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

by David Roberts

  Some of us with our sleeping bags hanging straight down our backs, with the foot of the bag curled upwards and outwards, resembled the scorpion men of the Assyrian sculptures: others marched with their household gods [sic] done up in the form of huge sausages; yet another presented Sinbad, with the place of the “Old Man of the Sea” taken by a huge brown bag, stuffed with all our cooking utensils; this bag had a knack of suddenly slipping off his shoulders, and bow-stringing him around his neck.

  Alistair Mackay, who had a reputation for impetuousness, took the lead, chopping steps in the hard snow with his ice ax, only to slip and fall a hundred feet, fetching up without serious damage on a projecting snow ledge. That evening, the team set up camp at 8,750 feet. The sun set in a clear sky, but by 10 p.m. a blizzard had moved in. For thirty hours the men lay in their bags, unable to cook hoosh or even melt snow for water; they had left the tent poles behind with the sledge, forcing them to drape the tents over their recumbent bodies like ill-designed bivouac sacks, leaving no room to set up a Primus stove. At the peak of its fury, the wind roared so loud and slung such blasts of snow that, ten feet apart, the occupants of one tent could neither see nor hear the occupants of the other.

  In the middle of the storm, as he went out to relieve himself, Philip Brocklehurst, one of the supporting trio, dropped a mitten. Making a dash to grab it, he slipped and fell. When he did not return in a few minutes, Jameson Adams went out to look for him and also slipped down the slope. After a considerable time, both men separately regained their tent, crawling on hands and knees. “It was a close call,” wrote David later. Brocklehurst “was all but completely gone, so biting was the cold.”

  The blizzard finally blew itself out on the morning of March 9, the team’s fifth on the mountain. Battered by their grim bivouac but still ambitious, the men resumed their ascent. The slope of the volcano grew steeper. By now, the men were also suffering from the effects of thin air at altitude.

  That day, with a dogged effort, the team reached the crater rim. None of the six men had ever before peered into an active volcano. According to David, they expected to see “an even plain of névé, or glacier ice, filling the extinct crater to the brim, and sloping up gradually to the active cone at its southern end.” But the scene that greeted them on the rim was Dantesque:

  Beyond the wall and trench was an extensive snowfield, with the active cone and crater at its south end, the latter emitting great volumes of steam; but what surprised us most were the extraordinary structures which rose every here and there above the surface of this snowfield. These were in the form of mounds and pinnacles of the most varied and fantastic appearance. Some resembled bee-hives, others were like huge ventilating cowls, others like isolated turrets, or bits of battlemented walls; others again in shape resembled various animals. We were wholly unable at first sight, to divine the origin of these remarkable objects.

  What the men were seeing were gargoyle-like ice formations created as scalding steam, blown furiously out of the volcano’s core, froze almost instantly in the patterns in which it splashed back onto the surrounding plain of snow.

  The team was still well short of the summit. The men hurried along the rim until they found a shelf flat enough to pitch their fourth camp. During dinner, Eric Marshall, the surgeon, examined Brocklehurst’s feet. “We were all surprised and shocked,” wrote David, “. . . to see that both his big toes were black, and had evidently been ‘gone’ for several hours, and that four more toes, though less severely affected, were also frost-bitten.” His condition meant that Brocklehurst would have to lie in his sleeping bag, hoping to recover circulation in his toes, while the other five went for the summit.

  The next day, rather than head straight for the top, the men descended into the crater itself. Leery of crevasses, they roped together, apparently all five on a single rope. Examining the “extraordinary structures” up close, David the geologist declared them to be “the outward and visible signs of fumaroles.” (A fumarole is the vent hole in the earth’s crust through which an active volcano spews both steam and lava.) It seems that the team was oblivious to the extreme danger of trudging across newly formed volcanic crust. Both Mackay and Marshall fell up to their thighs in “concealed conduits,” but arrested their plunges with their ice axes. Back in camp at 6 p.m., the men brewed up tea and took in the “glorious view” that lay before them.

