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

by David Roberts

  Equally Edwardian was Mawson’s decorum as he asked Paquita’s father for her hand in marriage. His plea took the form of a seven-page letter, handwritten on University of Adelaide stationery. Mawson addressed Guillaume Daniel Delprat first as “My Dear Dr Delprat,” then added, “and I hope with your consent, My Dear Father.” He went on, “Love has run out to meet love with open arms—it is the ideal story. I hope you will approve for the persons referred to are your much beloved daughter and myselfallunworthy [sic].”

  Mindful of the mining tycoon’s lofty social status, Mawson laid out his modest financial situation—a salary from the university of “but £400 per year,” the money owed him by Shackleton, the dribs and drabs he expected from his own commercial ventures. But he boasted, “Personally, I have never yet failed in anything I have undertaken and look forward to a bright future.”

  It was not money that Delprat père was worried about. Replying by mail the very next day, he reassured Mawson: “I fully approve of you as a son-in-law. Let me tell you that I don’t know a better man than yourself in Adelaide to whom I would trust the future happiness of Paquita with greater confidence.” His qualms arose instead from Mawson’s upcoming Antarctic expedition.

  Do you think it is a wise thing to run these risks and expose your wife to the terrible anxiety and all its consequences when you go away for 15 months on a dangerous trip where you may meet with accidents or where your health may be be permanently injured through hardships and exposure[?]

  Do you think it is a fair thing to make a woman go through? Do you think it helps you to build up the home you want to provide her with? You have made a great name for yourself there already—what good can a second trip do you?

  Delprat went as far as to ask Mawson to give up his expedition in order to marry Paquita. He invited the eager suitor to “think it over” and to visit in person to discuss the proposition further.

  The father’s doubts were certainly reasonable ones. Yet somehow Mawson overcame the objections. In the end, he could have his expedition and Paquita too. They were formally engaged in January 1911. Almost at once, Mawson set off on another long trip to England and Europe to raise money, crew, and a ship for what would become the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.

  Mawson’s motivations for the AAE can be divided into three categories: commercial, nationalistic, and scientific. As a geologist, he believed that the icebound continent might hide vast reserves of precious minerals, oil, and gas, and in 1910 he could see no reason why mines and wells might not someday tap those resources.

  As for the nationalistic: in the second decade of the twentieth century, Antarctica still loomed as the last great tract of land on earth that no nation had yet convincingly claimed. The swath from 90˚ to 160˚ east of the Greenwich meridian lay unexplored. In a tradition dating back into the Renaissance, the first discoverer of a new land (whether or not it was inhabited by natives) promptly claimed it for the country under whose flag he sailed.

  Mawson, then, fully intended to stake a lasting claim to that unknown land, not simply for the British Commonwealth, but for Australia.

  Yet the scientific motivation for the AAE was by far the most important. On his journey to the South Pole, Amundsen made no pretense of doing science. Shackleton offered only a token nod to that goddess. Scott’s Terra Nova expedition had had genuine, if secondary, scientific aims.

  But Mawson was serious about science. The AAE, he believed, would be little more than a capricious exercise if it did not issue in scores of voluminous scholarly reports. Indeed, he would spend the rest of his life coaxing those reports into print.

  In 1910, field science meant above all the gathering of specimens and data. Yet quite aside from the taxonomic minutiae of species and strata, for explorers such as Mawson science meant above all the discovery of unknown lands. To go where no one else had ever been, to see vistas that no human eye had previously beheld—those were the deeds not merely of romantic adventurers, but of men serving Science with a capital S by extending the realms of human inquiry. Knowledge for its own sake was a credo that Mawson and his peers lived by.

  It would seem, with Shackleton’s thrust to within 97 miles of the South Pole, that the general outlines of the Antarctic continent were becoming known. Nothing could have been further from the truth. All that Shackleton and, before him, Scott had proved was that there was a corridor of ice-covered land stretching south on either side of longitude 160˚ east. By 1910, no one could say with any authority whether Antarctica really was a continent, as opposed to a scattering of polar islands separated by huge frozen seas.

  In his official account of the AAE, The Home of the Blizzard, Mawson published a map that astounds the modern reader. Titled “Antarctic Land-Discoveries Preceding 1910,” it renders the “continent” as a virtual blank, except for a swath of gray hatching along the Scott–Shackleton corridor. Otherwise, only the most fugitive dots interrupt the blankness within the Antarctic Circle at 66° 33' south. These dots, based on the unreliable sightings of earlier explorers, bear names such as Balleny Islands and Enderby Land. Most of them would eventually be proven not to exist.

  Thus the ultimate goal for Mawson in devising the AAE, embodying its most devout homage to Science, was to find out what was there, in the almost limitless blank that lay south of Australia. In 1911, the only way to find out what was there was to go there, and to march for weeks and months into the unknown, mapping as you went.

  The nearly six months abroad that Mawson spent in 1911 organizing the AAE passed in a frenzy of anxiety and dashed hopes. Almost at once, however, he secured the services of John King Davis, the chief officer on board the Nimrod who had effectively saved Mawson’s life by finding him and his two companions near the Drygalski Ice Tongue in February 1909. Davis’s first task was to get a ship. After endless machinations and haggling over prices, Davis and Mawson managed to buy a vessel that had been built in 1876 to serve the Newfoundland sealing industry. She was named the Aurora, and though thirty-five years old when pressed into service for the AAE, the ship was so stoutly built and so seaworthy that a substantial part of the expedition’s eventual success could be credited to her—and to Davis’s cautious but canny navigating.

  Back in Adelaide in July, Mawson soldiered on with his fundraising. Slowly the money came in, much of it donated by the various Australian states and territories. Meanwhile, Mawson recruited no fewer than thirty members of his team, not counting the twenty-four who would serve as the Aurora’s crew. Three of the team were British, one Swiss, and four were New Zealanders. (It was in deference to the Kiwis that the expedition chose “Australasian” rather than “Australian” for its title.) Besides Mawson, only one man had previous Antarctic experience—the redoubtable Frank Wild, who had played pivotal roles in both Scott’s Discovery expedition from 1901–04 and the BAE from 1908–09. Some of the Aussies were mere students, whom Mawson had cultivated at the university. The youngest team member was nineteen, the oldest forty-three. Most were in their twenties, and however reliable Mawson considered them as scientists and workers, only a handful had much wilderness experience. As the expedition left Hobart on December 2, 1911, Mawson himself was only twenty-nine years old.

  Those months of fundraising, buying equipment and food, buying and refitting the Aurora, and recruiting his team took a heavy toll on Mawson. Ever loyal, Paquita could not help noticing that her fiancé “looked thinner and thinner as the months went by.” At a farewell dinner in his honor in Adelaide, Mawson confessed to the gathering, “I think we shall all be glad to get away. Personally I feel I would never have the energy to get up another expedition. I am prepared to go on exploring for the rest of time, but it is the organization from which one shrinks.”

  With Davis at the helm, the Aurora sailed from London on July 29. Aboard were forty-eight Greenland huskies, intended for sledge-hauling on the southern continent. In charge of their care and training were two members of the team, Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz. Ninnis, the yo
ung lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers, had been heartbroken when he was rejected by Scott for the Terra Nova expedition, but had promptly applied for a position with Shackleton. Finding the eager youth entirely likable, the Boss signed him up, then passed Ninnis on to Mawson when he realized he would not be going to Antarctica himself.

  Mertz, a lawyer from Basel and a champion skier, had applied for a position on the AAE by mail from Switzerland. In his letter to Mawson, the twenty-eight-year-old had waxed enthusiastic about the potential usefulness of “skys” (as he spelled them in his uncertain English) in Antarctica. Mawson appointed Mertz to the expedition sight unseen.

  After the first winter on the southern continent, Mawson would be so pleased with Ninnis’s and Mertz’s talents and verve that he chose them as his teammates for the Far Eastern journey. But on board the Aurora, John King Davis was at first less than favorably impressed. “The only two idlers in the ship [are] the two passengers,” he wrote in his diary, distinguishing the dog-handlers from the crew. They “are too fond of their bunks in bad weather.” Ninnis in particular, Davis thought, was “lazy and ignorant.” As for Mertz, the Swiss athlete would “probably turn out to be a decent sort when he gets used to roughing it which is part of your life on this sort of job.”

  Taking care of the dogs, which were housed in makeshift shelters on the deck of the Aurora, turned into a nightmare. The proximity of males and females led to numerous pregnancies. On August 16, no fewer than thirteen puppies were born, but in the squalid conditions of heat and heaving seas, most of them died within days, either washed overboard or eaten by the adults. The huskies’ constant howling kept sailors awake, and their excrement fouled the deck. Then several of the dogs came down with fits, foaming at the mouth; the men attributed the condition to distemper or epilepsy. When these huskies did not soon recover, Ninnis had to take on the doleful job of shooting them.

  One scholar later speculated that the strange malady affecting the dogs was piblokto—“a mysterious hysterical disease affecting the seemingly unrelated triad of Greenland dogs, Arctic foxes, and Inuit women.” In any event, by the time the Aurora left Australia, only thirty-eight of the original forty-eight huskies were still alive.

  In choosing dogs as the animals to propel his sledges, Mawson emulated the logistical gambit that would win success for Amundsen in his quest for the South Pole only months in the future. But another locomotive innovation for the AAE was a bit too far ahead of its time. Mawson had decided to use an airplane in Antarctica. In England, he hired the Vickers manufacturing firm to custom-build a light monoplane, and enlisted Vickers pilot Hugh Watkins to fly it.

  The monoplane was carried from England to Australia on board a commercial steamer. But then, in a test flight-cum-fundraising show at a racecourse in Adelaide, disaster struck. With Watkins as pilot and Frank Wild as passenger, the plane took off, hit an air pocket, and plummeted to the ground. Wild, in his characteristically droll way, later wrote:

  I remember feeling my head strike earth & getting a mouthful of it, & in the same fraction of a second felt as though a thousand mules had kicked me all over at once, & saw the whole blessed machine coming over on top of me. When to my surprise I found I was still alive, lying on my back, my legs mixed up in the body of the machine & a fearful weight on my chest, unable to move. I could not see Watkins, but in a few seconds . . . I heard him say, “Poor old bus, she’s done.”

  Mawson, who had paid nearly a thousand pounds for the plane, was furious. The wings were irreparable, and Watkins was removed from the expedition roster, but in an effort to salvage what he could of the machine, Mawson had the plane’s body shipped aboard the Aurora. In Antarctica, he hoped to convert the crippled plane into an “air-tractor,” a motorized sledge-pulling device. Despite being coddled and tinkered with through the first winter in Antarctica, the air-tractor proved almost as worthless as Shackleton’s motorcar in 1908.

  Because of its multipronged program, the AAE was by far the most ambitious expedition yet launched in Antarctica. To explore as much land as possible, Mawson originally intended to subdivide his thirty-one-man team into four autonomous parties. The Main Base, run by Mawson himself, would be placed as close to Cape Adare on the west as the Aurora could land. Once having dropped off the men who would staff that headquarters, the ship would sail farther west, eventually landing two more parties, each to build its own hut, placed far enough apart so that their sledging journeys would not overlap.

  The fourth sub-party would not be based on Antarctica at all, but rather on Macquarie Island, a skinny upthrust of tussock grass and rocky hills at 54°30' south, roughly halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica. Discovered accidentally in 1810 by a British expedition, the island so teemed with seals that during the century that followed, the animals that flocked to its shores were hunted to the edge of local extinction. It was Mawson’s forward-looking plan to drop off five men on Macquarie to erect towering radio masts that in theory ought to be capable of relaying messages from Australia. Another set of radio masts and equipment would go with the Aurora to Antarctica, to be erected near the Main Base hut. If all went well, using Macquarie Island as a relay station, the AAE could become the first Antarctic expedition ever to have live communication with the outside world.

