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

by David Roberts

  In the end, out of loyalty to his teammates, Mackay acquiesced. During the next three days, which were graced by almost perfect weather and by the leveling off of the plateau, making small depots of supplies each morning to be picked up on the way back, the trio carried out Mawson’s plan to perfection. On January 15, Mawson got a dip reading of 89˚ 45', indicating that the men had to be very close to the magnetic pole.

  The next day, they hauled their sledge two miles, left it behind with supplies, recalculated their position, and walked at a very fast rate five more miles to what Mawson determined to be “the mean position” of the magnetic pole. Even as early as 1909, Mawson, along with other scientists, knew that the magnetic poles shifted position slightly on a daily basis. An “exact” magnetic pole could not be determined.

  It was good enough for the played-out trio. At 4:15 p.m., they hoisted a Union Jack they had fabricated in the hut over the winter. David uttered an official proclamation: “I hereby take possession of this area now containing the Magnetic Pole for the British Empire.” Mawson set up the expedition camera with a string attached to the shutter for a group portrait. With the Union Jack on a pole planted in the snow, all three men took off their helmets and stared into the camera. David, in the middle, pulled the string.

  The photograph remains one of the most famous images ever exposed in Antarctica. In it, exhaustion radiates from the haggard faces of all three men.

  They had 260 miles to cover in order to reach the coast near the Drygalski Ice Tongue. Ahead of them lay the fight of their lives.

  Mawson’s diary entries from January 17 through 29 are clipped and terse, as though after each day’s march he barely had the energy left to record the day’s details. For a man normally unwilling to complain about hardship, these passages resonate with anguish and suffering:

  My feet and legs pain a little. Mouth no better.

  Dreadful day, very cold.

  Eyes bad as have gone several days without goggles.

  Tent torn again, drift this morning, in agony.

  My leg gave excruciating pain for large part of day and have hardly ever had a worse time in my life. Agony all day.

  Likewise Mackay, who for four days after January 27 found it too much trouble to write in his diary at all.

  I don’t feel so horribly exhausted and inclined to vomit up my food, as I have done for the last two or three days.

  The strain of the whole thing, the exhaustion and actual muscular pain, the cold, the want of food and sleep, the monotony, and the anxiety as to what is to happen at the end, make me think that this must be the most awful existence possible.

  Both men were deeply worried about David’s state. The leader still showed little interest in food. One day he found it impossible to put on his crampons, so he clumped along behind his comrades, fitting his feet into the shallow steps their spikes gouged in the “marble” snow. Wrote Mawson on the 29th, “Prof crampy about left calf and very much done. One can see he is much worn out but sticks it well.”

  Indeed, despite the trio’s debilitation, they were making remarkable progress, several times covering 16 miles in a day. From January 16 to 27, when he stopped writing, Mackay closed each diary entry with the men’s estimate of the mileage left ahead of them to reach the coast. Steadily the numbers declined, until he could write “43 miles” on January 27.

  Now the morale that had bound the team together fractured. The always short-tempered Mackay exploded, directing all his wrath against David. Curiously, this debacle is recorded neither in Mackay’s nor David’s diaries, but only in Mawson’s. January 31 was “an awful day of despair, disappointment, hard travelling, agonising walking—for ever falling down crevasses, etc. Mac called prof a bloody fool once on falling into crevasse, and all sorts of other names.”

  Mawson’s own assessment of David’s state was grim: “Prof’s burberry pants are now so much torn as to be falling off. He is apparently half demented [judging] by his actions—the strain has been too great.” That day, Mackay delivered his ultimatum:

  Mac, it seems got on to the Prof properly at one halt in the afternoon whilst I was reconnoitring. He told Prof also that he would have to give me written authority [to take over] as commander or he would, as a medical man, pronounce him insane.

  Stunned and perplexed, David did not respond. The next day, according to Mawson, “Prof’s boots were frozen on and foot gone. . . . During most of the day the Prof has been walking on his ankles. He was no doubt doing his best in this way, and Mac appears to have kicked him several times when in the harness.”

  In camp on February 2, Mackay renewed his ultimatum. “The Prof was now certainly partially demented,” wrote Mawson, and David finally gave in to Mackay’s demand. On February 3, having taken up his diary again, Mackay recorded his own version of the momentous event:

  I have deposed the Professor. I simply told him that he was no longer fit to lead the party, that the situation was now critical, and that he must officially appoint Mawson leader, or I would declare him, the Professor, physically and mentally unfit. He acted on my proposal at once.

  Mawson, however, was not comfortable usurping the leadership of his mentor. Even as David wrote out the formal transfer, Mawson twice demurred. “I said I did not like it and would think on it,” he noted in his diary. But Mackay’s will prevailed.

  In The Heart of the Antarctic, the only version of the journey to the South Magnetic Pole readily available before the publication of Mawson’s diaries in 1988, David glossed over this humiliating denouement. He wrote that on February 3, as Mawson sought a campsite,

  I joined him a few minutes later and as I was feeling much exhausted after the continuous forced marches back from the Magnetic Pole, asked him to take over the leadership of the expedition. . . . I thought it best for Mawson, who was less physically exhausted than me, to be in charge. He had, throughout the whole journey, shown excellent capacity of leadership.

  In David’s account, there is no hint of any threat from Mackay, nor any indication of his own mental breakdown.

  At last the men reached the coast near the Drygalski Ice Tongue, where they had left their cairn with its substantial depot of cached supplies, including some penguin and seal meat. They pitched their tent and crawled into the three-man sleeping bag.

  There was no sign of the Nimrod.

  The relief ship, under the command of Captain Frederick Pryce Evans, with John King Davis as first officer, had sailed into the Ross Sea in early January, only to find the last twenty miles north of Cape Royds blocked by fast ice. Two days later, a fresh wind broke loose the pack. The Nimrod came into view of the hut on January 5. But the reception the crew got there alarmed them.

  There was no news of Shackleton’s four-man party that had set out for the South Pole at the end of October, and no news of David’s three-man team that had started man-hauling north and west even earlier. According to Davis, the instructions Shackleton had left behind were so vague that he and Evans could not even be sure what objective David, Mackay, and Mawson’s journey had been intended to pursue. Shackleton had specified simply that if David’s Northern Party (as the team was dubbed) “had not returned by a certain date,” the Nimrod should search for the men along the western coast of the Ross Sea, starting at Butter Point in Victoria Land.

  During the next several weeks, the crew of the Nimrod were kept busy with a series of harrowing efforts. Two men who had set out overland from the ship when it was still blocked by ice were missing and feared dead. And a third team, the Western Party, sent out to explore inland from the southernmost corner of Victoria Land, needed to be picked up. In the end, the two who had left the icebound ship, having survived crevasse falls and out-of-control glissades, stumbled into the hut after a nine-day ordeal that should have taken less than two. The Nimrod, searching for the Western Party, became icebound for a week. Only on January 26 was the ship able to find the three-man team at Butter Point. That trio had suffered its own share of extremely close ca
lls.

  The Nimrod carried the Western Party back to Cape Royds, only to learn that there was still no news of Shackleton. Thus it was not until the very end of January that Captain Evans recrossed McMurdo Sound and, starting at Butter Point, steered north to look for David’s party. It was an arduous assignment, covering some 200 miles of coastline. As Davis later wrote:

  In order to carry out [the search] effectively the ship had to be kept as close inshore as the ice would permit. Slowly we steamed northward at a distance off shore of from two cables [about one-fifth of a mile] to three quarters of a mile, keeping a close look-out for anything that could be a tent or human figures. Needless to say, we strained our eyes to the utmost and after a while each distant penguin, basking seal or small outcrop of dark rock seemed to take on human shape.

  Captain Evans was extremely agitated about the ship’s diminishing supply of coal. He declared that the Nimrod would push the search only as far as Cape Washington, a major promontory at about 74½ degrees south. If there was no sign of the overdue trio by then, he told Davis, “we would have to leave them to their fate and return to Cape Royds.”

  At 4 a.m. on February 3, the ship drifted past the Drygalski Ice Tongue. On watch, Davis peered through a light falling snow. “There was nothing noteworthy in sight except a group of tabular bergs close inshore and faintly visible,” he later wrote. He climbed to a lookout post atop the main mast and peered again. “I . . . had a good look round but saw nothing that in my opinion warranted further investigation.”

  The Nimrod had steamed past the stranded men’s camp without seeing it.

  In their green, conical tent on that very day, the three played-out explorers were discussing what to do if the Nimrod never appeared. Mackay recommended waiting until February 10, then starting to trek south along the shore, killing penguins and seals for food along the way. Mawson and David urged setting out only on the 20th. But Cape Royds was more than 200 miles away, and all three men knew that that desperate march would probably prove fatal. “The Professor could not have lived many weeks,” wrote Mackay in his diary, “and his weakness would have delayed us to such an extent as to finish us.”

  On board the Nimrod, Davis was having nagging doubts. Could those dimly glimpsed icebergs near the Drygalski Tongue have blocked a hidden inlet? At last he voiced his uncertainty to Captain Evans, who badgered him mercilessly for hours to make up his mind. Evans demanded, “Are you sufficiently uncertain of what you saw to make it worth my while to return to those bergs?” Without hesitation, Davis answered, “Yes!”

  The ship pushed on to Cape Washington, some 50 miles north, to complete its search mission, then turned back south.

  In the middle of the day on February 4, Mawson, Mackay, and David were squatting in the tent as they finished “a meal of penguin livers, etc. and an exceedingly thin and bulky pem[mican hoosh] as a drink.” Suddenly a shot rang out.

  Davis’s hunch had been dead on. On the 4th the sky was far clearer than it had been the previous day. Weaving its way among the icebergs, the Nimrod found the hidden inlet Davis had intuited. All at once, the crew spotted the tent pitched on a small but conspicuous knoll of ice. As Davis described that discovery fifty-three years later:

  Immediately on sighting this we fired a rocket distress signal from the bridge and as the echoes rolled back from the shore the tent seemed to be shaken by an internal upheaval. First one tall figure appeared, Mawson, beyond a doubt. He was closely followed by a second who seemed to trample on a third who had apparently been lying next the entrance of the tent. They were all safe! And as the two leading figures ran like excited schoolboys towards the ship, all hands on the forecastle-head cheered them wildly. Professor David followed more slowly, limping as he came. It was a wonderful moment. But suddenly and as if by magic the tallest and nearest of the two runners vanished from sight. The Nimrod was at that moment being brought alongside the ice foot and we could hear Mackay shouting, “Mawson has fallen down a crevasse! Bring a rope!” and, almost in the same breath, “We got to the Magnetic Pole!”

  Mawson’s fall into the crevasse was the expedition’s last straw. It might have been a comic denouement except that he had plunged 20 feet before fetching up on a narrow snow bridge, in the most serious crevasse accident of the whole journey. His partners were too weak to get Mawson out. In the end, Davis had himself lowered into the crevasse, tied a rope around Mawson, and supervised the ship’s crew as they pulled him to the surface.

  On board the Nimrod, the three men gorged on food for two hours as they regaled the crew with their adventures. As Captain Evans later described them, they looked “abnormally lean . . . the colour of mahogany with hands that resembled the talons of a bird of prey.” In the soiled, tattered clothes they had worn for four months, they smelled so bad that Evans demanded they “adjourn to the engine room for ablution and fresh raiment.”

  The three survivors wanted nothing but to head north toward home. But the BAE was not over. Almost at once, Captain Evans turned the Nimrod south again, toward Cape Royds, to find out what had happened to Shackleton’s four-man polar party.

  In Shackleton’s absence, his written orders placed Evans in command of the expedition. Now Evans decided that, no matter how close Douglas Mawson had come to death on the journey to the magnetic pole, no matter how weakened the man was physically and mentally by the ordeal, he would be in charge of any subsequent search for Shackleton and his three companions. If that search came up empty by the time encroaching autumn and diminishing coal forced the Nimrod to leave McMurdo Sound, Mawson would be placed in charge of a smaller contingent of men who must spend a second winter in Antarctica, if only to discover the fate of the polar party during the following spring.

  3

  CAPE DENISON

  On the day the Nimrod picked up Mawson and his two companions near the Drygalski Ice Tongue, Shackleton, with his three teammates—Frank Wild, Eric Marshall, and Jameson Adams—was still almost 300 miles south of Cape Royds. Thanks to dysentery and near starvation, they were verging on collapse. A month before, Shackleton’s diary entries had been rich and expansive. Now they were reduced to telegraphic jottings: “February 4.—Cannot write more. All down with acute dysentery; terrible day. No march possible; outlook serious.”

  The four ponies pulling the sledges, with which the polar party had set out in October, had proved to be of little use. By December 1, three of them had had to be shot, their carcasses butchered and cached in depots for emergency food for the return journey. On December 7 the men reluctantly decided to shoot the last remaining pony, a stalwart but gimpy animal named Socks. But before the men could make camp, Socks broke through a snow bridge and plunged to his death in a hidden crevasse. The pony would have taken the vital sledge he was hauling along with him, had a swingle-tree—a wooden cross brace rigged between sledge and horse to facilitate changes of direction—not snapped in two. Wild had been pulled halfway into the crevasse, but saved himself by flinging his arms out to catch the far edge of the chasm.

  Obsessed with reaching the pole, Shackleton drove his team on and on, as they man-hauled a 1,000-pound load through soft snow and mazes of crevasses. The terrain rose steadily in altitude to over 10,000 feet. By early January, Shackleton recognized that the men could not attain the pole and hope to return alive, but he forced them onward for nine more days, determined to get within 100 miles of 90 degrees south. On January 9, he confessed defeat in his diary: “We have shot our bolt, and the tale is latitude 88˚ 23' South, longitude 162˚ East. . . . Whatever regrets may be, we have done our best.”

  That reckoning placed the men 97 miles short of the pole. Experts have wondered ever since how accurate the reading was, for Marshall, the team’s navigator, had not been able to get a sun sight with his theodolite and had to rely on dead reckoning. Given that Marshall’s private diary records the growing fear that Shackleton’s fanaticism might cost the men their lives, it is possible that he certified the latitude just to fulfill his leader�
�s arbitrary hopes.

  Shackleton turned homeward tasting only bitter defeat. Eight decades later, however, his biographer Roland Huntford saluted the polar party’s accomplishment:

  Shackleton had set a marvellous record. He had beaten Scott’s Furthest South by 360 miles. He had made the greatest leap forward to either Pole that anyone had ever achieved. Of that, he could never be deprived. He had shown the way to the heart of the last continent. Whoever finally reached the Pole would have to follow in his wake.

  During the return journey, the men grew steadily weaker. Only the recovery of the cached pony meat and of food in depots laid by supporting parties allowed them to keep sledging. But they were running out of time. Shackleton had left orders that if his team had not reached Cape Royds by March 1, the Nimrod should sail for home without them. This was no deed of heroic bravado, but a pragmatic decision, for the Boss knew that by March the relief ship ran a serious risk of getting frozen into the pack ice of McMurdo Sound, as Scott’s Discovery had in 1902. In Shackleton’s mind, being left behind by the Nimrod would not inevitably spell a death sentence. During the return journey, he proposed to his comrades the outlandish last resort of rowing and sailing the open whale boat the team would have left behind all the way to New Zealand.

  As it turned out, in 1909 the foursome cut it exceedingly close. By February 25, Marshall was suffering from what Shackleton called “paralysis of the stomach and renewed dysentery.” Two days later, he was incapable of hauling at all. Shackleton left him in a tent with Adams to care for him, stripped the sledge down to two sleeping bags, one day’s food, and a compass, and pushed on with Wild. On the last day of February, the two men set out at 4:30 a.m. and marched nonstop for sixteen and a half hours. Shackleton tried several times to send a signal with a sun mirror, but no answering flash came from the hill above the hut.