  Brocklehurst seemed no worse off after his day in a sleeping bag, so on March 10 the other five men climbed along the crater rim to the summit. “Our progress was now painfully slow,” David wrote, “as the altitude and cold combined to make respiration difficult.” So far in his account, Mawson goes unmentioned, but on summit day the young geologist took charge of the photographic documentation of everything the team discovered. He also measured the depth of the crater at 900 feet, and its width at about half a mile. In four hours, the men climbed 2,000 feet, to a high point they calculated at 13,370 feet above sea level.

  The descent verged on chaos. Anxious to get back to the hut as fast as they could, the men began “glissading,” sliding not on their feet with ice axes as brakes, as experienced alpinists would, but on their rear ends, throwing caution to the winds. They also simply flung their lumpy loads down the slopes, then gathered them up where they came to rest. In this slapdash matter, the men descended 5,000 feet and regained their cached sledge. Since another storm seemed on the verge of arriving, they were tempted to push on through the night to regain the hut, but exhaustion trumped impatience.

  On March 11, the men packed all their remaining gear—some of it had been lost when the bundles rolling down the slopes had come apart—and pushed on to their first night’s camp. By now, the gathering storm was almost upon the worn-out team, so they abandoned the sledge and much of the gear and stumbled on toward the hut at Cape Royds. (Another party later retrieved the valuable equipment.) “Many were the hand-shakings, and warm the welcome,” wrote David of their arrival. “How cosy and luxurious were our winter quarters after the wind-swept slopes of Erebus! And how delightful it was to pour out our travellers’ tales into the ears of willing listeners!”

  David fully believed that the probe of Erebus would bear scientific fruit. In a pair of appendices to Shackleton’s The Heart of the Antarctic, he argued that observations on the volcano were a crucial key to understanding the larger pattern of Antarctic climate and weather. Modern scientists endorse his views as sound.

  Shackleton himself embraced the climb as a bold deed. In his expedition narrative, he detailed the celebratory dinner the famished climbers devoured back at the hut:

  In a few minutes Roberts had produced a great saucepan of Quaker oats and milk, the contents of which disappeared in a moment, to be followed by the greater part of a fresh-cut ham and home-made bread, with New Zealand fresh butter. The six had evidently found on the slopes of Erebus six fully developed, polar sledging appetites. The meal at last ended, came more talk, smokes and then bed for the weary travellers.

  One would like to know what Mawson thought about the climb of Erebus, but both he and his biographers are silent on the subject. Reading between the lines of David’s account and of Shackleton’s The Heart of the Antarctic, however, it seems clear that the wretchedly seasick sailor on the voyage south, whom the hypercritical Marshall had dismissed as “useless & objectionable,” had quickly developed on land into one of the strongest and most trusted members of the expedition. On the ascent, he had suffered none of the close calls experienced by Mackay, Adams, and Brocklehurst. He had carried out even more of the scientific program ancillary to the climb than had his mentor, Edgeworth David, taking the trouble on the descent to pause to gather specimens of feldspar, pumice, and sulfur.

  There was nothing to do now but settle into the hut and wait out the dark, dreary months of winter. By the first decade of the twentieth century, wintering over in an Antarctic hut had taken on a predictable pattern, one closely adhered to by the BAE. The greatest enemies of the cooped-up men were boredom a
nd getting on each other’s nerves. Thus all kinds of entertainments were concocted to leaven the tedium: special dinners on occasions ranging from the teammates’ birthdays to holidays celebrated at home. Midwinter day (June 21) was a cardinal event, marking the initially imperceptible return of the sun to the men’s lives. Shackleton’s men put on theatricals (with the more flamboyant members in drag), read books aloud, played records on a Victrola, and filled their idle hours with “cags”—endless arguments about unresolvable theoretical questions, such as what caused the wind to blow in particular directions.

  By the end of October, Shackleton was ready to start his trek toward the South Pole. He had chosen the three teammates who would join him on the final push, which he was confident would attain 90 degrees south: Frank Wild, Eric Marshall, and Jameson Adams. The other members would lay depots in support of the polar party or carry out geologizing forays secondary to the main purpose of the expedition—except that three men, the stalwarts of Erebus, would set out in a completely different direction to discover a different, equally inaccessible Antarctic locus, the South Magnetic Pole, which lay somewhere far to the northwest of Cape Royds. By the middle of the winter, Shackleton had designated Mawson, David, and Mackay to carry out that mission.