  On the afternoon of December 2, 1911, the Aurora glided slowly out of the Hobart dock, as thousands of spectators cheered from shore. The ship was so overloaded that Davis found her exceedingly difficult to manage. Besides the thirty-eight huskies, the decks were strewn with radio masts, timbers and boards to be assembled into two huts, the air-tractor, a number of sledges, food for both men and dogs (the precious tins of butter being placed out of the reach of the leashed dogs), thousands of gallons of fuel, and all kinds of miscellaneous equipment. “The piles of loose gear presented an indescribable scene of chaos,” wrote Mawson later. “The deck was so encumbered that only at rare intervals was it visible.”

  Realizing that even an overloaded Aurora would not suffice to carry everything the expedition needed, Mawson had chartered a second vessel, the steamship Toroa, to depart five days after the Aurora, carrying sixteen members of the team, more cargo, tons of coal, and fifty-five sheep. Its captain, Tom Holyman, was no match for Davis as a pilot. As Charles Laseron, one of the team aboard the Toroa, wryly recalled decades later, “If the skipper had a proper name we never heard it, as he was known, not only on board, but in shipping circles generally, as Roaring Tom. A rather burly personage with a black beard and a habit of shouting at the least provocation, his ways were, to say the least, very casual.” The second in command was no better. According to Laseron, “The mate was deaf and a Christian Scientist. His hobby was to argue on every conceivable subject, even if he had never heard of it before, and as he never heard any replies he won all the arguments to his own satisfaction.”

  On the first day out of Hobart, the Aurora ran into a fresh gale, and waves breaking over the deck threatened to tear loose the cargo. The plug of one of the water tanks popped out, a calamity that severely restricted the team’s drinking water all the way to Macquarie Island. Wrote Davis:

  Such boisterous weather so soon after our departure was a severe test, but the heavily-laden Aurora came through it very well. Living conditions aboard were hardly less crowded than in the old Nimrod but everyone co-operated and settled down to a ship routine, in spite of sea-sickness and discomfort. Mawson once having acquired his sea legs presumably never lost them again, for on this occasion his diet was not confined to tinned pears.

  Despite Davis’s recollection of shipboard tranquility, tensions broke out almost at once on both vessels. They tended to pit the ship’s crew against the explorers. According to Laseron, on the Toroa, “The crew are about the worst lot I have ever met. All day there is nothing but a constant stream of grumbling. They are never satisified, and though they get exactly the same food as we do, good tucker too, they are never satisfied.” As so often is true on expeditions, discontent focused on food. According t
o Percy Gray, second officer on the Aurora, “The cook we have signed on is apparently a fraud, as he has made no effort to cook anything since the ship has been rolling. We had no breakfast, and there is no sign of dinner.”

  An exception to the mutual disdain between crew and explorers was Gray’s esteem for Belgrave Ninnis, which had blossomed during the long journey from England to Australia. “I shall be very sorry when he leaves the ship to go on shore, as we are great friends,” Gray recorded on December 18. “In all this six months that I have been in daily contact with him I don’t think we have had a single difference.”

  Laseron’s dim view of Roaring Tom’s capabilities as a captain took another comic turn as the Toroa approached Macquarie Island:

  The mate could navigate, but the skipper never believed his results, and the skipper himself, from day to day, forgot on which side the variation of his compass lay. The course he set tended naturally to wobble a bit. One day he took Hoadley and Dovers [two of Mawson’s team members] into his confidence. He had just determined his position, but was puzzled at the result. According to his figures, the Taroa [sic] was in the centre of India.

  When he did ultimately blunder upon Macquarie Island, Roaring Tom boasted, “I have found this bloody island without a chart & I will enter the bay without one.”

  During the eight days it took the Aurora to reach Macquarie, the ship was constantly buffeted by waves crashing over the decks. On December 9, the worst of those storm-lashed days, a single “mountain of water” smashed in the rear end of the motor launch (the vital craft needed to ferry goods from ship to shore), and also broke open the box containing the air-tractor, leaving the unwieldy contraption protruding four feet out of its casing. On deck feeding the dogs at the time, Ninnis and another man were nearly swept overboard.