By January 28, the Aurora had steamed past a point 400 miles west of Cape Denison. The men kept a constant watch, day and night, for any black streak of outcrop that might signify solid land, but there were only ice and snow and, in the sky near the horizon, ice blink. Percy Gray grew exasperated with the captain. On February 5, after beginning his diary entry with the lament, “Still no land,” he fulminated:
At 8. o’clock last night, the pack looked fairly thin to the southward so the “old man” decided to have another try. So in we went and made our way slowly south, until at 5 a. m. this morning the “old man” decided that it was getting a bit too thick and stopped, and we have been stopped ever since, goodness only knows why, as we don’t do any good by stopping. For goodness sake, I say, let him push ahead into the pack, and if necessary get frozen in, or turn around and come out of it.
Like “Gloomy,” “the old man” was a derisive epithet based on Davis’s stern demeanor and cautious piloting: when Gray wrote his diary entry, the captain was only twenty-seven years old.
Davis knew what he was doing. As impatient as anyone on the ship to land the Western Base party, he knew that to get the Aurora frozen into pack ice would spell unmitigated disaster. Other Antarctic ventures, such as Scott’s Discovery expedition, had had backup rescue plans built in. But as of February 1912, no one in Australia had a clear idea where Mawson’s party had disembarked on the coast of Adélie Land. That knowledge—not to mention the fate of Wild’s eight-man team and of the full ship’s crew—depended on the Aurora’s returning safely to Australia in the early months of 1912. There was no plan in place for a rescue mission in case the Aurora failed to show up, and even if one could be mobilized, trying to find Mawson’s men at Cape Denison and a ship locked in ice somewhere far to the west would amount to the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack.
As the days passed and nothing but ice appeared ahead, everyone on board began to face the possibility of utter failure. “We have just got enough coal to do about another week’s searching, and then take us back again,” Gray wrote on February 5. In other words, should the search for a harbor prove fruitless, Wild’s whole team faced the prospect of returning to Hobart with the ship, having accomplished no part of the AAE’s ambitious agenda of discovery. Wild and Davis discussed the alternative of returning the Western Base party to Cape Denison, “but there is such a crowd there already that it is of little use.”
Davis’s spirits plunged with each day’s fruitless search for land. On February 7, he wrote, “I am feeling very low indeed about things, and now success seems further off than ever. Well, we will have a good buck at it before giving in, and we have done our best. We cannot fight nature any longer.”
On February 8, however, the watch reported an “ice barrier” ahead. It was not land, but it might be the tongue of a huge glacier like the one that had presaged the discovery of the good harbor at Cape Denison. “I do not know that I have ever felt more relieved than I did to see this barrier,” claimed Davis. During the following days, he was able to round the edge of the barrier and head south, with no pack ice to impede his way. But what was the barrier? Was it a huge shelf attached to land, like the Ross Ice Shelf near McMurdo Sound? Or was it a gigantic detached tabular iceberg?
The barrier’s edge ended in sheer ice cliffs at least sixty feet high. Even if it were possible to anchor under its lee, the possibility of Wild and other men climbing onto the shelf to explore it seemed dubious. Day after day, Davis’s hopes dwindled again. On February 13, he wrote, “I had hoped that a landing on the barrier would have been possible but even this does not appear to be so.” And the next day, “I feel very miserable about the whole business, but we have done all we can and are now about at the end of our tether.”
By February 14, it had been twenty-six days since the Aurora had left Cape Denison. The ship lay not 400 miles west of the Main Base, but 1,500. Yet the day before, Wild and Alexander Kennedy had managed to clamber through a weakness in the ice cliffs and reach the top of the barrier. They returned that evening from a quick reconnaissance with discouraging news. “Wild . . . reported that the land was at least 28 miles off, the ice floe was much older further in, and that the barrier appeared to terminate before reaching the land.” Still unresolved was the question of whether this huge ice mass was attached to mainland Antarctica or floating free in the ocean, but Wild’s observations appeared to favor the latter possibility.
Now the veteran explorer made a bold decision. Without ascertaining the true nature of the barrier shelf, he committed himself to establishing a Western Base upon it. Whether or not the shelf was attached to the mainland, it was unmistakable that its seaward edge calved regularly, dumping tons of ice into the ocean. To erect a hut on top of the shelf and establish a camp there for the long winter ran the very real risk that the mass, whether or not it was a glacier or a colossal iceberg, in its slow but ceaseless gravity-driven slippage toward the north would eventually pitch men, hut, and everything they owned into the sea, spelling quick and certain death for all.
Such a dangerous gambit had been attempted only once before—by Amundsen’s party in the Bay of Whales in 1911. Living in tents while the men ferried supplies south across the Ross Ice Shelf, Amundsen’s team eventually erected their base, which they named Framheim, a full two miles from the ocean’s edge. It was still a calculated risk, but a much less dicey one than Wild proposed.
The day after Wild made his decision happened to be Sir Ernest Shackleton’s birthday, so, at Davis’s suggestion, the team named the vast plateau the Shackleton Ice Shelf. “The whole sheet was undoubtedly moving,” Wild later wrote, “but I was confident that only a few yards broke away yearly.”
Knowing, however, that this desperate stab at a Western Base could mean a life-or-death decision for his men, Wild told each of the seven that he was free to decline the proposition and sail back to Hobart with the Aurora. Yet “each said in almost the same words ‘If it is good enough for you, it is good enough for me.’ ”
There followed a frenzy of unloading gear, food, and nine huskies. In four days, the men transferred forty tons of gear from the ship to the surface of the shelf, aided once more by a flying fox Wild contrived at the top of the ice cliff.
Davis’s reaction was a blend of relief and deep concern for the men he was leaving behind. Yet no matter how hard they worked during those four days, the effort struck the always judgmental Davis as sometimes verging on the indolent. On February 20, he complained to his diary:
The party themselves do not seem to be in any hurry to shift stores further in. . . . I do not like to be critical but I should not care to work with some of them. Today all hands started at 9:30 [a.m.] and I knocked our men off at 4 p.m. as we go to sea at daylight. The party also knocked off and although it is a beautiful evening, they are some of the[m] playing football on the floe, instead of getting their hut up to the site or doing something useful. . . . Wild is a first class man and so is [Charles] Harrisson. The rest are an indifferent lot and will not do anything very startling, I think.
Nonetheless, the parting on February 21 was a warm and congenial one. At Davis’s request, Wild handed him a letter explaining his choice of the Western Base site. It read, in part:
I am a very poor hand at making pretty speeches as you know, and I feel that I have not thanked you half enough for the way in which you have worked for us.
No doubt some authorities will consider we are taking unjustifiable risks, and were this a barrier I should be of the same opinion. However, I am convinced that it is a glacier and with practically no movement. It is quite possible that during the twelve months of our stay here that small portions will break away from the edge, but at the distance back at which I intend to build the hut I consider we are certainly as safe as Amundsen on the Ross Barrier.
Whether or not out of over-confidence, Wild ultimately directed the building of the Western Base hut only 600 yards from the edge of the calving ice cliff—a mere one-sixth
as far from the lethal sea as Amundsen’s Framheim.
As he steamed north, Davis was keenly cognizant not only of the peril of the Western Base party but of how crucial the safe return of the Aurora to Hobart was to the survival of those eight explorers. As he would recall decades later, “In the event of the Aurora being lost with all hands on her voyage back to Hobart, a searching vessel would not have known where to search and the little party, left behind to explore the new land we had discovered, might well have had to remain there until they died.”
After an uneventful journey, the Aurora arrived in Hobart on March 12. Upon disembarking, however, one of the ship’s crew members told an Australian journalist, “Wild’s party is camped on moving ice and there is little probability that they will ever be seen again.”
Back at Cape Denison, the seventeen men supervised by Mawson, working sixteen-hour days, had immediately started to erect their hut. Before it was finished, the men slept in a makeshift shelter constructed out of benzine cases stacked in double rows to serve as walls, with boards from the crate that had housed the air-tractor as a roof. Their reindeer-skin sleeping bags kept them warm during the short hours of semi-darkness. “My first experience of a sleeping bag,” John Hunter, a twenty-three-year-old biology graduate from the University of Sydney, marveled in his diary.
During those first weeks on shore, Charles Laseron, the expedition’s taxidermist, witnessed a striking demonstration of Mawson’s hardihood as a leader. The men had discovered that a crucial part of the hut stove was missing, and they remembered that one box had accidentally been dropped overboard during the unloading at Boat Harbour. Mawson was convinced the missing part would be found in the box. “Come on, Joe,” he urged, “let us see if we can get it.” (“Joe” was the nickname by which Laseron was known to his cronies.)
Getting into the whaleboat, we pushed out from the shore. The case was clearly visible in about 6 feet of water. For some time we angled with a boathook, but without success. Presently Mawson remarked, “There is only one thing for it,” and straightaway stripped off and dived over. His first effort was unsuccessful, but at a second attempt he was just able to lift it up, and I got it on board. The temperature of the sea was at the time about 30° F.—that is below the freezing point of fresh water—and the air was much colder. Ice was already forming on his body as he raced for the hut to dry himself and get into his clothes again.
Alas, the case turned out to be filled only with tins of jam. (The missing stove part was later found hidden beneath a pile of miscellaneous gear.)
The prefabricated hut had been manufactured by an Australian firm that specialized in making kits out of which wooden cottages could be assembled. The basic design was Mawson’s idea, but team member Alfred Hodgeman, a twenty-six-year-old architect by trade, took charge of the finer details. Mawson’s previous experience wintering over at Cape Royds dictated several of the choices for the hut plan. The building was a simple square, 24 feet to a side, with internal subdivisions to create separate cubicles or rooms. (“Not a very big room,” Laseron observed of the whole hut, “when it is remembered that it had to serve as bedroom, kitchen, dining-room, and living-room for eighteen men.”) Since Mawson expected snow to cover the hut through most of the winter, the only windows he called for were in the roof. Finally, the pyramid-shaped roof would extend down to only five feet off the ground, creating verandas on all four sides in which supplies could be stored, which would serve the additional purpose of helping to insulate the hut.
Since the Aurora had brought south another hut kit for the third base that Mawson had intended to make somewhere along the Adélie coast, he ordered that it be erected as an adjunct to the Main Base hut, sharing a common wall. That extra space would eventually serve as a multifaceted workroom. Inside the larger hut, bunks were laid out along the three walls not adjoining the workroom. A separate cubicle served as Mawson’s private quarters. The dining table stretched across the center of the hut, in the least cold place. (See diagram, page 126.)
Some of the men were surprised when Mawson demanded that foundations for the hut be dynamited into the bedrock, then filled with tons of boulders. As Frank Hurley put it, “We, who were inexperienced, thought the precautions excessive.” But Mawson’s constant motto was “Be prepared for every contingency in Antarctica. If the worst does not come so much the better; if it does, then you are prepared.” During the coming winter, the team would be deeply grateful for Mawson’s foresight.
The construction of the hut produced its share of semicomic episodes. Hurley recalled one:
Doctor Mertz was sitting astride the outer ridge cap [of the roof], nailing it down, and the learned bacteriologist, Doctor McLean, was “tacking” on the thin ceiling lining with four-inch nails directly beneath.
Suddenly Mertz sprang into the air with a wild yell, lost his balance,—slid down the sloping splintery roof, clutched a stay that held the kitchen stove pipe and took the chimney with him in a headlong dive into a snow dump. . . .
Investigation displayed two inches of bristling nail which had been driven through the ridge cap by the scientist below, and had caused the puncture which the aggrieved Mertz was rubbing.
