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

by David Roberts

  Astonishingly, on January 29, 1840, d’Urville’s ships passed so close to Wilkes’s brig that the men could plainly see each other’s crews on board. Yet thanks to a misunderstanding of signals, neither team chose to stop and compare notes. Almost three quarters of a century would pass before the next ship entered these virtually unknown waters.

  Five days after leaving Macquarie Island, on December 29, 1911, the watchman aboard the Aurora suddenly cried, “Ice on the starboard bow!” The men, nearly all of whom had never seen anything remotely resembling an iceberg before, flocked onto the deck to stare. All their preconceptions vanished as they gazed in awe at the glittering phenomenon. During the following days, the ship was surrounded by floating masses of glacial ice. Even Mawson, who had seen plenty of icebergs on the BAE, was moved to poetic rapture:

  The tranquility of the water heightened the superb effects of this glacial world. Majestic tabular bergs whose crevices exhaled a vaporous azure; lofty spires, radiant turrets and splendid castles; honeycombed masses illumined by pale green light within whose fairy labyrinths the water washed and gurgled. Seals and penguins on magic gondolas were the silent denizens of this dreamy Venice.

  Far less poetically minded, Captain Davis—nicknamed Gloomy by his men, in homage to his stern temperament—was concerned only with practical matters. The icebergs soon gave way to pack ice, still with no hint of a mainland in the distance. Wary of getting the ship trapped in the ice—as both the Gauss and Scott’s Discovery had been in 1902—he kept darting among leads between ice floes, then steaming back north to escape the enclosing pressure. When it became clear that there was no hope of reaching any sort of mainland near the 157th meridian, he headed west.

  Both Mawson and Davis constantly searched the sky to the south. Their previous voyages had taught them to distinguish “ice blink” from “water sky.” The former was a bright white cast to the air, sometimes reflected off the undersides of clouds; it signified only ice beyond the visible horizon. The latter, which both men craved, took the form of dark streaks on the same clouds, the reflected image of open water to the south. For centuries the Inuit in the north had used ice blink and water sky to navigate.

  Day after day, the men saw only ice blink. And as the Aurora pushed farther west, the broken pack through which Davis had been weaving a careful track gave way to a massive barrier of ice. Whether it was a huge iceberg or the edge of landfast ice, neither man could say. It would take another year for Mawson and Davis to realize that one such mass, whose ice cliffs towered as high as 150 feet, was nothing more than a colossal iceberg, fully 40 miles in length.

  New Year’s Day, Davis recorded, “passed uneventfully.” Now the captain began to wonder about another matter—the supply of coal the ship had left. If too much fuel was expended searching for a place to land, the Aurora might lack the coal needed to return all the way to Hobart. This possibility nagged at the hypervigilant pilot.

  On January 3, the ship’s mate called Davis’s attention to a large tongue of ice protruding into the sea. It looked for all the world like a glacier, which would signify mainland. Best of all, for the first time Davis could see water sky beyond the barrier. Yet this happy discovery only perplexed Davis further. “We were all very much puzzled to account for this huge tongue of ice as Wilke’s [sic] track on the chart is shown 30 miles further south,” he wrote in his diary. “Either the tongue did not exist in those days or his observations were at fault.” (As Mawson would subsequently prove, most of Wilkes’s purported sightings were fugitive at best, imaginary at worst.)

  The extreme cold, at a latitude far to the north of McMurdo Sound, where the Nimrod had sailed in 1908, and the consistently hazy, misty weather confounded Davis. On January 6, he wrote in exasperation, “What an extraordinary thing the Antarctic is, everything seems to be different from the Ross Sea Zone. Probably we do not understand as much about this area.”

  Mawson had his own doubts and tribulations, which he did not readily confide in his men. One of the chief objectives he had set for the AAE was to launch an overland party to approach the south magnetic pole from the north—closing full circle, as it were, on the marathon discovery trek to the pole that he, David, and Mackay had performed in 1908–09 from exactly the opposite direction. But the farther west Aurora drifted, the longer and more difficult that journey promised to be.

  Even more troublesome was the knowledge that the farther west the main base for the AAE might have to be established, the more difficult and uncertain radio communications with Macquarie would become. Finally, Mawson himself could not ignore the coal problem. Unless the ship could discover a viable harbor for the main base soon, Mawson’s whole program was in jeopardy. Davis’s anxiety on this matter leaked into his journal: “I feel that we must take chances if we are ever to land anyone here. . . . We must hope that after some bad luck, we shall get some better. Who knows what we might find if the weather would only clear up.”

  Mawson had begun to realize that his plan to establish three separate bases scattered along the coast of Adélie Land would strain the coal supply beyond breaking point. Privately, he began to reconfigure the scheme. He would attempt only two bases—a main one that he would superintend himself, and a smaller contingent farther west under the charge of Frank Wild. Before he could explain the change to his team, rumors began to circulate. Some of the men, fearing the worst, suspected that Mawson intended to jettison his third party altogether, asking them to return to Australia with the ship. For several days, those “empties,” as they thought of themselves, chafed under the premonition that all their Antarctic dreams might go for naught.

  It was only on January 6 that Mawson explained his new plan to the whole team. Wild’s western base would be staffed by eight men, the main base by the other eighteen. The prefabricated hut intended for the third base would serve as an annex to the main base hut.

  Even this whittled-down agenda was predicated, of course, on finding a harbor anywhere to land the main party. Morale by now was reaching a nadir. On January 5, five of the huskies suddenly died. As Alexander Kennedy, a twenty-two-year-old engineering graduate whom Mawson had recruited from his own university, wrote the next day:

  The coroners verdict [that of the two expedition doctors] was gastritis and appendicitis probably induced by exposure. . . . Ninnis went about with a long face yesterday as the four abovementioned dogs were having fits. “Four dead dogs,” he said, and so it turned out. . . . The black dogs are the best, the white not so good & the piebald are the sick looking ones.

  At noon on January 8, Wild burst into the ship’s chart room to report that a substantial rock exposure could be seen about 15 miles ahead on the port side. Davis redirected the Aurora to get a better look at it. Soon the ship was coasting through a scattering of small offshore islets. Mawson and Davis grew more and more excited. As Mawson later wrote:

  Advancing towards the mainland, we observed a small inlet in the rocky coast, and towards it the [whale] boat was directed. We were soon inside a beautiful, miniature harbour completely land-locked. The sun shone gloriously in a blue sky as we stepped ashore on a charming ice-quay—the first to set foot on the Antarctic continent between Cape Adare and Gaussberg, a distance of about two thousand miles.

  Seven men, led by Mawson and including Wild and Hurley, were the first to step ashore. “We had come to a fairyland of ethereal blue and silver,” recalled Hurley more than a decade later. “High exaltation swelled our hearts as we inspected the site. . . . Doctor Mawson decided to establish his Winter Quarters upon it.”

  Mawson would name the perfect harbor Cape Denison, after an Australian patron of the expedition, and the enclosing cove Commonwealth Bay. Soon the rest of the team and much of the ship’s crew had come on shore. While Mawson and Wild set out to explore the surroundings, the men broke out into a spontaneous snowball fight. “Accidentally hit Bickerton in the eye, splosh!” wrote Kennedy gleefully. “Madigan also hit ‘Gloomy’.”

  The joyous lark w
as perfectly comprehensible—after all, some of those men had never seen snow before the present expedition. But it would not take long for the true character of Cape Denison to show itself—and to test every fiber of the team’s patience and endurance.

  4

  THE HOME OF THE BLIZZARD

  In the newly discovered Boat Harbour, as Mawson named it, the glorious sunshine under the blue sky soon faded. As soon as the seven reconnoiterers had rowed the whale boat back to the anchored Aurora, a breeze sprang up. Wanting to waste no time, Mawson had the motor launch lowered and prepared to take a first load of cargo ashore.

  By the time we had reached the head of the harbour, [Archibald] Hoadley had several fingers frost-bitten and all were feeling the cold, for we were wearing light garments in anticipation of fine weather. The wind strengthened every minute, and showers of fine snow were soon whistling down the ice-slopes. No time was lost in landing the cargo, and, with a rising blizzard at our backs we drove out to meet the Aurora.

  It would take nine more days to complete the unloading and ferrying ashore of the tons of equipment and food for the Main Base party. During much of that time, Davis had all he could handle just to keep the ship from running aground against the surrounding ice cliffs.

  On one windy day, the motor launch broke adrift from the Aurora and was driven out to sea before a 45 mph wind. The three men on board desperately tried to start the engine, which had been doused by waves breaking over the shallow gunwales. The rest of the team watched with growing apprehension as the boat drifted half a mile toward a small island onto which the sea was violently crashing. At the last minute, the engine caught fire, and the launch avoided a wreck.

  Still the wind increased, until a steady gale of 70 mph turned Commonwealth Bay into a frothing maelstrom. For two days, no one dared leave the ship. Davis became distraught about the possibility of the ship’s anchor failing to hold, after the strain on the cable completely flattened a steel hook two inches in diameter. When the officer on watch failed to realize the seriousness of the situation, the captain unleashed a diatribe in his diary:

  I feel that I have not an officer in the ship that can be trusted to do anything. The boatswain is the only one that has the ordinary knowledge of a sailor, and he cannot be on deck all the time. . . . It is too much to find that the officers are too lazy to take the ordinary precautions of seeing that [the strain on the cable] is eased as much as possible. . . .

  Anchor still holding but it may go at anytime.

  Among the Aurora’s crew, the tension and resentment were reciprocal. In his own diary, second officer Percy Gray—as sanguine a man as Davis was choleric—complained about the captain, “It is his one hobby in life to find fault with anybody and anything.”

  Still, morale among the Main Base team remained high, as the men could not help marveling over the novelty of their surroundings. When the weather improved and cargo ferries could be resumed, some of the party indulged in hijinks of the same sort as their initial snowball fight. On January 14, four men took a stroll through a nearby penguin rookery.

  They are beautiful birds . . . with their silvery white breasts and dark plumage. They are clumsy and foolish on land and in their element at sea. We amuse ourselves catching them suddenly from behind by the flippers before they have time to peck, and throwing them head first into the water. . . . Bickerton and Wild seized a few from a rookery full of furry chicks, and glissaded them down a snow slope.

  Apparently the hijinks carried over to late-night carousal aboard the ship, for Percy Gray grumbled, “I shall be glad now once we land the first party and get some of the people off the ship, as the awful crowd and noise which is continually going on is apt to get on the nerves of a person who has a good deal of work to do. They very often keep me awake at night.”

  The unloading proceeded apace. Each load in the motor launch brought another five or six tons of gear and supplies. Had the shore consisted of ice or snow, the cargo would have been unloaded directly onto sledges, then hauled to the hut site, already chosen by Mawson, some 60 yards inland. But since the shore was solid rock, both the unloading and hauling were far more onerous. The ever-resourceful Frank Wild improvised a derrick, not unlike the flying fox he had constructed on Macquarie Island, to swing the heaviest burdens from boat to land.

  The gales continued almost without interruption, further hampering the men’s work. On the 17th, the impatient Davis wrote in his diary, “We have been quite long enough here, half the time doing nothing on account of the weather. It certainly seems to be a windy spot.” By the next day, however, Mawson could boast:

  a great assortment of material was at length safely got ashore. Comprised among them was the following: twenty-three tons of coal briquettes, two complete living-huts, a magnetic observatory, the whole of a wireless equipment, including masts, and more than two thousand packages of general supplies containing sufficient food for two years, utensils, instruments, benzine, kerosene, lubricating oils, an air-tractor and sledges.

