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

by David Roberts

  Prof broke attachment of sledgemeter this evening in rage when camping. Prof finds it necessary to change his socks in morning before breakfast, also has to wear 2 [pairs] per day. And comes in late for bag and sits on everybody. God only knows what he does.

  For the BAE, Shackleton had chosen to use three-man sleeping bags made of reindeer hide. Three-man bags were warmer and more efficient in terms of weight than three single bags, but the hardships they wreaked would virtually negate those advantages. Every time one man turned over, he disturbed his companions. And by crawling into the bag last each evening, David invaded the cocoons of comfort Mackay and Mawson had hollowed out for themselves.

  The warmest position, of course, was the middle. It would have seemed only fair for the three men to have rotated places every few days; but from the start, without a word said, David seems to have arrogated for himself the central sleeping space. In the same October 8 entry, Mawson rails on:

  He is so covered in clothes that he can hardly walk and hardly get into bag—that is to say, hardly leaves any room for us as he very nicely made us take side places. He wears at least 1 singlet and 1 shirt, Jaeger wool waistcoat, waistlet sweater, blue coat and burberry, drawers, blue pants, double sealed burberry pants, fleece balaclava and fleece lined helmet, burberry helmet.

  Except in unusually damp conditions, one normally stays warmer in a sleeping bag on cold nights by removing a good deal of one’s clothing: the warmth radiated by the torso thus heats one’s extremities. David’s over-bundled body, however, was guaranteed comfort by the warmth given off by his bedmates on either side. Yet he seems to have been oblivious to the annoyance it caused his companions.

  At the first promontory they reached on the mainland, named Butter Point, the men cached some of their load, hoping to reduce their weight and improve their speed. Still, they could gain only an average of four miles per day, while sledging and hiking twelve.

  Mackay had not yet begun keeping a diary. He would first lay pen to paper only on November 30. David’s own diary confined itself chiefly to practical matters of navigation and meteorology. So, during the week from October 9 to 15, did that of Mawson, whose entries are curt and short.

  But tempers were fraying. The complaints in Mawson’s diary about the Prof’s behavior resume on October 16. He is vexed again about David’s late crawling into the sleeping bag, and the space he monopolizes; by the older man’s physical state (“doggo”); by his slowness on the trail; and by his slovenliness inside the tent. A long, exasperated entry on October 20 makes another inventory of the excess clothing David wears inside the sleeping bag, adding:

  His pockets are full of food scraps, specimens, books, Bonza set [a toolkit] etc. so that there is little room left in the bag for us. He is so warm that he likes to leave his toggles undone while we shiver. The weight of these clothes makes him ill on the march but he cannot see it. There is no getting him to hurry up and partial rows are frequent at meal times.

  On October 22, the three men had their first major argument. Dubious of the three-pronged expedition objective from the start, Mawson now urged giving up the magnetic pole in favor of surveying the coast and thoroughly examining the Dry Valley. But David and Mackay overruled him, and, as leader, David had the last say. The argument was not resolved until the 23rd, when “this morning culminated in the Prof offering up no alternative but Magnetic Pole, which must, he says, be done on ½ rations, pulling one sledge only.” Such a desperate expedient, besides driving the men to their physical limits, would, Mawson recognized, almost certainly preclude their return to Cape Royds by January 15.

  On October 30, after twenty-five days on the trail, the trio crossed the hard ice of what they named Granite Harbour. They guessed that they had completed one-third of the journey to the magnetic pole, though the daily runs on the sledgemeter added up to a paltry 109 miles—barely four miles a day. (In actuality, of course, thanks to their double-hauling, the men had covered nearly three times that distance.) Reconciled to a late return to Cape Royds, David had the team build a large stone cairn in which they deposited letters. One, addressed to Shackleton, promised to try to return to the Drygalski Ice Tongue, a point on the coast more than 100 miles north, by January 25. There they would wait for the Nimrod to pick them up.

  As October slid into November, the tension between Mawson and David escalated. The two younger men, physically larger than their leader, could not abide the idea of reducing their intake to half rations. Instead, they recommended killing seals to supplement their diet. On October 31, the men dined for the first time on seal meat. At Mawson’s insistence, they continued double-hauling.

  The interchanges between mentor and protégé began to take on a ritualized formula. David would retreat into an over-polite, indirect way of asking questions, while Mawson forced him to be more blunt. The issues over which they wrangled seem absurd, except that the men were entering a life-or-death predicament in which every detail could be consequential. David, for instance, had put Mawson in charge of the team’s chronometer. But then, on the trail, “On all occasions he has asked for the time, especially 3 or 4 times in the early hours of the morning, by saying until I am sick of it ‘Would you mind kindly letting me know the time presently, there is no hurry, if it would not be troubling you too much, please.’ ”

  More serious was David’s pokiness. As Mawson described it:

  He is full of great words and deadly slow action—the more we bustle to get a move on the more he dawdles, especially tying strings to one another and all over the sledges, which all have to come off again in unpacking.

  He dodges packing sledges every morning, then, when we are waiting to press on, having packed up, he comes along with a lot of wants and things to be put into the already packed bags. Finally, when all ready to go, he must have a rear [i. e., defecate].

  As the men trudged north along the coast of Victoria Land, they kept looking for a passage by which they could head inland, for they knew that the magnetic pole lay well to the west of the shore of the Ross Sea. The trekking was not only dangerous; sastrugi regularly capsized their sledges, and a two-day blizzard reduced visibility almost to zero. As the days warmed with the approach of summer, the men decided to travel at night, on firmer snow. By now they were supplementing their diet daily with seal meat and blubber, as well as penguin meat. Whether or not they knew it, those additions to their staple food sufficed to ward off any threat of scurvy. (The link between vitamin C deficiency and scurvy was not demonstrated until 1932.)

  The brutal labor was steadily wearing all three men down, but David, nearly twice the age of his erstwhile star pupil, was suffering the most. In his diary on November 24, he wrote, “up at 10 p.m. very sleepy, very hard to keep awake after 2 hours sleep, and only 4 or 5 for 2 nights preceding. Keep awake during day by nibbling . . . chocolate.”

  On November 23, Mawson and Mackay began to suspect a dereliction of duty on the leader’s part that was truly unforgivable. As Mawson wrote:

  The Prof is certainly a fine example of a man for his age . . . but he is a great drag on our progress. He certainly and admittedly does not pull as much as a younger man. . . . Seeing that he travels with his thumbs tucked in his braces . . . one concludes he lays his weight on harness rather than pulling. Several times when we have been struggling with hauling he has continued to recite poetry or tell yarns.

  In other words, David was apparently faking his contribution to pulling the sledge, just putting his weight on the harness, leaving the other two to do all the actual hauling.

  The trio’s immediate goal was the Drygalski Ice Tongue, the snout of a gigantic glacier that thrust far into the Ross Sea at about 75½ degrees south. It had been named from shipboard by Scott in 1902, in homage to his German rival, the Antarctic explorer Erich von Drygalski. Not only was it one of the most prominent landmarks along the whole coast of Victoria Land, it was the place from which the three men were determined to head inland.

  By November 30, they could s
ee the ice tongue looming ahead of them. David described it as looking like “a great billowy sea of pale green ice.” The glacier was guarded, however, by ridges of ice up to 20 feet high lying perpendicular to the men’s path, and the surface was riddled with crevasses. Here the men faced by far the most hazardous terrain of their now nearly two-month-long journey. It would take them a full thirteen days to solve the chaotic maze and gain access to the relatively smooth plateau inland.

  On November 30, for whatever reason, Mackay began his diary. The first entries reveal the leaden discouragement of those days spent trying to solve the Drygalski Tongue. December 1: “Country continued to grow worse. We decided it was impassable and resolved to return to the southern shore.” December 2: “I spent a sleepless night thinking the others were inclined to give up, but this morning they both declared themselves keen.”

  On top of their other problems, the men were running out of seal meat, which they had counted on to help provision their push inland. On December 4, David made an extraordinary request of Mackay, who faithfully carried out the thankless job. That was to backtrack six miles by himself, kill seals, and carry forward the meat. The effort took Mackay “twelve hours of continuous walking.” He added laconically, “I got lots of seal meat, and one Adelie penguin.”