On January 30, for the first time, all the men slept inside the nearly completed hut. As in the BAE hut during 1908, the various clusters of bunkmates and working quarters earned ironic nicknames. Frank Bickerton, the twenty-two-year-old Englishman whose main job was to care for the air-tractor, slept under the bunk of the Swiss ski expert Xavier Mertz; in recognition of the European flavor of that sector, Ninnis nicknamed it Hyde Park Corner. The doctor, Archibald McLean, commanded a lab table dubbed St. George’s Hospital. Frank Hurley had his own darkroom, where, in his words, “By the light of the ruby lamp not only was the latent photographic image rocked into reality but latent wit was cradled into song.” Already emerging as the team’s practical joker, Hurley lent the darkroom to others bent on playful mischief. “It served as a lair,” he later wrote, “in whose concealment surprises might be prepared. From its shuttered precincts the chef would emerge ceremoniously holding aloft some culinary triumph, or the grotesquely garbed actors of ‘The Its Society for the Prevention of the Blues’ would step forth dramatically into the acetylene glare to perform their latest farce amidst uproarious applause.” As this passage indicates, amateur theatricals inside the hut sporadically enlivened the gloom.
Not all the bunk pairings were congenial ones. About Walter Hannam, the portly radio operator, one teammate wrote, “Hannam is our ‘Ring Snorer.’ Baby Bliss as we call him snores practically all night; in fact one night he was so bad that [Herbert Dyce] Murphy who sleeps next to him shifted his bunk to the little hut.” Two of the men regularly talked in their sleep. Bickerton, in fact, was capable of keeping up his unconscious chatter “all night almost continuously.”
In keeping with the egalitarian ethos that prevailed among the team, each member took his turn cooking, washing up, cleaning the hut, and gathering ice and snow for drinking water. Mawson himself put in his hand as cook, though, characteristically, he was unwilling to acknowledge his occasional blunders. As Laseron recalled:
The first day that the stove was in commission he said to me, “Joe, come here and I will show you how to make blancmange.”
I looked on for a while and the Doctor explained the process, until, happening to look at a packet, I remarked: “Why, here are the directions on the packet.”
“Oh, yes,” remarked the Doctor airily, “those are what I am following, but what is most important is the technique of the thing.”
Later, when the blancmange wouldn’t set, the Doctor discovered that instead of boiling it for ten minutes, as the directions stated, he had simply brought the stuff to boil. Hannam came to the rescue with some cornflour and made a good job of it.
As the months wore on, four of the men, including Hannam and Laseron, who considered their culinary efforts as rising to a higher standard than the others’, formed the Secret Society of Unco
nventional Cooks. The others were “class[ed] under the plebeian stigma of ‘crook cooks.’ ” If one of these unfortunates managed to produce a “worthy dish,” he was elevated to the Secret Society. “But even to the end there were a few who still ranked as ‘crook cooks,’ and even gloried in the title.”
Nearly a century’s legacy of overwinterings, first in the Arctic, then in the Antarctic, had taught explorers the essential value of keeping men busy and entertained during their long confinement through the darker months. On the AAE, reading out loud became a regular evening diversion, with Mawson usually taking the rostrum. His favorite poet, Robert Service, filled many a stirring recital. After hearing Mawson declaim “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” McLean wrote in his diary, “The rest [of the poems] were realistic, virile, full of strong, manly life, like Mawson himself.” Another of Mawson’s favorite works was Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Virginibus Puerisque,” his tongue-in-cheek essay about the rewards and hazards of marriage.
The small library Mawson brought with him on the expedition included not only several volumes of Service, but Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads and Departmental Ditties as well as The Oxford Book of Verse. Inspirational reading ranged from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations to such now-forgotten tomes as Daily Light and Bible Talks. The collection also comprised a generous store of Arctic and Antarctic narratives, including those by Shackleton, Fridtjof Nansen, and Otto Nordenskjöld. As evidence of Mawson’s eagerness to connect with his men, the library contained a volume titled German Self Taught—perhaps a token of the leader’s effort to go halfway linguistically with Xavier Mertz.
Like other Antarctic expeditions, the AAE had brought along a gramophone and a hefty supply of recordings. Of an evening, music could be even more soothing than Mawson’s poetry readings. Wrote John Hunter on January 30:
Alone on the Ice: The Greatest Survival Story in the History of Exploration Page 12