  On January 19, the Aurora prepared to sail west to deposit the second party somewhere along the unknown shore. The parting between the eighteen men staffing the Main Base and the eight who would establish the Western Base was both celebratory and sad. For just such an occasion, back in London, Davis had been offered the handsome gift of some bottles of madeira that had been carried aboard the Challenger during its pioneering oceanographic expedition of 1872–74—the first crossing of the Antarctic Circle by a steam-powered ship. Mawson spoke briefly, and the bottles were uncorked for the first time in thirty-eight years. The men drank toasts all around. Frank Wild made a surprise appearance dressed as Sir Francis Drake, in “long purple stockings, scarlet cap with white feather, and tinselled coat.”

  The men sang “Auld Lang Syne” and exchanged three cheers. Then the Main Base party climbed into the whale boat. Last to leave was Mawson, whose “unwavering eyes” fixed Davis’s as he said, “Good-bye, and do your best.” The parting was “rather a pull at our heartstrings,” wrote Charles Laseron. On board the ship, Wild later admitted, “we steamed away feeling more than a little melancholy. I for one could not help thinking that our goodbyes were to some of them forever.”

  Second officer Percy Gray wrote, “Well, at last we have got rid of the first party.” But he added:

  The whole thing impressed me very much, those 18 men on their little boat pulling away to their icy home. I only hope they all return safely, which I am sure they will. I was very sad at saying goodbye to old Ninnis, he is one of the nicest chaps I know, and we have been very thick, all through this rather trying voyage. . . . I was sorry to see the last of old Mertz too.

  Ninnis mirrored the feeling. In his diary, he wrote, “I could have wept with the greatest ease. All the second party, the ships officers, and many of the crew, were my friends, and they were leaving us and vanishing . . . into the unknown land to the west.”

  “They are a fine party of men,” wrote Davis upon parting, with a vague sense of premonition, “but the country is a terrible one to spend a year in.”

  From the very start of the expedition, there was little doubt that Frank Wild would be in command of the Western Base. Born in England, at age thirty-eight he was the third oldest member of the AAE. Not only was Wild the only one in the team besides Mawson to have visited the southern continent before, but he was at the time the most experienced Antarctic explorer in the world. He had been a member of Scott’s Discovery expedition in 1901–04, as well as of Shackleton’s BAE in 1907–09. On the latter journey, he had proved the equal of Shackleton in drive and endurance during the grueling push to the new Farthest South and the ordeal by near-starvation and scurvy on the return march to Cape Royds. Before 1912, Wild had already overwintered in Antarctica three times—one more time than either Scott or Shackleton. After the AAE, still in love with the frozen continent, Wild would become second in command on Shackleton’s disastrous Endurance expedition from 1914–17. The Boss would leave Wild in charge
of the twenty-one refugees on Elephant Island as he set out on his open boat journey to South Georgia in an effort to save the whole expedition.

  As the Aurora steamed away from Cape Denison on January 19, Wild and Davis carried with them Mawson’s orders not to establish the Western Base closer than 400 miles to the west, so that none of Wild’s sledging parties starting out the next summer would overlap in their explorations with Mawson’s own parties. Yet day after day passed without a hint of mainland appearing on the port side of the ship. Once again Davis fumed over the purported sightings claimed by Wilkes in 1840. The captain’s mood, already anxious, grew dark. “I only wish that our observations would fix the position of something more solid than this interminable pack,” he griped to his diary on January 22. And the next day, “It is very disappointing to find the pack off the land. I had hoped here to have pushed between the pack and the land, but this is impossible so we must resume our journey round the edge of it again. I think that this is about the dreariest coast in the world.”

  The escalating dilemma of the dwindling fuel supply nagged at the captain. “We have still about 200 tons of coal left so I am not going to go past anything without seeing it, if possible,” he wrote on January 25; “but the pack is a terrible obstacle and seems to hang on the coast here, unlike Adelie Land.” By January 28, “Coal is getting less all the time and nothing can be done.” February 1: “Nothing to be seen but the endless pack.” February 3: “The position is becoming serious. We have now 150 tons of coal left, and this means that if we get caught in the pack, we shall have no chance of landing the party at all.”