  During these days of wandering in search of a route to the inland plateau, the men sometimes separated to reconnoiter. All three fell into crevasses, but managed to stop themselves at about waist level. But on December 11, just when the men thought they were clear of danger, David suffered a genuine close call, as he left the tent briefly to sketch the distant hills. He did not bother to take his ice ax. As David later wrote in The Heart of the Antarctic:

  I had scarcely gone more than six yards from the tent, when the lid of a crevasse suddenly collapsed under me at a point where there was absolutely no outward or visible sign of its existence, and let me down suddenly nearly up to my shoulders. I only saved myself from going right down by throwing my arms out and staying myself on the snow lid on either side. The lid was so rotten that I dare not make any move to extricate myself, or I might have been precipitated into the abyss.

  Hearing David’s cry for help, Mawson emerged from the tent and reached out with the haft of his own ice ax. David seized it and pulled himself free.

  On December 12, despairing of finding an easy “road” to the inland plateau, David urged his teammates to build a giant ice mound on the northern edge of the Drygalski Ice Tongue to leave as a cairn. In it they left extra clothes, geological specimens, and a letter explaining their plans to anyone who might come looking for the men. And they decided at last to leave behind one of their two sledges. After laying over for three days, waiting out a blizzard and sorting their belongings and food, the men set out on December 16. For the first time in more than a month, they would not have to relay loads, but their parsimony meant reducing their rations. The single sledge and load, Mawson noted, still weighed “not less than 660 lbs,” and pulling it uphill through deep snow was agonizingly hard.

  Initially smooth going on a uniform snow slope gave way, by December 18, to a broken glacier riddled with crevasses. On the 19th, it was Mawson’s turn to break through a snow bridge and fall into a hidden fissure. “I fell into one but hauled out with aid of alpine rope,” he deadpanned the mishap in his diary. “It was a job to get him up,” Mackay noted in his own diary; “looks bad for the pole,” he added gloomily that evening.

  Despite the exhaustion that was overtaking the men, Mawson diligently recorded each day’s geological finds. Whether or not those entries would ever prove useful to science, they testify to the young man’s ceaseless curiosity about the natural world. A sample, from December 21:

  Very coarse pegmatites crossing some granite . . . in eskers near camp. Tiny ruby-like crystals of rutile (?) and larger crystals of ferriferous rutile noted in these. One of these eskers (further out) was found formed of granite at shore end and passing suddenly into quartz porphyry at outer end.

  Every stratum and intrusion the men came across, of course, had never before been seen by humans. But Mackay’s and David’s diaries exhibit very little of Mawson’s geological zeal.

  There was no ignoring the fact that the men, with too little to eat, were wearing down. And David was by far the weakest. Mawson recorded his concern about the deterioration he saw in the trio’s leader. On December 21, “The Prof was doggo this afternoon. I had him well under observation and showed him to be in nothing like the condition we are in.” Three days later: “Prof getting flatfooted.” And on December 25: “Prof very doggo and day easy. He has of late appeared to have lost all interest in the journey.”

  There was no feast to celebrate Christmas, just another day of sledging. Mawson noted merely, “Had lunch, saving cheese by using excess meat.” Meanwhile, Mackay, an inveterate pipe smoker, had run out of tobacco. As a kind of joke Christmas present, David gave him some sennegrass—the dry, grass-like sedge that explorers used to insulate their finnesko—to smoke instead.

  On December 27, to lighten their loads even further, the men made a second depot, leaving behind their ice axes, the alpine rope, ski boots (which were less effective in the cold than finnesko), some kerosene, and even a little food. They had reached an altitude that Mawson, using the hypsometer, estimated at 4,050 feet above sea level.

  Along with geologizing and recording the temperature and altitude each day, Mawson had been taking dip readings with the inclinometer to determine how close the men were to the magnetic pole. The results dismayed him. On the last day of the year, he wrote, “Dip reading very little less than previous and very discouraging—regard it as erratic.” On December 28, Mawson told his companions that the pole was at the very least still 170 miles away, 230 at the most.

