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

by David Roberts

  In the early morning hours of December 11, the ship came in sight of Macquarie. Having visited the island in 1909 on his way home from the BAE, Davis opted for a preliminary anchorage in Caroline Cove, a protected bay on the southeast shore. Twelve members of Mawson’s team jumped aboard the launch and motored toward the beach. Historian Beau Riffenburgh captures their rapturous excitement:

  They were staggered by its beauty: a steep hillside matted with thick tussock-grass, streams rushing down rocky cliffs, and stunning patches of moss and lichens—green, yellow, grey, and orange—running over the darkness of the rock. The wildlife was equally amazing—crested penguins in their thousands on the cliffs and leaping from the water around the boat, while elephant seals warmed themselves on the shingle beach and sea birds screamed overhead.

  One of those twelve was twenty-six-year-old Frank Hurley, the expedition’s official photographer, for whom this was the first expedition of any kind. As he would write fourteen years later about that first landing, “I felt that had I sufficient plates and films, I could live here for the rest of my life. How helpless I felt to portray even a glimpse of it all in a few hours. I must have more time: I must return. But how was this to be done?” Hurley knew that in all likelihood, Mawson would choose a site on the opposite, northern end of the island for the Macquarie party’s base, some twenty miles away. So, on the spur of the moment, he concocted a ruse that would ensure his second chance to film and photograph Caroline Cove. “I took one of my indispensable lenses from its case,” wrote Hurley, “wrapped it in waterproof, and hid it beneath a rock.”

  Meanwhile, on board the Aurora, Mawson and Davis were taking the soundings that proved that Caroline Cove was too shallow and treacherous to serve as an anchorage. Indeed, as the captain sailed across what looked like “a fine clear bay,” the ship struck a submerged rock. “Fortunately we were not moving much at the time so no damage was done,” wrote Davis in his diary. “It was however a very nasty shock and the first time I have been on the bottom.”

  The next day, as the Aurora lay offshore in Hasselborough Bay, at the northern end of Macquarie, Hurley “simulated dismay” and told Mawson about the accidental loss of his camera lens. “I received a verbal trouncing for my apparent carelessness,” Hurley later remembered, but he was immediately ordered—just as he had hoped—to take two companions and march the length of the island to retrieve the irreplaceable lens.

  As the AAE would prove time and again, such chicanery was characteristic of Frank Hurley, who early on seized the role of the expedition’s practical joker. Eventually Hurley would build a career that justifies the common judgment of him as the finest photographer in Australian history, but at twenty-six he had only begun to show his talent, and his inclusion on the AAE was far from a done deal.

  Hurley had grown up in the Sydney suburb of Glebe, not far from Mawson’s Fort Street School. His indulgent father was a prominent typesetter and printer who had high hopes for his son, but at thirteen, Hurley ran away from both school and home. The precipitating event was a practical joke played on “a cantakerous tubby little man” who was Hurley’s tutor. The joke escalated into expulsion after the lad threw a pair of inkwells at the enraged teacher.

  Or so Hurley later claimed. His biographer, Alasdair McGregor, casts doubt on this Dickensian anecdote, as he does on many of Hurley’s stories, for entwined with the practical joker was an inveterate embellisher of tall tales. In any event, the runaway hopped a freight train west into the Blue Mountains, where he landed a grueling job as a handyman at an ironworks. A series of equally drudgerous jobs filled his adolescence, until he drifted back to Sydney. There, one day, “I found a new toy. A fellow worker induced me to purchase his camera and to take up the study of photography. Soon I became so deeply absorbed in ‘this new fad’ as my friends called it, that everything else fell into neglect.”

  By 1911, Hurley was recognized as one of Sydney’s leading professional photographers, but he was also saddled with huge debts as the co-owner of a postcard-producing firm that was on the verge of going under. His forte with the camera was taking dangerous pictures of events never before seen on the page. One of his favorite tricks was to plant his tripod on the tracks in front of a fast-moving train, shoot the chugging behemoth at the last possible instant, then dive off the tracks as the locomotive thundered by.

  When Mawson announced that he was accepting applications for official photographer for the AAE, Hurley jumped at the chance—as did quite a few of the country’s other leading cameramen. Hurley was by no means the leading candidate, but he wangled an “accidental” meeting with Mawson on a 75-mile train ride, during which he used every minute to plead his case and trot out his virtues.

  Or so, again, Hurley later claimed; Mawson never reported the meeting on the train. In any event, the AAE leader was all set to appoint Hurley to the job when a warning came to him in the strange form of a confidential letter from Hurley’s mother. Worried about her son’s safety if he set off for Antarctica, she told Mawson, “I am certain that he is not strong enough for the position. He has never roughed it in any way during his life. He has lung trouble so bad that if he started I do not think he would come back.”

  Mawson was sufficiently alarmed by the letter to grill Hurley during the weeks before the departure from Hobart about the state of his health, though he heeded Mrs. Hurley’s plea not to divulge the source of the warning. Hurley was utterly perplexed, for he knew that he had roughed it since childhood, and he felt in perfect health. He agreed to submit to a medical exam, which he apparently passed. Even so, Mawson came very close to dropping Hurley from the team. Had he done so, it would have been history’s (and photography’s) eternal loss.

  Given the century-long legacy of seal-hunting on Macquarie Island, Mawson and Davis were not surprised to find the place inhabited. But on December 12, as the Aurora neared the island’s northern tip, the crew on board spotted a shipwreck on the beach—“evidently a recent victim,” as Mawson put it. Next, the men spotted a pair of rude huts, “but no sign of human life.”

  As the crew members discussed the meaning of these talismans, suddenly “a human figure appeared in front of one of the huts. After surveying us for a moment, he disappeared within to reappear shortly afterwards, followed by a stream of others rushing hither and thither; just as if he had disturbed a hornet’s nest.” These castaways were the crew of a New Zealand merchant ship employed to render valuable oil from seals and penguins. The Clyde had run aground in a gale about a month earlier, though no lives had been lost. Another dozen sealing men were also spending the summer on Macquarie Island, but had no plans to head home until the end of summer. On learning that the Toroa would soon arrive and could take them directly home, the refugees from the Clyde were overjoyed.

  After several aborted efforts to approach the Aurora with their rowboat, the sealers signaled to Davis to circumnavigate the narrow northern promontory of the island and come into a sheltered cove from the west. Hasselborough Bay, named after the 1810 discoverer of the island, offered the only safe anchorage on any of Macquarie’s shores. By late on December 12, the men had started unloading the cargo and food for the five-man party delegated to establish the radio link between Australia and Antarctica. The next day, the Toroa arrived, carrying the remainder of the team and yet more cargo—including the fifty-five sheep that would graze the tussock grass on Macquarie Island before becoming, as mutton, part of the larder for the Antarctic overwinterers.

  In charge of the Macquarie party was George Ainsworth, a thirty-three-year-old meteorologist who had impressed Mawson with his physical strength and a knack for leadership. On the journey south, however, Captain Davis had formed a distinctly less favorable impression of the man. In Hasselborough Bay, the two disagreed vehemently over where to build the hut. Davis wanted to consult the sealers, while Ainsworth had already made up his mind. “Well I am glad I shall not be with Ainsworth,” Davis confided to his diary, “he is an ass.”

  With
the arrival of the Toroa, a frenzy of unloading and hut- and radio-mast-building began. Time was of the essence, for the Aurora still needed to land three parties on the unknown shores of Antarctica, where the AAE would carry out its wildly ambitious program. Meanwhile, Frank Hurley set off southward, hiking inland to retrieve the precious lens he had “misplaced” in Caroline Cove. His two companions were the expedition biologist Charles Harrisson and one of the Macquarie sealers, a man named Hutchinson, who volunteered to scout the way.

  The journey of 20 miles out and back turned out to be far rougher than Hurley had bargained for. And Hutchinson proved to be not only a vivid local historian, but a gloomy pessimist who painted Macquarie Island as a kind of subantarctic hell. As Hurley recreated the man’s monologues fourteen years later, Hutchinson inveighed against the wanton depredations of a hundred years of sealers: “They slaughtered every flipper that showed itself, not even sparing new-born ‘pups.’ It was a wicked business. One vessel, by the way, the same name as yours, the Aurora, carried back 35,000 pelts in one season.”

  When Hurley ventured to ask about ships wrecked on Macquarie shores, Hutchinson spat, “Wrecked! Why the reefs are ships’ graveyards and the rocks tombstones!” The man went on to tell the “saddest story of the lot,” about a ship named the Eagle:

  Went to pieces during a gale on the West Coast. Nine men and a woman saved themselves after a hell of a struggle. They lost everything and the ten of them all lived together in a cave for two years. . . .

  The cave is littered with bones and, inside you can see all round the mouldy grass that they slept on for beds. There’s a cross too, to the woman, poor soul. She died the very day relief came.

  Hurley wondered why Hutchinson had chosen such a dismal profession, and the doomsayer proclaimed, “Sealing is not all the big adventure it’s cracked up to be—darned rotten grub, cranky little cockleshells of boats, seas swarming with icebergs and reefs and cold Davy Jones always waiting to tuck you up in his locker below.”

  The first night, the trio bivouacked in an abandoned sealers’ hut. Hurley found it impossible to sleep, especially after “swarms of rats” crawled over the men’s blankets. Hutchinson claimed the rats had arrived on board ships that, once wrecked, disgorged the stowaway rodents in such numbers that they now “infested the whole island.”

  On the second day, the men found the coastline impassable and had to climb inland, scaling short cliffs and wallowing through peat bogs. A steady rain began to fall, and all too soon night overtook the trio. Returning to the beach, they searched in vain for a decent open bivouac site, but the sea shingle was too rocky. Noticing that the abundant elephant seals slept on beds of kelp, the men drove the animals away by “pelting them with pebbles,” then settled in. “We found their beds very wet and slimy,” wrote Hurley, “yet preferable to the cold knobby pebbles of the beach.”

  Despite the hardships of the trip, Hurley was in a state of photographic ecstasy, even in the midst of chaos, including a penguin rookery that the men strode through with the animals “peck[ing] viciously at our legs.” Hurley added, “The scene was one never to be forgotten, a writhing congestion of birds that maintained a raucous din. The drizzling rain which falls almost incessantly converts the rookeries into vast slushy areas of filth.”

  It was not until the third afternoon that the men reached Caroline Cove. Hurley had no trouble finding the lens he had hidden, but when he pleaded for time to shoot more landscapes, Hutchinson, fed up with the whole fool’s errand, demanded an immediate turnaround. The return journey was even more arduous than the outward jaunt. In darkness the first evening, Hurley jammed his right foot between two boulders and badly sprained his ankle. The next morning, it had swollen so much that he couldn’t get his boot on. Hutchinson swaddled the foot in canvas, “and this enabled me to limp along.”

  Harrisson had been gathering biological specimens the whole time. Between the enormous burden of his pack and Hurley’s bad leg, it became a true ordeal for the men to hobble back north across the inhospitable terrain. When the Aurora at last came into view, the men gave hearty thanks. But in retrospect, Hurley’s self-inflicted traverse of Macquarie Island seemed almost a lark. “We had been exploring,” he wrote in 1925, “and had shaken hands with adventure in an unknown land.”

  During Hurley’s absence, the rest of the men had chosen a nearby hill, rising more than 300 feet above the sea, for the site of the radio masts and telegraph center. Getting tons of gear up Wireless Hill, as the men named the promontory, was no trivial task. Here Frank Wild, the veteran of two previous Antarctic expeditions, came into his element. He improvised a “flying fox,” a kind of aerial tramway supported by a tripod at the upper end and strung with a pair of steel cables that spanned the 800-foot carry. A bag filled with rocks or sand at the upper end acted as a counterweight to the load to be hauled from the foot of the hill.

  For loads too heavy to be hoisted by the flying fox, the men strung out in a line and hauled their burdens by brute force along the ground. To invigorate the labor, they sang such chanties as “A’Roving” and “Ho, Boys, Pull Her Along.” On top of Wireless Hill, five-foot-deep holes were dug in the stubborn ground, to be filled with heavy “dead men” to anchor the stays that supported the radio masts.

  Eager to leave for the southern continent, Mawson prepared a departure for the day before Christmas, leaving Ainsworth’s crew of five to build their hut from the prefabricated boards and timbers carried on shipboard from Australia. The last chore was to load the huskies, who had been given their liberty on shore, back onto the Aurora, and to round up and slaughter the sheep. According to one team member, “The sheep allowed themselves to be killed without trouble, but they strenuously objected to being caught, and a stern chase among the tussocky grass involved a great deal of language.” Not all the sheep were slaughtered on Macquarie; others were carried aboard the Aurora to be turned into fresher cuts of meat during the coming weeks.

  No one worked harder during the layover on Macquarie than Mawson himself. On December 15, he wrote a letter to Paquita, to be carried back on the Toroa, in which he reported:

  The last few days have been very strenuous ones but I like it—I am in my element. Hard physical work agrees with me. I have only had one rinse of my face since leaving Hobart and there is very little skin on my hands now. Have brushed my hair twice. You would scarcely recognize your Dougelly.

  The emotional parting between the Macquarie quintet and the rest of the AAE team took place on the morning of December 24 on the beach—“their cheers echoing to ours”—as the motor launch carried the southern-bound crew back to the Aurora.

  One final Macquarie Island chore remained—to replenish the drinking water supply for the long haul to Antarctica. Despite his harrowing escape earlier in the month, when the Aurora had struck a submerged rock, Davis agreed to return to Caroline Cove, where freshwater lakes just inland promised a good supply of potable water. On Christmas Eve, anchored inside the cove, Mawson sent a bucket brigade on shore to fill two big barrels resting on the beach. It was a nasty job:

  It was difficult at first to find good water, for the main stream flowing from the head of the bay was contaminated by the penguins which made it their highway to a rookery. After a search, an almost dry gully was found to yield soakage water when a pit was dug in its bed. This spot was some eighty yards from the beach, and to reach it one traversed an area of tussock-grass where sea-elephants wallowed in soft mire.

  That night, while Davis tried to catch a little sleep, the Aurora drifted loose, this time colliding with a sizable reef. It was a far more dangerous predicament than the one of December 11. As Davis wrote in his diary:

  I jumped up on deck found that the ship had dragged her bower anchor, and that the stern was bumping on the rocks (rather an unpleasant Xmas Box). I jumped on the bridge and rang up slow ahead, but the engines did not move. Meanwhile, all hands who were to be found were pulling on the kedge, and I think that this really started her out
, as to my relief the engines began to revolve and we soon straightened up.

  By midday on Christmas, the Aurora was at last clear of Macquarie Island, steaming through open ocean, bound for Antarctica.

  Mawson and Davis’s intention was to head straight south from Macquarie, roughly along longitude 157° east, striking the continent a bit to the west of Cape Adare. Just the previous year, the crew of Scott’s Terra Nova, returning from dropping off the team on Ross Island, had sighted land inland from Cape Adare, but had been unable to penetrate pack ice to reach the shore. Because the ship had reached New Zealand in early 1911, Mawson knew all about this discovery. But between Oates Land, as the crew named this remote plateau, and Gaussberg, an extinct volcano discovered by Erich D. von Drygalski’s German expedition in 1902, at about 89° east, a sweep of possible coastline no less than 2,200 miles in extent (roughly one-fifth of Antarctica’s gigantic circumference) was virtually unknown. Drygalski’s ship, the Gauss, named after the great mathematician, had frozen fast in the pack ice, and barely escaped the next summer.

  Only two expeditions had previously penetrated that swath of terra and aqua incognita. Both had coasted alongside floating bergs and possibly landfast ice in the summer of 1839–40. One was American, under the irascible naval officer Charles Wilkes; the other French, led by the flamboyant mariner Jules S.-C. Dumont d’Urville.

  In January 1840, Wilkes thought he had sighted land at longitude 154° 30' E, 66° 20' S, very close to the destination toward which the Aurora was heading seventy-two years later. The next month, Wilkes landed some men on an iceberg that he gauged to be eight miles offshore. Finding stones and gravel embedded in the berg, he deduced a genuine continent to the south.

  At almost the same time in early 1840, Dumont d’Urville spied an inland plateau whose height he estimated at 3,000 feet above sea level, some 23 degrees of longitude west of Wilkes’s sighting. Later, the French team made a landing on a small isle only a third of a mile offshore from what the leader was convinced was mainland Antarctica. The team raised the tricolor and uncorked a celebratory bottle. “Never was Bordeaux wine called on to play a more worthy part,” wrote an expedition officer; “never was a bottle emptied more fitly.” Dumont d’Urville named the whole region Terre Adélie, after his wife. Thanks to Mawson, as Adélie Land, the name would stick.