  The ultimate success of Amundsen’s expedition in reaching the South Pole in December 1911 would depend on two crucial logistical choices: the decision to use skis and the reliance on dog teams to haul the sledges. It was the tried-and-true Norwegian style of polar travel, but one that British explorers never fully embraced. Instead of dogs and skis, Shackleton chose to assault the South Pole with ponies and a motorcar. On board the Nimrod, he had shipped ten Manchurian ponies that he had obtained through connections in China. And he also brought along what he proudly described as “a 12–15 horse-power New Arrol-Johnston car, fitted with a specially designed air-cooled four-cylinder engine and Simms Bosch magneto ignition.”

  The ponies proved almost useless. One died on the voyage south, while another had to be shot on arrival. Four more died during the first month in winter quarters, when they ate quantities of sand in a desperate search for salt. As for the automobile, it too proved useless. For its first trial, the machine was unloaded on the ice only days after the team’s arrival at Cape Royds. As one member recounted the fiasco:

  It . . . went a few feet and stopped dead, pulsating violently, until [Bernard] Day, moved no doubt by a feeling of pity, soothed it by a series of hammerings and screwings. After a brief rest, the machinery was started again, and the after wheels in duty bound turned violently round in the snow, burying themselves to such an extent that the car moved not an inch.

  On October 29, Shackleton set out with his three teammates and the remaining four ponies. Worn down by lameness and overwork, all four died during the subsequent weeks, after which the team had to resort to man-hauling.

  For Mawson, David, and Mackay, man-hauling was built into the program from the start. Shackleton put David, as the senior member of the trio, in charge of the party. As they set out from Cape Royds, David was fifty years old, Mawson twenty-six, and Mackay thirty. As it would turn out, David would be by far the weakest of the three men, and would be the main cause of so many problems that all three men nearly lost their lives.

  For both Mawson and David, as professional geologists, the magnetic pole was a far more interesting goal than 90 degrees south. Rather than an arbitrary point determined by latitude, the magnetic pole was a real thing, one of the twin foci of the earth’s magnetic field. The compass, invented in China in the third century AD and used for marine navigation from the eleventh century on, depended on the magnetic poles to attract the quivering needle of its simple but elegant apparatus. For almost a millennium, all terrestrial discovery had been governed by the compass.

  In pursuit of the elusive Northwest Passage, the finest British Arctic explorer of his day, James Clark Ross, had discovered the North Magnetic Pole on June 1, 1831, on the west coast of the Boothia Peninsula in Arctic Canada. Ross recorded its position as 70° 05.3' N, 96° 46' W. The second observation of the pole was made seventy-one years later, by Roald Amundsen, in the course of the first continuous traverse of the Northwest Passage. To Amundsen’s surprise, the pole in 1904 was located some 40 miles northeast of where Ross had found it.

  Since 1831, the North Magnetic Pole has drifted almost 700 miles, generally in a westerly direction. It is currently migrating at a pace of about 25 miles per year. Why the magnetic poles move at all remains a deep scientific mystery, itself a corollary to a larger unsolved question: why do some planets, including Earth and Jupiter, have magnetic fields (Jupiter’s being more than 19,000 times stronger than Earth’s), while others, such as Venus and Mars, have none at all?

  To ascertain whether one has reached 90 degrees north or south requires a series of relatively straightforward observations with a theodolite or sextant. Determining if one is at the North or South Magnetic Pole is much trickier and more uncertain. The closer one gets to those poles, the more erratic a conventional compass becomes. Within 50 miles, it is virtually useless. Instead, the explorer must use a device called a dip circle or inclinometer—a kind of compass in which a vertically oscillating needle indicates the angle between the horizon and the invisible lines of the magnetic field. At the true pole, those lines in theory should point straight down into the earth. There, the dip ought to read exactly 90˚. In 1831, on the shore of the Boothia Peninsula, Ross got a dip circle reading of 89˚ 59'.