  By now it was obvious that the team had no hope of returning to Cape Royds by January 15. Mackay, in particular, was beginning to doubt whether the three men could even reach the coast by February 1, when the Nimrod, according to Shackleton’s instructions, would begin to search for them. Yet to have come so far only to admit defeat and turn around was intolerable. The men marched on, making surprisingly good runs of 10 or more miles per day.

  David, though keen to push on, was starting to break down. Mackay’s diary was reticent on the matter, but Mawson’s was not. On December 31, he unleashed another outburst:

  The Prof is dreadfully slow now, he does nothing. Mac mends tent, I mess [cook], he is always sitting down when we are packed and pushing our way out of tent. This morning I told him he was keeping us waiting as he was not attempting to get ready. . . . He looked very angry at my saying this. . . . He never, or seldom, helps pack a sledge. . . . Something has gone very wrong with him of late as he [always] morose, never refers to our work, shirks questions regarding it, never offers a suggestion.

  Despite the strong marches on relatively easy snow, the men’s reduced rations were taking their toll. On January 6, Mawson wrote:

  We are now almost mad on discussing foods, all varieties having a great attraction for us. We dote on what sprees we shall have on return—mostly run to sweet foods and farinaceous compounds.

  We don’t intend to let a meal pass in after life without more fully appreciating it than formerly.

  On the 12th, the men “planned menus for dinner to be given by Prof to us on arrival in Sydney.” Mawson recorded those menus in the back pages of his diary. The delicacies included “Jugged Hare with mashed potatoes, black currant jelly and champignons,” “Omelet au Rhaum,” and “Fried trout (Loch Leven preferred) in oatmeal and butter.”

  Despite such fanciful flights, Mackay and Mawson had begun to worry about David’s state of mind, as well as his physical collapse. “The Professor is very nearly crocked now,” wrote Mackay on the 13th. Ten days earlier, Mawson had observed, “The Professor seems most affected by the altitude, and is quite prostrated between hauls. . . . Also his memory seems fainter. He is certainly doing his best—how much better though we would get
along had we [as] a third [a] younger man.”

  Since heading inland, the men had been steadily climbing uphill. By January 5, they were camped at 8,000 feet. They were counting on the downhill slope of their backward track to speed their return to the shore. But Mackay had grave doubts. On January 13, he confided to his diary, “I think now, that we have not more than a 50 percent chance of getting back to the coast in time for the Nimrod to take us home.”

  In their undernourished state, the men suffered severely from the cold. In a blizzard, Mawson suffered superficial frostbite on one cheek, as well as a touch of snow blindness caused by taking off his goggles. “Biscuit now always tinged with blood from lips as I eat,” he recorded on January 10. “Mac’s lips are bad also.” David had lost his burberry helmet, so Mackay gave him his, further exposing his own head to the wind and cold. The night temperatures were regularly below zero Fahrenheit.

  Mawson continued to be deeply troubled by the conflicting results of the inclinometer. The men, he had at first calculated, should by now be very close to the magnetic pole. But on January 12 he carefully went over his readings before announcing the result to his teammates. They were stunned by the new calculation. “Last night,” Mackay wrote on January 13, “Mawson made the astounding announcement that the pole is prob. 40 miles farther off than we had ever thought.”

  The men had a strenuous debate about what to do. Mawson came up with a plan—to go ahead for three more days, trying to push each day’s trek up to 13 miles, then to return to the coast, still averaging 13 miles per day. By his calculation, that schedule would exactly “pan out provisions on already reduced scale.” In other words, by the time the men reached the coast, they would be out of food, with no guarantee the Nimrod would be waiting to pick them up. On the coast, however, there was always the hope of subsisting on seals and penguins.

  It was a desperate proposal. David somewhat passively agreed to it, though by now his thinking had turned almost dreamy. To the further alarm of his comrades, he had virtually stopped eating. Mackay, however, thought Mawson’s plan was folly. “Mac then protests strongly against going on,” Mawson wrote, “says if we go on past the 15th we cannot get back as head winds and bad weather will retard us, and 13 m per day impossible.”