intensely hostile to foreigners, but of eating them after they killed them. By 1903, virtually all the reports of cannibalism in the New Hebrides had come from missionaries, and thus might be taken with a grain of salt; but anthropologists have since confirmed the practice as continuing well into the twentieth century. Mawson himself believed that the islands swarmed with cannibals, especially in their hinterlands, but the threat dissuaded him not at all.

  The boldest exploit during the expedition was an attempt by Mawson and botanist W. T. Quaife to climb Losumbuno, the highest peak on the island of Santo. They hired three native guides who were mistakenly thought to have been to the summit before on a hunt for flying foxes, the indigenous bats that were one of the locals’ favorite foods. On Mawson and Quaife’s second attempt, the party reached a point only 1,200 feet and a mile and a half short of the top, but there their guides quailed. As Mawson dryly reported:

  Stopped at 11 O’Clock as natives would go no further. Reasons

  1. Seemed to be as far as ever

  2. Ravine in front

  3. Mist came up so we could not see

  4. Very cold wind

  Collected a few species coming back.

  On the New Hebrides expedition, Mawson also suffered an apparently trivial accident that came close to ending his career as an explorer. On a remote part of one of the islands, Mawson, wearing shorts, was geologizing with his rock hammer. Years later, his wife would record Mawson’s own account of the incident and its aftermath:

  While he hammered away to procure a typical specimen of rock a sharp piece of it struck him on the knee. He did not take much notice of this at the time; he felt only a sharp little blow. But when he b
egan to use his leg it became evident that the injury was serious. A small sliver of rock had pierced the skin and lodged under his knee-cap. . . . The only medical help available was on board the naval vessel many miles away. For thirty-six hours they rowed back in the small boat, two men rowing while one rested. . . . For Douglas each movement was agony, especially when he was rowing and had to bend his injured knee. His leg became puffed, red and then blackish up to the groin. . . . By the time they reached the ship he was practically unconscious. The naval doctor told him frankly that amputation was the only way of saving his life. However, he began by opening up the knee, and releasing about a pint and a quarter of dark fluid. For some weeks Douglas lay on a cot in the ship’s hospital, dangerously ill. Then continued expert care and his own remarkable constitution saved him and his leg.

  Mawson’s expedition was celebrated later that year at the university’s Commemoration Day. A fellow student later recalled “Douglas dressed as a New Hebridean cannibal and H. J. Jensen, as a cowering missionary, on the opposite side of a big pot, being driven in a lorry from the University to the Town Hall.”

  Mawson’s own interest in glaciation was aroused by reading the breakthrough papers of geologist Walter Howchin, who taught at the University of Adelaide. Howchin’s great discovery was of evidence in the stratigraphy of massive glaciation in South Australia during the Precambrian era (570 million years ago)—the oldest proof of an ancient ice age yet detected anywhere on earth.

  In 1904, Mawson learned of an opening in the geology department at the University of Adelaide. Though tempted to stay at the University of Sydney under the wing of Edgeworth David, Mawson applied for the Adelaide job and got it. On March 1, 1905, Mawson began as a lecturer on mineralogy and petrology. His salary was three hundred pounds a year—three times what he had been making in Sydney. Mawson would spend the rest of his career at the University of Adelaide.