  Ten years later, Ross tried to reach the South Magnetic Pole, but was thwarted when he ran into the edge of the continent itself. (The Ross Sea is named for the great explorer.) By 1908, no one had come anywhere near the South Magnetic Pole.

  The written instructions Shackleton placed in David’s hands, however, were confusing. On the one hand, the three men were charged with making magnetic observations as they trekked northwest toward the magnetic pole. Along the way, they were supposed to make a geological survey of the coast of Victoria Land, the huge, complex shore that borders the Ross Sea on the west. But Shackleton added a third injunction that seemed to preclude the other two: a thorough investigation of the so-called Dry Valley (an anomalous pair of ice- and snow-free troughs that begin some 10 miles inland from the southern ramparts of Victoria Land), in order to see if those regions could ultimately be exploited for mineral wealth.

  The ambiguity of Shackleton’s directions may be attributed in part to the Boss’s fickle interest in true science. But the arrangement he proposed for the men’s return was so casual and risky as to seem almost callous. The Nimrod was due to return by January 15, 1909, to pick up the expedition members. Ideally, David’s trio would have arrived at the hut at Cape Royds by that date. But as it would turn out, there was no way the three men could get anywhere near the magnetic pole and return in time to catch the ship.

  In that eventuality, as Shackleton off-handedly directed, “If you are not returned by 1 February, Nimrod will proceed N along coast and look out for your signal. She will not go N of Cape Washington.” Shackleton surely knew that such a search would be like hunting for a needle in a haystack. And if the Nimrod failed to find the overdue men, they would be condemned to a slow death.

  For the official expedition narrative, The Heart of the Antarctic, David contributed several chapters about the journey toward the South Magnetic Pole. They essentially whitewash the story in a bland, understated narrative. Fortunately, however, all three men kept diaries during the trip. What convinced Mawson to start writing his own diary cannot be determined today. It would, however, become his unfailing practice on all his future journeys. And though the writing in The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson’s book about the AAE, hews to the tradition of keeping an expedition’s dirty laundry mostly out of sight, the diary he kept from October 5, 1908, through February 10, 1909, is as rich, candid, and unblinking as the most voyeuristic reader could wish.

  Mawson, David, and Mackay set out from Cape Royds on October 5, more than three
weeks before Shackleton launched his polar party southward. The best estimate of the distance to the South Magnetic Pole was 420 miles, compared to some 800 miles from the hut to the South Pole. What no one could have foreseen was the extreme difficulty of the terrain that thwarted the northwest-bound trio at every step.

  The first obstacle was crossing the frozen sea ice of McMurdo Sound, which separated Ross Island from the mainland. With neither ponies nor dogs to aid them, the men hauled their pair of sledges by themselves, yoked into harnesses with ropes attached to the frames of the low-slung craft. The crossing of the sound went relatively smoothly, taking a week, as the men were able to hoist makeshift sails to reinforce manpower in the hauling of the sledges.

  Once the men reached the coast of Victoria Land, both difficulty and danger multiplied several-fold. Here the men found themselves “in the strange half-world between land and sea; crawling along the fragile frontier strip of ice that formed a precarious coastal path. At any moment it might break away and sweep them in a current out to sea.”

  It soon became obvious that along the coast, the men had too much weight to move in a single effort. Thus for weeks, they had to resort to double-hauling—all three men pulling one sledge ahead a certain distance, leaving it there, hiking back, then hauling the second sledge. For every mile gained, three had to be traversed. There is no more soul-destroying toil in polar travel.

  The wintering over in adjacent bunks must have sparked in Mawson a growing irritation with his mentor. From the very start of the journey toward the magnetic pole, Mawson’s diary voices that irritation. On October 5, the first day of the journey, Mawson wrote, “The Professor dog tired all day as he had not slept the night before.” The next two days: “Professor doggo again,” and “Prof doggo.”

  It would take only four days of travel for Mawson’s vexation to erupt in a diary outburst: